I had finally arrived at a famous dive site; I was in the Red Sea in Sudan at Sanganeb reef. Very close to where Jacques-Yves Cousteau had his famous Conshelf II experiment in June 1963¹ and where Hans Hass did lots of his diving 1955? Now many years later I was going to dive here and find out why both Cousteau and Hans Hass liked this spot so much.
Sanganeb is a small island with a lighthouse, it has south and a north tip that are very good dive sights but for some unexplained reason we where dropped on the east side, me and my buddy asked to be dropped off at the south tip instead. We didn't know exactly where the good place was so we missed it and had to do some surface swimming and finally we saw a white tipped reef shark and decided to start the dive, but the white tipped swam away. After just a few minutes we saw a larger shark coming towards us, it was a Gray reef shark and it was not frightened at all. I tried to take some pictures of it but never got close enough so at first I didn't see the Scalloped Hammerhead shark that swam up to us. Finally I saw it; the Hammerhead did some circles around us to check us out and then swam away, at this time there where 3 Gray reef sharks swimming around us. After a while they swam away, at this time this was already the best shark dive I had ever done and I had only been in the water less than 10 minute yet.
We though that that the dive was over at least when it came to see big fish and hoped to see some nice smaller stuff to end the dive so we continued to try to find the south plateau. It was not far away and we swam out on it and saw 3 more Gray Reef sharks, maybe they where the same I don't know or maybe they where others. On the plateau the sharks didn't seem to want to swim away, they circled around us on the edge of the plateau. They came as close as 1 to 1.5 meters. They could swim straight towards you and lazily make a small turn only 2-3 meters away from you and continued passing you very close. None of the sharks showed the arched back or jerky movements that they do when they are aggressive or feel threatened. They just swam around us as if we where just a new strange bubble blowing neighbors. Soon we started to run out of bottom time and we had to surface and leave the sharks at the same place that we found them on.
On the next dive all other divers wanted to dive on the plateau, they had seen nothing interesting on the wall and where all very jealous of what we claimed to have seen. We where dropped into the water last 10-15 minutes after the first divers and didn't think there would be any sharks where we found them, they might tolerate 2 divers but not 20. So we swam to the other end of the plateau, but it was empty so we swam to where the sharks had been on the previous dive and now there where 5 Gray reefs sharks there and 20 very happy divers.
We did 4 dives on Sanganeb and on every dive we saw the Gray Reef sharks there, they never left, and on every dive at least one diver saw 1 or more Scalloped Hammerheads out in the blue water.
Now I'm pretty sure the Gray reef sharks had been feed regularly at Sanganeb, and they thought we where going to feed them as well, well we got a even better deal they came very close without showing any aggressive behavior at all.
Reference 1: National Geographic April 1964 "At Home in the Sea"
© Stefan Sarin 2000, 2001, accessed