VALERIE IS STILL SWIMMING WITH SHARKS ...AT 86!
SHE’S BEEN BITTEN FOUR TIMES, BUT THE DIVER HAS VOWED TO PROTECT HER FINNED FRIENDS
It’s not often you hear of an 86-yearold woman donning a hot-pink wetsuit to go swimming with sharks – but Valerie Taylor isn’t your average woman. Despite being bitten by sharks on four separate occasions over the years, the spearfishing champion-turned-conservationist has spent most of her life exposing the myth
‘BEING UP CLOSE TO A SHARK IS NO DIFFERENT TO A BIG DOG’
surrounding the public’s fear of sharks – and even refers to them as her ‘friends’. “Being up close to a shark is no different to being up close to a big dog,” Valerie, who lives in Fairlight, NSW, tells New Idea. “So many sharks wouldn’t attack anybody and the ones that do are just curious. If you stay still, they will let you go – I know that from experience.” Valerie has been fascinated with the underwater world since she handmade her first pair of goggles when she was 13 years old.
The adventurous blonde took up spearfishing in the 1950s and beat most of her male counterparts in multiple competitions, where she met her future husband, Ron.
The pair took out Australian titles before experiencing a radical change of heart in 1969 after watching multiple sharks being hunted and killed during an expedition.
They vowed to only shoot sharks through a camera lens and went on to pioneer underwater photography using DIY equipment.
Valerie laughs as she recalls putting her forearm in a shark’s mouth while wearing a protective mesh suit to prove their jaws don’t have any ‘crush power’.
Her and Ron went on to make history as the first divers to film great white sharks underwater without the protection of a cage for the blockbuster film Jaws in 1975.
“We didn’t realise how much harm Jaws would do at the time,” she recalls. “After
that, Universal [Pictures] sent us all around America. We did every talk show to tell people not to be afraid to go to the beach because Americans overreacted hugely.”
Their work on Jaws is one chapter of Valerie’s incredible life that was the subject of the National Geographic documentary, Playing with Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story, released last year.
It features Valerie and Ron donning chain-mail suits and covering themselves in raw fish to try and coax sharks to bite them.
In another clip, Valerie coaches a whitetip reef shark to swim over pink coral for a photograph and says, “they learn faster than you can teach a dog.”
Valerie also speaks of the only serious incident she has ever experienced with her friends when she was bitten by a shark while filming in The Bahamas.
“I was photographing a bull shark and I felt something pulling on my foot,” she explains.
“I turned around and a big female had my foot in her mouth. So, I just stood still, looked at her and she looked a bit embarrassed and let go.
I had 300 stitches and plastic surgery, but if you are going to get bitten by a shark, be working in Hollywood when you do.”
Sadly, Valerie lost
Ron to leukaemia in 2012, but it didn’t stop her diving or working with ocean conservation.
She hopes to appear in more films in the future and is planning to travel to Indonesia to explore the coral reefs.
“I don’t walk as well as I used to these days, but I can still float just fine,” she adds. “I’ll keep it up as long as I can – until my body stops me.”