Shark Week! (Not Really)

We spent a few days of vacation hanging out at the beach and playing in the water near the pier. The kids had fun, and the pier gave us a reference point on occasion when someone needed to find us. Plus it made for some nice photos in the background.

The last day we were on vacation, we paid to walk out onto the pier. (They find new ways to charge you for old things all the time, don't they?) I did this solely for the photographic opportunities that it would provide. I'm just being honest. There was a shark and a swordfish hanging from the pier, mocking us all week, and I needed to get pictures of the kids with it because that's the kind of vacation photos you need. See?

That right there is a good vacation photo. You've got a plastic shark complete with beady eyes and sharp teeth, you've got a cocky young man who supposedly caught that thing, and you've got the pier and the ocean there for good measure. Well worth the money paid for that. *ahem*

There were many fishermen on the pier there, and it was fun watching them cast and reel and other fishermen things. The kids soon noticed the commotion in the water, however.

I know you can't tell what's going on there, but there is a fin right in the center of the photo. The fin of a shark. There were two sharks circling the waters below the pier, hoping for whatever it is they were there to find. Bait on a hook? Bait thrown out by fishermen who were done fishing? Cleaned fish guts? Who knows. But the kids were uber fascinated watching them, and I'm not going to lie - I was rather fascinated as well. It's not every day one sees a shark in Pennsylvania, after all.

As we were watching the circling sharks, one of the fishermen got a bite on the line. His grandson with him was all sorts of gleeful over the impending fish being reeled in, and then we all stood and watched as he landed a shark.

The teeny tiny little shark is adorable, no? We watching him flop around on the pier for a few minutes before he was nabbed by the tail and tossed back into the ocean. And then we watched the sharks circling again and wondered if he'd been eaten. Do big sharks eat little sharks? That's a question for the internets to answer.

And THEN we realized how close the sharks were to the shore where we had been swimming for a few days that week.  Clearly, there were no shark attacks and we had been safe, but I'll fully admit to being a little freaked out retrospectively.