Sharks...?

{One of our favorite travel pictures (Aruba) because it shows how clear the water really is}

  I am not a huge going in the ocean person. Correction... I wasn't a huge going in the ocean person until we went to Aruba for our honeymoon 5 years ago. That seemed to be the turning point for me (pretty sure the crystal clear water had something to do with it). Over our 8 days there, you couldn't drag us out of the water, and to be honest, I was surprised we never fully made the transformation into a prune during that trip. But from that point on, I actually liked going into the water, and it always didn't have to be crystal clear water either. Take for example when we visited Shaun's family in Cape Cod last summer, my niece and nephew managed to convince me to get in the ocean there too, seaweed and all. So for the last 2 years here in France, we have been blessed to be able to live so close to the water, and pretty clear water too I might add. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, we spent nearly every day at the beach and even bought some snorkel gear. We did some paddle boarding and have been looking forward to the weather warming up so we can take advantage of it all once again before heading back to the concrete jungle otherwise knows as Atlanta, for the summer. Why do I bring this all up you might ask? Well Shaun made a huge mistake yesterday. Just casually in conversation, he mentioned something about seeing a shark on the cover of or paper here but in typical Shaun fashion, he was very vague with the details. I could tell though that as soon as the words left his mouth, he knew he had made a mistake. Wait, a shark? How could that be? Everyone (or at least all of our really smart friends here) said that there are no sharks in the Mediterranean Sea, so maybe Shaun read the paper wrong. Being the spaz I am, I checked the paper on-line right away and sure enough, they found a shark in the golf of Saint-Tropez. Mind you, they didn't find this shark a few miles off shore, they found it in the bay...the same bay we ate overlooking a few weeks ago while visiting Saint-Tropez for the day. And while that is still 30 miles from us here in Toulon, there were also sightings of a large shark a few weeks ago around Porquerolles. Porquerolles... the same island I wrote about earlier in the blog. The same island we visited and swam all over earlier this year. I know it is a big sea/ocean out there and it is unrealistic to ever be 100% safe but knowing that there might have been a shark swimming in the exact spot where we were snorkeling makes me a little uneasy. So for the time being, I am enjoying this cooler weather and wind, (it gives me a built-in excuse to not go in the water) and hopefully by the time it warms up again, I will have toughened up. Hopefully...although I know it won't happen if I keep looking at this picture.

{The sharks is obviously not a great white, however, it was over 16 feet long. Photo courtesy of Var Matin}