This post is an excerpt from the Offshore Journal post. I thought that the event that it describes needed its own post.
Swimming with Sharks
11/14/05: Today, I jumped into a group of sharks that were swimming below our ladder. After the jump, the bubbles started to clear and a school of fish appeared. The next thing I saw was a lemon-fish, which does look like a shark, but then I looked a little up and saw the big fish.
A school of 8 - 10 sharks swam into view (I actually thought it was more like 15 individuals, but the next diver saw the sharks to be around 8 to 10 individuals, but the school was already started to move on.) The sharks were a dark mud color. The dark brown on top for their counter shading effect.
As soon as I recognized that they were sharks, which I debated because their mouth structures made them look like huge lemon-fish, I stayed stationary on the downline watching them, frozen in a state of excitement and fear. As I was talking about the situation with the dive supervisor, the school of sharks began to circle the wagons, by doing a complete circle around me. Now I was on high alert.
These 4 - 5 footers were circling around me in a tight circle that was ten-foot or less. Discovery Channel documentaries started to flash around in my head, while common sense was screaming for me to go back up to the deck where it was safe and dry.
The nail that hit my panic button was when they were coming back into view from the starboard (right side), one of these massive fish turned a little tighter than the rest. It was starting to head straight to me! That was it I screamed for the tenders to get up on the divers hose. I turned around to hit the ladder, with thoughts of this shark chomping down onto my back.
I hit the ladder hoping to shot straight up like a fast rocket, but atlas nothing ever goes as plan in a panic rush. My hose hits the bottom of the ladder and I'm at an allstop. I have to drop down a rung or two and un-foul myself from this situation. I realize that these extra seconds would be my downfall if this was an actual savage attack, but hell I'm still hauling my ass up the ladder.
This is going to be a good fish story, so I got to finish with the correct ending. So I hit the deck and the adrenaline is flowing, the story is being told, and the jabs are sent back at you. So as the excitement starts to die down, it is decided that this time I will stick my head down to see if they are still roaming around. It has only been around five minutes, but I slow descend down the ladder, into the flesh-tearing waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
I realize that to actually look down, I am going to submerge most of my body into the water. I don't know about you but I can't flip a 45lb dive helmet upside down. So here I am at the waterline, hanging on a ladder. I curl up into as much of a ball as I can, because I remember someone, somewhere mention that was what to do in shark infested water. But it was as much of instinct as it was a thought, who wants a limb hanging out there for something to take a nibble of.
I get my head down below the water, and start to glance around, nothing. I hit the downline, and descend at a blistering pace. My ears are trying to keep up, but they aren't and the pain is starting to build. I hit bottom at the bone crushing depth of 57 feet. Nothing followed me; well nothing is visible in the 2ft of murky visibility.
I caught the fear and excitement of the sharks and stuff it down inside, there is work to be done. I go ahead and do my dive, which is scrapping trash of the bottom of the sea.
After getting home, I check the Internet to see what kind of shark they were. I was able to narrow it down to two species. The two species are the brown reef shark or the bull shark. The eyes that I saw on the fish were small like those of the bull shark. I never heard of bull sharks swimming in a school, and they were definitely smaller than the average adult was. So if they were bull sharks, I can assume they were juveniles. If not, they were a group of the smaller brown reef shark.
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