Where It All Beginsīlacktip reef sharks greet divers from the moment the boat arrives at the mooring. This would have been a great photo opportunity even without the tiger, but its arrival made our White Valley dive - the first dive of the trip - exceptional. I got only a couple of passes by a single tiger shark, but I understand it’s not uncommon for several to show up. The tiger moved at a slow pace, edging ever closer to the bait.
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While the gray reef and lemon sharks were full of bravado at the outset, they became deferential when the tiger shark arrived. It also sent cues to the feed’s apex predator, the tiger shark ( Galeocerdo cuvier). The shark wrangler would occasionally swim to the box and pull out a little bait, and of course this amped up the action.
It also allowed attractively polarized groups of sharks to appear in a single frame. Our distance from the bait box seemed a bit far at first, but soon so many sharks were around it that the distance gave them just enough room to circle in a predictable fashion. Most were gray reef sharks ( Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos**), but some large lemon sharks ( Negaprion brevirostris) were also in the mix. This dive isn’t meant to be an interactive shark feed the chum is used to encourage the sharks to show up, and plenty of them did - immediately. The guide brought a small box of chum down onto the rubble reef flat, and we formed a semicircle around it, each diver about 50 feet away from the box. Unlike the dives we would do in the Tuamotu Islands later in the trip, this was a baited dive. We were diving White Valley, a shark dive off Tahiti that I’d been hearing a lot about. We soon discovered, however, that the real action was 60 feet below. From the moment we pulled up to the mooring buoy, a squadron of blacktip reef sharks surrounded the swim platform, no doubt accustomed to handouts.