SPECIAL ISSUE

ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME?

Adrenaline addict Douglas David Seifert is your guide to two highly unusual solutions to getting up close and personal with the big boys – whale sharks in Belize and reef shark in Polynesia

The Mob: excited by bait blacktip reef sharks mob the photographer at the surface

For sheer adrenaline, divers seek out sharks. There was a time when just to see a shark was enough, but now that seeing them is no longer a startling novelty, the emphasis is on seeing sharks up close and personal – within touching distance or, for the melodramatically inclined, within biting distance. Viewing sharks under natural circumstances is normally a long-distance
scenario akin to bird watching. Sharks generally keep their distance from divers. This is believed to be because the shark has no certainty what a diver is or represents, other than a potential threat or rival for dominance in the shark’s territory. The diver’s size surely plays a part in the shark’s calculations, as does the intrusive noise of exhaust bubbles issuing from the regulator, and the spatially expanding pyramid of bubbles rising as they head to the surface.

Their reaction to this territorial invasion is often to perform a ‘fly-by’ – passing at a distance of several of their own body lengths and offering their flank as they move to a distance beyond visibility. For years, divers have tried different techniques to fool the sharks, with very little success. You can crouch among boulders (equivalent to the birdwatcher’s hide) in an attempt to be ‘invisible’ to passing schools of scalloped hammerheads, but the second a diver breathes and the tell-tale bubbles issue forth, don’t believe for a second the sharks are fooled. Some have tried, with small

degrees of success, to entice shark interest by donning garishly coloured wetsuits in fluorescent yellows, oranges and pinks. By and large, dive operators have resorted to attracting sharks into close proximity to their diving clients by appealing to the sharks’ most basic instinct: availability of food, abundant and for the taking. Shark attraction dives are usually conducted by what is called baiting. This works fine for 99 per cent of all shark species, from great white sharks to reef sharks. It does not work for scalloped hammerhead sharks and, until recently, I was sceptical as to whether anyone could amass enough plankton to make a really good basking shark or whale shark dive. I was sceptical, that is, until I visited Belize...

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