Shark feeding in the Bahamas

Shark-feeding operations in the Bahamas have had their critics in the past. DIVE readers reveal their experiences. Kate Quarry reports

 

Where to go
As the Bahamas has more than 700 islands, there is a vast number of dive sites to choose from, but many divers visit the Bahamas to encounter sharks, to explore blue holes or to dive walls. Among those running shark-feed dives are Stuart Cove’s Dive Bahamas on New Providence, UNEXSO on Grand Bahama, the Walker’s Cay Hotel and Marina on Walker’s Cay, and Small Hope Bay Lodge on Andros. The most famous blue holes are probably those around Andros, but there are others close to the Exumas, Abaco and Grand Bahama. For more information contact The Blue Hole Foundation, Grand Bahama, tel: 001 242 373 4483.

When to go
The high season is mid-December to mid-April, when the Bahamas experience the most settled weather and, usually, the best visibility. August through to October are usually the windiest and wettest months, so try May, June or November for lower prices and fewer tourists.

What to wear
In summer, with water temperatures up to 30°C, a shortie will suit most, but winter water temperatures can sink to 22°C, so for those who feel the cold a semi-dry would be the best option. Bear in mind that northern Bahamian waters will be cooler than those further south.

What to look out for
Five species of dolphin, grouper, jacks, barracuda, stingrays and eagle rays, a wide range of Caribbean reef fish and, of course, sharks, including Caribbean reef, black-tip, nurse, bull, hammerhead, lemon and silkies.

Water and air temperatures
The driest months, from November to April, are also the coolest, with daytime highs of 25–28°C. From May to October the air temperature can reach 32°C. The hurricane season is officially from June to November – on average, the Bahamas experience one hurricane every nine years. High winds are most common from August to October. Water temperatures are between 22 and 26°C from December to April and between 25 and 30°C from May to November.

Flights
From London American Airlines (via New York or Boston, and Miami), British Airways and Delta Airlines (via Atlanta) fly to Nassau, New Providence, capital of the Bahamas. Those travelling on from New Providence will probably have to stay overnight in Nassau. Flying American Airlines may involve an additional stopover in New York or Boston.

American Airlines tel: 020 8572 5555/08457 789789, website: http://www.aa.com
British Airways tel: 08457 733377, website: http://www.british-airways.com
Delta Airlines tel: 0800 414767, website: http://www.delta.com

Bite dive - Colin Cotton

Colin Cotton, 46, is a carpenter and lives in Cambridgeshire with his wife, Karen. He learned to dive five years ago, and in November 2001 visited Grand Bahama and New Providence to dive with sharks on a trip arranged by Harlequin.

I’m absolutely fascinated by sharks. My passion for them is such that I have about 80 books on the subject of sharks in my study. I was on the Internet one day when I came across information about a shark-feeding course run by UNEXSO in Grand Bahama, where divers wear chain-mail suits to hand-feed sharks. I phoned Harlequin and I was really lucky that they knew exactly what I wanted – the way they put it together was spot on. I did a week with UNEXSO and another in New Providence, where I did a shark awareness course with Stuart Cove Dive Centre. I couldn’t fault Harlequin – on the second week the hotel was not so good, but it was changed straight away and we stayed at the Atlantis resort, which was something else. Even if you’re not stopping there you can pay a few dollars to look around the grounds.

I highly recommend UNEXSO, it’s very professional. You do a whole day in the classroom learning safety stuff and your reaction to sharks is checked. Some people are given their money back if they’re not suitable, and I was only the 48th person to do the course. I did 12 dives with UNEXSO, all of which were in about 18m. You wear a chain-mail suit and on your feeding hand you also have a neoprene glove, plus a butcher’s glove. You have a tube with the fish in it, you pull a fish out and hold it up for a shark to take. After a few days I got bitten because I’d turned my hand the wrong way when I was holding the fish. The shark realised something was wrong because it didn’t have a fish in its mouth but could still taste fish, it bit again, spun around and smacked into my mask, which broke and cut my face quite badly. The chain-mail hood took a chunk of skin out of my head as well. The shark then swam off. I had quite a bad nightmare that night – after all, it was a very big shark. Apart from that dive, I got butted in the head a lot, as the sharks associate the ghostly white of your face with fish and they also sense electric signals from your head.

After this little adventure I didn’t feed sharks any more, but handled them instead. You lure them towards your body with a fish, drop the fish and rub their snout with your chain mail. Their eyes flicker and they go into a trance. You can pick them up and hold them at arm’s length with their snout in the palm of your hand, or stroke them. My instructor wanted me to kiss one, but I didn’t want my face that close to their teeth – she’d been bitten a number of times and had the scars to prove it.

