A fifty-minute flight southeast from the bustle, cruise ships and tourist-centric Nassau, lies the sleepy island of San Salvador. Twelve miles long and five miles wide, she is the tip of an underwater mountain rising from 5,000 metres below (15,000 feet) surrounded by picture-postcard, crystal-clear, blue seas.
Many people are scared witless by sharks, but I love them. I scuba dive and freedive with them whenever I can.
First described in 1837 by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell, the great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) is the largest of the hammerhead shark family and can reach a length of over 6m (20ft), although some specimens have been seen to be much larger than this. However, with overfishing, the great hammerhead is usually observed to be much smaller than this.
I felt apprehensive heading out to Tiger Beach where I was supposed to enter open water in the presence of some big, wild apex predators, without any protection other than holding up my camera as a shield in case I was singled out as a snack.
As picture perfect as Malapascua is, in a nation of 7,107 palm tree fringed islands, 2.5km long Malapascua wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar were it not for the thresher sharks that treat the island like a spa. Each morning as the sun peeks over the mountains on distant Cebu, Pelagic threshers rise from the depths to be cleaned by reef fish along a deep ledge known as Monad Shoal.
The fox shark, also called the common thresher shark, lives usually at depths of over 200 meters and it is sighted only rarely. This is the main reason, we don’t know very much about these animals, and there is very little good visual documentation showing thresher sharks up close on camera.
Coral reefs are places of immense natural diversity. They accommodate some of the highest densities of animals on earth and have more species than any other marine habitat. However, the species inhabiting coral reefs are not distributed evenly through the oceans.
There is a line of thought in the scientific community that this is where it all began and the first corals originated… a large sheltered bay, roughly one third along the north coast of the island now called New Britain.
On a cold day in February 1944, little would the workers of the Commercial Iron Works in Portland, Oregon, have known of the fate and unlikely resting place of the USS LCI(L) 739—now known to those who visit her as the HTMS Sattakut.
It’s an adventure. You swim like a champion, trying to be as streamlined as possible and glide effortlessly through the water. Your heart rate is already at its limits and your breathing borders on hyperventilation. Your focus is on the sperm whale and its blow, which you can see just as you slide into the water. You are hoping to get the animal in front of your camera, but it is a bit of gamble.
