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Imagine this. Standing, coffee in hand, comfortably on the stern of a beautiful dive boat watching huge Great White sharks circling around chasing tuna baits under calm, cobalt blue skies just offshore of a towering volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean. The crew identifies, by name, the individual sharks using distinctive spot patterns and fin characteristics. Now, you decide to get up close and personal and get familiar with the sharks for yourself. You don your wetsuit, grab your camera, and enter a dive cage in 100 ft visibility deep blue waters teeming with mackerel, huge yellowfin tuna, and, of course, Great White sharks. This is what the experience is like aboard the Nautilus UnderSea liveaboard at Guadalupe Island off Baja, Mexico. Nothing quite prepares you for the uniqueness of this experience, not the slick Nautilus Liveaboard brochures or the fantastic stories by your friends. Within minutes of my first submersion, huge female Great White shark Scarboard came right next to my cage, staring at me as if to size me up and introduce herself. Make no mistake about it, she looked me right in the eye and, for that moment, I was the only focus of her thoughts. No photograph or video can capture that feeling. Scarboard traveled alone without remoras or pilotfish. Contrast that to my next visitor, Lucy, another large female who sports a caravan of pilotfish and other assorted freeloaders. The second I saw Lucy’s damaged tail, I felt more affectionate toward her. That is, until she ferociously grabbed a bleeding tuna head on the surface and swam, head-on, with eyes closed and mouth gapping into my cage. Fortunately, I was shooting video at the time so I could be totally “in the moment” and stare down the throat of this hungry Great White shark and live to tell about it. Her huge ventral fin penetrated the cage and got caught on our regulator hoses as she returned, almost pulling the regulator out of my mouth. Her pilotfish, which populated our cage, strafed us on the way out. Everyone on the boat shared their own personal experiences with the sharks and the crew created a composite video which was excellent. Every detail of our comforts on this shark expedition were attended to by a world-class crew. The food was delicious and even included a BBQ taco dinner under the stars. And would you believe, on our last day, that we witnessed several huge Great White sharks fully breach out of the water, a behavior the crew identified as distinctly unusual. Perhaps they were saying goodbye or just showing off. We will revisit the Nautilus Liveaboards, possibly to see Whale Sharks or Manta Rays in the near future.
