Shore-based and liveaboard shark encounters

1. Land-based two-island shark adventure

Itinerary

D1 – arrive Nassau, transfer to Sheraton

D2 – double tank AM dives (reef and/or wreck sites), PM shark adventure

D3 – double tank AM dives (reef and/or wreck sites)

D4 – Transfer to airport, flight to West End

D5 – 2 or 3 dives

D6 – 2 or 3 dives

D7- 2 or 3 dives

D8 – transfer to airport and departure to Nassau

Add 52 USD for additional AM dives on day 2, ditto day 3 if required.

It is ossible to swap a day's diving in West End and add 45 USD to make it into a dolphin day.

2. Liveaboard

Shark Central

As shark populations fall around the world, there are less and less places to observe these beautiful, graceful hunters. South Africa has its share of shark action, Fiji’s Beqa lagoon has its feed, Guadeloupe has Great Whites, the Galapagos and the Cocos have Hammerheads and Whitetips, Papua New Guinea has healthy populations of reef-dwelling species, and a few Egyptian sites can be of interest, but nowhere guarantees such up-close-and-personal and prolonged encounters as a liveaboard off the Bahamas.

After flying to West Palm Beach, Florida, I boarded the 12-berth Dolphin Dream II and met up with my companions for the next six days and our host, Captain Scott Smith. Initially attracted by its Spotted Atlantic and Bottlenose dolphins, Scott has been visiting the banks off Grand Bahama for the past thirty years and has an intimate understanding of the tides, currents and reefs.

I was sharing a room with Mike from Texas, a veteran of two Dolphin Dream expeditions, and the rest of the passengers were a single US female, an American couple, an Aussie father-daughter combo, and a group of five Dutch divers. Over dinner a few shark stories were swapped, and there was a distinct air of happy expectation, possibly assisted by Captain Scott declaring that all beers on the trip were free. As soon as dinner was over we left our moorings for the night crossing to the Bahamas.

Once at Tiger Beach we moored up to a buoy. A steel drum with bits of fish carcass stood on the aft of the port deck, to which Scott added some fish offal and some tuna heads before he started pumping the stinky grey gunk out into the sea. Plastic crates were filled with more carcasses and some fresh snapper the crew had caught, and were suspended aft of the dive deck and from a couple of buoys. Within 10 minutes dorsal fins appeared and Lemon sharks dotted the bright blue ocean.

The pre-dive briefing was simple and succinct. We would be moored here for at least 24 hours, as the sand was six metres below the boat no buddy pairs were obligatory, and the only limit on dive time was the rate we used our air.

“Don’t hang around on the surface, don’t fondle the sharks, do have fun. Pool’s open!”

The Lemons cruised around the dive platform, and we waited for a gap in the traffic to stride in. Crew Travis and Connor handed down our cameras and we sunk down to the sand.

Five lemon sharks, all pretty much fully grown three-metre specimens, one of whom was in the latter stages of pregnancy, glided around with much more grace than a human in the same state, checking out the bait boxes but pretty much ignoring us divers. Mostly they stayed close to the sand, occasionally resting and opening their mouths to pump water through their gills to breathe without swimming. I’d never encountered Lemon sharks before and the thing that struck me was the number of remora hanging off them. One of them must’ve had over 20 suckered up to its browny-bronze skin. A three-metre Tiger shark put in a brief appearance and then moved on. Contrary to popular belief, Tiger sharks are shy and wary, they don’t grow so big and so old by blithely approaching anything new without much caution. The lemons, on the other hand, and a fearless loggerhead turtle, happily cruised around us.

At such a shallow depth and with very little finning to do, my first dive lasted over two hours as I lay on the sand and let the sharks swim around me, making the most of the light and shooting without my strobes and using manual white balance. After tea, cake, and a battery change, I headed back down for more of the same. After another hour underwater a 3.5-metre tiger with a permanent, lopsided grin turned up and swam around in an oval pattern, coming up to one of the bait boxes, and then gliding away to reappear a couple of minutes later, over and over until I was low on air again and my stomach was rumbling.

