I was checking a few RSS feeds this morning before dragging myself out of bed and came across this little gem at Divester. I read it over once, saw Dave's name in the story and thought "No... it couldn't be..." but they they said Key Largo, so at that point I knew it could only be Cajun Dave Marcel formerly of Bob Soto's.

"Cajun" Dave Marcel used to work at Bob Soto's with me, back in the day. Good guy, good cook, sometimes though he had some pretty crazy ideas. I seem to recall one of his other nicknames was "Crash & Burn" but I digress.

After Hurricane Ivan disassembled the island back in '04, and subsequently dismantled Bob Soto's Reef Divers, all the staff scattered to the four winds. Larry went to Thailand I heard, Inaki & Alex ended up in Amsterdam and Dave ended up at Capt. Slate's on Key Largo. Matty & I went to visit him there last year, before Matty's wedding.

So what happened was that Dave was wrangling with a nurse shark, rubbing it, petting it, stroking it, loving it... and decided to give it a little kiss. Maybe it was a male shark who took extreme offense at being kissed by another guy, who knows. When Dave came in for the kiss, the shark opened wide... and bit him on the lip.

This reminded me of another friend of mine (or friend of ours? fuhgeddaboutit..)  named Brian who did something similar, but with a Southern Atlantic Stingray... and some bait. Brian, while diving at Stingray City (as opposed to the sandbar) put some squid in his mouth, held it in his teeth and tried to feed a stingray that way. It didn't quite work out the way he thought. He underestimated the extreme sucking power of the ray so when she swooped in for the squid, sucked his lower lip up into her mouth. Since she could smell and taste squid (mmmm squid) she started chewing/grinding on it AND his lip.

The consequences of his decision were the following: his lip got purple and bruised. His lip swelled up about three or four times it's normal size. The little flap of skin that connects your lip to your gums was torn so that his lip sort of flapped in the wind. It healed on it's own with just some antibiotic cream on it every now and then. Dave on the other hand, required reconstructive surgery where the surgeon described his lip as "looking like it went through a meat grinder"

Dave probably didn't think the story would get the reach it would, but CBS4 in S. Florida posted it and the video to it's website, and from there came across the crosshairs of Willy over at Divester, then from there to here and from here to you.

The irony of the story is that both Dave and Brian probably had WORSE experiences with women than they did from a shark or a stingray!