Chapter 1

The Great Hammerhead

When tourist boards organise press trips for journalists, their mission is just as political (in that they try not to upset any of their local suppliers) as it is practical in getting as many column inches of publicity as possible. That’s why journalists on press trips to promote holiday destinations usually stay at a different resort every night. It’s important to the tourist board that as many different resorts as possible get exposure.

With dive travel this can be quite arduous, especially if the resorts are very many miles apart and involve transfer by air between them. When you add the extra requirement that one should not fly for twenty-four hours after diving, it can make the logistics quite difficult indeed.

My first visit to French Polynesia was subject to this problem. Each resort was on a different island and French Polynesia covers an area as large as that of Western Europe. I contacted each dive centre in advance of my arrival because it meant I had no time to waste.

Flying from Papeete in Tahiti to Rangiroa took nearly two hours and I was not a little uncomfortable because I was already prepared, wearing my wetsuit. Sebastian met me at the tarmac’s edge when we landed and we drove the short distance to the dive centre. I was soon kitted up in my diving equipment, camera in hand and off to the famous Tiputa Pass by Zodiac.

It’s a narrow channel where the water rips through with the rising tide as it fills Rangiroa’s lagoon, the second biggest lagoon in the world. There’s a standing wave and a resident pod of dolphins that cavort in it. Underwater, Rangiroa is famous for its huge grey reef shark population but there’s plenty of other stuff too. The flow of oxygenated water is just what requiem sharks love since they can surf on the flow in an effortless way while the current flows through their gills.

I worked my way across the channel not without a lot of effort. With one hand occupied with holding a camera rig, I had only the other to drag myself along with. At one point veritable walls of grey reef sharks surrounded us. Wow! Not only that but there were flotillas of eagle rays and tonnes of other fishes too.

Eventually we two divers were alone in the current. Everything had seemed to magically disappear, making itself suddenly scarce. In a complete change of pace, there were no fish visible. It was surreal. I wondered why we stayed where we were. What were we waiting for?

The fact of the matter was that the time pressure put on by an itinerary written by some bureaucrat disconnected from the practical aspects of scuba-diving had given me little chance of a significant dive briefing before I’d taken to the water. I wasn’t expecting what happened next.

I was busy looking at Sebastian. My briefing had been composed of not much more than to stick closely with him. It was at this point a great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) passed by from behind me. It came past my right shoulder within inches of my head.

This monster was around five metres long from head to tail. To meet such a massively large animal so unexpectedly underwater is unusual to say the least. It passed by me and swam with a gentle gyration of its body and long tail, in an unhurried way off through the limit of underwater visibility. I was so stunned by its sheer size, it made the grey reef sharks look toy-like by comparison and I failed to raise my camera and squeeze off a single shot of it. Evidently, it was frequently seen by Sebastian in the Tiputa Pass but that was the first great hammerhead I saw and I saw it in great close-up, if in rapidly receding perspective.

Although I often saw a distant silhouette over sunlit back reefs elsewhere in the world, plus a memorable aerial sequence on YouTube of such a shark chasing a stingray in shallow water, with twists and turns as the ray tried to evade its certain demise, it was to be years before I got so close to one again.

When you find yourself confronted head-on by a great hammerhead shark during a dive, its head held low and swaying from side to side like a fighting bull approaching a matador, it can make you stop for a moment and wonder if you had been wise, if you should have been there. Great hammerheads have a fearsome reputation among shark fishermen. They are among the biggest of the tropical requiem sharks, at up to six metres long and weighing maybe half-a-tonne, and they don’t appear to have any natural enemies. Their common name is derived from their sheer size.

They don’t school in social groups like the much smaller and very skittish scalloped hammerheads that divers often get so excited to see, neither do they back down when they see a diver. These are lone hunters that roam the colder currents of tropical seas, which is why a good place to encounter them is on the Gulf Stream where it runs close to the islands of The Bahamas. Even so, it’s only during a short window in winter when the water is at its coldest, that these magnificent nomadic animals migrate by on their way north.

It’s at this time that so-called ‘brave and intrepid’ shark fishermen head out from Florida to get themselves a big shark and the dose of machismo they feel they need to get from doing so.

“I’ve killed hundreds of them over the years,” claimed a fisherman at North Bimini marina in the Bahamas. “They’re dangerous man-eaters and I’m doing the world a favour.”

It’s all very sad because nothing could be further from the truth. They are big animals with a lot of teeth but they appear to pose no threat to either swimmers or divers.

