Travel - My Loulé

It strikes me on the Princess II that seeing sharks first-hand in the wild may be the best conservation message there is.

attack zone on the surface with bait, Rodney Fox takes you down to the depths where great whites live.

“Out of the kiddie pool”, Andrew calls it.

With four of us inside, the cage lowers into the sea where the sharks circle. Cold water creeps up my legs, across my chest, over my face. Fear flutters in my stomach.

That’s the thing about ocean-floor cage-diving. It strips you back to yourself. You may be going underwater with Andrew Fox, a world authority on great whites who has probably notched up more encounters than any other diver over 37 years of cagediving. But as our cage drops through the startlingly azure water you feel alone; steadying your breathing, rechecking your air supply, facing your ‘what ifs’.

What if my air runs out? What if a small shark lunges through the eye-level gap between bars? Oh god, what if the cage’s hoist cable snaps?

No matter that every eventuality is covered – spare tanks, the gap is too narrow for a shark to bite, emergency safety floats. To hang 25 metres below a boat that now looks like a bath-toy in the silvered surface confronts you with suppressed fears. Because you’re going to have to deal with whatever happens. There’s no escape. Not now we’ve caught the attention of several great whites.

Two white bellies cruise slowly through the splintered sunlight above. A larger primeval silhouette hangs in the distance. Other sharks close around the cage, attracted by the fish blood

that hangs in a rust-red haze around our legs. Another shark cruises past me at eye level. It’s so close I can see the nostrils that can smell blood five kilometres away and the pores on its snout that are, even now, assessing my electrical field. Its huge black pupil is only a metre from mine. We eyeball each other.