Sal Jorgensen, Gulf of the Farallones. After three weeks of challenging weather, on Sunday we finally had one of those rare days in the Farallones with sunshine, clear water, and no wind. Luck was really with us -- in addition to the conditions being just right, we were fortunate to witness white sharks feeding. In the Fall, thousands of elephant seals and sea lions haul out on the rocky shore of the Farallon Islands and white sharks gather here to patrol the surrounding waters for their next meal.

A good day yesterday. Some female white sharks showed up. Since the white shark tag team finished putting all the pop-up tags on the sharks, says white shark researcher Sal Jorgensen, they attached two acoustic tags to two females. Here's how it works: The researchers drop a video camera off the side of the small boat they use as their tagging platform. They use a seal decoy to attract the sharks to the boat. When the sharks swim by, they attach a tag just beneath their thick, sandpapery skin beside the dorsal fin. Some sharks sense the "stick", some don't.

Those Farallones winds. They often put a crimp in the best-laid plans. And they did so yesterday, as they have for half the days this month. The shark tag team assembled at the Marina Green at 6 a.m., then sailed all the way out to the Farallon Islands, which takes a couple of hours. The winds kicked up more than forecast. Anything above 15 knots makes it too difficult and dangerous to tag the sharks. The shark taggers lower a small boat from the back of the vessel pictured below, and does the tagging from the small boat.

October. White shark tagging month at TOPP. It's notoriously a bad-weather month. No wonder that white shark researcher Sal Jorgenson and the rest of the white-shark tag team have made it past the Golden Gate Bridge only 13.5 out of 25 days so far. They're not too disappointed, though. They've attached 10 pop-up satellite tags to the sharks. Those tags automatically release from the shark after a pre-progammed time.....anywhere from 30 days to a year. Our star white shark, Omoo, wore a pop-up tag for a year, and that's his track that you see on TOPP.org's home page.