Yesterday at work we did some trawls in northern Pine Island Sound. While I was quite ecstatic to NOT be driving the boat, I was exhausted from 2 sawfish trips and a 600' seine trip already that week. My arms were already shot - so the last thing I felt like doing was dealing with trawls containing gallons and gallons of drift algae and sponge. Trust me, that stuff weighs a ton.
I was pretty excited for lunch - I had a delicious Publix sub waiting in the cooler for me, and we were headed to the beach at Boca Grande Pass for lunch. Our second trawl took FOREVER to work up, and my stomach was growling the entire time. Yeah, we only had 2 out of 7 samples done by lunch. FAIL. Anyway, here's my view from our lunch spot. Yes, you should be jealous. I earned that lunch spot!
To my excitement, the ship from the show "Shark Men" is currently anchored in Boca Grande Pass. In case you are unfamiliar, the ship Ocean is a converted crab boat that is now used for shark research. In the show, they capture large great white sharks and raise them onto the deck of the boat using a specially designed platform. They take measurements and tag the fish. Oh, how I wish I could be on the boat when they do that! Anyway, they are currently in Boca Grande to tag large sharks (hammerheads, etc). I jumped up and down excitedly when we drove by the Ocean on the way to one of our sample sites. Here it is!
If you would like to learn more about "Shark Men", check out the website here:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/shark-men/all/Overview
We did finally finish all of our samples, and it darn near killed me. I was pretty crabby by the end of the day. As the icing on the cake, I had to winch the boat halfway up the trailer since the tide was super high - couldn't back the trailer down far enough to make life easy for me. Running on adrenaline and cheers from a couple boaters and charter captains, I winched that baby all the way up. If you want toned arms, try my job.
