Chasing Angels - Diving with Angel Sharks in the Canary Islands

First published in Shark Diver Magazine December 2008

CHASING ANGELS

Some shark dives are planned months in advance and some just come together out of nowhere. This one was as random as they get.

Claire and I were sitting in a café in St Maarten figuring out where to go next. We were contemplating flying back to Canada for the summer when the phone rang with a job offer. Would we like to crew a 103ft racing yacht from the Caribbean to Valencia, Spain? Hell yes! Three days later we set sail on our first transatlantic crossing.

It was a smooth trip except that I had some problems with my camera charger and couldn’t shoot the whales and dolphins that we encountered on route – that sucked.

When we finally hit the Azores, I Googled ‘Valencia Nikon D2X’ to see if anyone might have a charger that I could borrow. Juan Moro’s name popped up on the internet so I emailed him for help.

When we met him at the dock in Valencia he handed me his charger and then asked if we were there for the festival. It turned out that the biggest underwater film festival in Spanish history was starting the next day in the new Valencia Aquarium and Juan was working as an underwater cameraman for the Spanish company Blue Screen. He is also a self confessed shark nut – isn’t everyone? The next day he introduced us to another guy named Juan (there are a lot of Juans in Spain) from the tourism bureau who issued us with press passes and put us up in a fancy hotel with the rest of the paparazzi from different dive magazines around Europe. Sometimes you’ve just gotta toast the shark gods and smile.

As soon as the other photojournalists found out that I worked for SDM, the conversation turned to sharks and all the European shooters had the same question “Have you dove with the Angel Sharks in the Canaries yet?”

Angels are usually really hard to find so we were stoked to find out about a place where sightings were virtually guaranteed. After the festival we bummed around Spain for a while but the action was slow so I emailed a couple of dive shops in the Canary Islands. I got through to Brian Goldthorpe from Davy Jones Diving in Arinaga, Gran Canaria. He told me that not only do they see Common Angel Sharks on a regular basis but that he was working with a team from a University in Las Palmas to track Angel Shark sightings. It sounded like he was our man.

We scoured the internet for cheap flights and snuck all the heavy camera equipment into our hand luggage. Brian found us a cheap hotel and before we knew it we were in the El Cabron Marine Park bouncing along a dirt track in a beat up mini van.

El Cabron is a daunting place. It consists of a barren volcanic hillside covered in Saharan sand deposited by the relentless tropical winds that carry the scorched grains all the way from mainland Africa. Not much survives above the high tide line but underwater life abounds.

We geared up, tiptoed down a gravel path and descended to 70ft where the Angel Sharks are supposed to reside. I looked around for awhile hoping to spot a tell tale fin tip or the pulse of a partially covered spiracle but nothing caught my eye so I bowed to experience and fell into step behind Brian who was methodically exploring the sand close to the rocky slope that we were drifting along.

Before long Brian stopped swimming and pointed downward at the sand. I could see nothing and looked vacantly back at Brian as he hovered above the shark. Settling on the bottom he began to gently fan the sand away until the head of a Common Angel Shark began to take shape. He then swam off and let me head in for a better look.

Even among angel sharks, these ones are crazy looking. Most angels are plain or spotted but the Common Angel Sharks in the Canaries have adapted to the black and white sand by developing a lattice of lines that mimic the local terrain perfectly. Consequently they are almost impossible to see when lying still, covered with a little sand.

Predictably, the shark took off as soon as I started shooting but Brian was able to find another and over the next few dives we had enough encounters for me to build up a nice variety of pictures.

The sharks would swim away at about 2 knots which meant that they were just about possible to keep up with. Over three days in the water we developed a routine for maximizing my shooting time. Brian would find a shark and then leave me to uncover it. I would shoot for as long as it let me and then give chase to get some swimming shots. Claire would then kick like a woman possessed and get on the far side of the shark to encourage it back towards me. Being the professional that she is, she would do this without breathing so as not to wreck the shot with bubbles. If you think that’s easy, next time you’re underwater see how far you can swim at full speed on one breath!

Exhausted, Claire would eventually veer off and I’d swim away into the blue chasing the shark at a distance, hoping that it would get used to me and slow down before I ran out of air, energy or both.

This worked well until the last day. It was towards the end of the final dive and we had swum right out of the bay and into the next one. Brian found a particularly stunning shark and I took off in pursuit. The shark swam quite slowly, tantalizingly out of shooting range but close enough for me to really appreciate its fluid swimming motion as it glided over the sand. I was in 50ft of clear water and feeling pretty comfortable. There was a swell up on the surface but I was so focused on the beautiful shark that I tuned out everything else and simply frog kicked along beside it.

After about half an hour of this, my air supply was getting low and I knew that Brian would be getting worried so I drifted up to the surface and took in my surroundings. Reality really sucks sometimes. I was looking up at a coastline that I didn’t recognize. I was no longer in a bay at all, but drifting past an unscalable cliff face that the Atlantic rollers were slowly pushing me towards. The surf was breaking on submerged boulders at the base of the cliff and white water was shooting skyward and raining back down around me. If I let the surge drag me any closer to the rocks it wasn’t going to be pretty.

I slipped back underwater and kicked as hard as I could out to sea. Fortunately the current was not too strong and when I next surfaced I had made some ground in the right direction. When a particularly high wave picked me up I could see the bay where I should have exited. It was a good kilometer from where I was now so I took a reverse compass bearing and flipped onto my back for the long swim home. At one point I started getting sucked over a submerged shelf that spun me around like a top and there was a counter current that wanted to pull me out to sea if I was careful (next stop Brazil) but the swim was otherwise just a good workout. After about 40 minutes of kicking I could see Brian and Claire standing on the far shore with binoculars. I gave them a big ok and then sank underwater to swim the last leg more comfortably. Brian assumed the worst and plunged back in to assist. I thought this was pretty funny but I have to commend his diligence. If you ever make it to Gran Canaria, look him up: davyjonesdiving.com.

Claire was her usual calm self throughout the whole adventure. Later she came out with the classic line “I knew you were ok because you swam off with a shark”.

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