Jeff Corwin comes to Coconut Island!

Last week,  Jeff Corwin and his team came to Coconut Island to film Dr. Carl Meyer and his shark research. They needed someone to drive a whaler up close to the other boat so that Travis (the guy on camera 2) could get good footage of the sharks.  I also had the producer, Carolina, and the sound guy, Tyler, on the boat. Unfortunately, they didn't fare so well in the open ocean and both got sick.  Usually in those situations I feel like I'll get sick too, but thankfully I didn't.  

It was pretty exciting to meet Jeff Corwin since he basically does what I want to do--travel the world and talk about animals.  Who wouldn't want to do that?!  The day I went out with the film crew, we saw a small tiger shark, but none of the six-gills we went out to catch.  The next day, however, they caught a whole bunch! Of course I missed it :( But, I'm glad they got the footage they wanted of the research happening in the Holland Lab.

Carl Meyer and an associate in Japan are tagging these sharks with devices that have accelerometers (to find out how fast the sharks move), temperature and depth gauges (pretty self explanatory) and video cameras! So, when the sharks go off and do their sharky stuff, we get to see what they are up to. It's pretty neat--I saw some of the video and it's like you are riding on the back of a shark!  It turns out that they often meet up with other shark pals and so there is great footage of them all together, even separate species mingling in the same area.