Bimini is the site of the Shark Lab, run by iconic Dr. ‘Sonny’ Gruber of the Shark Research Institute. With the Gulf Stream passing close by the island it’s a good place to study a wide range of sharks.

Stuart Cove’s girlfriend went to do voluntary work with the Shark Lab and discovered that they were tagging great hammerheads. The volunteers, mainly girls like Liz, were free-diving with these big animals and attaching tags to them. It seems they were not the man-killers they were made out to be.

Armed with that information, in February 2013 we went to Bimini with Stuart Cove, Bahamian born and ‘Mr Shark’ to those in the world of movies. Contrary to common misconception, Stuart Cove is not a place. He’s a person. He’s been encouraging sharks to come up close to cameras since the making of that scene when Sean Connery as James Bond 007 had a close encounter with a tiger shark when he dived into the wreck of the ‘Tears of Allah’. Stuart Cove has been the shark-wrangler on nearly every movie that has featured sharks since then.

We weren’t alone. There were some very well known wildlife cameramen who came along too, including award-winning Andy Brandy Casagrande IV and Frazier Nivens. Video-maker Mark Rackley and his girlfriend Cat Rockett preferred to free-dive with the sharks. Half-a-dozen other keen video pros, several with expensive Red Epic cameras, joined us too, so you can guess YouTube was soon to be flooded with footage gained in that short window of opportunity.

What do great hammerheads eat? They search the sand in the shallow waters of the backreefs for their favourite food source, southern stingrays. They munch through these oblivious to the poisonous spines that the rays impale in their tormentors in a vain attempt at defence. Many of the sharks we saw had the unmistakable evidence of this with spines still lodged around their mouths.

We didn’t have access to any stingray carcasses but Stuart’s crew had managed to acquire sacks of parrotfish heads and barracuda cleanings from the local fishing dock and these would have to do when it came to shark bait.

People don’t eat barracuda for fear of lethal ciguatera poisoning and the sacks of parrotfish heads were labelled ‘grouper heads’, something to bear in mind when ordering grouper fillets in restaurants in that part of the world.

Sharks don’t simply turn up without reason. The right bait is important. As Liz jokingly likes to say, “They are not like dolphins. You can’t simply do yoga at the back of the boat and expect them to appear.”

Besides the obvious feeling of trepidation felt when getting into the water with big and unpredictable predators, there was also the worry that none would actually turn up. We got out to the magic spot where Stuart anticipated they might come to and started chumming the water with scrapings from the barracuda. Scales and tiny bits of barracuda flesh drifted away on the current over the deep wall and a nervous couple of hours passed before the first dark tell-tale shape became ominously silhouetted against the white sand below. These boys were big.

With a gentle current persistently pushing across a soft white sandy bottom, we rigged a long rope held in place by Danforth anchors to give us something to keep us on station. Everybody was sworn to a code that included never chasing after a shark. We then divided ourselves into two groups and had forty-five minutes at one time in the water.

We, in the second group, were concerned that only the first group might get the rarely seen footage. We need not have worried. Two or three sharks at one time turned up, drawn in by the tantalising smell given off by two of Stuart’s stalwart fish scrapers, standing on the sand behind us and letting a mist of seductive scent drift over us. Beto Barbosa buried parrotfish heads in the sand in front of us and the big animals came in remorselessly looking for the free meal. The show was continuous.

Great hammerheads are magnificent creatures. Big aeroplane-wing-like heads with enormous black eyes at either extremity are swayed from side to side in order for them to both get a complete image in forward vision and for the wide range of electro-receptors, the ampullae of Lorenzini, on the underside to search out possible prey. Set back behind is the mouth, full of very visible flesh-ripping teeth.

Their muscular bodies and long tails give them an amazing turn of speed that is belied in still pictures frozen in time as they are. I needed a very fast shutter-speed with my camera to get sharp pictures. When there’s food in the water, sharks don’t muck about. Eating is what they’re good at.

These great hammerheads are fast, very fast, and we were in their element. With no hard bones to speak of, these big animals can turn in a moment and they did, frequently. I was quite glad I wasn’t a stingray.

There was never any question of these sharks getting their fill and going away. When you consider the amount of flesh present on a big stingray, the bait we offered amounted to nothing more than canapés, but the sharks seemed to enjoy the game and came in again and again, searching out the treasure of fish heads buried in the sand. We kept station in the current and the sharks swam swiftly around us, sniffing out the seabed and bursting into a flurry of action when they found something. It’s an amazing feeling to be in close proximity to such enormous creatures that you knew could destroy you in a moment if they so desired, but they don’t. They’re only looking for what they normally eat.

