This lovely shou puerh came in a pack of 20 minis. I drank almost all of them when I first got them in 2021, but the remainder have been sitting in storage basically since then, aging and waiting and aging.

 

These were absolutely delightful. The first steep had a sweet, almost fennel-y taste, that soon gave way to a rich, warm, velvety tea. It was the perfect thing to have on a sunny afternoon a few miles off the Miami coast, after a tiring day of throwing out floats and pulling up drum lines.

 

In any event, where was I? Ah yes. The tea. There is something about being in the sun all day, in a humid place, that makes tea really hit the spot, and pu-erh in particular. Yes, cold, iced drinks are nice, but hot drinks seem to have the opposite effect to what I would imagine. They don’t heat me up; in some ways, the heat of the drink feels like an acknowledgement that yes, it is really hot out.

 

It probably helped that at that point, the water for my tea had cooled to maybe 90 degrees Celsius, after hours being stored in one of my vacuum thermoses. It was definitely hot enough to brew, but I think the brew that came out was more mellow than it might otherwise have been.

 

This was a lovely bit of calm in a day that was spent in the best shark-infested waters that you can imagine.

The waffles minis are no longer up for sale, but you can still get waffles on the white2tea site as a full tea cake, imprinted with a waffle pattern for easy breaking.

Several months ago on BlueSky, David Shiffman, a shark researcher, announced that they would be doing a contest whereby you could join a research team on a boat and watch them do shark research, which honestly sounds like the greatest thing ever in the entire world, so of course I entered.

 

I did not win the contest, but I did get a spot as an alternate, in case anyone dropped out, and I did not think anything of this because, and this is important, WHO ON EARTH would conceivably drop out of shark research?????? Sharks??? The most toothsome of the megafauna remaining on this planet? The primeval terror of the deep? The adorable keystone species for the part of the planet that is key to our survival?

 

And someone might willingly choose not to go? Utterly ridiculous ideas. Impossible. Cannot be done.

 

Nonetheless, a few weeks ago David emailed me and told me that somebody had dropped out and was I possibly available? I looked at my calendar—I did not need to do this; I was going to make it happen—and then checked my frequent flyer balance and indeed, I was extremely available. So I hopped on a plane and got myself to Miami.

 

I had a beautiful day. I walked to the marina where the science research vessel Garvin docks, met a large number of extremely lovely people, and then we got underway.

 

It was absolutely beautiful: the temperatures were in the high 70s, the sun was bright overhead, with clouds covering the Miami skyline, and the sea was salty and spraying all around us. The team on board taught us how to put out lines and let us help so that we could get them out. Then the time came to check the lines: once again, we were showed how to help, but this time, we were assigned duties to help with Shark Research.

 

I was on parasite check, which was very cool.

 

In any event, there are very few things that are more amazing than watching a shark come up out of the ocean, showing a white belly on a roll, and then turning into a cascade of stripes. We were told that the larger sharks in the area (nurse sharks, tiger sharks, hammerheads) were relatively rare—in fact, the prior year, they’d only seen 4 tiger sharks over all.

 

We saw two tiger sharks and one hammerhead (the hammerhead was just a shadow ghosting by the boat before it decided it was not going to be caught by us and passed on by).

 

The team was gentle with the sharks. You might be thinking, how gentle can you can be with a beast who has the height advantage and the weight advantage and the tooth advantage on you? It turns out that the answer is quite gentle indeed. If you get them up onto the shoe behind the boat, and have several people holding them down, they sit there and let you do science while the pump sends water through their gills, helping them breathe for the few minutes they are in air.

 

I got to come down and sit next to a massive tiger shark and gently touch its skin, looking for parasites. The skin was impossibly rough in one direction and smooth in the other, and it was a lovely, lovely animal.

 

My husband wanted to know if the shark was snuggly, and I feel the situation was not conducive to shark snuggles, and also, I would be wary of trying to snuggle a shark.

 

After the shark had been sufficiently scienced, it was gently slipped back into the water, while everyone watching waved goodbye and said things like “bon voyage!” and “it was nice to meet you!”

 

One of the things I learned on this trip is that there are many things about sharks that we simply do not know, simply because they move so much and are exceedingly full of teeth. There are things we are still learning about them, and that we will keep on learning, and those things will help us understand what the ocean is and what it does, and—as the world changes by our hand—what we can do to keep everything working together.

 

One of the other things I learned on this trip is that the two ends of the shark are referred to as “the chompy end” and “the slappy end” by actual scientists, and I will never refer to them as anything else ever again.

 

Goodbye, sharks. It was nice to meet you.

 

Anyway, I did not know that this school existed at the time I entered the contest, but this was a program affiliated if you would like to learn shark research schools, the Field School in Miami allows you to go and learn about shark research for days at a time. It is not cheap, but it is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime OH MY GOD SHARKS that is both fun, intellectually challenging, and deeply, emotionally meaningful on a primeval level.

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