4.26. La Jolla Cove
Went to the kelp forest at the cove this morning once more. The water had a murky 15 ft visibility, was warm 58 F, and super calm. Each patch of the kelp hosted a ton of sand seabass and a huge school of barracuda was wandering from one to another. I wasn’t sure what would show up today. For a while it was quiet.
As I crossed a sand channel and entered a new patch of the kelp, shadows of three sevengills merged – one was small and two mid-sized. They obviously looked curious. They were circling and one caught my attention. It had scars all over the body. With parasites or maybe algae around, those scars were likely not fresh. Its mouth was not completely shut. More dramatically, the tip of its tale was missing.
The ‘half tail’ felt different from the other two. It did not swim away; instead, it kept on turning back and swam right toward me. It had this unrelenting curiosity in its move. It repeated a few times and in the last approach it came close, made an eye contact with me, and glided away. It probably noticed that I was a quite irrelevant subject in shark’s world. This time, it didn’t come back.
The encounter was a thrill. As these sharks cruised in and out of the kelp forest, they always looked mellow. But behind those scars and injuries is a wild side of their life barely seen.