In some ways they reminded me of old fashioned upright vacuum cleaners. The males are distinguished from the females by their huge, sharply pointed dorsal fins.

It was ironic that at times we were distracted by a dozen or so slow-moving yet muscular nurse sharks, also drawn up to the back reef by the smell of a free meal and at times getting in the way. It could have been an iconic nurse shark dive if there had not been more spectacular animals to watch and these sharks were smothered with massive remoras clinging to them.

There were moments when we thought the great hammerheads had gone but time and time again they’d reappear wraithlike out of the gloom and without pause come directly to us for the big close-ups, and we were happy to oblige.

Sharks are quick learners. By the third day they were waiting for us as the boat was moored up. We were getting bolder too.

Beto managed to lure the occasional shark up off the seabed into open water so that we could get the classic overhead hammerhead shot. The huge beasts didn’t seem interested in the fish he held in his hand and he only needed to put it out of sight behind his back for them to lose interest, not something one might try with some other sharks. There was one exciting moment when a great hammerhead dipped into the sand exactly where Beto stood waiting and picked him up so that he gave us a brief impression of an underwater surfboard rider.

By the fifth day we were getting up to five hours at a time with the sharks. The current had dropped, allowing us to dispense with the rope and sand anchors, the sun shone without break and the sharks stayed around. I was able to get wide-angle close-ups that had been unheard of before. We photographed them at dawn through midday and until dusk. In four days I got more than two-thousand useful pictures of them. The girls with us then wanted to free-dive with them and who we were to stop them? Great hammerheads are not remorseless man-eaters. They are remorseless in their search for prey buried in the sand.

While back in 2013, good pictures of these magnificent animals were rare and only obtained as a result of a fleeting encounter, the word soon got round among keen underwater photographers and by the following year the unique spot where we had been was flooded with dive boats disgorging divers armed with cameras during the short window of opportunity. Today there are endless such pictures available but most of these photographers are so pleased just to have such a magnificent large animal in front of their lenses they do little more than record the image. Few try to get truly iconic photographs.

Chapter 2

Early Experiences in the Bahamas

In 1994 I went to the Bahamas to fulfil a project for an advertising campaign that required sharks to be featured in the pictures. I went with the then famous cave diver, Rob Palmer. I also recounted the experience for the benefit of readers of Diver Magazine.

Rob Palmer looked less than comfortable as he kneeled on the seabed besides the loaded bait box. The chainmail gloves and long sleeves might protect his arms and hands from those ripping razor-sharp teeth, but if he accidentally got bitten he’d certainly sustain a bruise or two through the stainless steel links. The rest of his body, including his head, seemed strangely unprotected by comparison. I wasn’t worried. I was armed with my camera and intent on getting some good pictures but I admit my heart was racing.

Rob gingerly opened the box and speared a massive lump of tuna with his over-sized fondue fork. Carefully allowing the lid of the box to fall closed, he offered the meat, doing his best to disallow the attention of a thousand yellowtails and four massive Nassau grouper that had made their way up on to the reef top. A jolly giant green moray eel nuzzled expectantly around his knees.

We each carried tuna meat in our pockets and Kentucky Dave, the resident dive guide and that day’s shark feeder, crushed more pieces in his hands, allowing blood and fish oil to mix with the surrounding water.

Suddenly the sharks were upon us. There were about eight or nine of them, circling round. The smallest, at about a metre and a half, was the quickest. The biggest, much bigger than me, wore decorative remoras or shark-suckers like badges of rank. The groupers understood the pecking order and stood down, relegated to being non-participating spectators of the ensuing action.

A shark swooped in and wrenched the meat away from Rob’s spear. The others circled in repeated patterns, disgruntled and searching for easy pickings. Adrenalin pumped through the veins of the warm-blooded section of the audience.

These were female Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi), requiem sharks heavy and regularly fed, the stuff of every mariner’s nightmares.

I found myself continually within touching distance as they brushed past me, but I was well advised to resist the temptation, although once or twice it was necessary to gently push a heavy old black grouper out from in front of my camera lens.

Rob cautiously felt for another lump of tuna in the bait box. The closest shark snatched it from him, teeth extended in a ferocious sharky snarl. It roughly shook the bait and swam away at pace from the other competing sharks.

