Roundabout to steinhart aquarium - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 151

for a few years, and when that shut down the United States maintained
its presence with a small civilian crew, in the event the island might be
needed again as a military base. In 1983 the United States pulled out
and the island was turned over to the Gilbertese, becoming Kanton Is-
land, part of the nation of Kiribati.
In the seventies, the U.S. Air Force made weekly flights from Hickam
Air Force Base in Hawaii to bring in food and supplies for the civilian
crew. This was how the Waikiki Aquarium flew their blacktips back to
Hawaii. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to collect and transport
some blacktip reef sharks to San Francisco.
Thanks in part to the organizing help of Bruce and the sta¤ of the
Waikiki Aquarium, I arrived on Canton Island with my shark trans-
port boxes, oxygen pumps, and, of course, dive gear. Stepping o¤ the
C-141 military transport jet, I was immediately struck by the intensity
of the sun. I'd forgotten how intense the midday sun's radiation could
be right on the equator. When I was handed several bottles of sun-
screen and told to use it or else, I fully understood why.
The next day Waikiki Aquarium's Ralph Alexander and I went scout-
ing for small blacktips on the shallow flats inside the atoll lagoon. Like
other coral atolls, which are formed when a coral-ringed volcano sinks
back below the sea, Canton is a ring of land enclosing a large lagoon.
The lagoon has one entrance channel connecting it to the outside ocean.
Inside the lagoon we found the little sharks cruising close to shore.
We stretched a fifty-foot-long nylon barrier net straight out from
shore and waited until we saw a couple of sharks working their way
along the lagoon's edge. Then, sneaking up behind them, we made a
wild dash, hoping to panic them into the net, where we could grab
them. More than half the time the alert, lightning-fast little sharks dou-
bled back and shot between our legs to freedom. Twice, though, our
technique worked, and after a couple of hours of exhausting work,
skinned knees, and impending sunstroke, we had two beautiful little
sharks in the boxes on the truck. Perhaps they were the retarded ones,
but at that point we weren't picky. We had sharks! After two more ex-
hausting days we had a total of six.
Some of us, needing a bit of a break, decided to do some diving and
photographing on the outside of the island. Les Gunther, a trustee of