Diving with giants, Mocambique April 2nd

Ok, I’m often accused by my wife that I’m always after the big stuff when diving… instead of the cute small and colourful fishies. To an extent that is true, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate a good reef with colours and lots of smaller stuff. This time though we’re at Ponta Do Ouro, and I’m the only diver… and the conditions happened to be good enough to go out to the pinnacles. The deep pinnacles is a deeper dive and a bit further out than the other sites and can only be done when the conditions are very good. You don’t go to the deep pinnacles for sardines. It is one of those sites where you just have to go when the conditions allow it, and I was only SO happy. We saw lots of Zambezi’s, about 7 or 8 hammerheads in the surface and a few other kinds of sharks sliding by, lots of rays… and a huge Cuda/Cuta, like the one I caught fishing the last time - awesome. This Cuta must have been just as long as me though.

But the really cool thing about the dive was that I thought I’d seen a whaleshark for the first time, although at a distance. It was huge, so what else could it be? I was not in doubt - it was like a big fleet of something sliding past with pilot fishes big as Barracuda’s around. No spots on the back though… but the right square front, so of course it was a whale shark. Maybe I just wanted it to be a whale shark so much that I ignored other possibilities completely, coz back in the boat people where only talking about that f**king big tigershark! My god, I thought only the extinct predator Megaladon could reach a size like that. For sure it must have been fully grown! It kinda makes sense also since I didn’t see the stripes on the back. The stripes are distinctive on young species, but tend to fade with age. It almost makes me shiver to know in retrospect what it really was!! Awesome!!

Sharks and lutefisk, March 13th

We went to Natal Sharks Board in Umhlanga to watch a dissection of a shark, whatever they picked up from the sharknets the same morning. Sharks Board is a legend and one of the leading institutions in research around sharks throughout the world, so it's absolutely a place to go for people interested in sharks. This day they were showing a dusky shark and a 2,5m Spinner shark. The spinner shark got its name because it is often caught by anglers, and when it jumps high out of the water it spins around.

Measuring age of a shark is pretty much like counting the years of a tree in the woods. You just cut the spine and count the thin lines from the inside and out. Every new year makes a new ring. I’m quite impressed that the sharks also got a 12 months calendar system… unlike dogs and cats and such, where you have to multiply with 7 to find the equivalent of human years.

Sharks are commonly perceived as not to be good for eating! This is because sharks contain a lot of ammonia, mostly in the blood, and therefore require some preparations before you can fry it. Since ammonia is a form of acid you need some alkaline to neutralise it, so people dilute the shark-steaks in milk for 2-3 hours before frying it. This is of course not strange at all for us Norwegians. We don’t have fish that are already full of ammonia or alkaline or anything, so we add some. The fish is actually soaked in alkaline for several days (some times 2-3 weeks) to get the acquired sharklike basis. Basically you have a perfectly edible fish, then you soak it in poison… very logical! Then after poisoning our food, instead of using the antidote.. we wash it out thoroughly in water until it is safe to eat again (traditionally placed in a cage and put in a stream, where the flowing water could wash the alkaline out. Why go through all that trouble??