Sad news re the acoustic tagging expedition - we went out yesterday from 10am to just before 3pm and did not see a single shark! We had 6 hardy expedition members with us including staunch supporters from Nairobi and a journalist all the way from Kigali in Rwanda. Peter Zanetti was our pilot teamed up with David Kimtai our KWS spotter and Volker was all set to tag. It was very windy and overcast so the sea was quite rough and it was hard to see anything with the sun. It had poured with rain during the night as well and even though I had dreamt about seeing lots of sharks it was not meant to be. We sat out there on the churning sea for hours watching the plane go up and down but we only saw dolphins and turtles (not bad but not great when you are looking for whale sharks).

Here is Volker giving a briefing and behind him you can see Gwili from the Colobus Trust who also joined us. Gwili’s mum has actually adopted and named the first 2 sharks that we tag with acoustic tags so although it was completely by chance it was very fitting that Gwili was on the boat with us for the start of the expedition.

This is a picture of the actual tags with some visual references for you thrown in for you to judge size easily.

They are amazingly small - the silver dart goes into the whale shark’s skin. You can also see that they are numbered and coded.

And here is a mournful sight - Volker’s spear gun with tag attached and fins close by - all set for him to jump in when the radio call comes in.

Sadly the fins did not touch water yesterday and the tags won’t be put out now until November at the earliest. I am really disappointed as I wanted to report on this when we presented our work to date at the 2nd International Whale Shark Conference to be held in Mexico in July. We have never tried tagging at this time of year but were of the opinion that unless we try we will never know more about our whale shark population. I was totally convinced that we would see whale sharks!

Thank you to all the people who came down to support us, and hopefully we will have more success next time. We are glad that we tried because otherwise we wouldn’t have learnt what we did. Every little bit of research that we do really counts and helps us build a clearer picture of whale sharks in Kenya. It will now be a double celebration when we finally do put these tags out because we were so disappointed this time.

Every donation we receive will also help us carry on with our work so please help us continue what we have started.

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