Monday Dec 10th 2007
Currently, I am flying over the Gulf of Mexico on my way to the second location shoot for Feeding Frenzy ll for the Discovery Channel. The ink is still wet on the contract I signed with Discovery to host the second installment of this special on sharks. I hosted the first one last year, as well as the entire twentieth anniversary of Shark Week itself. The past three days of this shoot have been a rough go.
We landed in Louisiana a few days ago and headed down to the mouth of the
Mississippi River. We were there to film the mako shark, one of the fastest fish in the ocean. A powerful predator, it has been clocked at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. The weather in Louisiana was great, although this area is still on the rebound from hurricane Katrina. On any given stretch of highway you might see a truck or two way out in the middle of the swamp, half buried in the muck and water, or a couple of huge boats way up on land, a mile from the water’s edge. The hurricane hit especially hard in this area, at the mouth of the river in a marina called Venice Marina. Though signs of the cleanup are becoming evident, it will take years still, and it seems eighty per cent of the trees are standing dead. The entire region feels as though it is in the middle of a country-sized oil refinery. I guess in a way it is. After all, this is the Gulf of Mexico. A Louisiana girl named Cindy met us at the gate and welcomed us to the marina late the first night after our drive down from New Orleans.