Biology Reference
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she'd come into the lagoon through the one entrance channel and wasn't
able to find her way back out. People at the base were concerned that
there wasn't enough food in the lagoon for the plankton-feeding shark.
There was much talk among the island crew about how to get her out
again to the open sea. One proposal even involved dynamiting a new
channel through the coral reef.
We didn't see Mini. Instead we found another whale shark, a smaller
male about thirteen feet long that had been given the nickname
“Mickey.” This was my second experience swimming with a whale shark,
the first having been with a very large thirty- to forty-foot shark near
Loreto in the Sea of Cortez.
In the shallow water of the lagoon the shark swam slowly, unper-
turbed by our presence next to it. The water at the end of the lagoon
was rather murky, so our underwater pictures weren't the greatest, but
it was still thrilling to be in the water with such a wonderful and docile
animal.
The time came for the weekly Air Force C-141 plane to arrive with
supplies and to fly our sharks and us back to Hawaii. For the sharks, I'd
brought two large fiberglass transport boxes—big enough for eight
little sharks (selected from the fourteen) to swim constantly—as well
as oxygen, twelve-volt car batteries, and submersible oxygen pumps.The
flight to Hawaii was uneventful, and the sharks arrived in perfect shape.
Waikiki Aquarium had arranged for a large pool that I could use to
hold the sharks for three days until my flight to the mainland. This
gave the sharks time to rest and recover in case there had been any phys-
iological stress from the first leg of the trip. The next phase would in-
volve two legs: Honolulu to Los Angeles, where I would have a six-
hour layover to change planes for the flight up to San Francisco.
The sharks and tons of other freight were loaded in the Pan Am
DC-8 cargo plane, and we took o¤ from Honolulu just as the sun was
setting. The crew consisted of two pilots, a navigator—and me and
my sharks. After making sure the life-support system was functioning,
I moved up to the cockpit as the heavily loaded plane roared down the
runway, lifted o¤, and circled over Diamond Head. What a breath-
taking sight, with the glowing red sunset and twinkling lights of Ho-
nolulu! As we sped eastward, the dark of night came quickly. It seemed
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