Sumbawa (Part II)

So, here we are nearly 3 months later! I promised myself I would write the second part a week after I published the first part. But alas, here we are wayyy past my deadline. I bet you can understand now why my blog posts are so sparsed. My apologies dear no one, but I'm here and I'm glad to finally publish the second part to my whale shark endeavor. Voila!

After spending 3 days on the bagan, we headed home. We didn't want to of course, but the restless winds and waves left us no other option. With our newly tanned, nay, burnt skin and tiredly happy smiles, we returned to the village. We were back to enjoying the simple luxuries of life; a bed, a shower and the college student's equivalent of crack-indomie with a shit ton of chili peppers. Our supervisor told us we had to wait another week or so before we headed out to sea again. Fortunately, our week was occupied with identifying the whale sharks we photographed on our previous trip so it went by rather quickly.

About 2 days before the scheduled departure of our second trip, two other CI staff members-both sharks and rays scientists- joined us in Labuhan Jambu. They came with two satellite tags! And a drone! And 2 of the biggest underwater cameras I have ever seen. We didn't think we were allowed to go since we were rookies after all. But to our surprise, they let us tag along. Our supervisor braced us of the incredibly tiring week to come. It was going to be a week long tagging trip, meaning every day we would travel back and forth between the village and the bay, identifying and tagging whale sharks. We would be hopping from one bagan to the other, photographing as many whale sharks as we could to add to the database. My toes tingled with excitement. We were on the cusp of a once in a lifetime experience. 

Since this was a tagging trip, we brought along a lot more equipment: Scuba sets, oxygen tanks, 2 satellite tags, underwater drills, and a drone. We left at 3 A.M. It was quiet. The water rippled as we cruised. The sea was calmer and the night was clearer. I tried to stay awake, as usual. I fell asleep anyway, as usual. When we arrived at the first bagan, it was still dark, not even a streak of sunlight. But there they were, clear as day, gentle giants swimming and feeding near the surface. Like a couple of school girls on a fieldtrip, we kept asking our supervisor,"Can we go now? Can we go now? Can we please pretty please go now?". "No, it's too dark, we have to wait for the sun to come out before we can properly photograph them." At the first glimmer of sun, we dove in immediately. 

It was different this time. On our very first encounter, the sea was chaotic, so were the whale sharks. Although I did enjoy myself, I was less focused on the sharks and more on just staying afloat amidst the strong current and turbulent waves. But this time, there were barely any waves and the water was still. I stayed on the surface the first time, admired them as they swam down below. But this time, I dove with them, admired them as they swam next to me. I followed them until I ran out of breath. My favorite part is when one of the sharks were vertical feeding. I would freedive as deep as I could until I reached their tail and let myself float to the top along their underside. I can never properly describe the freeing and vivid feeling of swimming with them: when they side-eyed me as they swam by, when I forgot how long I'd been holding my breath being next to them, when they grazed me with their fin. I didn't care if my freediving skills was less than adequate. I didn't care if I could only hold my breath for a minute or two. I didn't care if I couldn't dive past 6 meters. All I cared about was how truly privileged I was to be in their presence, in their natural habitat. 

Day after day, we travelled back and forth to the bagans. Our skin grew tanner and tanner with each trip. The enthusiasm and vigor in our hearts were slowly and carefully replaced with exhaustion and a longing for proper rest. But the whale sharks were still truly something to behold, even after a week of consecutive whale shark watching. The fatigue would temporarily wash away each time we entered the water. But it would creep back in faster and faster as the sun continued to ferociously beat down on us during the 2 hour trip back to the village.  

The best part of our trips was the short window after we finished photographing the whale sharks and before we headed back to land. We would lounge around the bagan and have breakfast with the fishermen. It was always seafood on the menu, fried and served with rice and fresh sambal. The best breakfast I ate, however, had to be the indomie cooked with squid. It was black and the noodles were overcooked for my taste but my god was it absolutely, fantastically delicious. You could honestly take me to a three michelin starred restaurant, and I would still say, without a doubt, that the plate of indomie cooked with squid I had on a bagan, in the middle of the ocean, is the most glamorous meal I have ever had. 

Before we knew it, our week was up. We had precisely a week and a half left before we had to go back to Bali. Our last week was probably the most stressful. We had to finish identifying the sharks, classifying them into the database, and writing our final internship reports all within that last week. The aftermath of fieldwork is the side most people don't tell you about being a scientist. We see marine scientists posting breathtaking pictures of their fieldwork all the time, but very rarely do we get to see the data science, the compilation, the analysis, the hard math behind it. But I enjoyed it. Was it frustrating? Yes. At times, it was painstaking. We identified them with a software, but we mostly had to match the photography manually to the ones stored in the database in order to determine which whale shark we encountered. I probably sighed every 30 seconds. After identifying them and processing the data, we finally had our graphs and statistics to analyze in our reports.  But I guess that's how you know you're doing what you love: when you keep going even if you're not obligated to. It was an internship after all, no strings attached. But we finished what we came to do, and furthermore, we finished because we wanted to, because we loved the work. The moment I finished typing the last word of my report, it was pure ecstasy. I managed to write a real scientific report! It didn't matter that it was my first draft, certainly peppered liberally with mistakes. I finished it, and I was, and will always be, proud of it. 

At the end of the day, our internship in Sumbawa was, as cheesy as it might sound, life changing. We learned that conservation work is not always glamorous. We learned that conservation is truly tiring. We learned that conservation requires patience of the highest degree. But more importantly, we learned that conservation is worthwhile and powerful. A cutthroat world awaits us beyond the borders of our little faculty. But no matter what happens to the three of us in the future, I know for certain, we will always remember the people we met, the meals we shared, and the bonds we forged during that time we decided to brace uncharted territory together, as friends.