Les Stroud

Wednesday Apr 2, 9:07 pm

Hi all,

I’m just now on a plane back from South Africa, where we were shooting Surviving Sharks, the last installment of shark encounters for Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, U.S., produced by Gurney Productions. We were doing a series of experiments with the great white sharks in ‘shark alley,’ just off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa. It was pretty incredible. We had a few small twelve footers come in and one or two monsters – one of these breached the water by a few feet while going after our 50 lb frozen bait ‘chumsickle.’ I was in the cage for a closer look and at one point was experimenting with using a pole to stop them from going for the bait. It worked reasonably well with the twelve footers, but the fourteen to sixteen footers had so much more girth that it was like pushing a toothpick against a submarine. They really are massive, impressive beasts. And very beautiful.
I haven’t yet had the chance to tell you about shooting my other show for the Discovery Channel and Gurney Productions called Surviving Alaska, which will be part of a new series week they are promoting called Alaska Week. When you see these shows, remember that I’m only the host and not involved in any way on the production side of things. But the Gurneys do a great job.
For the Alaska shoot they cut a big hole in the two-foot thick ice and…well… along with the leading expert in hypothermia, Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht, I jumped in and stayed in for 13 minutes. At that point, Dr. Giesbrecht insisted we get out and then warm up carefully to make sure we didn’t succumb to/get hypothermia.  Other highlights of the shoot included being rescued from the ocean by the U.S. Coast Guard and simulating being buried by an avalanche. I think it will be quite a show! I believe it premieres on April 25th in the U.S.
I would love to bring you up to speed with even more happenings, but I’m two hours into a twelve-hour flight and I’m using the time to catch up on some work – including putting the finishing touches on the season three license deal for Survivorman.

All for now,

Les

Wednesday Dec. 26th, 2007

I’ve tried to get to the blog before now but we have been so busy with the sharks, shooting both day and night, that I just couldn’t manage it. Ok, disclaimer over with.
It was a fantastic time in Nassau. We went to the same dive shop that pretty much most, if not all, of the Shark Week shows have been shot over the last bunch of years. The reason? It’s simply fantastic shark diving there. The owner, Stuart Cove (that’s his real name, which is fortunate when you consider the fact that his place is on the ocean in a little cove and therefore dubbed Stuart’s Cove), has been interacting with these reef sharks and developing a tourism- and Hollywood-based business here for twenty years. The photos on his wall of fame will attest to this. It is actually a place that was built specifically for the filming of the T.V series Flipper. Read more »

Sunday, Dec 16th 2007, 3:45 pm

The seven-hour boat ride to Walker’s Cay was smooth and easy and lulled us all to sleep so that we arrived rested. We shuttled over to the island in a small boat and hung out on ‘bull shark beach,’ which is actually formed of jagged coral with no sand to be seen, and chummed the waters for bull sharks. Only a handful of black tipped sharks showed up so we shot a sequence of me free diving (without scuba gear) with them. They tend to be a smaller and slightly skittish shark, as well as very beautiful and graceful looking. Today we tried our luck at another island, to no avail, and we are all currently holed up on the big boat watching bad weather come in. I plan on doing some remote recording of some of my songs on board the boat, and tomorrow we head down to Nassau and the reef sharks.

Friday, Dec 14th 2007, 11:32 am

The rest of the day yesterday went off without a hitch. We spent the time scuba diving with the lemon sharks and getting the footage we needed to create the show. Last night was our last staying in the hotel. Now, we’re back on the boat and after today’s filming is done we will head over to Walker’s Cay to film the deadly and unpredictable bull sharks. We’ll be living on the ninety-foot boat Dolphin Dream for a few days while we’re there. Our underwater cameramen for this trip are Andy Casagrande, based out of Oahu, and Andy Mitchell, based out of Vermont. They come with boatloads of experience having shot numerous wildlife encounters for National Geographic. Our ‘topside’ cameramen are Ryan Powers and Dan Branam. Ryan hails from San Diego and I was fortunate enough to work with him on last year’s Feeding Frenzy show for Shark Week. He’s fresh off shooting episodes of Supernanny so he was ready for the sharks! Dan is from Miami and is a regular shooter for ESPN, he shoots a lot of their offshore material. These two guys do all the ‘topside’ footage – mostly me talking to the camera and all the shark action as seen from the boat. And at this very moment they’re being yelled at to get moving and shoot the tiger shark that just showed up. And I gotta go and be the host.

9:22 pm

Today was yet another great day of filming. We had two tiger sharks come in and rip apart the pairs of fake floating legs we were using to test the theory of whether or not it’s better to stay as a group or to spread out during a shark attack. The group survived; the solo pair of legs was destroyed. We then set about testing various coloured lights and how they affect the sharks at night. It’s after sunset now, and dark, and we’re heading by boat to Walker’s Cay. It’s about a seven hour trip.

Thursday Dec 13th 2007, 7:55am

What a difference a day makes! The last two days have been incredible. We headed out at midday by speedboat to meet up with the Dolphin Dream, our ninety-foot boat that we will use as our filming base. As we pulled up to the larger vessel we could see a mass of fins at the back of the boat. The crew had already been chumming and had a huge school of lemon sharks, along with a few tiger sharks, circling the boat. As we only had a few hours we got right into the filming and the sharks didn’t let us down. Mayhem always ensued whenever a fish carcass was thrown into the water, giving us a chance to film a lot of the ‘topside’ segments of my hosting.

