In a crazy nutshell…the kids are playing at the beach while monkeys ransack our kitchen while I’m 45 ft. under being circled by two sharks!

If you believe that this could really happen all at once, keep reading!

This is what happened…

My cousin, Gina, showed up this week! Gina is like a little sister to me. She does beautiful family portraits, helps me with the business, and is our number one help with the kids. We couldn’t come to Thailand and not have her join us for a little while. She’s here for 10 days, and we are loving the experience of her witnessing the craziness too!

Since Brian and I are going through the scuba certification course, Gina hung out with the kids so we could do a couple dives together. While they were at the beach, the monkeys did something they NEVER do! They broke through the shades! This means they got into the kitchen, broke my crock pot scr300ss cooker and ransacked the whole place! Now I have to replace the countertop in my kitchen so I’m going to visit countertops in Salt Lake City.

The kids and Gina came back to all our bananas eaten up with peels everywhere! Lamps were knocked over, and they did something that is SO OFFENSIVE! They broke into our rice!!! Just when we thought, we had made our Alpha stand, changed their pattern, outsmarted them…they prove us wrong! Those darn monkeys!

But the craziest thing is somewhere in the Andaman Sea, 45 ft. below, Brian, myself and our instructor are being circled by TWO of these bad boys!

Seriously…this is not what I had hoped for! Just when I thought we’d seen all the wildlife there was to see…

But let me back up to how we got ourselves into this spot.

With Gina and the kids playing on the beach today, Brian and I went and did a day of diving together. We haven’t had a chance to do any thing alone since we’ve been here, so this was a blast!

Here’s some fun shots of him catching me in the act of setting up all my gear!

This is Keith, our AWESOME instructor, from Cape Town, South Africa. He’s done over 4K dives!

I’m having a BLAST, as you can see. That’s because no one has informed me of the fact that one of our dives today will be focused on finding sharks! Not vegetarian sharks but CARNIVORES!

We do our first drive, and it is breathtaking! The dive is focused on a tall reef wall that has endless activity, coral of every color, it totally takes me breath away. And then I feel it. It’s subtle at first, but the feeling keeps coming back. It’s as if something is sucking on my leg. Before I know it, Keith is in my face asking me to hold still. Then he goes down to my legs, and is trying to get this THING off of me. It would have been one thing if this THING was shooed away, but only seconds later, Keith is shooing this thing away again. This time Brian is trying to kick it with his fins, and I’m feeling it on my LEG! Keith asks me to follow him, but the feeling is BACK! I’m starting to freak out, but we can’t surface yet. Both guys are at it again, trying to shoo this thing off me. I can’t even get a good look at it. All I can tell is that it’s long, a foot long, slithery and black! You can hear me squealing through the water!

And then it stops. We go to a sandy spot, work on some skills, and I don’t feel the “thing”. But when we finish our skills, I see Brian and Keith both smiling b/c the THING never left me! Turns out, he’s a Remora Sucker Fish! Can anyone say “YUCK!!!!” with me!

He’s a somewhat rare kind. They usually attach themselves to whale shark or whales. Yeah ladies, you know EXACTLY what I’m thinking! “He’s mistaking me for a WHALE!” Nice!

As we begin to ascend, I feel him on my leg again, and then I see him finally LEAVE ME BE as we surface. He never left me the WHOLE DIVE! He was hiding from me on my tank when we were doing our skills. Brian and Keith saw him but knew he wasn’t going to shoo away, and since he’s harmless, they let him be my buddy for the dive and didn’t tell me. “One in a million,” Keith says. Figures it would happen to me!

I’m a little creeped out about going back in for our second dive. It’s amazing how the Sucker fish made me feel completely claustrophobic under water. But we’re not done for the day, and Keith decides to brief us on Dive 2. Turns out we are headed to a place where Black Tipped Reef Shark are quite prominent. And not only that, our intention is to be looking for them. In Keith’s words, “We’ll come to an open space, I’ll signal to you both to start looking for the sharks, and we’ll hold still and wait to see if they come to us.”

I’m looking at him like “Are you kidding me?! What did YOU just say?” No way Hosea! That’s not interesting AT ALL to me!

Keith assures me that even though they are carnivore sharks (man eating sharks is what carnivore shark says to me!), they are terrified of people. Another fellow instructor/photographer tells me I have more reason to be afraid of peanut butter than these sharks. Then Keith shows me a picture of what the sharks look like. Okay people, you tell me what’s scarier looking–the shark or Skippy?! C’mon now!

Then I am told that the number of shark sightings has dropped significantly b/c of all the frivolous shark hunting. If we do see them, it’s a total gift. A gift…I’m still not buying it. But…

Somehow I end up in the water…descending…looking every which way I can.

Thirty minutes into the dive, we come to an open spot–just as Keith had described. He makes the shark sign with his hand to his head (and I think of every “shark” game I played in the pool with my little brothers growing up–except this time it’s not one of them pretending to be a shark–we’re looking for the REAL thing). I can’t help but think ‘How on earth am I forty five feet under water, sitting here quietly, waiting for sharks to hopefully arrive? What on earth is going on!’

And then he appears.

He’s four feet in length–about twenty feet away. The first two things I notice are his shark FIN and his SHARK SWIM. Sharks just swim different than all the others. You all know the swim. Gave me the creeps, and yet I found myself totally fascinated and enthralled! We watched him do a full, slow circle around us, checking us out. Our instructions were to hold still. I’m not sure I was even breathing! But then he moved on.

Only minutes later, I spot the second one. I’m actually making the shark sign to Keith and
Brian! He’s a much bigger and badder boy than the last one. He’s almost six feet long–uh huh. This guy does a half circle, moving slowly, watching—ooooh, that beady black eye that never blinks. I can picture it now as I type this. And then without notice, he moves on too. I have to admit that neither shark ever seemed scared of us. Nope, that’s not the feeling I got. 🙂

We make our ascend, and I’m on cloud nine! I have lived to tell that I went scuba diving and was circled by two big reef sharks! Unreal!! I feel TOUGH after this episode! (I was attempting to make a muscle in the image if you can’t tell. ;))

So it’s official. Sharks have now joined the wildlife encounters we’ve had! Monkeys, Geckos on steroids, flying termites, sharks, bats the size of our Golden Retriever!…wait, have I told you about the hundreds, literally HUNDREDS, of bats that flew over our heads?! HUNDREDS–the size of dogs! Ooooh, that story is coming up!

Someone commented on my Twitter and Facebook that I’m a magnet to wildlife. I’m thinking that may be true!

(Shauni, I have to tell you that I thought of you while I was being circled ‘Shauni would have totally dug this!’ Shae Min, you never once came to mind. :))

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WIN A SONY CAMERA!! It’s a NATIONWIDE CONTEST that Woman’s World and Sony are sponsoring with us! For details, CLICK HERE !

Register for our Upcoming Discovery Workshop ! Ladies Only! CLICK HERE to get your spot!

For fun photo exercises, check out our popular Instructional DVDs Refuse to Say Cheese and Beyond the Green Box (They are BACK IN STOCK!! Yeah!!), our 101 Kits for starting or expanding a business in photography , click on the words of your choice!