Tiger Beach Dives Can Go Wrong

"Thump!"

I was diving at Tiger Beach and felt the impact on my back, but I wasn't sure which part of me was hit. I felt myself being carried through the water like a helpless ragdoll. I remember hoping I wasn't losing too much blood, although after the initial impact, I felt no pain. It turned into a dreamlike sequence, an out-of-body experience. I became strangely passive, almost resigned to my fate. I was like a wildebeest in the helpless grip of an attacking lion, only I was underwater. Was I going to die peacefully? It certainly felt like it. I didn't panic. Panicking underwater is a prelude to drowning.

My breathing remained normal. My heart rate, probably, too. I couldn't see my attacker. I'd been expertly taken from behind. Luckily, the enormous beast had grabbed me by my equipment and not my body. Doing nothing had turned out to be the right thing to do on my part.

One feels strangely detached when a huge tiger shark grabs you by your scuba tank and swims off with you, but that was what had happened. It soon decided the metal was not tasty enough and discarded me. The whole sequence had probably lasted only sixty seconds, but that's sixty seconds too much in my book.

Then I got grabbed again. The same thumping impact and the same feeling of being carried off by an invisible force. The helplessness was followed by same feeling of relief as I was eventually released from that dreadful grip. It was 2013.

One of the tigers, "Emma," as the American operators call her, has now made a habit of grabbing cameras and swimming off with them. She's done this with one camera owned by the BBC.

There have been more serious incidents.

In July 2014, John Petty, an American chiropractor and underwater photographer aged 63, went missing during such a shark dive at dusk. He was diving under the auspices of Jim Abernethy, an American operator from Fort Lauderdale, from the vessel Shear Water. Only the diver's mask and BC were found. When divers go missing, many theories abound as to what happened. Maybe this man was also grabbed by a tiger, which swam off with him, but unnoticed by the other divers in the dark.

Jim Abernethy, who originally developed the dive site, was accidentally injured by a shark during one such sharkfeeding dive in 2011, resulting in his hospitalisation. He lost a client diver to a shark bite in 2008.

Austrian lawyer Marcus Groh, age 49, was bitten on the calf, probably by one of the competing lemon sharks or maybe a bull shark that was present at such a feed. Despite efforts to save him, he died on board the boat due to loss of blood caused by the injury.

Though I was taken by a tiger, I was one of the fortunate few.

-- John Bantin
abstracted from his book Shark Bytes