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Strangely, there is no fear. As we anchor ourselves onto the reef, a total of eight large silvertips now surround us. A flurry of excited bubbles rises from our mouths as the sharks jink and circle around us in an almost choreographed whirl.

They are coming close now. Darting between and behind us, cruising overhead. Yet I can only marvel at their streamlined beauty, observe how their markings seem so perfectly applied - as if by make-up before the show - to the ends of all their fins.

I look across at my dive-buddy Pierre, his eyes on stalks behind his mask, his lips clamped around his regulator in an unmistakeable grin. Above his head, a 3 metre shark glides by.

Then, a little way off, she arcs into an effortless U-turn. In an instant the shark is powering straight toward me, her chunky torso slightly twisted, mouth partly agape, her black expressionless eyes fixed on me.

Still I feel only admiration. And trust. Like there’s something understood between us. I grip the reef hard and try not to move. Within seconds, she is centimetres from my face, the sight of her thick, angular snout filling my vision.

All I see next is white.

It is amazing how far our obssessions will take us. Both Pierre and I are here in the deep-blue waters off the atoll of Rangiroa, in the Tahitian islands, for exactly the same reason.

We want to see sharks. As many as possible. As big as possible. Pointy-nosed, flat-faced, big-toothed. We don’t care. So long as they are sharks.

For me, the fascination is relatively new. But for Pierre, a former Parisian police-diver, sharks have been a lifelong passion.

You can see that in him when he is diving with them. On the surface he might look like a balding, pot-bellied 45 year-old, jammed into a wetsuit. But down here among the silvertips, you can see in him a small boy poring over shark books in the library, sense in him a child gazing proudly at his new shark-pattern wallpaper, dreaming of the real thing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As the shark soars overhead, all I can see is the creamy-white of her vulnerable underbelly and my own air bubbles fanning out around it. Then, with a swoosh of her powerful tail, she is away.

For ten minutes, the silvertips grace us with this dance, each one of them closing in on us unthreateningly before pulling away at the last.

Then, as if bored with the game, they move off once more toward the deep. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That night, at the small family-run Pension on Rangiroa, conversation at the communal dinner table inevitably orbits around sharks. The underwater channels around these scattered Tuamotu islands, deep in the midst of the Pacific, are among the best places in the world to see them. There are many varieties out there too, from thousands of small reef-tips and greys through to the bigger ocean-going types, the king of which is the tiger shark.

The one I am itching to see is the cartoon-like hammerhead, which looks like it has crashed nose-first into a plank of wood. When I am asked why, I tell the bemused audience in broken French that it is because, I feel a kinship with any creature that, has, like me, evolved to look so strange.

Despite the warm night, Tahitian guest-house owner Cecile shivers at our talk of sharks. For her they are the stuff of legend, creatures to respect and fear. She tries to change the subject, drawn by her exposure to gritty cop shows on satelite TV, to Pierre’s former occupation as a police diver.

For the first time since I met him, Pierre’s face looks weary. "Yes," he admits, "conditions could be a bit tough in the Parisian winter." When the temperature in the Seine hovered just above freezing and you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. "Yes," he allows, over ten years working for the police he probably pulled over a thousand bodies out of urban waterways.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For the next few days, as we dive the warm, hypnotically-clear waters around Rangiroa, my mind is plagued with half-imagined visions of Pierre groping around in the pitch black, feeling for human corpses. Yet, each time we encounter sharks, I see his face light up again in a boyish grin.

The ugly images stay with me, though, even when we leave Rangiroa, for the even more beautiful and remote Marquesas islands, once beloved of Gaugin.

The volcanic island of Nuku Hiva, where we are now staying, is completely different from where we have just been. Where, in Rangiroa, the turquoise waters of the lagoon lapped gently on low-lying shores, here the brown cliffs rise up like rotting giant’s teeth from an angry sea. Where the stringy atolls of Rangiroa were but sparsely covered in palms, here volcanic amphitheatres give way to deep, verdant valleys.

The diving here is very different too.

It’s like being in a gigantic bowl of pea soup. I can sense that the hammerheads that we are here to see are out there somewhere. But, as we fin along at the base of the gnarled cliffs of Nuku Hiva, all I can actually see is the swirl of thousands of green phyto-plankton.

For a moment, the murk feels strangely comforting, like walking out of a rave into the balm of an urban winter smog.

But more disturbing images - sparked off by my Pierre’s police-diving history - recur. I picture the sharks as eerie shadows, moving like murderors in a Parisian fog. I imagine the last moments of some ill-starred lovers, fast forward to the discovery of their dismembered bodies in a sewage-plant.

Suddenly, everything goes dark. What light there is has been extinguished from above.

I raise my chin, and peer up to see...

The underside of an old-man Manta sailing over me, his enormous wings billowing like a vampire’s cloak on a windy night.

I am so relieved I nearly miss what Pierre’s frantic gestures are imploring me to see.

Hammerheads! There, in the gully, less than five metres away. Four or five of them roaming through, looking like wooden crosses floating on a stream of green.

