Suzy Kohin from the NOAA Shark Survey. Today was a short day. I am writing to you from my home. This will be my last blog entry for this trip, but Russ Vetter will be writing about our daily activities over the nest 3 weeks as we continue our survey and tagging trip. After he starts posting, you can see his blog at http://topp.org/blog/russvetter. We depart tomorrow morning for the second stage.

Today we again fished about 30 miles from San Diego. This time we fished in relatively shallow water (roughly 900 to 1,200 feet deep, or 300 to 400 meters) over a submarine plateau. The Southern California Bight is an area with a wide range of depths, where the sea floor may be either over a mile deep or reach to nearly the surface. In addition, the seven main Channel Islands provide diverse habitat and protection from open ocean swells and currents. We caught all 3 of our main species today: one male open-ocean (aka pelagic) stingray, which we will transfer to Catalina Island next weekend, 9 juvenile blue sharks, and an adolescent mako shark that was 58 inches (147 centimeter), long from the tip of his nose to the fork of his tail. We put a SPOT tag on the fin of the mako shark, which will send location information to a satellite, so that we can monitor its horizontal movements. Today's picture, taken by Laura Jordan, show a picture of the shark swimming off with its tag. Whenever the fin is above the surface, as in the photo, we should get a location from satellites that can pick up the tag's radio transmission.