Shark Dive with no cage!

Introduction

There are two outfits at Pacific Harbour that offer the Shark Dive experience where they feed the sharks underwater in front of the divers/customers.

Beqa Adventure Divers is one outfit and the other is Aquatrek. I chose the former.

In the back of my mind, there was the question of ethics.  Should we be feeding these wild creatures?  Does it alter their behaviour? The industry’s response is that it by having customers up-close with the sharks, it demystifies them and shows them not to be senseless killers.  The income from tourists is shared with the local community to replace the income they otherwise have from fishing (or shark-fishing or worse, shark-finning), which means there is conservation of fisheries in the area.

Ah well, let’s go have a look and experience it for myself …

Getting going

The transport arrived just slightly after 0730 at my hotel for the 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 Shark Dive and Feeding Experience

For both shark dives, we entered the water in a way I hadn’t experienced before.  We would jump into the water and hold on to a current line floating in the choppy seas, wait for everyone to be in the water before descending. Similarly at the end of the dive, we had to hold on to the current line once we surfaced and patiently wait our turn before climbing up the ladder into the boat.

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 a 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!
• 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 then came “extra” for this dive, which 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.

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.