As I settled to the bottom out from the mouth of the cave, I noticed a big palm frond sitting in the silt on the floor of the cave. The other divers settled to the bottom around me. The ascending bubbles of 8 divers is quite a noisy and visual thing and as everyone started to search inside the cave, the palm frond turned into a Nurse Shark and with a jerk of its tail, stirred up a wall of silt that blinded our view of the cave.
Photo from Google.
When the divers realized that it was a shark, they started to breath heavily in fear and surprise. More air in the lungs started our whole group ascending toward the surface. I immediately grabbed everyone that I could with my arms and wrapping my legs around others, dumped all the air from my buoyancy compensator and started exhaling like crazy to try and keep the group from an un-controlled ascent. The mass of divers rose several feet until I was able to act as an anchor and hold them down. When all were finally calmed down, the shark decided to peak out of the silt to see what had disturbed it. Suddenly, within a couple of feet of us the shark poked his snout out of the wall of silt until his eyes were exposed.
Photo from Google.
One of the Japanese divers in his late 40’s was a cameraman. He had an underwater camera with a big arm attachment with a flash on the end. Without thinking and without hesitation, he bopped the shark right on the snout with the flash unit. The panicked shark withdrew into the cave. Once again, the excited divers started to breath hard and rise from the bottom. As everyone settled back to the bottom, the shark decided to get the heck out of there and bolted from the cave. It escaped out of the right corner of the mouth of the cave and swam up at a 45 degree angle toward the surface
As it swam, I saw something that to this day still amazes me. Its skin turned colors in patches at a fast rate as the shark was speeding away from us. I had read the some sharks and whales can alter the shape of their skin to make them more hydro-dynamic. I am going to do some research to find out more about that.
As the shark swam out of our view, our exciting shark sighting ended. I, as well as the others were kind of angry with the cameraman for striking the shark. But it did give us the opportunity to see a very interesting phenomenon.
