I first watched Jaws when I was 5 years old. I spent most of the movie simultaneously trying to cover my eyes and ears because the music was almost as scary as the shark attack scenes.
When the movie originally came out, my mom was working as a lifeguard at a man-made lake in upstate New York. She told me that someone would scream “SHARK!” and everyone would run, screaming, from the water… of the MAN-MADE, fresh water lake.
I don’t think shark-mania is quite as strong 30+ years post-Jaws. But if someone yelled “SHARK!” on a busy beach, most people would knock down the nearest child in their rush to escape the frigid waters where the man-eating beasts lurk. Including me. (Although I’d try to knock down a big man on my rush to escape. A man can be a meal for that shark but a kid would only be a snack. That damn shark would still want to eat me if he had only eaten a little kid!)
One of the many reasons I decided to swim with sharks is simply because it sounds so bad ass! When you think of a shark, what comes to mind? Big, blood covered teeth! To swim with these huge creatures of the deep, to conquer the fear of giant, blood covered teeth, to tame those wild beasts, just sounded too exciting to pass up. I was 19, and on a tropical vacation with my family and two best friends in the Dominican Republic. Fear, and giant teeth, be damned!
But images of giant teeth and man-eating beasts were running through my head, with the Jaws theme as background music, while I road a “booze boat” out into the waters of the Atlantic. We were off to swim with sharks and sting rays. I was nervous. I thought that they must toss us all overboard and then toss in some chum (ya know, that fishy blood and guts mess you always see in Shark Week when they are trying to see Great White Sharks, and the like). Then sharks would be swirling around us, snapping their jaws.
I mentioned this swimming-in-blood idea to my mom and she reminded me… we are swimming with nurse sharks! Oohhh now I remember why this was a good idea in the first place! Nurse sharks… the calm, bottom-dwelling, docile sibling of the Great White. Nurse sharks look like they wouldn’t move off the ocean floor… even for blood or a taste of the little Jewish Princess (that’s me!) swimming above them.
After an hour-long boat ride filled with singing and dancing (no drinking on the first leg of the “booze boat”… they thought we would drown if drunk), we arrived at a large net coming out of the water.
Sharks and sting rays were contained in this cordoned area of the ocean. I hopped off the boat and right in! There were about a dozen nurse sharks, some as big as 14 feet long, gathered on the ocean floor 10 feet below.
I had a snorkel to use so I could keep my face in the water.
I started swimming, watching these huge animals that, just minutes before, I had been terrified of encountering. This was easy! And fun. Until, our guides decided to wake the little (big) beasties up. They swam to the bottom and smacked the nurse sharks until they swam off the ocean floor, right at me! I tried to scream but just wound up choking on seawater. One passed by me, just inches away.
It was an exciting and scary experience, although not quite Jaws-theme-song scary.
Scratch that one off the list!
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