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In the world of shark diving, complaints by irritated anglers who cannot
land whole fish make for encouraging and tantalizing leads. It was just
this sort of frustration that first led divers to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island
in the late 1990s. Aggravated fisherman following the tuna migration
150 miles west of Baja California seemed to be bringing tuna heads
onboard as often as tuna, and so a few daring souls eventually decided
to venture in and see what was down there. Those first snorkelers didn’t
stray very far from the swim platform while viewing the 14-foot great
white sharks, for no one knew much about how the sharks would react.
The Great White Sharks
of Guadalupe
TEXT AND PHOTOS BY STEPHEN FRINK
Guadalupe presents a unique opportunity for close encounters with great white sharks in stunningly clear water.
Below: Accessible by liveaboard boat, shark dives are conducted within the safe confines of cages.
Opposite: Cages have specially designed viewing ports, big enough for unobstructed viewing with cameras and
small enough to keep the sharks on the outside.
booming. We now know the whale sharks converge on the
area to feed on the tiny, clear eggs of little tunny, members
of the tuna family, which spawn in huge numbers along
the continental shelf. Older fishermen recall spotting large
groups of whale sharks as long ago as they can remember,
but back then nobody paid much attention to sharks.
REFLECTION
Many experienced divers struggle with a sobering reality:
Overfishing and a long list of other human factors have
systematically reduced the oceans to a shadow of their former
glory. “You should have seen it before” is a phrase we hear all
too often, and in most cases the depletion is indisputable. It can
weigh heavily on the souls of passionate divers, but the whale-
shark aggregation off Isla Mujeres offers us a reflection of a time
long past — a time before we exhausted the inexhaustible, a
time of abundance, of massive migrations and unimaginable
aggregations. It speaks of wonders yet undiscovered and of the
resilience of the oceans if they are given a chance. If a gathering
of hundreds of whale sharks can go unnoticed so close to a
major city, what else is still out there yet to be discovered? For
me, this aggregation is message from the oceans that there are
wonders still worth protecting. But we must act now before
they, too, become shadows in the past.
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SUMMER 2012