ending dives with sharks circling?

[highdesert]

Shark Attack at 57 metres in Papua New Guinea - YouTube

Watch this video...no bait, no fishing, the divers were very carefully watching.... the guy got away from a bite by luck.

Darwin Award candidate ... the guy is calling sharks, and Doh!, one shows up! Surprise!

I have to at least give them credit for realizing themselves that they're "idiot divers".

 

[Brendon]

deleted...double post.

 

[smellzlikefish]

My closest encounters have probably been whilst blue-water diving. I've had oceanic whitetips voluntarily get much closer than the one in my profile pic. When you are the only thing around for miles, you are VERY interesting. I've also had two very large tigers show up (while solo diving no less) from the direction I wasn't looking. I didn't notice it until it was maybe five feet away. They left after a minute or so, but the pucker factor in that situation is pretty intense. The only thing I could do is stand my ground and hope they bought my bluff. My camera strobes may have attracted that encounter.

 

[Thalassamania]

Shark Story

 

[dumpsterDiver]

Yes carefully watching while calling them with a plastic bottle... They werent exactly minding their own business were they...? .

Yes sometimes idiot divers make lots of bothersome noise......What were you saying again?

 

[smellzlikefish]

Thal-Great read! Somebody mentioned earlier in the thread about a whitetip attack in Hawaii but failed to find the story. Any more details that might help add to a Google search on it?

 

[Rick Murchison]

I posted this a long time ago (can't even find the original thread) and re-wrote if last fall for my "Scuba diving with Uncle Ricky" piece I do for the local monthly... nowhere near as dramatic as Thal's, but hope y'all enjoy.

July 3, 2001
Sometimes the adventure is in our own back yard!
It was one of those picture-perfect days you always hope for but rarely get on the Gulf. A deep blue sky held puffy white cumulus clouds while a light breeze took the edge off the summer heat. The Gulf herself was nearly flat, with seas running only a foot or two on a long even swell. It hadn’t rained in a while, so the water was exceptionally clear, an infinite emerald with light dancing into the depths, the occasional silver flash from some passing Jack or King Mackerel or Bonito punctuating the deep dark where the light seemed to vanish. The water was cool but comfortable all the way to the bottom; winter’s thermocline had finally retreated to the depths for the summer season. We were in heaven.
Anchored over a small patch of rock bottom in the endless sand a few miles off Perdido Key, Sunday's second dive started out with a slight wrinkle... my buddy was late showing up at the bottom, so I headed out by myself, easing along looking for dinner. I cocked my speargun and began an expanding square search roughly centered around an old tire on the bottom. Nothing. The snapper I'd seen on the way down had suddenly disappeared, which was a little odd but not disconcerting - still, I wondered why.
Suddenly a big Crevalle came by my right side, and my immediate thought was that he was the reason the snapper had taken cover - then another and another, then two big redfish.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by dozens of the big Jack Crevalle and hundreds of two to four foot long, delicious, beautiful red drum, flashing golden and gorgeous through the clear gulf water! They were circling me, going in both directions! I'd never seen anything quite like this in over thirty years of diving. It was remarkable, beautiful, mesmerizing… and I brought my gun to bear on several nice slot reds but wasn't quite satisfied with the shot yet - something wasn't right. I thought “these fish are moving too fast. Too skittish, too much energy being wasted in behavior that obviously has nothing to do with feeding... why, these big fish are acting more like minnows in a baitball than the large gulf predators they are... and for some reason they've obviously chosen me as a center of the ball. No, something else is going on here...”
Suddenly, all comes clear -
Shark!
Big shark!
Two big sharks!
Two big heavy bodied sharks, and two more smaller ones.
Not just "cruising by" sharks, not "lucky to see" sharks, unapproachable, marvelous interesting sharks - no...
These are big, stocky, back up pectorals down maneuvering quickly and purposefully hunting feeding hungry serious Bull sharks intent on herding the school of Crevalle and Reds, and me in the middle of it all! Suddenly the biggest one (estimate 350 pounds, 7-8 feet) flipped and headed directly at me, with speed and purpose. All I could think to do was raise the speargun, realizing that I had no chance of doing any real damage to him, but maybe enough to discourage him with a poke in the nose. Just out of speargun range he veered off suddenly, passing on my left. As I turned to keep him in sight I could feel the dragon crawling up my spine as I was forced to turn my back on the other big shark. Why, oh why had I not waited for my buddy, my wingman - anyone to cover my six o’clock and help me keep both those big boys in sight? By now I had started a slow, deliberate, non-threatening "I am definitely not the food you want" ascent... Two full minutes - an eternity - from the sixty-odd feet where we'd started. The baitball of big fish and the hunting sharks stayed with me for awhile, but thankfully began to drop below me as I cleared 30 feet or so. No safety stop today, thank you. I surfaced about 50 yards from the boat, then dropped and made a slow, deliberate swim back there just deep enough so as not to be flopping around on the surface like a wounded fish, all the while keeping my head on a swivel, watching for the sharks, catching the occasional glimpse of them still working the baitball beneath me.
As I got to the boat, I didn't even need to ask my buddy if he'd seen 'em too, as he was already climbing in, speargun still cocked and aimed below.
God, I loved it!
Uncle Ricky

