DIVING WITH SOME BITE

Hand feeding sharks can be risky but not as dangerous as eating a reef fish.

“There was a standing wave in the Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa when we were there. The current was so strong we couldn't dive.”

“There was a standing wave in the Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa when we dived it. The current was so strong, it was awesome. We saw masses of grey reef sharks and turtles, schools of huge barracuda, a couple of silver-tip sharks and finally we saw several dolphins surfing close above us while we did our safety stop.”

These are two very different impressions of the same place. Divers who want to get the most out of the diving in the Tuamotus must learn how to fly the passes.

A group of low-lying atolls that form part of French Polynesia, “motu” means small island in the local languages. Don't look for them on a flat atlas. They're in that part of the world that is often omitted from an atlas due to an expedient use of space. Rangiroa is the largest of the atolls, with the world's second largest lagoon. Only Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands has larger. Rangiroa is about an hour by plane from Tahiti in the nearby Society Islands.

So why do divers go all the way there? Because in the passes of the Tuamotus they will see hundreds of sharks and there are veritable walls of them.

It's funny to read postings on the Internet by those travelling by sailboat in this area. They write things like, “We couldn't swim here because there were so many sharks,” or “We managed to get back into the dinghy just before a great big shark attacked us!”

In reality it's very hard to get close to the sharks, unless there's something in it for them. Two French dive guides, Sebastian and Bertran, are the Dream Team because as far as attracting sharks goes, they rock.

No chainmail suits, no gloves, they make a habit of taking a severed Mahimahi head under their arm when they go under water and cut off pieces of the dead fish to offer individually to passing sharks.

As Canadian fellow crewmember Mike Veitch wryly observed, “We let the Frenchies do the feeding.”

The Tuamotus have few passes out from of the lagoons, often only one, so when all this water flows, it flows in a torrent. Five knots is fairly normal. Ten is possible. This is a flow that can almost rip a diver's computer off his arm!

When water flows out of the atoll it takes nutrient-rich water with it, but the visibility in the pass can be very poor and if you dive it you can be tumbled out into the open ocean and be very difficult to find later. When the tide turns and the water becomes slack, the dives are very dull. There appears to be little wildlife to look at.

When the tide rises and clear ocean water floods into the lagoon, the big animals turn out to enjoy it. When divers come up after a dive they are at the surface in the restricted waters of the lagoon. They are relatively easy to find, even though the water can be exceedingly rough. A surface marker-flag proves useful more often than not.

The sharks enjoy the passes, but why? There is food in the form of prey fish and strong currents that allow them to cruise effortlessly. Otherwise they have to keep on swimming to force oxygenated water past their gills.

Neither are the grey reef sharks the top of the food chain here. A huge tiger shark and an equally impressive great hammerhead shark prey in turn on the smaller sharks. It's a shark-eat-shark world.

Sebastian and Bertran put on a good show with pieces of dead fish, even though they appear to get a few close calls with these ravenous raiders.

Isn't it a bit risky? Such an enquiry is dismissed with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders.

Bertran feeds the grey reef sharks. The sharks seem very well ordered. That is until they spot some unlucky prey near the surface. They don't mess around and a hundred or so sharks hurtle towards it in an instant. The divers never get to know what it was. All divers’ cameras are pointed at Bertran, but in a moment Bertran is no longer there. He simply disappears. What the other divers are unaware of is that he has sustained a bad shark bite to his hand. It happened so quickly nobody else sees it.

He left them to instantly get washed down by the strong current through the wall of waiting sharks. He made it to the surface, was missed by the crew in the skiff and swam, all the time bleeding heavily, more than a mile back to the Tahiti Aggressor, their mother ship, waiting in the lagoon. That was unwise. He was bleeding so badly he might have fainted, yet the adrenalin kept him going.

The other divers don't know that at the time. They suffer a low point when he does not get back on the skiff with the rest of them after the dive. They start searching for him without luck in the white water at the surface. He's missing.

They were relieved to find him back onboard receiving first aid. He needed 20 stitches back in Rangiroa, but meanwhile another drama was unfolding. One of the Polynesian crew had been fishing, caught a reef fish and cooked and ate it in private all by himself. He not only caught a fish. He caught ciguatera poisoning too.

Eating certain reef fishes causes it. The toxin is carried up through the food chain accumulating in the larger predators such as barracuda or snappers. Ciguatoxin is very heat resistant and cannot be destroyed by conventional cooking. It's a life-threatening condition. The man became desperately ill and had to be airlifted to Papiete in Tahiti. There is no effective treatment or antidote for ciguatera poisoning, just supportive care in hospital. It seems that out in this part of the world, it's often more dangerous to bite some fishes than it is to be bitten by one.