There's more than just sharks in Bimini. In fact, there is quite a bit of interesting things on land. A week or so ago, we came upon the Bimini Boa, a snake found only in Bimini. It's not venomous, so we carried a 6-footer around for a couple of hours, taking tons of pictures. Some info about the snake is posted on the Sharklab website

Night Fishing
I often walk out onton our dock at night and look for "stuff". I've seen lemon sharks, nurse sharks, snapper, rays, jacks, needlefish, crabs, sea turtles, just to name a few, swim right up our dock. A couple of times, we've put a hydrophone in the water off the dock to see if any of the lemons swimming around are our transmittered sharks. If one is, we might hop onto a boat and track it as long as we can into the night. Other times, we just like to fish off the dock. A couple of nights ago, after learning how to make rigs for the fishing reels, some of us went out to the dock, baited the water, and threw some lines in. After about an hour, I got a bite, and I reeled in a 123cm lemon. We pulled it up to the boat, tied it up with a tail rope, and did a workup on it like we usually do. It was about midnight, and everyone was out on the dock ooohing and aaaahing, watching the workup with headlamps on. Truly nerd fun.

The Bimini Gym
I'm not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way, me, Katie, Grant, and Sean (Sharklab staff) got a pull-up comptetion going. Apparently someone once decided that he needed to workout while he was at the lab, so he built what we call the Bimini Gym. This "gym" is a random assortment of things in the woods like a pullup bar in a tree, a climbing rope, a punching bag hanging from a tree, a barbell made with two concrete blocks on the end of a piece of rebar, and a pvc pullup bar nailed into a tree. It started out as just the four of us going out into the woods with headlamps in the middle of the night to have pullup comptetitions at the "gym", but somehow it turned into a lab-wide event. When pullup competitions weren't enough, pushups got thrown into the mix. Then wall sits. Then handstands. The fun never ends around here.

Hurricane Wilma
We've got our eye on Wilma, and it doesn't look good. We'll probably start hurricane prep tomorrow, and if it continues on its projected path, we'll probably have to evacuate to Miami later this week. Keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn't get too bad here...

Counting Down
Sadly, my time at the lab is coming to and end. Two weeks left to go, and I'm not so much looking forward to going back to reality. I've learned so much and seen so much, and it seems like time has flown. Didn't I just get here yesterday???