The Year of the Sharks –
27 January 2014 | Fowl Cay Bahamas
by Wiley
I have been a SCUBA diver since 1969, Merry since 1974. I saw my first shark – a nurse shark – in the Florida Keys in 1970. We both saw a single Lemon Shark in the Bahamas during a “live aboard” dive trip in 1979. In the 1990’s we went to the Keys a couple of times, did some snorkeling and SCUBA off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and saw an occasional Nurse shark. I saw a Sand Tiger shark (which is both shy and harmless) on a shipwreck off Cape Hatteras 15 years ago on a dive trip with my SCUBA club. Merry saw a Blacktip Reef Shark off of Lauderdale one time, for just a few seconds before it shot off into the murk. I was with her, but didn’t see it, and was very upset because I wondered if I would ever get to see any sharks (besides Nurse sharks) again in my life. For our 30th anniversary in 2002 , we spent ten days diving in Bonaire without seeing a shark of any kind! This paragraph is an entire summary of all of our experiences with sharks prior to the arrival of Les Miserables in the Bahamas n 2012.
In 2012, we went out on a dive boat out of Green Turtle Cay, and on that dive we saw numerous Blacktip Reef Sharks and a Bull Shark.
The three most dangerous species of sharks are the Great White, the Tiger, and the Bull. Some experts think that the Bull Shark is the most dangerous of the three. In the last couple of years there have been five serious shark attacks on the coast of Florida between New Smyrna Beach and Stuart. In one incident, a kite- surfer was killed by a shark. Another incident happened at Vero Beach, while we were in the Bahamas n 2012. A 32-year-old woman was attacked near where I would go swimming almost every day while we were in Vero. Many of the local experts attributed all of these attacks to Bull sharks.
This year (2013) we saw lots of Bull sharks. We went out on the dive boat from Froggies, in Hopetown, to a dive site called “The Tombstones”, which is in the Fowl Cay Reef Preserves. The “Tombstones” is a large patch reef, which has a cave. Inside the cave are two Tombstones, placed there to memorialize two deceased individuals who loved to dive there. Before the dive, the dive-boat captain told me that there was little chance that we would see a shark (“you could come out here ninety-nine times and never see one!”). We didn’t see any when we dove with Froggies. However, a week later we brought Les Miserables to the site – which was tricky, because we had to pick our way through patches of reefs to get there. Not long after we started our underwater swim around the bottom of this reef, we saw a six foot Bull shark doing the same circumnavigation of the reef we were, about ten feet above us! He (or she) had a pilot fish in front of his(or her) nose, and two remoras hitching a ride.
A week later we took our boat as close as we could to another dive site in Fowl Cay Reef Preserve, called “The Wall”. This is a difficult site for us to dive because the only sandy bottom suitable for us to anchor in is perhaps 750 feet from the dive site. The Wall is the point where the reef drops off from the Bahama Banks to the Atlantic Ocean. We have to snorkel from our boat to a narrow opening that goes to the Wall called Groupers Passage. We then submerge and make our way to the Wall. Last year when we were at this site, Merry made friends with a big Grouper, who seemed to love being petted by Merry. Merry had cut up some bread and put it in a zip-lock bag, to use to feed fish. The Grouper snatched the zip-lock bag away from Merry before she could even open it, and swallowed it whole. We actually reached down its throat to try to retrieve the bag, but to no avail. I told Merry later that the bag would doubtless lodge in the Grouper’s stomach or intestines and kill it. We both felt bad about this, so we were delighted to encounter Merry’s Grouper friend at the same spot. Merry knows for sure that it was the same Grouper because of a scar it has . After allowing time for Merry to pet her pal, we continued on, swimming toward the wall. It was there that we encountered three Bull sharks! How big were thy? Well, they were each bigger that we are. Merry claims that they were circling us. I admit that they were kind of swimming in a circle, which by coincidence had us in its middle, but believe that they were really not interested in us. I got a nice photo of each of them. While I was peering through the camera viewfinder at one shark, Merry saw another of the Bulls suddenly dart at and swallow a reef fish whole. Merry says that the shark was so fast, that if it did decide to attack, there would be no possibility whatsoever of being able to react before it was on you. The sharks got quite close to us at times – less than ten feet – and Merry wrote – ‘THESE SHARKS ARE FREAKING ME OUT” on her underwater slate and showed it to me. I nodded with great enthusiasm and gave her the “okay” sign as if she had written “WOW! I LOVE SEEING BIG BULL SHARKS THIS CLOSE!” Merry finally made me understand that she wanted to “get the hell out of there” so we swam the rest of the way to the Wall, and the sharks did not follow us. At the Wall, however, we saw another large shark cruising along the Atlantic, outside the reef. As usual, by the time we made it to the Wall, we were getting low on air and had to swim back to the boat.
I took some nice photos of the sharks, and of Merry’s pet Grouper, and we will try to post them as soon as we can figure out why we can’t get photos on our website.