Sharks!

Chyeah, I think my blog has been a bit boring as of recently, so lemme post some pics of sharks to spice things up.  A quick land update for those who are wondering.  Been on land now 2 and a half weeks and stuff is startin to get MASSIVLEY boring.  Risk every other night, and massive amounts of music experimentation are keeping me sane.  I had a mustache for the past couple weeks.  It was epic and bushy, however the time finally came for me to let it go.  Wow I am talking about nonsense...lets get to the pictures and captions!

First we have here this dude!  He is known as a crocodile shark.  They get to be about like 3 feet long and are bendy bendy!  You gotta pick these dudes up by their girls otherwise they could bite you anywhere else!  They are that flexible.  Unfortunatly, they get the hooks lodged right up in their mouths nice and good so normally we had to cut their jaws in half in order to free em :[  Oh well le sigh :\





Next on the list is this guy!  This is a shortfin mako shark and he is...well he is dead when we brought him aboard.  I got to snag a nice pic of me ridin him because...well when you bring a 8.5 foot shark aboard, you just gotta ride him like a horsey! :D  They are slightly different than the longfin mako which will be presented later in the pictures.






This guy here is a silky shark.  They are one of the MANY brown sharks we got going on in the pacific.  These were by far the most common sharks we caught.  The easiest way to determine they were silky sharks was the little black tips they had on their fins you can see below.  Most of these guys were caught alive and ranged from 2-6 feet in length so they really ran the gambit of sizes!





This is a blue shark.  Normally I was able to ID these guys a few feet out from the boat due to their completly different body structure and color.  They were sleek and blue, which the mako sharks did NOT share with them because the mako sharks were kinda chubby and not as brilliant blue as these guys.  Speaking of makos.. . .






This my friends is a longfin mako shark.  Notice how chubby they look.  Another big difference between the longfin and shortfin makos are the longfins (as seen in picture 2 below) have a "5 o'clock shadow".  Pretty gnarley eh?  They should SHAVE MORE!  those cheapy sharks!  Well, I am slowly getting better at posting pictures. . . hahaha.  By the way, most of these animals I have more than 3 pictures of them @ different angles and such, so if you ever want to see any animal in another angle, lemme kno and I'll post it!  Good day!  Off for a quick hike.

here fishy fishy fishy

FIIIIIIISH!  Oh how we caught so many of them! like over a thousand!  every night was a potporui of different fish and therefore I shall showcase some of the caught ones here

First, we shall start with what we were out there to catch.  This is a yellowfin tuna.  you can tell by the huge yellow fins on the dorsal and anal sides.  This guy was pretty big as you can see by the boots around him.




This guy is a shark bitten yellowfin tuna.  About the same size as the other, however it got destroyed by sharks.  Normally animals like this would be eaten by the crew as some of that crazy fresh shashimi

The next fish we were trying to catch was a bigeye tuna.  They look a little different than yellowfin tuna.  Can you notice the differences?

This is an escolar.  Also known as an oilfish, these guys are eaten, however eating too much of them will cause you some serious tummy trauama.  Reason being they are extremely oily and will coat your GI tract like a slip and slide.  anyways, most of the time, these guys came on board alive and were thrown into the ice hold alive, not gutted or anything.  kinda weird I know.

 This is another escolar and you can see round bites on it.  These are from Cookie Cutter sharks who have mouths that kind of look like melon ballers, hence the round holes all over this guy.  On the back end however, I believe there is a pinch of squid damage.  This is because how stringy the attack looks vs. the intense deep cuts caused by the shark as pictured above.





This was the number one fish we caught and weren't trying to catch.  This is the lancetfish.  These guys are extremely soft bodied and oftentimes their heads would pop right on em as they came aboard!  crazy stuff














MONCHONG MONCHONG MONCHONG!  This is a dagger pomfret, although they sometimes go by the family name of just Monchong.  These guys you can see the little daggers on their back keel (aka watch yourself, those daggers can keeeel!) haha. 

Last for today is a snake mackerel.  They kinda look like lancetfish, however there are some differences.  Can you spot em haha...i like playing these games.  Tomorrow, more fish! and perhaps even a ray OR a shark!

Food

Food on the boat was always...strange...to say the least.  Not that I dislike strange food by any means, but some of it was out there.  So, meal times were at the end of the haul (6am), at the end of the set (3pm) and in the middle of the haul (11pm).  These may sound like very strange times with no real correlation to one another, and this is true, but they were the only times to eat.  You frequently had a huge bowl and would stuff it with rice.  After this, there was always the option of hot land food and sea food, always choices, however they may not have been....to many peoples likings.  The fishermen would always have to gut the fish and therefore intestines, stomaches, ovaries, and testes were always at the table.  Also the cheeks of tuna were there which tasted great.  The intestines though, were quite chewey and contained a lot of cholesterol according to the crew, not exactly my cup of tea.

What was really good though was Ice cream!  yes, there was Ice cream on the boat and I had it for my birthday!  Otherwise, there were some strange things I had to get used to like eating with my hands again.  This boat, a lot like indonesia, was well...foreign, and the people on it preferred to used their hands to eat everything.  No forks or knives or spoons or even CHOPSTICKS!  just your two hand plowin away at the food.  Kinda gross I know but eating with utensils when I got back to mainland was really a treat.  Oh and on a side note, I am forever spoiled with sushi/shashimi seeing how i got to eat THE FRESESHET shashimi in the world  RIGHT off a yellowfin tuna with a sharkbite from the water, like just took a bite outta it!  Well, no pictures today, but next time, a special on fish where i'll show plenty of them!  Until next time