One thing we have seen a lot of here are shark and we agreed, being so far form any medical assistance, shooting fish for supper would be done with care and with a plan.
Heading out to a small island we dropped back into the water free diving. As usual, the 'meet and greet' committee here in the islands is a huge Barracuda we call Barry for normal size and Baba for the huge ones. Well a Barry greeted us with his evil smirk, trailing behind us like some sort of stalker.
I confess Barracuda scare me more than shark. When a Shark shows interest and you swim at him giving him the 'what you looking at' attitude, he usually responds with an 'oops didn't notice you, sorry' attitude and swims away or at least turns away. When you give a Barracuda the same look, his response is more of a 'you, I'm watching my lunch, what you going to do about it?' attitude. He keeps coming with that horrible grin on his face like he has a secret you don't want to know about.
Anyway, we were swimming along, me looking for shells, searching under rocks for kreef and watching out for lurkers. I spotted André hanging under a rock and saw his spear hit target. I was a little uncomfortable to see it was a good size Nassau Grouper! The dinghy was far away!!
Thinking the plan would be to put the fish on the stringer as soon as possible, to get it away from us, as we returned to the dinghy, I swam to the float, grabbed the stringer and handed it to André.
Then I casually turned to keep watch and looked straight into the face of a five foot shark about five meters away swimming at us with a goal in mind! I reached back blindly and frantically patted André on the shoulder. I believe I literally felt him jump out of his skin and back in. I couldn't help chuckling, scared as I was.
Thinking he was still busy trying to thread the stringer through the fish I swam at the shark smacking the top of the water and he eventually turned away. As soon as I started swimming back towards André he came at us again. I repeated my water smacking charge at him till he turned away again.
I glanced back to see if André had got the fish away from us yet, only to see him about 10 meters away swimming with said fish on the spear above the water. I never knew I could swim so fast backwards still making charges at shark when he got too close. My final charge and he seemed to swim off. I finally caught up to find we had other followers hoping for a bite of our fish. A huge Snapper and a Jack as well as smaller fish.
I confess to feeling a little like a chameleon as we swam around the island and back to the dinghy. I kept expecting Mr Shark to appear and couldn't wait to get fish out of the water, then I felt much better.
We swam a little longer but decided to move over to another reef. Got ourselves some kreef for dinner starters and headed back to the boat for sundowners.
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