March 12, 2009.

Yesterday morning we took our machete’s and cut a new trail from one beach to another on the windward side of the island. We spent an hour looking at all the junk that has washed up over the years.

On the way back to the boat we stopped to do a little spearfishing. We came up empty, but our friends Greg & Judy took home a nice lobster. After stopping at the boat for lunch and a few chores we once again headed out with our spears.

This time we headed north and it was Christy’s turn to be the first one into the water. We found a promising looking coral head and after donning her gear she slipped into the water. She immediately looked up and said “You just dropped me off into the middle of a school of Barracuda”. They were smaller fish so they swam away and left her to the coral head.

She swam the 10 yards to the coral patch and surfaced again said “There are 2 sharks in the coral head”. They turned out to be Nurse sharks, which are very docile sharks, as far as sharks go. They’re said to be harmless unless provoked. I’m just not sure what constitutes provoking. In Jersey, if you look at someone too long you’ve provoked them…..so we decided to move on to another patch of reef. Better safe than chewed upon.

We ended up spending 2 hours going from small coral head to coral head. We did end up taking our 7th lobster of the season but we were chased from the water on several occasions by a very large Sand Tiger shark. I was 20 feet away from and paralleling the iron shore in about 8 feet of water, to my right the water was only 3 or 4 feet deep. Out of my peripheral vision I saw the movement of a large fish. It turned out to be the Sand Tiger, he had come up behind me and overtaken me on the shallow side without me being aware of him until he was passing me. I got back in the dinghy and we called it a day. Christy had lobster to clean and I had to scrub my wetsuit.