Les Stroud Online

Tuesday Dec 11th 2007 The first day was not good for yours truly. Boats that run on diesel gasoline can be hard on the stomach at the best of times. Throw in some rough seas, really smelly chum (dead fish bait) and you have a noxious mix of smells that will challenge the hardiest of shark hunters. We stopped at two different spots during the day, about thirty miles out from the mouth of the Mississippi River, and started chumming. My producer, Scott Gurney, an experienced angler, has devised a special chumming system using a large barrel, a big hand operated fish chopper, some tubing and a water pump that works amazingly well. It spills out a ‘slick' of fish blood, guts, oil and flesh that, after a couple of hours, is miles long and works like a dinner bell to any sharks in the area. Not on day one, though. After trying one particular spot we boated out farther to one of the four thousand oil wells that dot this area and hooked up beneath its shadow. That was it for me. Then, instead of floating freely in the swell and waves we were tethered to a large, smelly, noisy oil rig and the boat rose and fell without sympathy for its passengers. While donning my scuba gear to see what was below, I had to concentrate on what I was doing — it was difficult snapping snaps and clipping clips while sweating profusely in a wet suit in the Louisiana heat. I ended up donating my then-digesting lunch to the chum slick to aid in attracting the sharks. Our efforts, and the day, wasted and my pride a little bruised (after all, I can no longer say ‘I've never gotten sick at sea') we headed back to Venice Marina for the night. The second day saw slightly rougher seas and we ran into new issues. Boat motor issues. An hour or so out the engines started to fail. Not a good thing. We limped back into the harbour and lost half a day until we finally had to switch to a larger boat, a ‘cat' — not an actual catamaran but rather a motorboat with a cat hull. Finally we had some room to move about, a good thing, what with two camera men, the boat captain, a stills photographer, me, my producer and his super angler assistant, Bill. We pushed it hard and stayed out into the dark to try and chum in some mako sharks, but to no avail. On the way back in the weather closed in on us. The fog blinded us completely for a while and then the rain pelted us hard. We lost sight of the harbour lights altogether and at one point we realized, at the last second, that we were headed straight for the jetty and would have had a terrible accident if Bill hadn't been standing stoically on the front deck with his keen eyes peering through the fog. We swerved and missed it by feet. Day three and the seas were bigger yet again, with swells reaching 7 feet. Still, we headed out in search of the mako shark. A couple of hours into the journey, things were not looking good. Even if we made it the eighty miles we had planned to travel, how would the divers get into those seas to film? Shooting anything topside would be pretty much out of the question. I was fine, but both my producer and Andy, the main cameraman, were sea-sick and both these guys have years of boating experience. In any event we still gave it a shot and chummed with our last bit of bait for a couple of hours in the rough seas, again to no avail. So where am I now? I'm writing this from Old Bahama Bay resort in the Bahamas just about to head out to Tiger Beach in search of lemon and tiger sharks. This is the same location where I was able to hold on to the tail of a massive tiger shark last year and swim with lemon sharks. We'll see how the day goes!
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