Shark!

 

Meet Mary Lee.  Mary is a Great White shark.  She’s 16 ft long and weighs 3,500lb: so you probably don’t want to be in her bad books.

Since she was tagged in September 2012, she has swum more than 31,000 miles.  At the moment, she’s somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, but apparently has a fondness for the balmy waters off Charleston.  In 2013 she even headed into the inland waterways just north of Hilton Head Island . Mary Lee also has some friends, who also like hanging out off the coast of South Carolina.  Mary is so famous in Charleston that she has a mural on the wall of a local outdoor shop.

So what, you say?  Well, Charlie and I have entered the Low Country Splash, a 2.4 mile swim in the Cooper River in June.  Charlie isn’t in the slightest worried about the swim: but the idea of being in the same sea as a large and hungry shark terrifies her.  As for me, I don’t think a shark will go anywhere near several hundred swimmers: but 2.4 miles seems like quite a long way.

At the weekend, Alice and I went hunting for shark teeth on the beach.  Some sharks shed thousands of teeth through their lifetime, and a colleague told me that the Low Country was a good place to collect fossilised teeth that collect on some beaches at low tide.  Sounds easy… but when you get to the beach, how do you know what is a shark tooth and what is a stone?  We picked up quite a few stones, and something that I was definitely, 100% sure was a shark’s tooth.  We were excited!

I showed it to my colleague. It is definitely, 100% not a shark’s tooth.

Alice found a clam shell, and found it a lot more exciting than a shark’s tooth.  Admittedly it is a pretty exciting clam.

So we didn’t find any of Mary Lee’s teeth.  Let’s hope that this is a sign, and that when we come to do the open water swim in June, she doesn’t decide to join in.