November 1st - 9th, 2008 :: Shear Water Shark Trip

This first expedition of November has blessed us with a group of wonderful guests mostly from Germany and Austria. Everyone seems very excited about seeing the tiger and hammerhead sharks. We depart early in the morning to hopefully avoid the winds that are blowing now.

We have arrived in the Bahamas and I must say that the crossing was very rough. We just completed a full day at a new site we call “Hammer Time.” Fortunately every time we have been here we have seen the great hammerhead. Yesterdays, great hammerhead, unfortunately would not come close enough for pictures. Only a few of the guests saw it. We are planning on spending the night here to see if we see it again tomorrow.

Today’s dives started out with some tremendous dives at Hammer Time. The Great Hammerhead was still there although she never came in close. I only saw her two times. Five tigers arrived overnight making the diving activity very enjoyable. Many of the guests had never seen this large species which makes the dive even more enjoyable for me, as they can see exactly how they really are around humans and dispel what many of the monster shark films still portray. Today we know so much more about sharks that to me it seems irresponsible for film makers to portray them as anything different. Without the scary music, these immense beautiful creatures are simply magnificent as they move slowly amongst the divers in a very cautious way.

After several dives with them we moved to a section of Tiger Beach called The Chain. The huge chain and an anchor are all that remains of a ship wreck long ago. At this site we did two more dives one just before dusk as well a wonderful night dive. This was their first experience with lemon sharks. This large shark grows to 3.5 meters with a double dorsal fin and an impressive rack of teeth. Some of these teeth actually point forward making for some great photographs. The night dive was very peaceful and surreal. The lemon sharks swam at all levels of the water column providing for beautiful opportunities to have a lemon shark in high contrast against a black background.

By the next morning we had one tiger although it was not one of our regular ones so it was very difficult to get an image of her. She was roughly 3.5 meters long. The lemon sharks grew in numbers overnight to roughly 30. I shot macro face shots of them until the weather would not allow us to stay any longer so we headed south for a calmer anchorage.

The next morning the wind had let up a little so we headed to “Classic Tiger Beach” which is the area we first started coming to when we discovered the area to have a very large tiger shark population. It is an area of white sand ripples and nothing else which provides a beautiful backdrop for  the dark stripes and spots of the tiger shark.

Although there were still waves and some surge, visibility went up to nearly one hundred feet. Within minutes of putting the bait in the water, our favorite tiger shark, Emma, arrived. Before lunch we had six different tiger sharks including some of our favorite super models, Begonia, Relentless and Kimberly.  All the guests now know what tiger sharks are truly like. At this moment they are talking about how sad it is that people portray them as such monsters. It is moments like this that fill my heart with joy as I know that telling the truth about sharks is exactly what is needed in order to get the world behind us in saving sharks from the shark finning industry. Although many film producers still portray sharks as monsters, people that really know sharks because they have been with them know that these shows are just sensationalist garbage.  The afternoon produced more wind and visibility dropped considerably. After a lemon shark sunset, we moved the boat to a calmer anchorage.

This morning we woke to flat calm seas and as I gazed out across the calm water for my first look, a new large tiger swam under the boat. We moved the boat back to another area of Tiger Beach on the edge of an area we call The Cornfield because of the plants that grow very tall there.  The water was really clean and lots of tigers were present. By the end of the day, I had seen a total of 9 different tigers with 3 bull sharks, one of which was very large. This is the type of day I hoped we would have. Almost everyone spent the entire day in the water. By 7:30 pm everyone was sound asleep.

Once again we awake to flat calm seas and clear skies. A perfect day for dolphin encounters, but first we jumped in to see Emma and the super model tiger sharks one last time. While the group was in the water I took advantage of the plethora of lemon sharks to shoot some very interesting topside images with a 8mm fish eye lens.

The dolphins were probably on vacation as we did not find any today. Tomorrow is our last day and everyone wants large sharks so we are planning on trying a new spot that we haven’t named yet.

It’s another beautiful, flat calm, blue sky morning. We moved to the new spot and were immediately greeted by three tigers. More and more arrived with each dive. The last dive was completely off the scale, even as far as I am concerned. We wound up with a total of 9 tigers, which we have had many times, but 8 of them were in the 14 to 16 foot range which really made this special. A perfect way to end a perfect trip.

Enjoy the images!

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