The Sharks

We're back from Hawaii! We're tan but tired. It was fun to be there again, but it's great to be home too. So far the only pictures I've had a chance to upload are from the shark cage dive (ok, really a snorkel) that we did on the north shore of Oahu.

We did this same dive on our honeymoon two years ago, and it was so much fun we decided to do it again. It's a good thing we did, because it was a completely different experience this time around. Two years ago, we were surrounded by about 30 galapagos sharks. These are medium-sized, generally non-aggressive open water sharks. This time, we had an opportunity to see three large-sized, generally very aggressive tiger sharks. Tiger sharks are notorious for causing most of the shark attacks in Hawaiian waters when they do happen (it's actually pretty rare out there). It just so happened that we timed the shark dive with the beginning of the tiger shark migration season.

Here are a few of the shark pictures. If you want to see all of them, click here.

This is the largest shark we saw - about 14 feet long. All three sharks were females.


They get pretty close, and they will often bump or bite on the cage to test it out and see if it tastes good. This is also a good photo of the tiger sharks' identifiable stripes.


I never want to see this view OUTSIDE of a cage.


This one is a little hazy, but it shows how large the shark is (14 ft) compared to the boat we took to get out there (32 ft).