Beqa Shark Dive

Sunday afternoon I grabbed a bus from Suva to Pacific Harbour to find a place to stay for Sunday night before heading out Monday morning for our much-anticipated shark dive. Unfortunately, the backpackers place where we planned on staying (the Uprising, where we've visited before) was fully booked, so we spent a while scrambling around trying to figure out where to stay. Also unfortunate was the fact that three of the girls that came with found out that they were on the waiting list and wouldn't know if they could dive until Monday morning, which they figured wasn't worth sticking around for so they went home and rescheduled the dive for another weekend. Once we were settled though, we watched some bootleg Indian movies and went to bed pretty early to rest up. Shark diving on Beqa is supposed to be the best shark dive in the world, so we were all very excited.

The next morning we scarfed down some breakfast and grabbed a taxi to head to the Pearl resort, where Beqa Adventure Divers is based. The local coordinator for the Wisconsin-Platteville program knows a lot of people in Fiji, and was able to get us about a $100 discount, which was amazing - this dive ended up being cheaper than most ordinary two tank dives that don't promise heaps of badass sharks. Beqa is a small island right off of Pacific Harbour (you can see it from Suva and all along the Coral Coast), and is famously home to firewalkers. The two dive companies that run the shark dives off the coast of Beqa have agreements with the local villages on Beqa where the locals won't fish on crest of the reef (preserving the sharks and other large fish species that feed there) in exchange for money provided by a small fee from everyone that dives off of Beqa. The reefs where the dives are located are protected, and the dive companies promote conservation and other environmental causes with the dives, aiming for them to be educational. We were primarily concerned with seeing a freaking ton of sweet sharks, however.

On one of the two boats heading out from Pac Harbour. We were lucky enough to be on the one with a French documentary crew - they were filming a special on eco-tourism in Fiji. The two guys were mostly filming our dive leader, Papa, on his dive briefing and explanation of the shark dive, but they also got sound and video clips of us getting on and off the boat, talking ot each other about the sharks, and asked a fair amount of questions about the dives and Fiji in general. They collected all of our email addresses and said that they would notify us when the documentary was being broadcast (they said around August), since it would also be available for viewing online. So I might end up on a French documentary. Badass!

Chauncey and I getting all of our gear on for the first dive. Our dive instructor Papa informed us that they had been out earlier that morning with hundreds of kilos of fish to feed the sharks to make sure that they weren't hungry and looking for a snack of little blonde human, which was comforting. For the first dive, we went down 30 meters (the deepest I've gone so far!) to an arena where we lined up behind a wall of dead coral and watched the dive coordinators feed the sharks buckets of fish heads. Since I've had a head cold for so long I had a really difficult time getting down: besides trouble with equalising the pressure in my ears, I also apparently have a socket left over from wisdom tooth surgery that was incredibly painful. I also kept coughing from the dry air in the tank and actually vomited underwater... I've always wondered what it would be like to boot with a regulator in, and I'm not too eager to repeat the experience. The plus side of all the trouble getting down was the fact that I was relieved to finally get to my destination and wasn't afraid of the sharks at all since I was so preoccupied with descending without having my head explode. Once I got down though, it was really cool. There were tons of sharks, and even more species of large carnivorous fish that wanted to get in on the feeding. After watching that for about ten minutes, we all swam up to another similar set up at around 10 meters, where we peeked over some coral to watch Papa feed lots more fish. We got good positions for this one, as we were pretty much in the center and had all of the animals swimming around very close to us. After watching that for 20 minutes we headed up to the surface for a break between dives.

Hanging with the Frenchies during our 1 hour surface interval. I tried speaking a little of fragmented French with them but gave up quickly and chatted with them in English instead. It was kind of funny when we got out of the water and onto the boat - they were filming each of us come up and asking each of us how the dive was, and as soon as I got on deck I ripped off my mask, which was filled with snot from my sinus struggles underwater, so I'm hoping they keep that glamour shot for their documentary, haha. We had a little snack of FMF peanut butter cookies and some very milky sugary tea, which was delicious. Diving always makes me ravenous so this may have been one of the most satisfying meals so far, although the processed cheese sandwiches at the Natadola reef on our spring break field trip is a close competitor. I noticed that Papa had a pair of chain mail sleeves that he wore down on the first dive - he said that he gets nipped a lot during the feedings, so those are essential. He also said that buying a full suit is around US$35,000 which is just unfeasible for him, so all he gets are sleeves.

My friends couldn't bring their underwater cameras down because of the pressure, but this is an idea of what we saw on the second dive. We only went down 15 meters, but the larger sharks like feeding at around that level so we saw a whole bunch. The leaders had a giant metal box filled with fish heads sunk down, and we again lined up behind some coral while laying down on some cement blocks that had been placed there. The shallower dives had lots of black tip and white tip reef sharks (along with a lot of other species that I didn't recognise), but this dive had the larger sharks, primarily bull sharks like the one in the picture. These were about 12-15 feet long and were biiiig fish. We weren't lucky enough to see a tiger shark, but the rest of what we saw was still amazing. There was a big swarm of large fish that would pick at the fish heads when they were released, until a bull shark swam through and chased them all away to gulp down the food in one bite. The spot where we were laying had a moray eel that lived just over the other side of the coral that didn't really enjoy our presence, as it kept bending around to stare at us and slither out to get a closer look. Moray eels are pretty nasty looking things with sharp white teeth, so we were a little nervous until one of the dive instructors swam over it and pretended to swat it with his hand, which made it retreat.

Overall we were all very happy with the dive. We never felt threatened or afraid, just excited. Besides the sharks, we saw tons of species of fish that we hadn't seen before that would come right up to our faces while we were sitting and watching, which was really cool too. Since it was so cheap, we might try to come out again some other weekend. I had an amazing time and this was something that I was dying to do while I'm in Fiji, so I'm happy. I can't imagine many other places where you can go and see 7 or 8 different species of sharks over the course of 2 dives.