Captain Alan Moore instructs his students to drop anchor in the placid waters of the Anclote Anchorage. They're on the lookout for southern stingrays.
"So we're just west of Tarpon Springs, between the mainland and Anclote Key," he said from the helm of the Miss Daisy. "Anclote Key is right there where the lighthouse is at, and then we're at this small rock island here that protrudes out at low tide."
Moore is president and founder of Moore Marine College, a new marine science school in Clearwater. He also started CMERA. That's the Coastal Marine Education and Research Academy, which lets students get real-life experience with sharks and rays.
Students aboard the Miss Daisy roll out a 200-foot-long tangle net. They capture the slippery rays without cutting into their velvety skin. And they bring them on board.
"We have a pump and a hose that we use to aerate them while they're on board so they can breathe," Moore said. "And we have short processing times, but we're going to tag them."
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"The ID tags are a dart tag that has our name and phone number on it and a tag number so that anybody else catches it, even a local fisherman, they can call us, give us the information that they can get from the tag," he said.
And it doesn't take long before their first ray is ensnared.
"We've got a ray! We've got two rays," several students cry out.
Three of the flat, diamond-shaped southern stingrays are caught and placed in onboard water tanks. They're carefully untangled from the net and measured.
"They could stay in that tub probably for a day and not die," Moore said. "We've caught almost 3,000 rays over 15 years and not one has ever died. So rays are extremely hardy."
Even though the waters off parts of Pinellas County are full of stingrays, Moore says there's still a lot to be learned.
"Everything here has a pretty strong populations and we're not seeing huge population declines," he said. "Now, we're not seeing huge population increases, either. It's pretty much staying steady, from what we can tell."
These tags are miniature radio transmitters. All the information on their size and migration patterns is shared with other marine scientists.
"Because we may have somebody down, say at Mote in Sarasota, that tags a bull shark or tags a ray with an acoustic tag, and it may come up here and swims past our receiver. So they need to know that as well," he said.
Moore says one year they caught 260 cownose rays, only to see that drop to 80 the next year. No one really knows why. And they've even discovered phases of the moon affect how many tiger sharks are caught.
Paige Cram of Tarpon Springs is a first-year student at Moore Marine College. The 24-year-old came down from Michigan for one week and fell in love with the water.
"These animals, definitely, especially the sharks, are misunderstood and feared in a way," Cram said. "Even the rays, sometimes everyone thinks of Steve Irwin, or they think like, 'oh, these guys are going to hurt me,' and it's a very rare occurrence for that to happen."
Irwin was a renowned Australian conservationist and television personality known as "The Crocodile Hunter." He died after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb.
Despite that, Cram wants to eventually help rescue injured animals.
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And just what do her friends think of her idea of fun?
"Sometimes, they're like, 'Oh, really? You're crazy, or they're like, What?' Sometimes they just don't understand, and I explained to them, and they think it's really cool," she said. "If they have a negative reaction like, oh, I'm scared of sharks, I'm like, no, they're, they're really cool. They're actually very mysterious animals."
"A lot of people just don't have that positive view for them," Cram said, "so they just need a little nudge."
She then chums the water to attract sharks. They let out a 500-foot-long line studded with chunks of Spanish mackerel, dipped in an oily fish sauce that sharks apparently find irresistible.
"It's going to run 500 feet along the bottom with individual hooks - up to 30 we can set at a time," Moore said. "Then anchor it and then set a ball at the very end. So if anybody drives over or something with a boat, it won't hurt anything; it won't catch on anything. Then we're going to set it for 45 minutes."
But apparently that fishy sauce is resistable. None bit, so they bid adieu to the rays.
"Goodbye! Tell your friends about us," the students yelled into the open water.
Those three rays are now free to transmit more information to these researchers — and maybe make them a little less mysterious.