We stayed moored up at Tiger Beach overnight, and after breakfast the lemon shark contingent had grown to 14, the smallest being over two metres long and around my age. Mature lemons can live an estimated 70 years, mainly living off a diet of slippery fish, hence their long and pointy teeth. The pregnant female was still around, and her bloated abdomen looked ready to release her litter of eight to twelve live pups. I wondered how that worked, whether they just slipped out as she swam around, or whether she went through the same drama as human females.

I swam under the boat to beyond the bow and inspected the chain we were moored to. Running perpendicular to the boat, its wrist-thick links were adorned with coral growth. A small rock harboured an eel and cleaner shrimp and a school of Cottonwicks decorated some finger coral in the early light.

In the afternoon we upped anchor and went to a spot where dolphins are regularly seen. With two lights dangling under the boat we slipped into the silent, otherwise inky black ocean as soon as curved fins appeared on the surface. Underwater the ocean was alive with high-pitched squeaks as the Spotted Atlantic dolphins darted around us, teasing those of us with cameras. It was impossible to get a clear, in-focus shot, but was most amusing as the dolphins appeared like ghosts and whirled around as if to say to their fellow mammals “hey human, this is how to dive”.

The next morning Scotty cruised around looking for his friends and within forty minutes had found identified the unmistakable notched dorsal fin of Chopper, the alpha male of the area, who he had first seen thirty years before, and we jumped in. Scuba was impossible as firstly by the time we’d have kitted up and jumped in they would have gone, and more importantly, the dolphins were after some fun. The best way to prolong any interaction was to freedive down and twirl and spin in the most dolphin-like way possible. Travis used a UPV to keep one pod interested, as I followed another. Every time they seemed to be disappearing I’d dive down to five metres and spin twist as much as I could and they would come straight back, chirping and chattering and shaking their heads in approval. Incredible.

After lunch we moored up at The Mountains, thus named due to the reef topography. The tops of the reef (or peaks of the mountains) were 13 metres deep, and the sides sloped down another 17 metres to a sandy bottom. The sides had small caves, overhangs, and gullies with plenty of reef life and coral coverage. Connor placed a bait box on a ridge and soon more than a dozen Caribbean Reef sharks had joined us. They were a mixture of juveniles and sub-adults, the longest being two-metres long. A Nurse shark put in an appearance and was soon using her mouth, adapted to feeding from the floor, to suck bits of fish out of the crate. It was a scenic site, but for the time being was tigerless and lemon-free. When my buddy and the other divers were low on air they ascended to the boat overhead. I was alone and sat on the bait box for five minutes of shark-petting. Some people say it’s wrong to touch wild animals, I used to too. Then I learnt to put sharks into tonic immobility, and the only thing I now consider “wrong” about it is how absolutely amazing it feels. It feels like being in love with a big fish.

For our third dive of the afternoon we visited the Sugar Wreck, a shallow wreck that has been broken open by successive storms, but that is home to large schools of snapper, turtles, French angelfish and lobsters. Being a shallow site it was a good choice after the deeper dives of the afternoon. As the sun dropped and the moon began to shine, a lobster scurrying across the rocky bottom caught my eye and I stayed down so long watching it, it ended up as a night dive.

A The Mountains I lay in the rocks next to the bait box, more like a sniper in dead ground than a diver. It did occur to me at one point that I was lying next to a box of dead fish and must've looked pretty deceased myself, other than the odd bubble stream. To a fish equipped with the unique electrical-field-detecting seventh sense that is the ampullae of Lorenzini however, we must have appeared very much alive and inedible as the two dozen sharks cruised merrily over and around our hideouts. There were plenty of lemons and reefies again, a nurse shark, and a hammerhead, possibly the daddy of the family the great hammerhead Sphyrna Mokorran, in the distance.

