WHAT LIES
BENEATH
THE SURFACE?

They are predators. The diving community is largely right about the statistics — the risk of being bitten by a shark while diving is negligible compared with the sheer number of peaceful interactions we have with them underwater every day. It is closer to the chance of being struck by lightning. But lightning does, sometimes, strike. That is precisely why we stay careful and humble when we dive with them.

You don’t have to dive with sharks

Beginner divers shouldn’t worry about any of this. There are plenty of dive sites perfect for early training that won’t put you face to face with a reef guardian on day one. It makes far more sense to build your water skills first and let the appetite for that meaningful first encounter with a big fish grow on its own.

If you are a new diver — or thinking about starting — and the idea of sharks is the very thing holding you back, know that you are not alone. Some divers simply choose never to dive with sharks, and they have no shortage of options for high-quality diving without ever meeting one. That is completely okay. You do not have to dive with sharks to belong.

My first shark

I met my first shark at around fifteen dives. It was a nurse shark, and I still remember spotting him swimming straight towards me. I felt a flicker of anxiety and thought: out of four divers, he picked me! The thought was so absurd it made me laugh — and the laughing made me relax. He swam right above me, then directly beneath me, and as he glided past my side I realised what he was doing: he had simply sized me up. Instinctively I made myself bigger and thought, hey, I’m swimming here — back off. I’m not sure the shark heard me, but it worked.

I knew nurse sharks don’t attack humans, so I was able to stay calm through the whole strange encounter. Later I learned that sharks in Belize often stay close to divers because the local divemasters feed them fish from a spear, so they linger in the hope of a snack. That one followed us for half the dive, staying near like a dog — which, honestly, was kind of wonderful.

Since then I have dived with hundreds of sharks of every kind — tigers at Cocos Island, bulls at Cabo Pulmo in Mexico. They remain some of the most enigmatic figures in the ocean, and no amount of size keeps them from moving like a symphony underwater. I still hold enormous respect for them.

Let the desire build

My advice? Don’t rush straight to shark diving as a new diver. Let the desire to meet them build at its own pace in your mind — because that desire is what will shape the encounter. Your emotion in the water is what will decide how you come to see these animals and what feels comfortable to you.

I do recommend building solid underwater proficiency first; the confidence it gives you genuinely helps make for safer, calmer shark encounters. But please don’t think of it as a box you must tick to belong to the diving community. The ocean is full of fascinating creatures, and if it turns out you’d rather not dive with sharks, that is completely fine — there are turtles, sea lions, monk seals, octopuses, and so many others who would love to meet you too.

By “fear” I don’t mean the sense that something is insane or impossible. I mean the quiet signal that I’m simply not ready yet. Over the years I’ve learned to condition my desire to my readiness — to grow into a dive through a deliberately conservative approach to risk. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t always comfortable, but it’s the discipline that keeps exploration sustainable.

Subjective and objective risk

One distinction has shaped how I dive more than any other: the difference between subjective and objective risk. The easiest way to see it is to watch a group on a liveaboard or a multi-day trip in a remote location. On day one, subjective risk feels high — but objective risk is usually very low, because first dives are organised in easy, controlled conditions, designed to let everyone settle in. Yet from the diver’s point of view, that first day is often the most stressful — even though by day four or five they may be doing far more advanced diving that is objectively much more dangerous.

As an instructor, I’ve learned to pay attention to both, because both matter. Sometimes, to do a hard dive, you need to get “into the mode.” But you have to be careful not to let the excitement of easy dives become a false licence for difficult ones — riding subjective comfort while ignoring the objective risk that actually deserves your attention. This becomes critical on deeper dives, where nitrogen begins to affect the mind, relaxing your judgment and quietly shifting your perception of risk. That is exactly when it is most dangerous.

So as you gain experience, you learn to be wise about how you plan and execute your dives — without ever losing the joy and the exploration that brought you to the water in the first place.

The diver who shaped my thinking: Sheck Exley

My personal hero in this is Sheck Exley, the legendary cave diver — a discipline I haven’t yet attempted myself. (A note on language: the cenotes I’ve dived aren’t technically caves but caverns, meaning the diver always stays within roughly 40 metres of the surface, combined vertically and horizontally. True cave diving demands entirely different skills and training.) I admire what Exley achieved through his passion — but what I admire most is his leadership and his focus on the team.

He was the kind of diver people trusted — someone who, even with his own life on the line, would put his team first. That is a rare quality, and it builds a different kind of adventure spirit around a person. He did genuinely dangerous diving, but he was never careless. His whole approach was a balance: rigorous risk management, looking honestly at every hazard, learning from mistakes, improving the procedures — and yet never giving up on exploration.

In diving, that balance is everything, because every decision you make affects other divers. Even when you choose to do something alone, just for yourself, you still put at risk the people who might one day have to come after you. You can never rule that out completely — and Exley understood it. It’s why his writing became a blueprint for safety, and why his style was always about coaching, improvement, and redundancy in the name of exploration. That, to me, is what it means to move from fear to curiosity: not the absence of caution, but caution in the service of wonder.