Why the fear of Great White sharks?

[down4fun]

Wow, that would be scary; I've always said makos are little GWS. They have the same build just in a smaller and faster frame. The speed of those suckers is what scares me. They are an open pelagic sharks that rarely encouter humans and when they do can be very curious.

Did you encounter one near Florida? Manny Puig did several dives with them and I was in awe at how big some of them can get. His head was on a constant swivel, because the mako would disappear and then be coming in behind you at a high rate of speed. I can see how your anxiety level would be through the roof.

This encounter was here in pompano. fl. And yes my heart rate was definitely up, lol. After he left us we still had 20-25 minutes of deco to complete, we were both hyper-vigilant in watching the water column.

A good reason NOT to dive a rebreather IMHO!

I've had a number of small makos in that size range swim by me on our shark dives and never had anything approaching what you experienced. They seem pretty skittish, but make for beautiful footage with those teeth showing.

it's the second one I have seen coming up from a deep dive. The first time there was 7 of us and the shark just hung out in the distance, never came in close. This time it was just two of us doing drift deco in 40ft of water.

 

[drbill]

it's the second one I have seen coming up from a deep dive. The first time there was 7 of us and the shark just hung out in the distance, never came in close. This time it was just two of us doing drift deco in 40ft of water.

I used to do a lot of deep diving with extended hang times of up to 35 min or so both on the anchor line and in blue water. I usually kept my eye out for the landlord in case it decided to test whether I was a sea lion or not.

 

[earz]

I believe it all goes back to 3 things.
1) the name it self. It got its name because well it is the largest Apex predator, outside of a Krakken, in the ocean. Great White just sounds scarier than Mako, Bull or even a tiger.
2) the sheer size of one of these beasts (and I use that term loosely) is awe inspiring. when your fishing out of a bass boat 24 feet long and you realize there is a shark as big or bigger than your boat in the ocean that seems to put things into perspective pretty quickly.
3) Hollywood and their desire to make a boggy man out of someone or something. In the 70's the myth that JAWS was going to eat you when you went swimming 5 feet off of the beach is scary. Think about the summer of 2001.

The 2 biggest stories that summer were A Chandra Levy the senator intern who was killed and B) shark attacks in Florida. Anyone remember the aerial views of all those brown shapes within a mere yards from swimmers. The only problem is, and no reporter (if there are any left anymore) bother to find out is how do the shark attacks in the summer of 2001 compare to other years.

The answer is easy they were actually down, but it was a slow news cycle. All that changed on 9-11 and you never heard Shark attacks mentioned again.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[seacreatures]

Great White Shark Adventure! on Vimeo