We made plans with one of the ladies who came to yoga with us to go diving together. Sally is an insatiable diver whose dive buddy had recently left the country, so she agreed to show us some of her favorite sites. We’d actually met earlier, at Laura’s party, but I think until her buddy left her days were fully occupied. So we made this plan, and then she heard that there were sharks at Margate Bay, so we scrapped the plan and went hunting for reef sharks.
Lest we bury the lede, yes, we did find the sharks. We counted five of them, though we never saw them all together; other people would later report that there were six.
We started off with the pretext that we’d treat this like a normal dive, and swam out towards the shelf and descended to maybe fifty feet. While down there, we met a “friendly” porcupine fish.
But we all kept looking around hoping for sharks, and eventually Andrew caught sight of one up on top of the shelf. So we (slowly and safely!) ascended the wall to the back reef.
And we caught glimpses of the sharks in the distance, but as we headed that direction we were distracted by a giant parrotfish. (Some of these photos are courtesy of Sally.)
There was also a chain moray, a lettuce slug, and a particularly photogenic damselfish.
And then Jazz saw the sharks again and we were off.
At some point the sharks swam away, so Jazz decided that she was a shark.
Eventually we started to get low on air and headed back towards shore. And that’s when we ran into a big stand of staghorn coral, and over it, a big squad of squids! Which seemed not to realize that there were sharks and they are delicious. At least this moray was smart enough to hide – not that they often do much else. (We were not worried, btw, because reef sharks don’t attack humans unless provoked.)
