State-side again

So it’s our penultimate day here in the states, tomorrow we’re homeward bound.

Today myself and Tom spent the day with Mahmood Shivji, filming and photographing his projects at the Guy Harvey Research institute.

By all accounts today could very easily have been a complete disaster. I’ll explain why. Upon arriving in Fort Lauderdale yesterday evening, I found that not all of our luggage had made it onto the flight. More specifically, one essential piece of equipment had not arrived; my tripod. Its was a small aircraft that bought us to the states from Eleuthra, and apparently our gear didn’t fit into the cargo hold. What would have been nice is the airline had told about this at the time, so we could say which boxes we needed and which we didn’t. Unfortunatly, we didn’t find out until we landed.

So, the morning started by phoning around camera hire facilities in the Fort Lauderdale area, trying to find a tripod. This was more difficult that it might sound. Once I’d found one, we hit the road to go and collect the tripod (by now I was really glad I’d decided to hire a Sat Nav system for the car). Tripod collected, we were finally on our way to the institute, our location for the day.

At the institute Mahmood Shivji is running two projects for SOSF, one on shark DNA forensics, and the other on polluntants in shark fins. We were mostly focused on the latter. There are potentially some intersting results that are about to be announced concerning this project, hence the reason for us documenting it. Watch this space for more news on the results.

After all the complications in the morning, things went pretty smoothly for the rest of the day. We filmed an interview with Mahmood as well as him and his team working on the project.

Oh, and by the time we made it back to the hotel, our missing bags had arrived too.