Shark bait ooo ahh ahh!!

Wednesday I crossed "scuba diving with sharks" off my bucket list. One of the most amazing things I've ever experienced. The sharks we saw were bull sharks. Here are some bull shark fun facts.

1. They can survive in fresh water. But only for a couple of days. So sometimes they travel up rivers, like the Mississippi.

2.  Bull sharks get a bad rap for "attacking" people in murky waters. As the dive master explained to us, bull sharks in murky waters (like rivers, the Pacific, etc) use their mouths to figure out what something is, since they don't have hands to reach out and touch it. So they take a little taste of you and then spit you out when they determine you aren't a fish. But again, this is in murky waters where they can't see what they're putting in their mouth. Diving in the Caribbean on a clear day, you can see as far as 200 yards away. As the dive master put it, it's kind of like a baby, putting things in their mouth to figure out what it is.

3. The movie Jaws was based on a bull shark attack, not a great white attack. EEK!! Here's a fun article to read.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/08/0802_020802_shark.html

**Note: all of the research I did about bull sharks was after my dive :)

Anyway, putting all the scary stories aside, I have never seen a more timid ocean creature. Even with the dive master pulling out fish pieces, the sharks were incredibly shy and afraid of us. We saw probably 6-8 sharks and I think I only saw one take a fish from Marcos. We performed the dive at around 80 feet, at a SHIPWRECK, which was freaking awesome and another dive that's on my bucket list. We didn't really get to explore the wreck, it's a fishing boat that has been down there for about 15 years. We started the dive on the upper deck of the boat, on our knees, with Marcos (dive master dressed in a chain link dive suit) about 10 yards away from us trying to get the sharks to come up. When that didn't work, he went down to the ocean floor and we moved down a deck, it was almost like watching a show in a theater. Amazing dive that I would love to do again. At no point did I feel afraid or nervous, there were 4 instructors diving with us that kept watch all the time but really, you were so busy watching these beautiful creatures, the dive seemed to only last 5 minutes.

I also experienced my first bout with fire coral on this dive. It was growing on the railing of the shipwreck and I brushed my wrist up against. It's really itchy.

Fire coral, looks pretty huh?

 

Day 1

 

Day 4

 

 

 

Day 9