Dive with hand-fed sharks

I woke at 0400 to go to the toilet. It was blowing a gale and I could hear it howl through the dorm. I had trouble getting back to sleep. By 0500, I could hear the birdsong and cicadas; I realised that was because the wind had died down. When the alarm rang at 0620, the wind had picked up again. I had this sick feeling that the shark dive wasn’t going to happen. This was something I had wanted to do for so long and made a detour to Fiji in order to make it happen.

The buffet breakfast started at 0700 with pickup for our shark dived at 0730. I checked with reception and there had been no word of a cancellation. The transport arrived just slightly after 0730 for our short drive to the dive centre.

We got our gear fitted and hopped into Predator (with Hunter being the other boat). There were about 10 divers and 4 dive staff (mix of feeder, shark chaperone and dive master roles) and the skipper. Chugging down the river slowly was smooth. The fun began once we headed out to sea; it was rough! It was about a 15 minute churn through the open sea to the dive site at Shark Reef Marine Reserve.

The first dive, we descended straight down to 30m where we knelt behind a low coral wall for about 15 mins to watch the bull sharks being fed from a bin. The graceful creatures swam round and round and nudged the bin waiting for their feed. The bin was operated by ropes, somewhat like a puppet on strings. Depending on the tilt, it may open to let out a piece of tuna head.

It’s not too different from a cat or dog at meal time. Strangely, it wasn’t scary even though they are so close. I had to duck a few times as they glided past my head! It was mildly thrilling but the overwhelming emotion was one of awe!  I said to myself “This is insane; I should be scared but somehow I’m not”.

We then came up to 15m and knelt to watch reef sharks (grey, black tip and white tip) being fed. Again, this lasted for about 15 mins. This wasn’t so good for me as my view was obscured by small reef fish.

The second dive, we descended down to 15m for 30 minutes to watch more bull sharks being fed tuna heads from the puppeted bin. This wasn’t too different from the first dive. But the “extra” this dive was the hand-feeding of the bull sharks. It was pretty unreal seeing the tuna head being let go by the feeder just in time to go into the mouth of the passing shark. I couldn’t get enough of those hand-fed moments.

Coming back up, a number of us headed towards the wrong boat. The divemasters were good at picking that up (considering they can’t see our faces well) and ushered us back into the right direction.

For both dives, we had to enter the water and hold on to a current line floating in the choppy seas, wait for everyone to be in the water before descending. And for getting out, we held on to the current line once we surfaced and patiently waited our turn before climbing up the ladder.

It was an experience so awesome, it was beyond words. The fact that it was “staged” or a “performance” didn’t make it less awesome. I’ve always considered myself to be a spoilt diver having done Sipadan several times. Having experienced this makes me even more spoilt than ever.

It was a good way to end my Vanuatu/Fiji adventure. I was so close to have this dive being pulled out under my feet due to bad weather. I don’t know how I managed to squeeze three such awesome experiences into the space of a week.  You can read more about the shark dive in my Diving post here.