Acknowledgements
It would not have been possible to build this website without help and input from many people.
Firstly thankyou to Laurence Skelly and Steve Rowe at www.isleofman.com for hosting and helping to set-up the site. I could not have put the site together without Steve Rowe's extreme patience.
This site needed careful editing. This was patiently done by John Galpin, a keen Isle of Man basking shark observer, Dr Jean-Luc Solandt of The Marine Conservation Society (UK), Graham Hall, my husband, and by the Manx Wildlife Trust's Marine committee. The Marine Committee is composed of Professor Richard Hartnoll, Dr Andrew Foxton, Dr Fiona Gell, Duncan Bridges, Mike Bates, Chris Bates, Maura Mitchell, Pauline Oliver, and myself (Jackie Hall). Thankyou very much indeed. My punctuation has improved as a result of your efforts and suggestions!
This site would be much the poorer without its excellent Isle of Man basking shark photographs. Most of these are by Maura Mitchell, underwater photographer. Some suberb photographs were contributed by Pauline Oliver, basking shark enthusiast, Shaun Stigant, a local canoeist, and visiting scuba divers Mike Glover and Andreas Perethoner.
The scientific references came via Mike Bates at the Port Erin Marine Laboratory, University of Liverpool with the permission of Professor Trevor Norton. Many, many, thanks to Eileen Thornley, who made the acquisition of these references possible and pleasurable.
Finally, thankyou to my husband Graham. This website rather occupied my attention for a while and his extreme patience was remarkable. He did contribute one very amusing quote to my whole basking shark website writing experience. "Basking sharks, basking sharks, basking sharks! What about my dinner?" He cooked it himself in the end!