Oh, you swam with a dolphin? That’s cute. I swam with a shark…literally.
For those of you who don’t know, I love sharks. They are one of my favorite animals. Shark week=my favorite week of the year.
Anyways, when my parents told me that they were going to take me to Hawaii with them I made a joke saying that they should let me go swim with the sharks. Of course they told me no. About a week before we left on vacation, they told me that if I wanted to that I could go cage diving. I freaked out!! The only thing was that I would have to go by myself. They would have gone with me but they both get super sea sick.They were actually going to surprise me while we were in Hawaii but they wanted to make sure that I would be okay going by myself. Of course I was okay with it! This has been one of my lifelong dreams and I didn’t want to miss out on this experience.
To make my 6:30AM dive, we had to leave the hotel at 4:00AM! Oh man, that was rough. We stopped off for some breakfast at a gas station and then made it to the harbor in plenty of time. I got all checked in, paid my money and was all set and ready to go!
I’m so ready for this!
I was kinda worried that my parents didn’t pay the captain a little extra to “get rid of me” ;) Jk.
The boat ride there was awesome! The sun was just barely starting to come out and it was so pretty. I wasn’t really nervous at all to get in the water with the sharks. I was more nervous that I would get sea sick.
And there it is. The little cage that 8 of us are going to squeeze into together.
The captain did his last little checks on the cage to make sure it was safe and into the water we went!
There were probably about 7 sharks total swimming around us. Most of the sharks were Sand Bars but there was one Galapagos. The Captain told us that Sand Bars were like the Chihuahuas of the sea. Haha. He said he’d rather be surrounded by Tiger Sharks then Sand Bars.
This shark somehow got caught in a fisherman's net and got some caught around his neck. They said that they have been wanted to try and get it off of him for a while.
This was the best picture I could get of the Galapagos.
The water was very rocky so it was hard to get good pictures
They are gorgeous creatures
A short little video from my adventure
Okay, now did anyone notice that at the beginning of this post I wrote “I swam with a shark…literally.” Here’s the story.
The cage can hold up to 8 people. We had a small group luckily and didn’t have to split the group up so we all got more time under the water. It was a semi tight fit with everyone but we were all fine with it. The only thing was the every once in a while you’d get kicked by another person which wasn’t a big deal because you could just kick then back and they wouldn’t know that it was on purpose ;) Lol. As you can see from the picture of the cage, we were just on the surface of the water so everyone brought snorkeling gear to use. I have actually never been snorkeling before so it took me a little get to used to breathing underwater but I got it down :) One other thing I learned on the little adventure was that I am just like my parents and am very prone to sea sickness. After being in the cage for like 20 minutes, I started getting really sick. So I took a little break from looking at the sharks, stayed at the surface, got some air and tried to compose myself. After a couple minutes I felt better and went back under the water. A couple minutes after that they Captain told us that we should switch spots in the cage so we could all have different views. We all switched. Then I started to feel sick again. I came up for air again. I was starting to feel better so was about to go back under the water when someone kicked me in the leg. Except this was a lot harder than anyone had kicked me before. I looked under the water and saw a shark…inside the cage. Yes friends, you read that correctly. THERE WAS A SHARK INSIDE MY CAGE!!!! The cage that is supposed to separate us from the wild animals. I immediately freaked out and jumped up on one of the bars trying to comprehend what I had just saw…The girl next to me was looking at me funny. I told her, “I think there’s a shark in here.” (Yeah, you might be thinking. “Why didn’t you freak out more and tell everyone to get out of the cage.” Well honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t freak out more than I did but I was still second guessing myself of what I had just saw. It all happened so fast that maybe my mind was playing tricks on me). The girl next to me started freaking out big time and swam for the ladder. In the process of this, she kicked my leg super hard that I started freaking out that the shark had ran into me again. I looked underneath the water again to see what was going on under my feet and somehow the shark got out of the cage. You might be thinking, well maybe you didn’t even see the shark in your cage in the first place. Two other people can testify to my story. The shark ran into one of them, and another girl saw it under the water. So don’t be calling me crazy! Haha. Well after all this shark business went down everyone was so done. We all got out of the cage, grateful that 40 limbs came out. Lol. One thing that I will not be able to explain to you is how the shark got into the cage in the first place. I also can’t explain to you how big the shark was. It all happened too fast to worry about how big the shark swimming next to me was. Haha. I assume that it was a little shark. The bars aren’t huge but possibly big enough for a tiny shark.
That is my experience cage diving with sharks. I got a pretty good story out of it too ;) Will I be cage diving with sharks again? Most likely :) As long as I get drugged up with antinausea medicine.
No comments:
Post a Comment