January 6

Diving With Sharks

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Reef-scene
Over the holidays, we were lucky enough to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. There is not much sailing to be had where we were as the seas are too challenging for charters. I made up for it by satisfying my second passion, diving.

I certified out here in 2004 and it is a great diving spot. The water is clean, fairly warm and there are some good dive shops out here. I did 10 dives, including 1 night dive, with Kohala Divers, a well-run shop in the Northwest of the island.

It had been two years since I last dived so my first dive was a little nervy. We went to 90 feet and I struggled with my air, only getting a measly 25 minute bottom time. Over the week, I relaxed and was getting as much as 60 minutes with 60 feet dives.

The underwater landscape is very cool in Hawaii as you get amazing lava formations with lava tubesRobyn-w-turtle
to dive through and some ledges for things to hide out under. The livestock was well-worth the price of admission: Parrot fish, Butterfly fish, Sargent Majors, Trumpet and Cornetfish, Moorish Idols, Box Fish, purple spotted Peacock Grouper,  Turkey Fish, shrimp, Nutibranchs, huge Pufferfish, Boxfish, the ugliest fish I have ever seen – the Titan Scorpion-fish, a small octopus, lots of eels including a six foot Moray with a girth the size of my thigh. We saw 3 turtles including one that swam right up to us.

Between dives, we saw pods of whales and dolphins on a regular basis.

Best of all was my first real encounter with sharks! On one of the earlier dives, we encountered a small White-tip shark 30 feet away in a cave. It took one look at us and swam off. On the 9th dive, we were swimming round the end of the large lava finger. The SHARK
dive-master and one of the other divers had passed the outcrop. I was at the back with another couple of divers, when a 6 foot White-tip shot out from under a ledge, about 20 feet from us. At first, it swam away, but then it turned and started to come back towards us.

The whole thing was like an out-of-body experience. They are the thing of nightmares but you are told that they rarely attack, especially the non-aggressive White-tip. I have heard statistics that more people die from eating shark than being bitten by a shark and that more people are killed by donkeys than sharks. But, as it swam back towards us, I started to wonder if I was about to buck the statistical trend. There is something surreal about coming this close to such a feared beast.

In the end it bore away and disappeared into the murky distance.

Damn that was cool!


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