Things That Make You Go Hmm...

Or maybe w00t! I always swore I was never going to say that. Anyway, for the last few years, whenever I've booked a dive vacation, I've always ended up winning the raffle at my monthly scuba club meeting. 2 years ago, right after I booked a trip for me and Mrs. Hondo to Maui, I won a SUUNTO Mosquito dive computer. Last night I won a Spare Air™ emergency tank. Hopefully, I won't use it on the trip to the Bahamas my wife and I just booked. 3 cubic feet of air in a tank just a little over a foot long.

We had a really interesting speaker at last night's meeting. A representative from the Shark Research Institute came and gave an interesting talk about the Whale Shark, a 40+ foot long gentle behemoth, and the Institutes efforts which got it listed (along with the Basking Shark) as an endangered species, over the objections of the Japanese fishing interests. He also showed a video, filmed by National Geographic, of him tagging a Tiger Shark underwater. The shark abruptly turned and tried to reduce his body mass by about 50%! I've tagged sharks before, the largest being a 200 pound Mako (got the newspaper article to prove it), but I've always been on a boat, not in the water. I'll never forget that big black eye staring at me with an absolute and primal hatred. I'll also never forget how the thing went ape-shit when we put the tag in it! But that's another story to tell.

File under The Undersea World.

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