We had some fairly odd shark behavior, if anybody can shed some light on this, please chime in.
Twice in the first two days we had sharks acting out of the ordinary. Lots of caribbean reef sharks in Little Cayman, but scuba divers (who are Very numerous) seldom see them. On day one, coming up from a roughly 90 ft dive, I saw a reef shark come vertically up the wall after me, coming fairly fast, not just gliding along like normal. I was going away from him at the time and kept going. He got to the top of the wall, maybe 45 feet, pealed off and went back down. No big deal, but out of the ordinary for this type of shark. Day two, 65 ft dive, I saw a reef shark coming across the bottom in my direction, again coming faster than normal. As I rose toward the surface, he came right up to me, met me about 15 ft. I stopped, put my fins out in his direction ( not having a spear, or anything else, in my hand is a paranoid feeling). He came up almost touching distance to my fins, turned away, came back, then went over to Ted. who had the camera and recorded the shark coming up to him. That part is on the video. Then the shark went over and bumped our float hard and finally left. Not a real big deal, but this is definately Not normal behavior. There is a possibility that an adjacent dive boat had been (or was at the time) feeding sharks.
After thinking about it, I began to wonder if being freedivers had something to do with it. It was pretty clear that freedivers are very very rare in Little Cayman, Nobody we met had seen freedivers in action. We do move a lot different from the scuba divers the sharks are used to. Maybe they were just curious and were reacting strongly to something unusual moving away from them. In any case, every time I saw a shark thereafter, I went after him, intentionally showing some aggression. Saw a lot of sharks but had no further trouble. Every time they either kept on slow cruising or went back to that.
Any thoughts on this?
Connor
