23rd April 2009.      So yes,  it happened.  I dived with sharks.

Just back on dry land after a week on a dive boat where we swam daily with loads of the critters.

Scalloped hammerheads , sometimes in shoals, beneath you or beyond you, cruising by against the current, sometimes circling around, so powerful and beautiful as we rubber clad humans hung onto a vertical cliff face about 20-25m down gazing out into the big blue to see what might come.

The sharks – note – glide by effortlessly against the current which when we let ourselves into took us flying as astronauts,  sensation pure joy. In fact there were several times when I had this feeling that we were not diving and not deep in water at all,  but just being weightless in some awesome blue paradise stuffed to the brim with life.

photo Cedric Villiere

Out in the bigger blue, shoals of creole fish, pelican barracuda, (I swam up into a huge swarm of them once, spinning, filming like a lunatic, and got so close that they made me starving and wanting to bite them so taught and shiny and long nosed mackerel-like they were), and jacks and snapper and blue fin trevellies and yellow fin tuna sometimes and more sharks always;  white tipped reef sharks and Galapagos sharks and one day a WHALE shark.

photo Richard Vera

And they glide by and are utterly inspiring and otherworldly : awesome swimming machines of muscle and beauty. Fear never enters the equation. More some sense of adoration at their locomotive perfection and sinuous power, or something  -  incredible no?  They have to be the most stunning and mysterious of creatures.They were even here a million years or so before dinosaurs. I would come out of the water every time so high, always singing. What is it about them?

photo Richard Vera

There were also tiny pretty fish of all colours even neon, soft corals, anenomes,baby octopus, sponges,star fish, giant frog fish, blennies, puffer fish, scorpion fish that looked like weed covered rocks, Moray eels often swimming about,  delicate weeds, and things…. often in vertical rock faces wedged in between the layers if you stopped and looked.  Plankton flapping solitary and jewel like out in the big blue,  and turtles,  and rays flying by or overhead like big birds, or leaping out of the ocean ~  and dolphins,sometimes in schools of 500 or more,   and sealsplaying like pups, smiling up at us and spinning, rolling their eyes white and grinning as they spiralled round our legs.

Things happened too. One girl got skin bends, I had to share air once to come up,  that’s a story  ….

photo Richard Vera

A week underwater was the first part of Kaffe’s Galapagos Residency, 2009.

Kaffe was filming and all photos presented here were contributed by fellow divers with her underwater as listed. They were diving from the Aggressor II boat which has been diving the islands for 25 years.

photo Richard Vera