Rob continued to offer food. I continued to shoot pictures. We’d been given the special privilege of conducting our own shark feed and things were going rather well. Moving continuously in a figure of eight, the sharks made repeated passes. Sometimes two would meet in a head-to-head confrontation. Forget the soundtrack from Jaws. It was not kettledrums that we could hear. It was the sound of our own hearts thumping.

We had positioned ourselves in a clear sandy area surrounded by coral heads, only a short distance from the deep water of the drop-off. More sharks appeared up from the depths. We were only too aware that a bull shark or a tiger might turn up, join the circus and put a very different complexion on matters. A huge great hammerhead was known to be in the area. An unexpected visitor from the outer blue might not be aware of the rules. However, we were assured that those already present were regulars. Stuart Cove, our host, has spent years studying their behavioural patterns.

People are still under the impression that sharks are voracious unselective predators that will eat anything. Evidence shows that they must be starving before they will do this. The Caribbean reef sharks of the Bahamas definitely show an order of preference for the different kinds of fish used as bait with cuts of reef fish such as grouper top of the list. Nor are the sharks entirely unpredictable. Stuart Cove and his team have proved that these sharks are no more or less predictable than any other animal, in the sea or on land.

Because of our own previous experience, Rob and I had been allowed the privilege of conducting our own shark feed. It’s often stated that you cannot dive safely while sharks are feeding. Fifty years ago it wasn’t thought safe to dive because of the sharks and twenty-five years ago people didn’t night dive for the same reason. Our perspective on these impressive predators is changing continually.

I should point out that conducting private shark feed dives is not without risk. One year later I took a girlfriend, a keen diver, over to the Bahamas and once again we were awarded that privilege of the private shark feed. Such was the effect on her of being so close to the sharks, I ended up marrying her!

*

In 1998 I travelled to the Bahamas to photograph a television Gladiator with the sharks. The article published in Diver Magazine was written by Nicola Tyrrell.

The voice crackled over the mobile phone, “It sounds like a great idea, but do these sharks ever bite?”

“Only when they are angry,” Nicola Tyrrell, the writer from Diver Magazine replied.

“OK,” the voice laughed.“Gotta go. What time do I need to be at the airport?”

Beefy blond prime-time television Gladiator, James Crossley (stage name: Hunter) had been invited to go to the Bahamas to dive with the sharks and being an utmost competitive individual, he took up the challenge. In the game show he appears to be totally unflappable, super-fit and a giant among men but we quickly discovered his Achilles heel. He suffered from seasickness and the Bahamian weather had taken a turn for the worse with squally weather and an unusually choppy sea.

Nicola reported that the Caribbean reef sharks with which we were about to dive were responsible for about ninety per cent of all shark attacks in the area. Where she got that information from, we really don’t know, but it gave a bit of an edge to the article she wrote. I arranged for my good friend, Canadian Graham Cove, cousin of the owner of Stuart Cove’s Dive South Ocean, to be our shark feeder.

Graham sagely advised James to hide his fear. He explained, “A shark will always choose to sink its teeth into the flesh of a wounded fish rather than a human with a tank on his back,” but added “But I guess there’s no guarantee. These are dumb animals you know…”

We were going to participate in this shark-feeding dive on the flat deck of a wreck that was below us in shallow water. Graham pulled on the long chainmail gloves that protected the full length of his arms.

“Make your way over to the wreck and kneel on the deck. I will be feeding from the bait box. Don’t reach out and touch the sharks. If they touch you, which they will do, stay still and don’t panic. When the feed is over, I will signal OK and you can safely swim back up to this boat.”

Dark shapes circled just beneath the surface but I jumped into the water and the fearless television Gladiator followed me. We descended down the anchor line of our boat but James seemed very reluctant. Maybe the sight of lots of sharks already circling Graham closely below him was putting him off. I went down to where Graham was waiting with the bait box but James stayed way above us. I returned back up the line to him and coaxed him slowly down to the deck of the wreck. It can be very daunting, seeing what you believe are man-eaters, circling around apparently fearless, but James was very competitive and seeing me prepared to swim amongst them, I assumed he’d conquered his fear and he soon joined us.

Nicola described in Diver what happened next:

“Suddenly the sharks were everywhere – and so was Hunter’s head. Looking up, down, left and right, he was wide-eyed – with fascination or horror, it was hard to tell. Keeping his arms tight against his side, he shuffled a bit nearer to our shark man, who by now was getting into his stride, stroking and nudging the sharks like playful puppies.

