Unusual encounters?

[Joshua Pritchard]

Today I spent a few minutes with a hammerhead shark.

Hammerheads are A@#$holes i do most of my diving off the coast of WA and i see a fair few of them they are really cool.. but of all the shark i see HH are the most likely one s to be labeled pricks by me ... not because they are aggressive or unpredictable but because they keep bloody sneaking up on me.

so my 3 most interesting/unusual HH incidents

1. i was waiting for my buddy to finish looking at something in a bit of a hole in the reef... and just floating about a meter above the lower part of a reef. said buddy who is very new to diving pulled back and turned to find me and then looked to have a brief panic moment that confused me for a minute till he started frantically pointing at something, wondering what was going on i turned and there were two HH slowly swimming toward me in some really graceful shallow turns.. they got to within about 2 meters of me and then turned to the right and charged off away from us. (that was his first shark encounter)
2. Diving around the same island this time on the north side and there is a huge short hole in the reef probably about 3 meters across almost perfactly round and only about 2 meters thick (this is as close as im likely to get to cave diving ) just as i swam through a shadow passed over me and i looked up to see a HH swim over me
   
3. this time a different Dive location a little up the coast and i had been following a cuttlefish for about 5 min .. budy and i turned about started heading back to the boat as had just gotten to the turn point of the dive when i felt a bit of side surge which was weird cause there was nearly no current that day ... then i felt something hit me in the back part of my shoulder and the reg hose as well cause it damn near pushed the reg out f my mouth. thinking my buddy was trying to get my attn or had just finned my hose i looked over and saw a HH swimming away with these huge tail flicks and buddy not in that direction (turns out the buddy was on the other side of me and about 3 meters behind) buddy tells me the HH swam past me then wacked me in the side with his tail

 

[Lorenzoid]

Is it an "encounter" if the other party is oblivious to your presence?

We were just about to begin our safety stop when below us we noticed a big moray attempting to corner a victim in a large group of lobsters. The moray picked target after target, but the lobster shot off backwards or otherwise got away every time. We stayed a lot longer than three minutes watching the drama below, and some of us hung a bit deep for a safety stop, but eventually we all had to end the dive. Did not see whether the eel finally got his dinner. Best Coz safety stop I have had.

 

[nodakdive]

I was a new diver on my second trip to Cozumel. It was the 4th tank that day and I think we were diving Cedral. The current was moving pretty good. There were 7 divers including myself and a DM. Another diver and I were with the DM and the other 4 were behind us some distance. We came up to this valley that ran north and south. It had a flat sandy bottom about 10 feet or so below the ridge and the walls sloped down at 45 degrees on either side of the valley, which was about 80 feet or more wide. Just as we came to the ridge I looked across the valley and on the other side, absolutely motionless, was an alien spacecraft about 4 feet off the bottom of the valley. From it's shape, which was basically round like a saucer, it appeared to be facing south into the current.

I looked to the DM who was motioning us down to the floor of the valley and to stay put there. We stayed on our bellies looking at the ship for about 15 or 20 seconds at which point the other 4 divers came to the ridge about 50 feet south of us. Just as they broke the ridge, the alien saw the other divers and reacted. The ship tilted to its left and made this beautiful 180 and headed north with the current. After it came around the current seemed to take it and then the ship flapped its wings. That's when I realized it was a ray of some sort. Huge ray.

On the boat the DM explained that we came to the ridge at just the right place as we were behind the ray and by going down the ray couldn't really see us so it just sat there until it saw the other divers. I will never forget the initial feeling that "we are not alone". To this day, it's the biggest eagle ray I've ever seen.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Hammerheads are A@#$holes i do most of my diving off the coast of WA and i see a fair few of them

I assume you're not referring to Washington.

 

[Lorenzoid]

I assume you're not referring to Washington.

Western Australia?

 

[El Graduado]

I have posted this before on this forum, but this thread seems a better place for the story.

I ad a very weird encounter with a dolphin once in Provo in the Turks & Caicos. I was snorkeling in about four feet of water off of a sandy beach using a pulse induction metal detector. The water was a little murky, but all of a sudden a dolphin came out of nowhere and began grabbing the transducer ring of the detector in his mouth. He would tug it and then let it go, circle me and then do it again. He seemed to have no fear of me, and when I swam the short distance to the beach, he followed me up to the point he was about to beach himself. I called out to my wife, who came running and got in the water with us. We all three swam back out to deeper water, where he would swim around us in circles, getting close enough to touch. At one point, he turned on his back and flashed an impressive erection. My wife freaked out and swam to shore with him following her all the way. A couple of days later, a local told me the dolphin was a wild dolphin who frequently "played" with folks near that beach.

 

[sefuchs]

We were drifting along our safety stop in Coz when a Nurse shark from well over 100 ft away shot up from the bottom and got in my son's face - literally. He's been around sharks in Hawaii & Coz but it kind of scared the crap out of him at first. He pushed it away and the shark went back to the bottom. We assumed he was looking to be fed (lionfish) but we were not feeding them or didn't have spears, he just kind of came out of nowhere.

 

[Joshua Pritchard]

Western Australia?

Lol yep western Australia

 

[Seaweed Doc]

Deleted due to redundancy.

 

[Seaweed Doc]

There was an attractive girl in a black thong who was apparently very interested to see what I was looking at. She was hovering about a foot above me with her thong right over my head. I didn't know she was there

This is the story you're sticking with?

"I didn't know she was there?"