I was on the Royal Emperor, a live aboard, in the Red Sea doing a marine park tour, i.e. going to The Brothers, Deldalus and Rocky Island. The reason for doing this tour is the relative unspoiled reefs and the chance to see pelagic fishes and 'big' sharks and we got sharks that's for sure! One buddy pair saw White tipped reef shark, Gray Reef shark, Scalloped Hammer head, Silky shark and Oceanic White Tipped shark in 2 dives just after each other. I was not quite that lucky but saw all of them except the Oceanic, and I also saw a Thresher Shark (probably pelagic warning very bad picture) and maybe a Great Hammer Head. And as a side note one buddy pair saw a Mola-mola!!! although they did not know what it was and swam away from it!!!! No names but yes I'm very jealous :-)
I had read the Silky Shark Attack by Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch just one or two days before and where a bit concerned by Silky Sharks, I do know that most people think sharks are dangerous but by now I have dived so many times with so called dangerous sharks that I do not get scared easily but this article was not written by any Hislop fan or know nothing journalist so I was a bit concerned but still wanted to see Silky sharks very much. We where moored on Little Brother and had seen Silky Sharks in the water the night before, I wanted to snorkel with them but no one else seamed very interested and I did not want to do it alone, snorkeling at night with a big supposedly aggressive shark gets even me a bit afraid.
The next day we saw a group of three Silky Sharks checking out each boat and then coming back, me and 2-3 other guys decided to jump in and snorkel with them! I only got a quick glimpse of them and they reacted as most other sharks I have seen, they knew I was there long before I knew about them and they did not care about me. One other guy snorkeling claimed that the shark was behaving a aggressive towards him but I did not see that.
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If you look carefully you can see the shark
up in the right hand corner of the picture.
Also look at the direction of the air bubbles of the second diver, the current was quite strong. I do not think that you could have swam back to the anchor line if you had let go of it. |
One other day 2 divers went down the anchor line before I knew the shark where there, of course I had to go after them, I have never put on all my scuba stuff that fast before. I jumped off the boat and started swimming towards the anchor line and realized why the divers was hanging on the line, the current was VERY strong, I had to really struggle to get to it but managed after a while. I went down to about 12-15 meters (36-45 feet) where the 2 other divers was flapping on the line, the current was really strong, but no sharks. After a short wait one Silky Shark come gliding effortlessly through the water, this was the first time I had time to really see the Silky and it looks like a 'normal' shark, like a Gray reef shark but bigger and only gray, no black or white markings at all. (Remember I'm just a diver crazy about Sharks, not a Shark nut, I'm sure many of you do not agree with my description of a Silky but that is what it looks like to me)
There was actually 2 silky sharks, cruising back and forth. They never got that close, normally 4-5 meters (15 feet ) each pass, sometimes more sometimes a bit less. They where swimming at 2 to15 meters depth ( 6-45 feet ), they where never aggressive or coming so close that they felt threatening, they just passed by gave us a look and then was gone, after half a minute or sometimes 2-3 minutes they came back. I spent 50 minutes hanging on the anchor line just looking at them. I did get some strange looks when coming back on the boat :-).
The next day on my first dive me and my buddy decided to take it easy, I had skipped the first dive in the morning because I was not feeling so good, so instead of going to the north point with the dingy we jumped in from the boat and saw one silky right away under the boat, now there was no current so we could swim with it for the first time. It was doing the same thing as before just cruising under the boats but this time we could get much closer by maneuvering us into a position in front of the shark as it was coming toward us and the light was much better now because it was afternoon not twilight. We spent almost 20 minutes before the shark swam away and got some nice pictures. The shark once came straight towards my buddy and did not turn until he was about half a meter from him, it was startled and swam away quite fast, but was never aggressive, I do think my buddy was a bit scared when it did not turn until so late though :-)
It was very interesting to be able to see these magnificent sharks so close for such a long time. This was definitely one of my top 10 dives.
If you enjoyed reading this email me and I might write about some of the other shark encounters that I have had.
© Stefan Sarin 2000, 2001, accessed