Rick

 

[Kourtjestr]

Again, just for humor and perspective... "10 Reasons Why Bear Week Would Be Better Than Shark Week" by Kevin Corrigan - CollegeHumor Article

 

[FuzzyNutz]

Did one shark dive with Ocean Frontiers in Grand Cayman. They told us that they would point to two divers to ascend together, since the sharks were being feed and were pretty much in a frenzy already, there was not 15' safety stop, and to ascend as quickly and board before the sharks could attack from behind/beneath before boarding. Made the whole experience just a tad more exciting.

Mine was also a feed dive and I was told the same thing for the ascent. When I signed up for the dive, it was an adrenaline rush for me. In my briefing (and even better, it was just me, the feeder, and a DM there), they told me to just back roll off the boat and go straight to the bottom. No meeting at the surface or just below to see if everything is ok... just "1, 2, 3, and see you at the bottom!". I was thinking, "F*** YEAH!!! THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!!!!!". I was actually excited to the thought of a bunch of BULL sharks circling around me in a frenzy (lmao, insert stupid / crazy comment here). Just for the story of it, I indeed wanted to get bumped (insert another stupid/crazy remark). The track record shows no one ever died during these feeding dives (or at least very few, lol, I dunno), and I read/watched enough stuff on sharks to know what to expect, so I was ready and pumped for all of it! The most surprising thing though was that... all the sharks were very calm. There was no frenzy at all! They were swimming pretty slow and in big patterns. They would come in every so often for the bait, and they took it from the feeders hand rather delicately. I was shocked by this. I thought there would be a swarm of sharks fighting for bait and see a cloud of fish parts everywhere. Very quickly, it was apparent that this was no adrenaline dive. I can only describe it as beautiful and surreal. Supposedly female bulls have the highest testosterone level on earth... and there I was, face to face with 15 of them... you could even see there tiny little eyeball staring directly into yours from less than 6 inches away. I felt sort of 'accepted' into their environment. It was also dumbfounding to actually witness, in real life and in person, just how majestic these creatures really are. It's just pure muscle machine swimming the ballet.

Getting bumped by bullsharks was cool? You are either stupid or crazy.....and those traits are not mutually exclusive.

Well that opened up a little can of worms, eh? lmao!! To clear things up, I meant the sharks coming vertically up towards us was cool. Regarding your comment, I took it as humor/sarcasm, so no worries, lol. Either way, you can't be crazy without at least a bit of stupidity... and I think I got a lot of both!

Now if I can only find an op that offers great white diving without a cage...

 

[Thalassamania]

Thal-Great read! Somebody mentioned earlier in the thread about a whitetip attack in Hawaii but failed to find the story. Any more details that might help add to a Google search on it?

I know Jim Stewart was hit by a reef shark off Eniwetok.