Hunter was within arm’s reach of the bait box. As one of the stockier sharks swooped in, hyper-extending its jaws to snatch a piece of fish from the feeding stick, it brushed against the side of his head. The Gladiator flinched, but only slightly. Another came at him head-on and, in its haste to grab its food, bumped into his chest, flicked its tail and darted away. Seconds later another shark pounced on the bait, missed its aim and clamped its jaws down on Graham’s hand. With an easy shake of his wrist he disentangled himself and pushed it away.

Hunter looked over to me where I was kneeling, out of harm’s way. His eyes were like saucers, his head shaking in disbelief, but he was in control.”

Twenty-five minutes later the bait was gone and with it the sharks. Afterwards, Nicola reported Hunter as asking, “What was I supposed to do if a shark bit me? Wouldn’t we be safer in a suit of armour or in a cage?”

As Graham pointed out, in an effort to dispel the ill-deserved image of sharks as frenzied man-eating beasts he eschewed the full chainmail suit although by two decades later all shark feeders at Stuart Cove’s dive centre used them.

“If we were to go into the water wearing full chainmail suits, what kind of message would that give people?” he asked. However, he has been dubbed the ‘Bionic Man’ by other dive centre staff, thanks to all the nips he has endured during the five years he had been feeding sharks.

As the photographer I had the problem of photographing someone who appeared to be very uncomfortable with the situation. Unbeknown to any of us until later, it was not the sharks that caused the discomfort. A recently certified diver, the brave television Gladiator had forgotten to clear his ears and had ruptured an eardrum during the descent. No wonder he didn’t look happy!

*

In 2004, I went to the Bahamas to write a profile of Michelle Cove. She had fed sharks for years, been a stunt double in Hollywood movies, was a mother of two and gorgeous to boot.

When the producers of the Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, needed to shoot an underwater sequence in the sea, they headed, as they often have in the past, to the Bahamas. More precisely to Stuart Cove’s Dive South Ocean dive centre, where the seabed is already littered with the remains of underwater sets from 007 movies. Even the dive centre itself has been a set – it was the fishing village in the film Flipper.

The Bond production crew spent five weeks here filming a working model of a submarine. The stunt in the closing sequence of the film sees James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) rescuing Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) from a submarine seconds before it crashes and explodes. They then make a free ascent together.

Stuntman Gavin McKinney took the part of James Bond for the underwater filming and Michelle Cove that of Christmas Jones.

A native Bahamian with the dark good looks of her father’s Italian ancestry, Michelle’s Canadian education has left her with a North American twang, despite the influence of her mother’s Scottish Oban upbringing. Instead this has instilled her with a dry, British sense of humour. She combines the business of diving with being a very capable mother of two. She’s the kind of woman that other women admire. As for men – they appear to like her too.

Michelle was known as a ‘bodacious babe’ when stunt-driving a ski-boat in the movie Flipper. The world’s diving community, however, better knows her for her partnership with husband Stuart Cove and their successful business, providing shark encounters.

They have built up an enviable reputation for being able to guarantee the presence of sharks both for the countless leisure divers who book for the daily two-tank shark dives, and for the specialised needs of the world’s film and television industry.

This side of the business has expanded from Stuart’s humble beginnings as an extra hand on an earlier Bond film, Never Say Never Again, into Stuart Cove’s Underwater Productions, a company that helps out many film and documentary-makers with underwater and shark sequences.

Since then Stuart has been closely involved with work on the film Deep Blue Sea, starring Samuel L Jackson.

Michelle has known Stuart since her childhood. “When I was sixteen years old I would come down and hang out with all the cute water sports guys. Stuart certified me as a Dive Master and I would spend the summer helping out, driving boats and so on. The girls back at school wouldn’t believe me when I told them about swimming with the silky sharks out at the shark buoy.” They can believe it now, as they read about Michelle’s unusual life in magazines like Hello!

“We used to go out to the US Navy buoy in the Tongue of the Ocean, and do some fishing and then feed the sharks. You know, sharks act very differently when there’s fresh-caught fish around.

“Stuart used to scare the pants off me. He started by stroking passing sharks and eventually found that if you caught one by the tail and flipped it on its back it would go torpid. It’s called ‘tonic immobility’.

We played around, sometimes very foolishly. When you grabbed a shark you could turn it over and aim it at one of your friends before letting it go like a missile. Another trick was to put a little ballyhoo (bait fish) down someone’s snorkel!”