We headed to the sands where Connor was going to do a feed. As we knelt or lay in a circle the Lemons cruised in along the bottom and started getting a little frisky. One of my strobes was given a sniff and a nibble and my grey freediving fins seemed to catch their eye. I was lying prone in the sand to get a Lemons’ eye view when I felt my fin being tugged gently. I turned to see a male Lemon shark feeling my fin like a puppy with a new toy. I gently pulled it away and the curious chap moved on. Three shy Tigers turned up and had a short mosey around before disappearing into the blue, and then it was time to head back to the boat. As I finned I felt myself kick something. Rather odd as I wasn’t over any reef and was a few metres off the sand. I looked round and saw my fin-fancying male Lemon shark friend again, sort of sniffing out my left fin again. As soon as he saw me looking at him he skulked off on a tangent, like a naughty schoolboy.

The Lemons and the Caribbean reef sharks hung around the boat though, and after dinner we jumped in and did a night dive - with sharks - an excellent if slightly unnerving concept. The two lights hanging from the stern and the dive platform lights cast a circle of light close to the boat, but a few fin kicks and I only had the light of my torch to rely on. It was pretty eerie. I sensed something behind me and saw two three-metre lemon sharks coming up on my right shoulder. When I shone my torch on them they circled once and swam of to inspect some other divers. Good fun, but pretty creepy, and I found myself drawn to the lights of the boat. I wondered if a Tiger would show up, and waited half an hour, but if one was there she stayed out in the darkness.

On the second dive Connor took down some bait for a feed, and the tiger was certainly keen. We were in a loose circle on the sand and Tigger was coming in close to each diver, sometimes head on, moving in calmly but assuredly. Sensibly divers let the graceful giant fish pass, moving out of its way, or gently pushing it aside with a camera housing or dome port. I wasn't sure whether I was imagining it or not, but I seemed to get extra attention, or maybe it was the white diffuser plate on my larger strobe. I moved behind a low rock encrusted with coral and an orange barrel sponge to compose images with a more interesting foreground, and held my camera for portrait shots, the smaller strobe positioned to the side to illuminate the foreground, the larger strobe up in the air. Tigger came in to the bait box and past Connor, and then went up and over my bit of rock and I snapped away, noticing her pause briefly and eye my strobe again. On her second pass, just as I had got a good shot, she twisted her head back to the right. I saw her nictating membrane flutter over her right eye, and then my strobe was in her gaping maw. This wasn't a nibble like yesterday, she had a firm grip and was not keen to let go. As it was a four-day-old camera and wide-angle lens in the housing, I wasn’t willing to let go either. She was over the top of me, her mouth to my right, her under belly above me. After four or five seconds I started to get worried about the state of my strobe, so I reached up and gave her a tummy rub with my left hand, manoeuvring my camera out of her mouth with my right, and thankfully she let go. I decided to stick to video and landscape format shots for the rest of the dive.

On the last dive of the trip we moved over to the reef and the bait was placed at a sandy crossroads where two gullies intersected. The tiger from the first dive was joined by a second of the same proportions, and just as we got out of the water, a third, larger female turned up. She was close to four metres long, and had an impressive girth to match. I hung in the water and savoured their graceful magnificence, the result of 400 million years of evolution, and thought what an amazing five days it had been. For anyone who wants shark action from dawn to dusk, with plenty of tiger shark time, this is the trip of a lifetime.

Availability on this trip is limited and best booked at least six months in advance. A six-night trip costs 2495 USD, and sell out fast. Most of 2012 is already sold out.

Current availablility for 2012 and 2013  as of February 18th 2012:

2012

Nov 10 to 16, 7 days

Nov 17 to 23 7 days

2013

Feb 10 to 17 2013

Mar 30 to Apr 5 2013

Apr 6 to 12 2013, 6 spots open.

Apr 20 to 26 2013, 4 spots open

Bahamas

Bahamas