Sandbar Shark Bump

Sharks don't seem to like bright lights being shined at them. My friend Steve found that out for certain on a dive on Stetson Bank recently.

We'd been seeing several Sandbar Sharks during the days diving at Stetson. Sandbars are not shy sharks, they seem to come in closer than many other sharks, and don't seem to be as scared of bubbles being exhaled. I got some pretty nice shots, a few of which I will post next, but my shots were only during the day. We got to do a night dive, and Steve took his video rig including his ET-phone-home-brightness video lights.


Steve wasn't hurt, and said that after the bump, the shark just swam away. He was a little shaken up but not much, considering. He was reluctant to tell me about it since I had given him a hard time about being worried about Lemon Sharks in Florida. But when I saw the video, I knew I couldn't give him a hard time anymore. I asked him if I could share it on this blog, and he graciously agreed. I think it's just about the coolest 5 second video clip ever.

Road Post

Can I post to blogger with my iPhone? If you are reading this, then the answer seems to be yes.

I should be out in the gulf right now, but Gustav, the hurricane, had something to say about that. That is especially unfortunate, as the Flower Gardens, especially Stetson Bank, have been spectacular over the past couple of weeks. Sharks. Mantas. Turtles. Spotted Eagle Rays. Coral spawning.

Damn Gustav.

Moving this blog

After being hacked a second time, I decided that I'd had about enough of managing my own blog software, and so decided to move the blog off of my own site and onto a service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com. I looked at both, and found that while it would be easier to migrate to Wordpress.com, I like Blogspot better. Plus, I don't exactly trust Wordpress given that security holes they had. They did fix them, but there could definitely be more to come. Not that Blogger does't have security holes as well, but they seem to be paying attention and fixing them pretty quickly. And, I like the options that Blogspot has for video, since I have some video clips that I want to be sharing soon.

I don't yet have it looking as spiffy as I want it to, but if more hurricanes show up, and it looks like they will, I should have some more time to work on it.

The official http address for the new blog is http://blog.chrisparsons.net. I'll redirect the old link to that address, so the old one should still work. If you have subscribed to the old blog, you'll need to re-do your subscription on the new one.

BTW, I used a java tool (on my mac) to parse an export of my Wordpress blog and make the equivalent posts on Blogger. Pretty cool, though I haven't yet been able to move the comments from the old blog to the new... I'll try to do that if I can. The tool (written by a guy in China) is here

Thanks for your patience... and check back soon for some video posts.