On the last day with UNEXSO I did a dolphin dive. They got a dolphin from the sanctuary there to follow the boat and we could then play games in the water with it – it gives you a kiss, spins you around and catches a hoop you throw. The visibility that day was 50m, but it was always above 25m, and on one day it was 100m – crystal clear.

Freeport in Grand Bahama is very laid back, has a lot of bars and restaurants, and the place suited Karen well, as she doesn’t dive she would relax and sunbathe until I got back at 3pm. The day in Nassau was longer, as, although our original hotel was right next to Stuart Cove, when we moved hotels the Atlantis resort was half an hour away. The shark awareness course lasted two days, and I did another three days’ diving with Stuart Cove. They’re quite Hollywood there – the dive centre looks like something off the Jaws set. Diving with sharks there was probably more frightening than with UNEXSO, as you’re not wearing the chain-mail suit. During the shark feed the bait was put above my head, so that was a bit scary. During our two weeks I saw reef sharks, bull sharks and hammerheads, and on one dive there was a tiger shark, though I didn’t see it.

The only downsides of the Bahamas are firstly, if you don’t like sharks, you won’t like the diving, as you see them on every dive. My logbook says things like ‘More sharks’, ‘Even more sharks’ and ‘More bloody sharks’! Secondly, it’s so expensive. We were there before high season, and a half of beer cost £7. The UNEXSO course alone, without accommodation or food, was £2,500, but even so, I’d go back again and again.

Feeding frenzy - Hank Sweet

Hank Sweet, 57, lives in Houghton, Cambridgeshire and works as a freelance IT consultant. He has been a diver for five years and in 2002 he and his wife, Judy, spent a week aboard the Aquacat exploring the islands of the Exumas on a trip arranged by the Barefoot Traveller.

Since qualifying, I’ve done nearly 150 dives, a lot of them in the Red Sea, but I’d never seen a shark. Non-diving friends were always saying to me, ‘Ooh, aren’t you worried about sharks?’ and I was getting frustrated that I’d never encountered one, which is one of the reasons why we booked a holiday in the Bahamas. The other is that Judy doesn’t dive, so we wanted a holiday that was fun for her as well. We met someone at the Dive Show who had been on the Aquacat a month previously, and we also spoke to the owner of the boat, so that’s how we chose the holiday.

The Aquacat leaves from Nassau, so we flew direct, stayed the night in a hotel and joined the boat the next day. It is a 30m catamaran with air conditioning, 11 double cabins with en suite bathrooms and plenty of room – it’s really hard to fault them. The food was excellent, the people very friendly and there were things to do for non-divers: there are several hundred islands in the Exumas, and there were a few trips to islands to walk around them or sit on the beach. On one island we saw a unique sub-species of the Bahamian rock iguana. There were also kayaks, but Judy didn’t use them.

The diving deck was very big, set across the 10m beam, and is well set up for photographers, with a table to get your gear together, two freshwater tanks for rinsing, and compressed air to blow water off your cameras. I was very impressed with the staff – on one dive my strobe leaked, so I made my fastest-ever ascent and the skipper said he’d sort it out. It was duly dismantled, dried, fixed and tested, and was ready to go again. On Red Sea boats the dive decks are usually painted with non-slip paint, with a few carpets, but even so, on one boat I fell and hit my head. However, on the Aquacat the dive deck is covered with a material made of rubber tubes, so you don’t slip.

I’ve been to the Red Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, and in the Caribbean the reefs are very different. There are a lot of fans, sea whips and sponges, but not as much coral. I enjoy seeing a lot of fish, as at Ras Mohammed, and I did see shoals of fish in the Bahamas, but not in the numbers you see in the Red Sea. There were snapper, grunts and barracuda on every dive – but not shoals of them – as well as yellow stingrays and lobsters. I saw one turtle and although I was hoping to see lots of mantas, I only saw one, which was swimming past the boat after I’d got out of the water. However, the sharks made up for any shortcomings.
The shark dive with the chumsicle was the most exciting dive I’ve ever done. Six Caribbean reef sharks and six big groupers appeared and the sharks swam in circles, taking chunks from the chumsicle. Some people disagree with feeding sharks, but if it does any harm, it doesn’t rank high on the list of things that do harm to sharks – either the locals make money out of taking divers to see the sharks, or the sharks would be caught for shark-fin soup. We dived the feeding sites after the feed and the sharks were still hanging around. On another couple of dives we saw a hammerhead and a nurse shark, but we didn’t see sharks on every dive.

