Barb Block, salmon-tagging in Alaska. Well, yesterday was not the day we shark taggers dream of. It was the day that reminds me why few have done this work before. It was a bit cooler and rained heavily all morning. I lost the sharks I hooked. We had been given some large silver salmon to entice them and it was tough to keep the salmon sharks on the gear. Eventually, we got in a groove, hooked some sharks from the skiff, which we use to get closer to shore, and brought them to the R/V Solstice for tagging.

By mid-day, Dawn Treader with Captain Dave Pope and his wife, Diane, transferred a salmon shark to a research vessel for tagging. A second transfer came from a group of men who were trying to set a light tackle record.

Later, we had a batch of fish that in every way tested the research team. Some just said no to tagging by escaping from our stretcher just before we brought them into the tagging station. Others fought hard once they were in the tagging station. We irrigated all the sharks with sea water so that they could keep breathing, and with some persistence into the evening, tagged 6 sharks. Two of those we put all three types of tags on.

So far, we've tagged 14 sharks. It's hard to describe the precision it takes with a team to do this. If it were not for TOPP's Stanford graduate students Chris Perle and shark soother Aaron Carlise; Dan Madigan and associates Alessandro and Mike; and Dr. Joe Bonaventura, this could not be done!

We've got one more day to go. Last night, the members of the tagging team were literally licking their wounds. Lots of broken skin from handling big sharks. Maybe the record runs of pink salmon are filling up these fish, because they're larger than we've handled before.