So on my recent expedition, I finally had an open sea encounter with a Great Hammerhead shark.   Technically, I had one at Protea Banks in South Africa, but it was VERY fast and mostly fleeting – all I saw was it’s caudal fin speeding it away from our group of divers. 




In Florida, to quote erstwhile shark fisherman Quint, I got the head, tail, the whole damn thing.  Unfortunately, Great Hammerheads are a speedy fish and this one was on a mission (my camera battery also died, so I didn’t get a shot), so it was similarly fleeting. But I saw it – and now, when it comes to the big sharks – I’ve only got three left I need to tally in the wild:  a tiger, a basking, and a megamouth.   

Sadly – this was not the only thing I would see on this dive.   I witnessed a man die.  The news article I’ve linked to glosses over what happened, but it was a fairly grisly way to die.  As a spectator to it, I’ve been trying to make sense of it – and gosh, let’s see how my brain reacts the next time I do a big step off a dive deck or try to get up on a ladder out of the ocean. This poem is an attempt to reconcile what I know and what I don’t know about death.     Continue reading “Death at Sea (New Poem)”