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To: RegulatorCountry

When I lived in Subic Bay as a kid, we used to go down to the beach at night, and they had a water ski raft about 50 yards off the beach.

I remember the water it was anchored in being about 15-20 feet deep.

We used to swim out to that thing and swim all around it, horse playing, throwing each other off, racing to see who could swim to the bottom and back the fastest.

Never even gave a thought to sharks. Not once.

Before anyone misinterprets that...it wasn’t bravado or anything like that. We were just too stupid to even think of it, so caught up were we in the fun of it.

Me and a select few friends spent all of our time in the water. We would bring our snorkeling gear to school, and when done, bolt on the busses down to the beach. On weekends, our families often went, and when they didn’t, we did.

We spent so much time in the ocean that we felt completely comfortable in it.

I shouldn’t admit it, but it is true: when I saw “Jaws”, it changed a lot for me. I thought back to all those hours I spent at night with friends swimming in those tropical waters, and it made me shudder.

I didn’t shudder because of the danger, because I can’t really gauge just how dangerous that is or was, but...I shudder more at the mere obliviousness of my twelve year-old self in retrospect.


32 posted on 07/05/2014 10:25:44 PM PDT by rlmorel ("A nation, despicable by it"s weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral." A. Hamilton)
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To: rlmorel

There are old family friends who live not far from Beaufort, NC, they’ve been in and around the ocean for generation after generation, have a Grady-White fishing boat that they take out to the Gulf Stream. They always told us we wouldn’t be in there if we knew what was swimming around our feet.

I still went. Only had two scares in going on almost five decades. Once as a child on Oak Island, NC. We arrived a week after a hurricane had blown through, new sandbars off the beach. People were finding tremendous conch shells out on those sandbars, about a hundred yards out. My dad and I started out there, paddling along on one of those renting inflatable rafts. About halfway, we heard people yelling and lifeguard’s whistles. At almost the same time, three large dark forms swam just below us. Scary feeling. Didn’t know whether to freeze or swim like mad. If I could have jumped up and walked on water I would have, lol. Turned out to be stingrays, trapped between the beach and the sandbars.

Other time, a dolphin leapt out of the water and smacked down not ten feet away from me, this was more recent. I was on Hatteras Island, NC. If you see smaller fish start jumping out of the water all around you, be very careful. Might not be a shark, could be blues or a barracuda, but they can still hurt you.


37 posted on 07/05/2014 10:36:37 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: rlmorel

I did the same in the harbor off San Kaien in Yokohama.


44 posted on 07/06/2014 5:40:21 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks (Rip it out by the roots.)
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