How Do You Swim With Aggressive Sharks?

See, lobster hunting involves this.

You dive down on one breath down to the reef, somewhere between five and 50 feet, and you put your head in a hole and you grab lobsters with a glove if you see them.

And lobsters like turbulent waters.

dark crevices, and coming out at night.

So they're the delicious goths of the sea.

I peek into a cave on my first dive down and I scream underwater because the first lobster I see is the size of my torso.

Luckily, no one can tell if you soil yourself in the ocean.

I'm so focused on the reef that I don't notice that the strong current is pulling me farther away from my friends.

And after a few minutes, I looked to my left and I see a flash of gray.

And I look deeper into the depth and I see a nine foot oceanic white tip shark swimming towards me.

I have seen dozens of sharks in my time freediving, and for the most part, they don't really care about you unless you have a speared fish attached to you.

Oceanic white tips though, although they're not the biggest species, Jacques Cousteau called them the most dangerous of all sharks because they're known to be bold, opportunistic, and they may have eaten people after shipwrecks.

So I'm facing the shark and I realized that I have never been this scared in my life because I have never faced an agitated shark alone.

So I once took a class on how to swim with sharks and I have to remember the lessons in this moment.

Lesson number one.

Don't swim away quickly, even though that's all I want to do, because it makes you look like a prey and it actually piques sharks' interest more.

Lesson number two.

Don't splash because you look injured.

So I have to fight all my instincts and do the counterintuitive thing, which is lesson number three.

Be cool.

move slowly, make a lot of eye contact, and occasionally move towards the shark.

They interpret this as dominant behavior, and they actually back off.

Side note, this technique also works in the subway.

And it works here.

I do this and the shark backs off and my heart lifts and then it loops back around.