Would you swim with 2 species of man eating shark...we did!

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In the words of the Kaiser Chiefs...."Oh my god I cant believe it, i've never been this far away from home!"

Well, we are now officially the furthest we have been away with a whopping 11 hour time difference and a mental 13000 miles from home. Weird, considering last week when we were in Indo we were comparitively close - just a direct flight from Singapore in fact.

To get to Fiji we had to cross into New Zealand briefly, just for a few hours and long enough to get a warning for joking about bombing planes. Suffice to say Lara is not any longer particularly welcome on Air NewZealand after she mentioned in passing that their incompetence and incorrect information meant that she could put a bomb in her bag and blow up the plane. However, after a warning and a brief pull over at the entrance to the gate it was all resolved fairly amicably.

Fiji is the last stop on our way home. When booking our ticket, STA kind of bullied us into it. You have to stop somewhere in the South Pacific Islands so go here. OK we thought, and as we stepped off the plane to be met by a quartet singing the Hello song (a fijian welcome song) and playing guitars, they were right. So, here we were. Fiji was planned to be the lazy end to our trip...Sun, sand, sea and diving. Well, there was sand, sea and diving, shame about the sun.

With so much to see and and so little time and money we had to prioritise and first thing on the list was a big fish encounter. That translates to jumping into 30m deep water in the middle of the sea, with 9 different species of shark, 2 of which are known man killers, having just watched a wheelie bin of fish guts being poured overboard as bate. Genius!

Just to set the scene, it was stormy and really heavy rain. The sky was dark, the waves were massive and we were rolling about on a small tin boat about to get in ....are we mad? With no accidents in 8 years (presumably this was a flowery way of saying no shark attacks) we buddy checked each other and stepped into the ocean. I hate diving in rough conditions. It is really really scary. As you surface from your entry, the waves are over the top of you and you are being buffetted about. The Adrenaline was flowing so much I was racking my brain to think whether I had ever read about any cases of people dieing of fear...broken hearts yes, not sure about whether being scared to death was actually a possibility. We were about to find out. (In fact as I am writing this my heart is thudding as I remember how scared I was and I know the ending!)

"Just drop to the sandy bottom as fast as you can" we were told. Frankly when I got in that water the only thing dropping was something in my pants. I was more nervous than when I sat my finals and for anyone around me at that time, I was a crazed mo fo at this moment too. But, without time to pop a valium or indeed any other drug I could get my hands on, I deflated the BCD and sank my shit...literally!

As we dropped down to 30m we were surrounded by Giant Trevelli munching up the fish that had been dropped. There were literally hundreds of them surrounding us. They were just the starter if you like before the main course was delivered...the sharks I mean, not us. We were not kept waiting long until the first of two Tawny Nurse Sharks rocked up. About 3 times the length of me and at least 3 times as thick (in diameter, Not IQ) they circled us a couple of times before approaching the feeder and dumping their heads into the wheelie bin to get a big gob full of fish guts. We were sat behind and imaginery wall about 6 foot away. Papa, the feeder then beckoned us over to touch them...yeah right! After you have just spent 20 minutes stelling us to keep our hands hidden and not dangle cameras off our arms...AS IF!
I was not stepping over the "imaginery wall" for any amount of money. I was happy with the view I had. Plus I kept thinking, worse case scenario, if any of them do fancy a munch then there would be others in front of me who would be first surely.

We ascended to 20m for the second feed where we hoped (well some more than others it has to be said) to witness bull sharks coming in to be fed. They are man killers by the way. Unfortunately again we were not disappointed. Although juveniles, they were still about 6 foot in length. Papa was disappointed to see no adults. At this time of year they tend to have retreated up rivers to mate and give birth before coming back to the sea after eating people doing their washing do doubt. In Jan/Feb he said there are lots of them. They are so hungry after starving for 5 months it is liek a feeding frenzy that can be difficult to control. He suggested we come back then.....I think not!

The next dive was the potential for the big one. Pretty much Tigers and Bulls. Second to great whites these bad boys are the next biggest man killers, and arguably a lot less fussy. No surfers looking like seals excuses for these guys. In fact, we were told that recently a Tiger Shark had washed up on a beach the other side of the island with a WHOLE HORSE inside it. As the shark swallowed, the horses leg got stuck in a gill and drowned it. One Nil Black Beauty!!!! Another day, a bull shark had washed up with a car engine inside it...you see...not at all fussy! We were given an extra special briefing about the Tiger Shark, we learned why at a later date. She is a big one....about 14 foot in length. As this is the open ocean it is not a controlled shark feed environment and there are no cages for us to hide in. In fact, reading this back, I have no idea what we were thinking. And we were warned that females tend to be more aggressive than males (sharks that is). I do believe I heard them say (over the blood thumping in my ears again) that it was really funny last week because she was so hungry the feeder had to lie down and let her at the wheelie bin herself because he could not feed her quickly enough. The feeders laughed at how scared the main feder had been that day. Ha ha and it was all caught on film. Really funny ay....I am not sure we share a common language afterall because funny does not mean that in the great british isles.

Anyway, in we went. No Tiger shark but a couple more baby bulls and we were lucky enought to see a marble ray in the distance. I have to say I was not dissapointed. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest and scariest things I have ever done. It made me realise how far I have come on this trip. Andrew loved it too, although I think he was also a little scared. However, we got friendly with a guy called ken who organises Great White trips in South Australia. He sort of talked Andrew into it and if he is ever in Australia again I think he will definitely be in a cage just off Port Lincoln with the real deal.

Anyway, so that was us diving in the Beqa Lagoon. Andrew went out and did a muck dive the next day whilst I caught up with my jetlag. Muck dives are all about hunting for interesting tiny things that live in holes and the like. Totally opposite to the shark dive, in which we are the tiny things being hunted. Andrew likes that stuff.

This blog has a post script....an addendum if you will.

Later that week when we were in the Mamanuca Islands we got chatting to a divemaster. On telling her about the shark dive (we were on a buzz for days afterwards) she was impressed and asked whether they told us what happened 2 weeks earlier. No we said. Here goes.....

2 weeks previoulsy on the second dive the Tiger shark turned up to be fed as normal. All going well and at 15 minutes in a second, never seen before, female tiger shark rocked up. This one was not interested in the fish. After initial excitement, at about 16 and a half minutes the shark started circling the divers. At 17 minutes when you need to ascend the shark took an unhealthy interest in the divers behind their "imaginery" wall. It started to go for them. Not to kill, more to bite the tanks and stuff. All divers were told to remain at depth and huddle up to provide a wall of tanks as the feeders hit the shark with prodders to get it to leave. There was no way the divers could start to ascend because the shark was too unpredictable. People started to run out of air and had the bolt for the surface. There was no attacks and no reported cases of the Benz, luckily. A few people went to recompression chambers in the city but everyone escaped uninjured. This dive instructoir friend of hers is now too scared to dive again! Terrifying. Put it this way, knowing what I now know, there is no way I would go again.

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