Stalking Sharks in Koh Tao

Greetings from Koh Tao, Thailand! I've been here for about 3 days now. I took a bus from Bangkok which reached a city called Chumphon about 14 hours later. I switched buses at 3 in the morning where I was taken to the ferry dock. The ferry was not set to leave Chumphon for Koh Tao (an island by the way: Koh means "island" in Thai) until 6 in the morning. But, very conveniently there was a little room set up with bamboo mats on the floor for people to sleep while waiting for the boat. So I curled up with my backpack, ready for a few Z's, but unfortunatley someone else in the room snored incredibly loudly... So much for sleep. Anyway, caught the ferry at 6 AM and reached Koh Tao around 9AM. A very nice little place, very touristy though. I am not really used to places like this where you walk down the street and see more foreigners on vacation than locals. Still, there are wonderful beaches and lots of hammocks to laze around in.

A few days ago I went on a snorkel boat trip for a day around the island. The highlight of this trip: stalking sharks! The crew told us if we were lucky we would see some sharks while snorkeling. Everybody shivered and then the captain screamed: "Hurry up and get snorkeling! The sharks are hungry!" A few people stayed on board our junk but I hurridly finned and masked up and jumped in. My mission: stalk some sharks. I recently finished reading "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea," and decided that I should be a bit more like Captain Nemo, afraid of nothing. So I went further out to sea with my little snorkel than the captain told us was safe. Oh well, there were sharks on the line here. Farther and farther I went. So far, had not seen any sharks so I amused myself by stalking some pretty rainbow colored fish that were snacking on the coral muck. After the rainbow fish dispersed I amused my self (very shortly) by stalking sea slugs. This proved to be not as amusing as I had hoped... Where were the sharks? All the sudden... a shadow! Two shadows! Three shadows! FIVE SHADOWS!!! I jerked around to see if there were any other people around. There weren't. I investigated further. SHARKS!! A pack of them was swimming along in a very menacing manner on the sea floor. I thought about what to do... swim away. No. Stay still? No. Stalk them. Yes! While I am sure that the captain (who I think was drunk) would not have let us in to shark infested waters if the sharks were dangerous, I decided to pretend that the sharks were dangerous. I was pretty much in grave danger. On the verge of a shark attack. Definetaly. It was almost like Jaws. I channeled Captain Nemo's spirit and chased after the pack of sharks. My "Jaws" shark attack adventure proved to be useless since the sharks were more scared of me than I was of them and they sort of just swam away when they heard me coming. Anyway, after the first pack disappeared another pack showed up. I stalked them around for about 20 minutes until this pack disappeared into the coral and into the murky depths of "way beyond safe area." I am glad I didn't have a harpoon because the spirit of Ned Land was starting to overtake me, my wrist was twitching at the idea. After about1 hour in the shark infested waters I emerged having seen about 25-30 sharks (all of them scared of me), with all my limbs intact. I got out of the water triumphant! A few others had seen the sharks as well and we traded "battle stories." It was obvious that we were all out for a little adventure. The (definetaly drunken) captain told us the sharks were called Blacktip sharks.
The boat trip was a great time! Sharks, rainbow fish, white sand beaches, snorkeling, relaxing. while I was not stalking sharks I amused myself with deciding who would be Chief (Lord of the Flies style) if our junk shipwrecked. I mulled it over, observing everyone on the boat. I finally decided on the old German guy with the big nose and beer belly. I thought that his nose would probably have a calming effect on everyone. My second choice was the Swedish mother of two boys. She could be vice-chief. I would be shark stalked extordinarie. It would be great. We would have pig roasts every night... and stuff like that.