Articles > Diving with Great White Sharks

I’m shaking so much I’d give unset jelly a bad name. Below me circling somewhere beneath the swell are the lumpen outlines of not one but two 15 ft Great White Sharks. Ahead of me, lifting and dipping in the chop, is an open metal cage. Sitting on top of the cage as nonchalantly as somebody watching TV in the living room is Andrew Fox, the Great White Shark Expedition leader. For what seems like hours now he’s been calmly repeating the mantra: “Come on, Dan, you can do it, just step into the cage. You can do it.”

In my mind the same nightmare that’s been giving me sleepless nights for the last two weeks is replaying. In it a six metre torpedo soars at me from a deep, dark nowhere and hits me around the hips, severing me in two. It’s an image that’s been with me on and off for over twenty years. Since, sorry for the cliché, I first read “Jaws” in one voracious sitting. It once had me fleeing my own shadow while swimming in the virtually shark-free waters off the South of England.

“Just move to the edge of the platform”, coaxes Pato, the dive co-ordinator, from beside me. At that moment one of the colossal dark shapes passes directly under where we are standing. My heart is thudding like a techno drum beat. “Step forward” comes Pato’s unperturbed voice again, “it’s now or never”.

As I inch forward my terror bellows a final despairing “DONT GO IN THERE” before, like some bit-part horror movie star, I inevitably do.

Splosh. Dread, courage, rubbery legs and thumping heart tumble as one into the cage. Cold water rushes around me, bubbles momentarily cloud my vision. It’s like being inside an industrial sized washing machine. Instinctively I grab the bars of the cage to steady myself.

As the confusion clears I see it, nearly three times the length of my 6ft 2in frame and easily thrice its girth, gliding toward me. I feel like I’m about to swallow my stomach. This is the face of my fear - giant conical grey/cream head, fathomless black eyes, jaws agape with deadly white teeth - and it’s no more than a foot away.

“You’ve seen it now!” screams that insistent yellow-belly in my head, urging my body upward out of the water. But as the shark moves casually past my terror is finally quietened, my body flooded instead by a feeling I can only describe as wonder. This is perfection. Power and beauty incarnate. A species so evolved that it has changed little in millions of years.

I spend the next I don’t know how long watching the two sharks in an atmosphere of surreal calm. The only thing that bothers me is the rock and heave of the ocean. Occasionally, one or both the sharks disappear for minutes. Then there they are again, cruising near the ocean floor, rising occasionally to circle the cage and the nearby baits just below the surface. It’s a sight that doesn’t exactly expunge fear but tempers it with awe.

“You did it, you dived with the Great White Sharks!” says Rodney Fox, who with his son Andrew has been running these expeditions for over thirty years, as I finally climb out of the cage. Apparently my face is a picture, though the encounter has rendered me virtually speechless.

What I have just experienced is, in some small way, a similar transformation to Rodney Fox himself, only far less traumatically. Ripped apart by a Great White while spearfishing off South Australia in December 1963 - his gruesome wounds requiring over 450 stitches - he emerged from a short period of justifiable paranoia to a lifetime of trying to understand the creatures through studying and filming them. That life’s work has led not only to a deep admiration for the White Pointer but also to a leading role in the fight to protect them from extinction, a campaign which recently received endorsement from the Australian Federal Government.

Running six and nine day voyages like this one to the Neptune Islands off South Australia, aboard the 150ft ketch “Falie”, allows the Foxes to share their knowledge of the Great White and to bring a small group of people - including a maximum of twelve divers - into direct contact with the object of their passion.

For this expedition, people have come from as far afield as Scotland, the US, Belgium, Japan and Papua New Guinea. Apart from their hunger to see the sharks - some have saved for years for this - the only other thing that links them, admits Andrew Fox, is that “they are all slightly nuts”. Over seven days I find the company of these “nuts” increasingly compelling. There is George, an amiable working-class Glaswegian who, while at school twenty years ago, did a project on Rodney Fox’s attack; there is pirate-like Japanese photographer Fumihiro, all goatie beard and wicked cackle; there is eleven year old Marie Stroh, along with her Dad Joe, already having the adventure of a lifetime, and there is Emma, from Perth, who like me, has serious second thoughts about the idea of getting into the water with these huge sharks. Then there is the sassy Chicagoan Dave, whose obsession for the Great White Shark knows no bounds. Devastated when the previous expedition he was on, in 1995, failed to yield any sharks, he begins the trip so wired-up I feel sure he’ll blow a fuse. He ends it, having sighted around eight Great Whites, a soothed and happy individual.

To experience this expedition is a little like what I imagine being at war must be like. There are long hours of watching and waiting for something to happen - I have never stared for so long with such hope at anything as I have at patches of ocean on this trip - and short bursts of dramatic, frantic activity. Diving in the cages is comparable to going over the top of the trenches, with the same sense of anticipation and a similar rush to prepare yourself when the alarm goes up. The collective enthusiasm on board wills the sharks to the boat, while constant light chumming of the water (with blood and tuna) proves an irresistible lure. Every time even a tail is sighted, everybody, including the cook, drops everything and on board the electricity alters instantaneously to a high voltage. One or two sharks come and go in a flash but others stay around for hours, surfacing thrillingly on occasion to “take” a full-sized tuna suspended off the side of the ship in two or three gargantuan gobbles. As the shark’s jaws swivel and slide and its teeth rip, it is no surprise to learn that their biting pressure has been measured at 1.5 tonnes. Put another way, a Great White Shark would have no trouble lifting a Volvo with its mouth.

At times of no shark action, it’s inevitably a case of round-the-clock shark stories, videos and jokes. But there are opportunities too to go ashore to both South and North Neptune Islands by dinghy. Here large colonies of small New Zealand fur seals and big brown Australian sea lions snooze on the rocks and lark in the water, unaware what a tasty dinner they’d make for a Great White. Back on the “Falie”, regular, plentiful meals help us humans not to completely lose track of time.

It is the final morning of our expedition when I come within a foot of those Volvo-lifting jaws underwater. It is a vision that elicits both what Rodney Fox describes as “the chilling excitement of fear” and a feeling of rare privilege. After all, perhaps less than 500 people on earth have seen the Great White in such a way. To do so is acknowledged as the pinnacle of a diving career, or as Fox puts it “the equivalent of climbing Everest”.

Growing cold in the water and noting that one of the 15ft sharks is getting just a little frisky, I reluctantly decide to retreat to the safety of the “Falie”. As I clamber out, so the diminutive Japanese photographer Fumihiro takes my place in the corner of the cage. About ninety seconds after I’ve left, I hear collective shouts of “she’s going for the cage!” and turn to see the beast break the surface and power toward the corner in which I’d just been standing. As its jaws widen to gnaw angrily on the top steel bar, its tail thrashing the water, Fumi moves not a centimetre from his position immediately behind the girder. For a moment, there is nothing between Fumi and those jaws but his underwater camera. And the odd thing is: I now wish it was me.

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