Seven bull sharks circle overhead, like grey submarines, bulky and watchful. During the pre-dive briefing, I signed a personal liability insurance form. If I do something stupid I will bear the cost.
The dive master warns me not to point at anything while I'm on the bottom at the feeding station. No sense in offering the sharks something else to bite, I assume. So I lie low.
Scuba-diving with large sharks is an exhilarating experience. On previous shark dives in South Africa I was alone in a cage while great whites eyeballed me. Though these were extraordinarily exciting dives, I felt like a sliced lunch at the seal diner, cold and unappetising. In contrast, this warm-water dive in the Beqa Island channel off Viti Levu's Pacific Harbour is a sheer adrenalin rush: no cage, and open water all around. Here, I'm with five other divers, an equal number of guides and countless sharks. Whitetips, blacktips and grey reefs dominate, mingling with tawny nurses, silvertips and sicklefin lemon sharks.
A guide and I feed a frenzy of whitetips and greys from a small bucket of fishy scraps. Only a few metres away, the sharks dart like silver bullets, missing one another by centimetres.
by Tom Neal Tacker - smh.com.au/travel
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