Eventually they started feeding the bigger Caribbean reef sharks – using a mesh bag. “It was very dangerous,” Michelle admits. “Nowadays it is all very controlled but in those days we just took risks and got away with it.”

Michelle’s life has changed less than you might imagine since becoming a mother, despite the risks involved in what she does.

“Stuart had me feeding sharks when our son Travis, now three, was only six weeks old,” she says. “His nanny would be waiting with him above in the boat so that I could take breaks to feed him.

Responsibility for your kids does settle you down, though. For example, I’m a qualified pilot, but I spend all my time in the back seat now.”

It was being bitten by a shark, rather than motherhood, that stopped her from feeding sharks quite so often.

“Once bitten twice shy – it really is true. I lost some of my confidence in my ability to do the job. It was my own fault.”

Michelle was controlling the bait box, filled mainly with unwanted parts of grouper carcasses from the fish market, with a length of rope. A shark got the rope caught in its teeth and, in its struggle to free itself, knocked the box over and spilled the entire contents.

“Without thinking I dived in to make things neat. In the free-for-all another shark accidentally bit me in the back of the head. I knew I was hurt, but blood looks green under water. I saw this dark green cloud around me and felt like I’d been punched.”

She had been scalped.

“It was when the boat captain nearly fainted as I climbed on board that I knew things were serious. My scalp was hanging off the back of my head and I was covered in blood. It took quite a few stitches to put it right.”

Michelle still works with sharks but prefers not to feed them now. Around forty big specimens usually turn up at each of the feeds and it’s quite a physical job.

“I probably don’t have enough bodyweight to cope with it,” she says. “Being pushed around every day is a lot of work and needs a lot of mental concentration. You have the sharks, the bait box, the videographer and the customers to worry about. I very much enjoy being in the water with sharks, it’s just that feeding so many now has become a little too physical.”

Michelle is well aware of the criticisms that are often levelled at shark-feeding by well-meaning people.

“It’s a misconception for people to think that these sharks have lost the ability to hunt,” she explains. “Some sharks disappear from feeds for periods of around three months. New sharks are always joining the feed. You cannot adequately feed so many sharks the way we do it. It’s always about half-a-dozen dominant sharks that get the food. They are big animals and the amount of bait we offer is just not enough. They are also obviously breeding, so they must be happy.”

Another view is that if people like Stuart and Michelle now stop feeding the sharks, someone will get gobbled up because there is no food available. “Unless it’s fish, they don’t want it,” argues Michelle. “My profusely bleeding head proved that. It didn’t provoke a feeding frenzy. It’s only the feeder who might be in any sort of danger, and then it’s from an accidental bite but he wears long chain-mail gloves and uses a short spear to offer the bait and that keeps his hand away from the sharp end.”

Customers come for the adrenalin, but it would not be good for business if one were to be bitten. It did happen once, Michelle admitted:

“A customer spontaneously thrust his hand into a passing shark’s mouth. He hadn’t followed instructions.”

Visitors are all told to sit on the bottom and keep arms folded with their hands kept to themselves. The centre always does two consecutive dives and checks that everyone can sit comfortably on the bottom, without waving their hands around, before it does the actual feed.

I needed to photograph Michelle swimming among the sharks for my article so we went to the reef where sharks were known to be. Stuart would swim ahead of us free-baiting the water and I would swim ahead of Michelle, facing backwards with my camera. In this way I got the photographs of Michelle surrounded by sharks, even if it did mean bumping into the occasional shark with the back of my head. Ironically, while we were doing this, a grouper bit Irvin, a local dive guide who was there in the capacity of a safety-diver. It dashed into the ensuing melee to competitively grab some bait and grabbed Irvin instead.

Chapter 3

Whitetip Reef Sharks

The ubiquitous whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus) is often the first shark that the person new to diving gets acquainted with. That’s because, as the name denotes, these sharks inhabit tropical coral reefs throughout the Indo-Pacific region and since they are nocturnal hunters, they are usually seen lying up during the day, resting.

They are one of the few requiem sharks that can force water through their gills without the need for forward motion so this gives them the advantage that they are able to lie about on horizontal surfaces, sometimes in large groups. Scuba divers may come across them lethargically occupying a patch of sand or a crevice in the reef during daylight hours. The sharks look quite idle and lazy until you get up close to one and it makes a bolt for it. However, at night, when it is time to feed, they become incredibly competitive and voracious, searching out small prey that might be hiding among the rocks or coral.

