Aimee and I slept in, again. But by now, Dean and Jill were wising up to us. We had all decided the night before that they would take the car to another beach for some early morning snorkeling. We’d barely notice.
Dean and Jill had likely been gone for hours by the time Aimee and I made our way outside. Since we knew our friends would be coming back soon, we decided to stay close to home. Our plan was to snorkel the local reef outside our front door and then swim home via the cove that led to our back door.
The reef swim was delightfully serene. My only concern was making sure that Aimee didn’t get surprised by a barracuda. We had since found out that Dean was right; the fish don’t usually bother humans. But I still wanted Aimee to have a nice time. She didn’t have her contacts with her the last time we went snorkeling, so this was her first real visit to the massive reef encircling the islands. As it turned out, the barracuda would be the least of our worries.
We casually paddled around the natural and artificial (concrete) reefs, and checked out the tropical fish that inhabited them. After snorkeling for about an hour, we saw Jill and Dean make it back home. So we set off for the cove. The tide was going out at that point, so the mouth of the cove was blocked by a barely-submerged sandbar. We had no choice but to take off our fins and walk at several points, but at least we didn’t need to worry about dodging boats.
The bottom dropped back to about 8-10 feet as we made our way into the mangroves deeper in the cove. We were hoping to see a sea turtle that tend to frequent that area, so I was looking out as far as the visibility would allow. Along the ground I saw a huge log about 10 feet from me and 8 feet from Aimee. Then I saw that the log had a tail. And a dorsal fin. By the time we realized that the “log” was actually a six-foot long shark, we had nearly drifted right on top of it.
I pulled Aimee back and pointed out what I had seen. To her credit, she stayed calm as we treaded water and talked through what we should do next. We decided to continue swimming to our house, since the route back to open ocean was nearly as long (and still left us in the shark’s turf). We put our masks back on, and looked down to make sure we didn’t literally bump into the shark as we swam through the murky, shallow water. But the shark was gone, and we could now barely see five feet in front of us. Not good.
For the next ten minutes (going on an hour and a half), we quickly and silently swam our way through the cove, gradually making peace with our impending doom. Even the field of jellyfish we swam through barely registered. We had a bigger threat on our minds.
As soon as we saw a break in the mangroves, we climbed out using a neighbor’s dock. Then we breathlessly kicked off our fins and walked/trembled our way back to the Lighthouse.
When we saw Jill and Dean, we blurted out a senseless word salad about what had happened to us. But they got the point, since we mostly just kept saying, “shark” over and over again.
As soon as the commotion had settled, Dean casually mentioned that he had caught a barracuda that morning. Ironically, he had been worried about spooking us, since it was right where we were swimming. We all shared a nervous chuckle at what had previously seemed like our most pressing concern.
 |
| Photo by Dean “Still Has Both Thumbs” Knuth |
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rest of our day was spent on dry land. We passed the afternoon on the dock, holding our books at reading distance while we relived our close encounter for the next three hours.
As we sipped on some sunset margaritas, one of our neighbors came down to sit near us along the bay. The small fishing boat tied up to her dock had a Canadian flag flying from it, but we got the impression that she spent most of the year in Turks and Caicos. During a pause in the small talk, she looked around at how pretty our surroundings were and said, “It takes a lot of this to kill you, doesn’t it?”
She was right, it would certainly take quite a bit. Or one shark. It would take a lot of this or one shark to kill us. I’m glad it wasn’t the shark today.
