Shark Tales

I went spear fishing last weekend. I’m talking legit spear fishing with just a medal rod and a fat rubber band. . . .no gun or anything ritzy like that. I went with a local kid named Thomas. . . .and by kid I mean 24 year old man. As soon as we went down he caught a good size rainbow fish and looped an old electric wire through its gills and out the mouth so that he could pull it through the water instead of having to go back to the shore. It looked like he was pulling the fish along on a leash. All the fish we caught we added to the same line. Pretty soon Thomas was dragging 3 then 5 then 10 fish behind him. We kept swimming further out and diving deeper on the reef.

Then while we were down I saw a shark. It was about 4 feet long. Not big enough to swallow you whole but big enough to take a nice piece; such as both your legs! I began to panic. Thomas’s electric cord of dead fish was basically a shark-chum line and I’m pretty sure a shark has got me beat in both the swimming and fighting department. I got Thomas’s attention to come to the surface. This kid can hold his breath for like 8 minutes. He should be in the Olympics. When we broke the surface I tried to act cool and nonchalant (and mask my mass panic), “hey um, there’s a SHARK. A SHARK. UH, A SHARK!” But Thoma just laughed and said that sharks sense “fear” and will only attack when you are scared. Great! How perfect for me?!!! I asked what I should do. He responded, “Just shoot your spear at it.” So Thomas Man-Child was telling me to shoot my only medal rod at the shark (I should probably mention here that when I am spear fishing, when I aim and fire, I come about as close to my target as Sarah Palin does in identifying where the countries Russia and “Africa” are on a map). Then after shooting I have to go and retrieve the rod in depth of the ocean - unarmed. This didn’t really sound sensible to me BUT what do I know? When we looked down in the water again the shark was circling. Thomas quickly grabbed his spear and shot. The shark swam away. It worked! Of course it did! Fijians are never wrong about fishing, the weather, or the best way to score in rugby.

I saw two more sharks while we were out. And there is no telling how many we didn’t see. But after the first shark I was able to look the other two dead on. I tried to show the sharks I wasn’t scared. Honestly, I was very scared BUT I was confident that they’d attack Thomas and his leash of dead fish before they decided to do a taste-test with me. After all he held the chum, not me.

I think the chances of dying from a shark attack look something like this in comparison to other life happenings (but I have done no research... this is just my guess):

Chocking on ice cream