Friday, December 05, 2008

Name this Shark!!!


We currently pride ourselves in having named 36 of our Bull Sharks - and counting!
This is all part of our enormous data base where we laboriously record all the relevant parameters for each of our Shark Dives. Having progressed well beyond 1,000 data sets, we're now safely within the realm of Statistical Relevance and are currently busy analyzing the facts and comparing them to our perceptions, sometimes with surprising results.

Thing is, 36 individuals is far from being exhaustive.
Perfect Sharks cannot be named as they cannot be recognized when they turn up again. In fact, to qualify, an animal has to show some flaw. So far, we have mostly concentrated on peculiarities in the shape of the fins, some prominent scar or some color mark which we deem to be indelible.

Having researched Fiona Ayerst and seen her Bull Shark ID Project, we shall certainly explore the possibility of basing our ID of the remaining Sharks on the individual pigmentation patterns of the head. With an estimated population size of close to one hundred individuals and up to 40 Sharks present at peak times, it's going to be a huge challenge to get a proper fix in the whole mêlée - but we'll try to avail ourselves of the ever-present camcorder and take it from there.

Our Shark names are
  • rather Pedestrian like "Whitenose" (you guessed it...)
  • Ethnic like "Adi" (pronounced "Andi" and meaning "Lady" or "Princess" in Fijian)
  • Evocative like "Annie" (who has a cut anal fin)
  • Honorific like "Madonna" (with her sexy facial mole, the next one being "Cindy" as in Crawford) )
  • Phonetic like "Tootsie" (in reference to her protruding teeth)
  • Imaginative like "Long John" (a male with a truncated tail fin named for the hobbling Long John Silver)
  • Far-fetched like my favorite, "Cilla" (she has a cut pelvic fin, leading to Elvis the Pelvis - but this is a female, hence "Priscilla"!)
  • Acronymic as in "Brat" (Broadreach Academic Treks)
  • Outrageous like "Bevis" (who we didn't quite have the heart to name "Butthead")
  • or sometimes Emotional like "Sorry" (because she has a hook embedded in her eye).
In brief, anything goes - so really, this new, medium-sized female who has lost the lower lobe of her tail should be a no-brainer!
C'mon, give it a try!

Should you be the lucky winner of this naming contest, you're in for a treat!
Long in the making, we're finally rolling out our innovative DiveShare, your very own ticket to a whopping fifteen weeks in Paradise - and you could become one of the first proud owners!

Think "Time Share": the concept is old, but to my knowledge and with the possible exception of one or two Liveaboards, it has never been applied to the Diving Industry.
DiveShare
owners purchase the right to come diving with us for one week each during the next fifteen years. The entitlement is fully negotiable, enabling the owners to sell, gift or even rent it out, either as a whole or in yearly installments. There's even a double money-back Guarantee!

Target customers could be
  • Satisfied repeat Customers, an ever increasing part of our Client base
  • Time-share and holiday home owners in Fiji
  • Anybody wanting to make a cool present to a diver
  • Dive Clubs who could raffle a yearly trip among their members
  • Shark NGOs who could auction them off when soliciting funding
  • Regular professional intermediaries who could sell them and pocket the difference to the discounted pricing
  • Shark Conservationists wanting to make a valuable, and highly welcome contribution
Any Questions, and I expect you to have many? Look no further than the exhaustive Q&A section that should hopefully cover most, if not all of them! Comments and Suggestions? Always welcome, ship 'em in!

Wanna give it a go?
Just drop a line to Andrew and Nani. The sharkier and more imaginative, the better! Don't forget to explain the reason for your choice of name.

Best of Luck!

5 comments:

stuartinfiji said...

Well done in finally launching the DiveShare Concept to the world Mike! About bloody time LOL!

Good luck with this, I think it very attractive to 'real' divers. Will look fwd to chatting to you about it soon!

DaShark said...

I guess it's a case of Good Things Come to Those Who Can Wait (for the legal side to be properly covered...).

Happy you like it - I do too!

U just keep reading the Blog buddy - got 1 coming yer way shortly....
(:

Horizon Charters Guadalupe Cage Diving said...

Dive Share!? That's brilliant!

In this economic climate it also fits nicely with the flight to longterm value.

Wonder if you could piggyback an existing timeshare mega corp to push this out?

DaShark said...

Our Landlord, Lagoon Resort are timesharing together with one of those, so yes, we are in that loop.

Having said this, we are only rolling out 4 DiveShare lots per day, so it'll never be "mega" - we want to remain "quality", not "cattle"!

Unknown said...

That goes without saying...the quality part.