MONTY: Oceanic whitetips

I’ve just enjoyed a terrific week on the liveaboard Blue Horizon, trolling through the southern Red Sea and diving the classics. Little Brother, Daedalus, the Salem Express – all names justifiably revered in the diving world, and all of which I’m delighted to say thoroughly lived up to the hype.

There were 24 of us on the boat, and, as with most liveaboard trips, the group seemed to span the entire social spectrum. We had a raconteur extraordinaire, some diamond geezers, a nutty professor, a professional Kiwi, an eccentric doctor, and a spattering of nationalities and characters drawn in by the opportunity to share the big blue spaces with a few sinuous shadows. We all had a great adventure over the course of the week – stormy nights, threshers, grey sharks, lone hammerheads, and a profoundly atmospheric wreck. It all culminated in a night that involved apocalyptic volumes of tequila and – to my deep regret and eternal shame – some dancing. When I dance, it looks very much like someone has propped up a deep coma victim before repeatedly tazering them. The truly horrifying truth is that – when a certain critical percentage of blood alcohol is reached – I actually think I’m quite good at dancing, and that the extraordinary collection of tics, spasms and flailing limbs make me quite attractive to the opposite sex.

Anyway, I digress. I’m sitting typing this in a café in Hurghada, nursing a hangover and a cappuccino, and reflecting on the trip. Foremost in my mind when I came on this trip was trying to get a photograph of an oceanic whitetip. This is pretty much the only large species of shark I’ve never dived with, and I was beside myself at the prospect of hanging just below the surface and facing this most curious and bold of sharks.

I was gutted when Dray – our excellent guide for the week – mentioned that we were at the very tail end of the season for the whitetips and possibly wouldn’t see any. I was – in turn – breathless with excitement when one appeared beside the boat as we moored at Little Brother. On entering the water and hanging in the blue under the bow – a distinctly unnerving sensation – I was finally joined by the shark in the last ten minutes of the dive. Led by its entourage of pilotfish, the whitetip passed inches away from me, turning on its own body length to return to investigate again and again this strange collection of electronic signals, bubbles and flailing limbs that hung in its path. Head on, the massive pectorals look like the swept wings of a glider, while the snowy white tips of the fins remain in view even when the grey body has melted into the gloom after the shark has passed you by. You can see them dancing and gyrating against the reef wall like strange disembodied creatures with a life of their own. This is a particularly beautiful, bold shark – a magnificent predator and one of the greatest shark encounters of my life.

As the shark melted away into the blue, and my particular encounter with it drew to a close, I hung beneath the boat for a moment – alone with my thoughts. I idly wondered if I would ever see an oceanic whitetip again.

We all know about the eradication of the shark – of course we do. Nevertheless, here’s a few statistics to focus our collective minds.

The oceanic whitetip was thought to be one of the most abundant large predators on the planet a mere 30 years ago. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which monitors the status of various species on behalf of the UN, notes that between 1992 and 2000, numbers declined by 70 per cent in the northwest and central Atlantic. That’s nine years ago – nine years of steady development in fishing technology, increased demand for shark fin soup, and larger, wider-ranging long liners.

In the Gulf of Mexico, a survey in the late 1990s noted a decline of 99.3 per cent since a similar survey in the 1950s. I’ll say that again. A decline of 99.3 per cent of all oceanic whitetip sharks in the Gulf of Mexico in 40 years – a sea now devoid of elegant shadows and graceful design.

I know I’m preaching to the converted – divers are invariably passionate and vocal about protecting the sea. But I’ll say again – as I have so many times before – what will future generations think when they look back on our own? Will they ask – aghast – as to how we could have let this happen? I suspect they will, as they hang beneath the hulls of dive boats, and wait, and wait, staring into the empty, echoing, silent ocean around them.