A site in Ari Atoll well-known for its sharks is Maya Thila. There was a time when I would have described it as the place for the world’s most frenetic night dive because there used to be such a large population of whitetip reef sharks together with very many large marble rays, and both these species hunt at night.

Whitetip reef sharks are not very successful hunting in open water so it’s the smaller reef inhabitants, asleep in their holes, that become the object of their fatal attention and this species of shark has evolved to be very good at extracting these helpless victims from where they hide. To this end they have flexible rubbery bodies and tough skin that allows them to force their way into the tiniest of holes to get at sleeping reef fish and invertebrates without damage to themselves.

At this time the action can become quite violent as great hordes of these slim bodied sharks gather together and compete for the food. One of the most famous places to observe such a nocturnal mass attack of the inhabitants of a reef is Manuelita off the main island of Cocos. Rocks can get moved during the tussles between sharks and in other places with less rocky terrain, corals frequently get broken in the ensuing chaos of thrashing grey bodies.

Divers have to be sure to maintain good buoyancy control in the darkness since to reach out with a steadying hand to push off the boulders would only invite an unwanted bite in the toothy turmoil below.

Of course the whitetip reef shark is by no means at the top of the food chain and although some can grow to approach two metres in length, this noticeably slim bodied shark can itself fall prey to larger sharks. They are often the first sharks to turn up at a staged shark feed dive but they disappear off somewhere else as soon as larger sharks arrive.

Not only that, they are often preyed upon by attackers other than sharks. I have seen a small whitetip reef shark have a lump taken out of it in an instant attack by a large Queensland grouper under cover of darkness. I also once witnessed a large moray eel grab a passing small shark.

Morays have a large number of fine sharply pointed inward facing teeth that means they can get a grip on their prey and the prey has no hope of escaping. In this case the shark struggled as best it could, bending round on itself in an effort to strike at its attacker but the moray thrashed about in a snake-like way, although it was dragged from the cover of its hole in the ensuing battle.

The shark struggled on endlessly. It wasn’t going to give up in any passive way, but because the eel had grabbed it across the mid-point of its body, it was unable to finish off the shark in any meaningful way.

Moray eels like to stay close to topography. They are not normally open water swimmers. The eel was way out into open water before the shark finally made its escape, seemingly none the worse for its experience, while the eel quickly propelled itself back to the comforting cover of the reef.

If you ever have the unusual experience to witness whitetip reef sharks mating (probably the only species of shark that anyone has witnessed enjoying this very private moment), you’ll know that the damage inflicted by the male upon the female in the process of grabbing a secure hold of it could be far worse than that inflicted by any moray eel.

During the day, whitetip reef sharks might look like they are posing for the would-be photographer but the challenge for the underwater camera user is to get close enough to obtain a clearly lit image and in doing so must be incredibly patient and move only a tiny amount at one time. Even then, the whitetip reef shark usually flees before you can get close enough.

Typically, whitetip reef sharks can be found in numbers close to a food source. At Sipadan, Malaysia’s only truly oceanic island, you’ll see lots of these little sharks lying lethargically around. The island is famous as a retreat for green turtles and you’ll spy endless numbers of these aquatic reptiles roosting in the coral. They use the soft white sand of Sipadan’s beaches to bury their eggs but once they hatch, the little turtle hatchlings are very much on their own and have to fend for themselves. During each full moon the surface of the water can be dotted with tiny turtles attempting to make their way into the world and they make easy pickings for the whitetip reef sharks.

There are so many whitetip reef sharks at Sipadan that the scuba diver starts ignoring their presence just as one might at Cocos Island on the other side of the world in the Eastern Pacific.

During the first of numerous visits to Cocos, I had been so enthralled by the massed schools of scalloped hammerheads that by nightfall my appetite for diving was assuaged. I didn’t bother to do any night dives. On my second visit, I was stunned to see the shark action afforded by the thousands of whitetip reef sharks that had learned to take advantage of divers’ lights at night, in order to hunt by. Each diver would find himself escorted by literally hundreds of sharks that turned the seabed below into a writhing mass of grey bodies. The night dive at Manuelita Island is probably the most exciting dive of any of the dives, all high-voltage, experienced around Cocos.

For my own part, I was privately amazed too that I had not been aware of this phenomenon during my first visit and once I returned home I telephoned one of the other divers from my previous trip and asked if there had been any sharks apparent on night dives he had done.

