Swimming with Sharks off Hawaii's North Shore

When I was about 10 years old my 13 years old brother and I were wandering the beaches in Florida a few weeks after a hurricane behind rows of private beach houses. We were the only one's around for miles. The beach was littered with all kind of debris and dead sea creatures. We were looking for shells and picking up sand dollars. There was so much gross stuff every now and then I would let out a yelp. My ankles were cut and bleeding from the various things in the water as I waded in the shallows. At one point my thoughts about the pretty shells were interrupted when I heard a splashing. I looked up and saw about 10 feet in front of me was a large shark, thrashing it's fins and jaws. It appeared to have been coming toward me, but got stuck on the sand bar.  You know those old road runner cartoons that show the person frozen with fear? Yeah, that was me. It was a for real thing.  I grew up in the era of Jaws, like so many of us Gen X and Y-ers, the impact was indelible. I stood there in 8 inches of ocean water staring at the shark, completely paralyzed. I couldn't move or speak. Finally, I was able to get the powers of speech back to try to get my brother's attention and repeatedly called out his name, but like Chicken Little who cried wolf one too many times, he ignored my cries.  He finally did look up to see the shark, to which he enthusiastically responded "It's a porpoise! It's a porpoise!"  And at that very moment our mom appeared several hundred feet behind us from between two houses on stilts shouting "Get out of the water! It's a shark! Get out of the water!" Like the cartoons, the frozenness melted from my body almost like a switch being turned on to wake my body back up and I immediately  turned and sprinted from the water up the hill and into my grandparents awaiting RV as fast as my skinny little legs could carry me.  We got some binoculars and a camera and headed back to the beach, at which point you could see there were actually multiple sharks in the water coming in to feed. 

Decades later I find myself helping people to overcome the impact of traumatic experiences in their life on a daily basis. I understand how when faced with something terrifying, your body may not respond the way you wish it would or they way others think it should.  If you've been reading our blog, you probably noticed that fear is not something that holds us back much on our travel adventures and I always wondered how I would do if faced with a shark again.  So, naturally shark cage diving had been on my bucket list for years and Hawaii gave us the perfect opportunity to try it out.

On our first day in Hawaii I made reservations with North Shore Shark Diving Adventures, but the trip was postponed due to weather. In the meantime, we decided to hit up our favorite snorkeling spot on the North Shore, Pupukea, also known as Shark's cove. One of the other snorkelers told us he spotted a reef shark just outside of the cove, where the tide water rushed in. The tide was already coming in and the water wasn't very calm anyway, so the current was strong, but we swam out anyway and clung to the rocks at the edge of the cove to keep from being blown like a fire hose into the water, and sure enough there was a white tipped reef shark, maybe about 5 feet long, swimming in circles below us.  Later research told us this is a pretty harmless shark that feeds from the bottom of the ocean. We didn't know that at the time, but I suppose we still felt the security of the rocks that surrounded us. Seemed pretty crazy to be open water snorkeling with a shark, especially since we would be paying to do that in a few days.

After that, I wondered if we should still do that cage dive, but the bucket list was calling, so we plowed ahead. We met up at our harbor meeting point, took a boat with our fellow divers and dive masters out into the ocean about 3 miles off the coast of Hawaii. They told us that the sharks follow the shrimp boats for chum and since they think we are a shrimp boat, they come when they hear the similar engine. The thing about Hawaii is the water is pure blue, almost like glass that you can see through on a clear day, so when we got out there, you could see these massive Galapagos sharks swimming all around the boat. You could see their fins come up and you could see them dive beneath the water. We were surrounded by them. These sharks were about 10 feet long, and are labeled "aggressive."  These guys looked like JAWS and wow, it was awesome, so of course we were getting in the water with them! We threw on our snorkels, climbed into the cage, jumped into the water and watched mesmerized as these ocean beasts circled us. Their eyes were like a cats staring back at us. When one would disappear into the depths another would appear in its place.  I'm very buoyant and short, so I can't reach to stand on the cage bars, which is pretty apparent and less than graceful in the video. HAHA. A very cool experience. Turns out, despite my early experience, I did just fine overcoming those once paralyzing fears. Hope you get a chance to try it for yourself. Even if you pee your pants, no one will notice it!  Thanks to North Shore Diving Adventures for some of the videos and the great memories! You should check them out (no, they aren't paying us, they don't even know we have a blog, we just really liked them). In the end, we didn't become the chum, but checked off another one from the bucket list!
​

---