(Great) White Saturday

Christmas came a little early this year when I realized at dinner, on Black Friday, that I was on my own on Saturday morning………..aaaannnnddd instead of suggesting that I finish putting up Christmas decorations, my wife tells me I should go out fossil hunting – Gotta love her!! Since it’s been more than a year since my last trip (ouch!), I quickly had to go through my pre-trip checklist:

• Went out to make sure my screens didn’t need new mesh – Check.
• Cleaned the spent spider egg cases off of my waders looking for any obvious holes as I did – Check
• Made sure there were no heavy rains in the forecast – Check
• Shook the bottle of Advil to see that there were at least 2 solid doses – Check

I arrived at Green Springs Park at around 7:15. The temperature was about  40 deg – perfect for collecting. I made a couple of stops as I walked upstream, picking up a decent lower mako but not much else. I came up to an area where I had some good success two years back (trip posts on 6/29/07 and 8/17/07) and noticed things had changed a bit. An area that had once been a sand bar, well above the waterline, was now 12 inches under water. I started loading the screens picking up some decent teeth in the first half hour until one particular screen yielded a spectacular, nearly flawless,  2 ¼ Great White. The next hour amounted to what would be the most productive hour of collecting I’ve ever had. I had hit a patch of material that was loaded with fossil material to the point that I was pulling out 2” teeth before washing the gravel…it was remarkable! I’ll let the pictures speak.