“Oh yes, millions of the buggers,” came the laconic confirmation. Somehow, it seems that none of the other passengers had mentioned this astounding night diving experience over dinner and I had completely overlooked the chance to participate in it. I went back to Cocos more than half-a-dozen times after that and never missed another night dive there. There’s an evocative description of such a dive in Amazing Diving Stories.

At Tubbataha reef, a reef positioned around 100 miles off-shore from Puerto Princesa in the Philippines, there lives a large whitetip reef shark population presumably for the same reason as at Sipadan, although there are no obvious dry beaches. During daylight hours the whole reef top seems to be littered with the bodies of resting whitetip reef sharks that appear oblivious to the presence of divers until the very last moment when all the photographer gets is a tail-end shot of a shark disappearing in a rapidly receding perspective.

I still remember well my first encounter with a whitetip reef shark as a recently certified diver. It was in the early 1980s in the Egyptian Red Sea. Since the water is a little cooler here than in the true tropics, reef sharks tend to be few and far between, but I was swimming along a reef at the Small Gap, a well known dive site off the west side of the Sinai, when I felt my buddy Tom Burton excitedly tugging at my fin.

He signalled ‘shark’ by making the shape of a dorsal fin on his head with his hand and looked to be quite agitated with excitement. He led me back down along the reef to the entrance of a small cavern in the coral substrate. At the time I had one of those new-fangled underwater video Handycams and a suitably bright video light so I did not hesitate in swimming into the cave.

There, lit up at the far end of the cave, was what was undoubtedly a shark, not big but more than a metre in length, swimming round in circles in an ever more agitated way. It looked more excited than Tom. Round and round it went. It had not occurred to me that I was blocking its only escape route from the cavern and I held the Handycam ahead of me recording on video the actions of this seemingly obliging shark.

Whitetip reef sharks might look lethargic when lying resting on the sandy seabed but they can put on quite a turn of speed when it comes to flight or fight. At some point it decided that it had had quite enough and in a moment that was too fast for me to react to, it stopped its endless circling and hurtled out past my outstretched hands holding the camera and rocketed past the top of my head in a successful effort to reach the safety of open water.

I enjoyed a full head of hair in those days and, not wearing a hood, I felt it carve a parting in my locks as it passed, it was so close. How it managed to get between my head and the ceiling of the cavern, I will never know but that is how I got my first video footage of a ‘shark attack’ only it was not an attack. It was a ‘shark escape’ and the shark had moved so quickly it had become nothing much more than a grey blur. It was not only my first encounter with a requiem shark but it had also been a close one.

Chapter 4

The French Connection

To me, when I first started diving in the early 1980s, the French divers I met had a particular style of their own. The men invariably sported a massive moustache, carried their gear in a hessian sack, wore equipment long past its sell-by-date, smoked un-tipped French cigarettes and drank Pastis between dives. The women tended to be merely decorative but they seemed to relish that state of affairs. You may think I’m describing a stereotype but there is no doubt that the majority of French divers did things differently to the rest of us.

In 1992 I took a job as a dive guide on a liveaboard dive boat that made a pioneering cruise each summer down the entire length of the Red Sea from Egypt to Djibouti.

In those days it was a stretch of water surrounded by hostile countries and in that regard it probably isn’t that much different today. The diving was adventurous to say the least. The fare paying passengers were drawn from all over Europe and America. We picked up passengers en-route and they tended to stay with us for a one or two-week period before disembarking and being substituted for another group.

My dive briefings were minimal. They used to be along the lines of, “Nobody has ever dived here before so we have no idea what it will be like. Let’s get into the water and find out!”

In those days, we were still regularly reminded in dive training manuals that if a shark was sighted we should leave the water immediately. We saw plenty of sharks but we were adventurous and stayed in the water with them.

Heading south after departing from Sharm el Sheikh, we first dived the twin Brother Islands, remote outposts in Egyptian waters, but on my first visit a thick green plankton bloom ruined the visibility. I could not honestly say that I then knew the sites after diving them because I really had been unable to see where I was. I’d have to return on another occasion. However, swimming along the walls, from time to time I would have a head-to-head close encounter with the occasional grey reef shark coming the other way. Each animal was always as startled as I was and disappeared each time with a flick of its tail. Naturally, the passengers blamed me, the hapless dive guide, for the poor conditions. Luckily by the time we got to the waters of the Sudan, further south, the visibility had cleared up. Things went better from then on.