I spent much of the day cleaning Shimshal’s bottom and grew slightly alarmed when, camera-less, I was scraping off the barnacles from the bottom of the keel at a depth of 2.3m. I’m not sure if it was the noise of steel on shells or the tasty morsels I was dislodging but, suddenly, I became aware that I was being circled by a lot of sharks and some of them quite big. Many were black tipped but also some grey reef sharks and I must admit that I was more than a little disquieted by the massed circling predarors who were suddenly looking quite hungry! I abandoned the scraping and switched to scrubbing off the green slime and gradually my new found shark ‘friends’ wandered off to go and terrorise a school of grouper.
Most of the bottom got scrubbed despite the intimidation and though we are not completely slime free I think I have chipped off every single barnacle unless there are a few lingering on the underside of the keel where they were protected by their sharky mates.
