Swimming with sharks

Creatures mainly outside of our Gardens; Land, Water and Sea
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fabindia
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Swimming with sharks

Post by fabindia »

Wendy and I spent a few days on Phi Phi island (pronounced Pee Pee) with our son, Josh, earlier in the week. Phi Phi, a tiny island, is a couple of hours away by ferry from where we live on Phuket, a much much bigger island (we have cars and roads here).
Josh has lived on Phi Phi for 8 years now and as a diving instructor knows just abot every inch of the sea round here. The first afternoon we arrived, I got roped in as an instructor, to help out as they had a lot of divers who needed looking after.
The next day we took a small boat out to an area known as shark point to look for sharks. The water there is pretty shallow not more than a couple of meters in places and at one point we were circled by five sharks. These are blacktip reef sharks, superbly graceful animals in the water which fully grown are only about 1.8 to 2 metres long. As far as humans go these are the most unaggressive of creatures and swim off instantly if you disturb them.
The trick is to find an area they are likely to be in and stay as motionless in the water as you can, not kicking your fins or swimming around, but just floating on the surface. That way the sharks come to you. In the end we saw so many sharks we lost count, though counting them is pretty pointless anyway as the same ones tend just tend to swim up and down past you.
In addition, we saw load of other fish, it was a great day for seeing stuff.
Wendy did amazing for someone who is not always at home in the ocean but yesterday she was like a professional in mask, snorkel and fins.
Image
Picture from Wikipedia
Michael
Spreckly
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Re: Swimming with sharks

Post by Spreckly »

Fascinating Michael, and what a stunning photo.
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