Scuba Diving With Sharks
by: ThePope
Word Count: 463
It's not the feeding frenzy of Hollyood movies, but even so, the master scuba diver wore a protective chain mail suit to hand-feed 12-footers with razor sharp teeth.
My heart fluttered wildly when I spotted the first shark circling below me, less than ten feet from the surface. I was scuba diving to the sandy bottom of Shark Junction, about five miles off the Lucaya Beach area of Grand Bahama Island.Perhaps going on a shark-feeding dive would be more of an underwater adventure than I expected, especially since I had gotten my scuba diving certification just the day before.
Dive master Mike Williams had told me not to worry, because humans aren't on their regular menu. Easy for him to say – the wiry Bahamanian looked like a medieval knight with a scuba tank and fins. But a few minutes later, he had these Caribbean reef sharks literally eating out of his hand.
It was nothing like the feeding frenzy of Hollywood movies. It was more like a surreal and elegant underwater ballet.
My group of scuba divers had been instructed to kneel shoulder-to-shoulder in a semi-circle that the shark version of sonar would reed as a coral wall, to swim over instead of through. We also had been told to keep movement to a minimum. There was to be no waving hands of feet that could be mistaken for lunch.
Dive master Mike pulled one fish at a time out of a sealed tube. It was sealed so the sharks could not smell the tidbits inside. He would wait until a single passing shark could be tempted. One chomp and the little herring was gone, almost too quickly for me to see the shark's razor sharp teeth.
After a while, I began to recognize individual sharks. One had a rusty hook stuck in the left side of his snout, like a teenager with body piercing. Another had a six-inch remora parasite fish hitchhiking on its belly, waiting for a stray morsel to float past.
Sometimes a big ugly brown cowfish would grab a herring before a shark, and there would be a momentary chase.
After the sharks were well fed, Mike put one hand on the sensitive snout of a mid-size shark and his other on the dorsal fin, effectively hypnotizing it. Then, he swept the shark around our semi-circle so anybody who wanted to could touch the shark's tail. It felt bumpy smooth, like a bad coat of nail polish.
When the herring were all gone, the sharks lost interest and swam away. A tap on my tank told me it was time to ascend back to the boat. When I reached the rope, I hung there for one last moment hoping to see one last shark. And I did.
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