ABOT's Deadliest Catch (aka- why we don't go swimming)

As promised, here are some pictures of ABOT's own "Deadliest Catch". I'm not sure of the names of all of them, but enjoy! This one I call "Big Fish"

Here is a close up of Big Fish's mouth.

This is the shark that we see at ABOT sometimes. It is hard to tell how big he is because we are looking at him from like 20 feet up. We estimate between 3 and 7 feet. General consensus is that it is a "Molly Sized Shark" (I am 5'2"). Now, as a human I know I am not of a tough and intimidating stature, but give me some teeth like that and I'm sure I could be scary too!

Here is a fish that they caught on KAAOT when I was visiting. So I lean in for a close-up and the thing JUMPS (I guess it was not already dead yet). I nearly had a heartache and jumped like 3 feet in the area. The SOC worker who was fishing laughed at me :)

Here is the bait that they use to catch fish. The waters below ABOT are literally swarming with these little guys.

Gar is the eel-looking fish that is most commonly caught on ABOT. The Iraqis SOC workers catch them and they cook them up and eat them. When I asked if I could take a picture of him and the gar, the SOC worker got really excited and thought I wanted to take my picture with him. He immediately whips out his camera (every Iraqi Marine & SOC workers seem to carry their digital cameras around in their pockets- just like us!) and so I figured we may as well take one with my camera. As you can tell, the gar is almost half the length of my body!

Here is a full body shot of the gar.

And while we're on the subject of gross things, here is a good illustration of what exactly is going on with my feet. All the guys on the staff make fun of me because between the layers of skin that I lost on my heels, the toenail that fell off and my foot infection, they all think I'm like totally un-hygenic and un-sanitary. I was like "no no I shower every day and dry my feet and change my socks twice a day- I swear I'm not gross!!!) It hurt really bad last night but healed a little bit overnight. Now it's hurting again so I'm about to go soak it and sit down with my feet up (Doctor's orders, but can't complain :)

This is what a "normal" foot should look like:

Here is the side profile view of the infected foot. I didn't take a pic of the actual infection- toooo gross.
Obviously, as you can imagine, putting this swollen foot into a boot seriously exacerbated the problem!