Lady With a Spear

"I had the great honour of meeting her when she was in her late 80s. She is an absolute inspiration to me. Getting a chance to sit down and chat with her over lunch was a joy. She had been studying the ocean for 60 years and was still diving, still researching and still as much in love with the ocean as she ever was. I felt a huge connection with her. This book describes a time when she was a pioneering female scientist, going off and having adventures and following her extraordinary obsession with the ocean. She spent time in Egypt studying the fishes of the Red Sea, as a single female at a time when such things were completely unheard of. To some extent she is one of the female underwater explorers who isn’t quite so famous, and she really should be. She was American, grew up in New York and tells a lovely story of how she fell in love with fish at a young age when visiting the New York aquarium. She went on to become known as the “shark lady” for her studies of shark behaviour, and founded the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, now known as the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. Her second book, The Lady and the Sharks , describes how that was set up and how she raised her family at the same time in what was then a remote, undeveloped part of Florida. She actually spent most of her career up in Maryland, where she was a professor at the university. I only wish I could have been one of her students, it must have been so exciting to work with her. She spent her whole life teaching and researching. And she was still doing it in her late 80s because she loved it so much she couldn’t give it up. I would love to be like that. If I get to that age and I am still diving and exploring the oceans, it would be fabulous."