Diving With Sharks

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 tubes 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 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!