Yesterday was the big day. We left the hotel and got out to the big boat early enough that the water was still clear from the high tide. Once the low tide comes in the water gets milky and is not very good for filming, so we only have a short window of opportunity to get great images.

I, along with Andy, the camera crew extraordinaire, as well as Stuart Cove, the shark expert from the Bahamas, Laura Bombier, the still photographer and Eli Martinez, the editor/publisher of Shark Diver magazine, spent the entire day in and out of the water in scuba gear. The big lemon sharks did not disappoint. We conducted a number of tests that had Stuart and I in the middle of the action, getting bumped and jostled by these big sharks. Don’t let the name fool you, they can be very aggressive and could rip a human apart at any time without much effort — especially since there were up to thirty of them coming in for the stringers of fish we took down to the bottom of the reef with us. Let’s see how today goes! They are calling me to get on the boat.

Later that day

We got an early start again, and made it out to the Dolphin Dream (the big boat that hails from West Palm Beach, Florida) for a good morning of shooting. The water was perfectly clear in the high tide and the sharks were ready. One of our tests didn’t film that well yesterday due to the milky, low-tide water so we decided to recreate it this morning. Money! The big lemon sharks came in and bumped and circled all around me while I was trying to figure out a way to get live and dead fish trapped in a milk carton. These lemon sharks are around eight to ten feet long and can rip off a human leg without much effort at all. To get them to back off a bit, I gave them a sharp hit on the nose with a stick or my fist; it did seem to scare them off fairly well. Though, when I tried punching them in the side to keep them away, it felt like hitting a big tarp. Their sides just absorbed my fist, as if they didn’t even know I was there. The nose is the key. It’s a sensitive area for them and they don’t like being hit there at all. A few times, when punching them to keep them away, I swear the look they gave me was definitely ticked off, as if to say: do that again and I’m taking a piece out of you.

Then came the test with the tiger sharks — three or four of these fourteen-foot giants moved in and stayed on the perimeter of the school of lemon sharks. We set up a manikin to float out to the tigers and put two cameramen on the bottom (about thirty feet down) to film it. Unbelievable! One huge tiger came in slowly and after a bit of a wait he figured out that the manikin was not going to hit back, not going to defend itself. While the divers used their cameras to keep the shark from attacking them, it ripped that dummy apart! It was a full on tiger shark attack in the scariest way. No mercy. No relenting.

Ok – now we have to set up for the next test and I have to get back in the water.

Tuesday Dec 11th 2007

The first day was not good for yours truly. Boats that run on diesel gasoline can be hard on the stomach at the best of times. Throw in some rough seas, really smelly chum (dead fish bait) and you have a noxious mix of smells that will challenge the hardiest of shark hunters. We stopped at two different spots during the day, about thirty miles out from the mouth of the Mississippi River, and started chumming. My producer, Scott Gurney, an experienced angler, has devised a special chumming system using a large barrel, a big hand operated fish chopper, some tubing and a water pump that works amazingly well. It spills out a ‘slick’ of fish blood, guts, oil and flesh that, after a couple of hours, is miles long and works like a dinner bell to any sharks in the area. Not on day one, though. After trying one particular spot we boated out farther to one of the four thousand oil wells that dot this area and hooked up beneath its shadow. That was it for me. Then, instead of floating freely in the swell and waves we were tethered to a large, smelly, noisy oil rig and the boat rose and fell without sympathy for its passengers. While donning my scuba gear to see what was below, I had to concentrate on what I was doing — it was difficult snapping snaps and clipping clips while sweating profusely in a wet suit in the Louisiana heat. I ended up donating my then-digesting lunch to the chum slick to aid in attracting the sharks. Our efforts, and the day, wasted and my pride a little bruised (after all, I can no longer say ‘I’ve never gotten sick at sea’) we headed back to Venice Marina for the night. Read more »

Monday Dec 10th 2007

Currently, I am flying over the Gulf of Mexico on my way to the second location shoot for Feeding Frenzy ll for the Discovery Channel. The ink is still wet on the contract I signed with Discovery to host the second installment of this special on sharks. I hosted the first one last year, as well as the entire twentieth anniversary of Shark Week itself. The past three days of this shoot have been a rough go.
We landed in Louisiana a few days ago and headed down to the mouth of the
Mississippi River. We were there to film the mako shark, one of the fastest fish in the ocean. A powerful predator, it has been clocked at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. The weather in Louisiana was great, although this area is still on the rebound from hurricane Katrina. On any given stretch of highway you might see a truck or two way out in the middle of the swamp, half buried in the muck and water, or a couple of huge boats way up on land, a mile from the water’s edge. The hurricane hit especially hard in this area, at the mouth of the river in a marina called Venice Marina. Though signs of the cleanup are becoming evident, it will take years still, and it seems eighty per cent of the trees are standing dead. The entire region feels as though it is in the middle of a country-sized oil refinery. I guess in a way it is. After all, this is the Gulf of Mexico. A Louisiana girl named Cindy met us at the gate and welcomed us to the marina late the first night after our drive down from New Orleans.