This was a race of a different sort: chasing after a small tag in a big ocean as it was heading out to sea. John O’Sullivan, curator of field operations for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Sal Jorgensen, a TOPP white shark researcher, flew to Mazatlan, Mexico on Saturday on the private plane of a friend who volunteered to pilot them down. Here’s how small that tag is -- that's Sal holding a tag and looking at data it gathered when it was attached to a shark off northern California earlier this year.

Sal had called Saturday night to tell me they would be leaving to search for the tag early in the morning. Around 7 a.m. Sunday morning, I sent the last five positions reported by the tag to Sal in a text message to his satellite phone. They needed to head out early as the tag was a relatively long distance offshore and it would be hours before they would be in the area where the tag was drifting along.

They found a boat and headed out toward the tag. At 11 a.m. I sent them another location reported by the tag. The nerve-wracking thing was that the tag, which usually “talks” every hour, skipped two hours. Was the battery dying already?

When the tag reported a new location at 4 p.m., I called the satphone. It was the only time in all the times we called each other that we had a clear connection. They hadn’t found the tag yet, and John indicated they only had about two hours of daylight left. We had a lucky break -- the tag’s position report was more detailed than previous reports, so we were confident about where to search.

At 5 p.m., I sent another text message with the latest position. Then I heard nothing….until 9:30 p.m., when Sal called and said: “We’re back on land. We’ve got the tag! Tell Barb! (Block, a TOPP principal investigator)”….and he hung up.

Sal and John are on their way back, and will give all the details in tomorrow’s blog. We're hoping for a few photos, too! Later, we'll let you know what the tag learned about the white shark's journey. Here's a map -- of course, the exclamation point is where they picked it up!