Their dark silhouettes are quickly gone again but throughout the dive we are revisited by individual sharks. Usually we can make out no more than a lumpen shape in the gloom. But, toward the end, a 2 metre hammerhead shimmies by and for a wonderful second I am eyeball to eyeball with one of nature’s most unusual creations. Or I would be were it not for the fact that its eyes are drolly planted at either end of its shovel-handle nose.

My final vision of the shark is of it rising celestially toward the surface, its outline defined from above by the filtered sunlight.

Although we dive around Nuku Hiva for another two days, these are the first and last hammerheads we come across. But to say that the waters surrounding it are brimming with marine life is an understatement. On one occasion, off the island’s east coast, we swim with at least fifty melon-headed (or electra) dolphins, their delighted high-pitched babble resounding underneath the water. Everywhere we dive there are big schools of tuna and barracuda. In underwater grottoes, hollowed out of the island’s jagged rock-face, we discover swarms of good-sized lobster and shrimp.

During the sultry evenings, over dinner at the Nuku Hiva Pearl Lodge, Pierre begins to open up about his police-diving days, relating stories that are even more horrifying and poignant than I could imagine.

There is the tragic tale of two teenage brothers drowned in a boating accident and discovered, after several hours of searching in a swollen river, with their arms around each other. There are numerous accounts of recovering bodies from cars driven drunkenly into canals, of suicides and of gruesome murders. The victims of professional killers, Pierre informs me, always took the longest to find, because they were usually wrapped in chicken wire, rolled in carpets and weighted down with rocks.

As he speaks, I am struck by the contrast of this darkness in Pierre’s past with the light in his present, seeking out sharks in tropical seas around the world. While once he acted as a garbage-collector of an entirely human-created mess, he now spends much of his time in the company of creatures which have, for centuries, been demonised and brutalised by man.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A couple of days later we are back in the Tuamotus for the last leg of our trip, a liveaboard dive cruise around some of the archipelago’s less accessible islands. For a week we sail around deserted atolls -- little more than a tangle of green in the midst of the blue Pacific ocean -- and dive the channels which punctuate them.

The diving in these passes, which link shallow lagoons with the open ocean, is once again superb. Each day, in visibility of over 30 metres, we encounter black and white-tipped reef and grey sharks, large pelagics like dogtoothed tuna and many of the four hundred other species of fish which inhabit these waters.

By the final day, Pierre looks soothed, his hunger to see sharks nearly sated. We have just one more dive to do, at Tetamanu pass, at the southern end of the long island of Fakarawa.

It’s like freefalling sideways. As the current races through the 30 metre-deep trench, like a fast-moving underwater river, it carries us thrillingly along with it. I flash past big rubber-lipped Napolean fish, swaying in the swell, and fly over two small reef tips, sticking close to the sandy floor.

Ahead of me, Pierre flips himself over in the water and does a summersault. Beneath him are two more sharks, above him another three, to the side yet more. Soon the trench becomes a mass of movement rushing towards us. There are small and medium-sized sharks everywhere, swimming in groups of ten and twenty, forming an arc above the channel and lining its sides. It is as if the pattern on Pierre’s childhood walls has finally come to life. In a little more than four minutes I see at least 300 sharks.

By the time we slow a little into a patch of sharkless blue, I am pumped with adrenaline and metaphorically rubbing my eyes in disbelief. But, above me, the divemaster is signalling that it is time to come up a little. So, I begin to fin toward him.

As we ascend as a group I sense again that there is a shark nearby. Blasé by now, I nearly don’t bother to turn and look at it. But when I do, I am confronted with the sight of a shark unlike any of the others we have so far encountered.

This fish is huge, with a thick, squarish head and a broad, long body.

By now the other divers have seen it too and those with cameras are rushing toward the 4 metre shark like sub-aqua paparazzi. Startled, the shark turns deftly away. But as it does so it is illuminated by a barrage of flashes. There, faintly visible down its flank, are the telltale stripes of one of the ocean’s greatest predators: a tiger shark.

When Pierre and I go our separate ways, a day later, we are still incredulous at what we’ve seen and as he walks toward his plane to Paris, there is a fresh jauntiness in his step.

As for me, I am so ecstatic that, on the plane journey home, I cannot help but share my experience with the person sitting next to me. Thankfully, Alain, a kind-faced older Frenchman who has lived in Tahiti for thirty years, lends me an enthusiastic ear.

It is some time before I think to ask him what he did before his recent retirement.

"I was a nuclear scientist," he tells me, "I came here in the sixties to be involved in the tests at Mururoa." He goes on to explain, with admirable frankness, how the early detonations were carried out on barges anchored in lagoons and that these were not wholly satisfactory.

The atmosphere between us suddenly chills. I had heard that what these early explosions actually did was suck all the water out of the lagoons and rain it down, in downpours laden with dead, radioactive marine life, onto the surrounding atolls.

"So," continues Alain, "when we conducted the later detonations in 1996, we did them at least a kilometre under the seabed." "That way," concludes the scientist, "we could be sure that there would be no ecological consequences."

"In any case," Alain assures me finally, "these sites are hundreds of kilometres from where you have been diving."

After two weeks spent coming face to face with sharks, it is only now, sitting next to this smiling human apologist, that I am truly afraid.

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