20 foot Great White Shark

Ha! Now I can hear you all saying... "That Deefski gets some weird and wonderful subject lines in but they always turn out to be relevant - how's she going to get a 20 foot shark in?"

Well... 's like this. Dad has been doing Gardening for Wildlife judging around this part of Kent and as part of this he's over last night to see the people at Buckland Lakes nature reserve, come fishing venue come diving training school, It is a 60 acre Lake up to 70 feet deep, so it's used by all the local scuba-folk - the Royal Engineers, rescue services and the civvie-street scuba clubs

To make the diving more interesting, they have deliberately sunk various "wrecks" in the lake, including a 40 foot fishing boat and a Lear Jet. The Royal engineers have then "helped things along" by smuggling in numerous stone garden gnomes, so there is a size-able gnome-population down there, apparently.

The owner also thought it'd be fun to have a 20 foot Great White Shark, so that the divers could take pictures of themselves being "fearless" (arms in it's toothy mouth etc), so he created a very realistic model out of fibre-glass. This was so bouyant, apparently, that it sat proud of the lake surface, with only 6 inches under. In the end the engineers had to load it with rocks and then winch it down from the lake-bed so that it now "hangs" at a suitably photogenic "height" in the water, and looks real in the divers' pictures.

http://polarisscuba.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=29

Amusingly the lake is also peppered with moored up, broken, abandoned but still floating early-design jet-skis. Each has 2 or three rolled up straw-and-chicken wire "mattresses" mounted on top for the ducks and moorhens to use as nest-box "tubes"

The owner turns out to be the judge for the amphibious vehicles on Scrapheap Challenge, so he also has a variety of amphibious cars, rafts, bicycles and other waterbourne tom foolery knocking about.

Excellent
Deefski