[Overpaid Slacker]

First -- cool pix. Ingenious.

Second -- I'm fascinated and horrified by sharks b/c I don't like being reminded that I'm not alone at the top of the food chain. Large bears, though fellow "top link" mates don't give me the feeling of prey like sharks do.

My own little story, if you'll indulge me:

It's Thanksgiving-ish a few years back, and I'm diving in the Keys (out of Largo w/ an outfit called Quiescence which I highly recommend). We're on a six-pack and go to a particular reef (French Ledge, I think; though it could have been Molasses) for the day's first dive.

The anchor line is at the end of this reef and we're in about 60' of water. The reef itself is about 10-12' tall, with a large cave/cut-back into the end of the reef (about 6 feet from the seafloor to the top of the "cave", which goes back into the reef about 20'). I'm a big guy, so I'm the last in the water and I get to the bottom and see the others have moved off down the reef. No big deal, they're not too far away; but they essentially "skipped" the tip of the reef, which usually has a bunch of smaller fish, hanging out outside of the current. So I drift on over there to check it out, and it's empty (!). Obviously the Spidey-sense had taken the morning off, and I click on my light, just as my head comes under the edge of the cutback in the reef.

The first thing the light hits is a black eye -- large, dull and about 8 feet from me. My heart stopped. I'm not kidding. Stopped dead. I pan the light to the right and cover the 3-4' expanse of head of a GWS. The business end of the perfect killing machine. Eight feet away. Staring at me (I assume). And the only plexi between me and those teeth are my goggles.

Well, what got my heart going again was me screaming "Holy *****" into my regulator. I stopped moving around, dropped to the seafloor and just backed up slowly.

Now, of course, this shark is not going to confuse me for a fish (or a turtle or a seal, which is how I think many surfers get chomped) because I'm making more noise just by breathing with SCUBA than anything else for a mile around. He heard me coming from the moment I hit the water, right up until I shined a flashlight right in his eye like some kind of fish cop.

But I was not having such reassuring conscious thoughts at that moment -- the reptilian brain had seized the controls and, having turned the corner from the mouth of the cave, I was edging my way along the reef toward my colleagues ( I don't have to out-swim the shark, I've just gotta out-swim YOU!). Well, they're nowhere in sight, so I keep putting distance between me and the Perfect Eating Machine.

Once the heart-rate dropped into the triple digits, I started looking around again, checking stuff out -- If I'm gonna go, I might was well enjoy the scenery. A moment later, about a million coppery fish come pouring over the top of the reef, like a living carpet, and zip around me on their way to wherever they're going. I could feel my brain about to think "Wow, that's cool." but just after it got to "Wow" and before it got to "that's cool", it was hijacked by "what scared all those fish?"

I put my back to the reef, expecting to see the underside of the shark coming overhead like the Star Destroyer in the opening scene of Star Wars. Several minutes later -- no shark. So I've had enough and hustle on over to the anchor line and begin my ascent. You've got to do a decompression stop at 15' for a minute -- and that was probably the longest minute of my life b/c the shark, if it wanted to come, could come from ANYwhere -- above, below, behind, etc. My head was on a swivel. I got to the surface and came out of the water like a Polaris missile, not wanting to leave my feet dangling.

I tell the dive master I'd seen a great white, and he was ... skeptical. Nobody else on the dive had seen any shark at all and GWS are not common in that area, so he politely, quietly believed I had lost it.

Fast forward three months. I'm back in the Keys, going out on a Quiescence boat and the (same) dive master asks us where we want to go. Someone says how 'bout "X". I say, anywhere is fine except French, b/c last time I had a bit of a shark encounter. The dive master looks at me, stunned and says "Holy crap YOU'RE that guy. With the great white. That was like Thanksgiving, right?"
"Yeah." Says I.
"About a week later, they caught the largest great white shark ever seen in the Keys on Molasses." (which is about 500 feet from where I'd seen him). The DM goes below and grabs a magazine that's got the fisherman and the caught shark - my buddy- on the cover. I looked at the shark and said "that's him, officer."

The DM says "man, I'm sorry, I really thought you'd imagined it. I was telling my buddies about 'this guy' who'd seen a GWS and we laughed our a$$es off. And one of my buddies brought this magazine to me a few weeks later. Dude, I owe you a beer."

JP