The Wandering Soul of Katharine the Great...White Shark

From Cape Cod to Miami, Katharine's travel log rivets me, especially since Katharine's a great white shark hugging the coast.

The awesome crew of Ocearch researchers tagged her with a radio transmitter in the cold waters off Massachusetts.

At fourteen feet, she took up most of the bay of their special vessel.  Her skin shimmered like something beautiful from another world.  On her face shaped like a bullet, her eyes seemed to reflect the darkest ocean depths, callous and cold.

The tag is attached to her dorsal fin and when she surfaces, it sends out a signal.  And Katharine surfaces a lot.  That gives researchers good data and a clear path of Katharine all the way down the Atlantic seaboard.

I tend to romanticize travel, and of the school that considers all travel good for the soul.  That's probably why my imagination soars with thoughts of Katharine's journey.

Did she hear the sounds of the squealing teenagers near the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore?  Did she smell the southern cooking along the Carolinas?  Did she run into the crowds -- surfers, paddlers, boaters -- enjoying the ocean every way possible along the Florida stretch?

The researchers say she is looking for food in almost everything she does.  She is a feeding machine, a top predator.  They call her species "the lion of the sea".

At several points along the way, she ventured very close to inlets and places where rivers meet the ocean with names like Ponce Inlet or Biscayne Bay.  This is where fish -- her food -- congregate as nutrients pour off the land.

We all know that sharks don't like to eat humans.  They usually bite them in a case of mistaken identity.  Still hard to get over "the bite" part of that scenario, however.

I wonder how many people, maybe swimming at dusk after a nice afternoon laying on the sand or out for a brisk morning kayak up the beach, never realized how close Katharine came to them.

Or perhaps a few did see her.  They spotted Katharine and watched wide eyed and breathless as her unmistakable silhouette silently glided past them.  Back on land, they found themselves unable to stop talking about her.

The pings show that Katharine moved past Key West and through the Dry Tortugas into the Gulf.  No one is sure where she'll go next.  I hope she finds what she's looking for but never stops swimming.

Orange line is Katharine's path. 

Osearch has a cool app.
News about Katharine.