The past two days have been a bit frustrating spending much time on the water and a lot of hard work in the air by Rob and Peter. But today helped dissipate all of that. We headed out at around 1030hrs on fairly calm seas and winds; four boats with about 42 whale shark enthusiats on board. What started out pretty quietly worked quickly into a fully eventful day. Rob located several sharks in succession...we missed the first one but then tagged the second followed by a brief lull in the action. The next shark encountered was reserved for snorklers and then as the shark accelerated and started diving after about a half hour of snorklers following we were able to tag it. That was followed by a couple more sightings and then a third shark that we tagged first, then relocated, and put several groups of snorklers in to follow above it for a bit. Lots of jellies, including some small Portuguese men-of-war made the following stimulating for a number of the snrklers and we sent one boat in with a couple of sting vicitms of concern.. Then tagged a third one and stuck with it long enough to get more snorklers in the water briefly.
A tremendously wonderful end to a magically productive expedition......17 sharks tagged with the satellite linked data recorders and transmitted. The next step will be their release and data reporting in either 9 months (November/early December) or 12 months (next February and March). Packing up now and will head to the airport in Mombasa in the morning for travel home to San Diego.
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