There were night dives every night and I did one or two, seeing things such as lobster and octopus. We also did one dive in a blue hole, which was not as exciting as I would have expected. We went down to a sandy bed at 15m, and the hole went down from here to about 60m. I didn’t go far down, as it got darker as you got deeper and there was not a lot of life inside the hole. We were there in January and the water was 25°C, the visibility was always 30m or more. As a photographer though, I noticed that the water was quite sandy. We never met any other divers, which after diving in the busy Red Sea was quite nice.
I’d like to think I’d go back, as I liked the laid-back lifestyle, the boat and the sharks, but I’m now thinking about arranging a trip to Manado in Indonesia.


Underwater circus - Richard Whiteley

Richard Whiteley is in his mid-fifties, has taken early retirement, and lives in Wilmslow, Cheshire with his wife Caroline. In the seven years since he learned to dive he has completed around 300 dives. He and Caroline, also a diver, travelled to Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas with Divequest in April 2002. I did all my dive training in the UK, and have dived Plymouth, Scapa Flow, St Abbs, the Farne Islands and North Wales. However, you have to like bouncing around in small boats, and the weather tends to blow you out, so we also enjoy diving abroad with bigger boats and better weather, and why not?

Part of the reason we went to the Bahamas is that we’d booked a holiday in Belize, which should have started on 13 September 2001, but we couldn’t go because of what had happened in New York. We were booked onto the Peter Hughes boat, Wavedancer, but never did the trip because it sank during a hurricane in October 2001. Finally, in April we visited Turks and Caicos with Peter Hughes, preceded by a week in the Bahamas, which we’d wanted to visit anyway, as it’s a long way to go for just a week.

We really enjoyed Walker’s Cay which is a very small island. It has three dayboats, an airport, a marina and hotel, as well as some villas to rent, all run by one organisation. Holidays on the island are very much fishing-orientated and you see a lot of big American fishing boats. I think it’s cheapest if you buy a package, as will you eat in the hotel anyway. There are no cars on the island – you can walk it from tip to tip in half an hour – and anyone who needs transport uses a golf cart. Our room was more than adequate and the staff were very friendly, smiley and helpful. The food was slightly disappointing, although the fish was good and there was a little fresh salad, there was no fruit.

As far as the diving was concerned, everything was pukka. There was the captain, a divemaster and a boat handler on board, and although Caroline and I were the only divers, they didn’t slack off just because there were only two of us. The divemaster was English, and the Bahamian crew were super. We did four and a half days’ diving, including a free welcome dive. We tended to do a two-tank morning dive and a single tank in the afternoon. The interval between the morning dives was minimal as all the dives were shallow – the deepest was about 15m – and the sites were a maximum of 20 minutes by boat away from the island. The water was greenish as there had been an algae bloom, but this cleared in the latter part of the week. We’re Red Sea enthusiasts, which is like diving in your own personal aquarium, but we found that the Caribbean was different – we did see southern stingrays, eagle rays, sharks, turtles and barracuda, but there was not a mass of fish life. There was some hard coral – in the form of boulders – with shallow caves and swim-throughs.

There was a shark-feed which we dived once during our visit. You enter the water, kneel in the sand and the boat comes back with the ‘chumsicle’ of frozen fish bits suspended from a hook. It’s quite interesting, as once the chumsicle breaks off the hook the sharks start chasing it, and they did come very near to us. We had been warned beforehand that we might have to take evasive action if they got too close. Between 50 and 60 sharks – Caribbean reef sharks and nurse sharks – appear on feeding dives, with some jacks as well, but we also dived the same site without the chumsicle, and saw between three and five sharks on those dives, attracted by the boat noise. We were told that at busy times there could as many as 60 divers in the water for the shark feed. I wouldn’t fancy diving with that many people, partly because something might go wrong with so many divers in the water and partly because it makes the whole thing seem like a circus – it’s mass ecotourism gone crazy.

One bloke got bitten by a shark while we were there. He was fishing from the beach, with his baby beside him, he caught a small shark and picked it up by the tail and it bit him on the leg! He then had to wait for the nurse from the main island to come over and assess him, and then get airlifted out for treatment. Because there are so few regular flights to the island, in emergencies they have to rely on visitors with private planes being able to take people to hospital or for recompression, which is something worth bearing in mind.