Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
GREAT SIGHTS
Divers mix with a whale shark and great white in separate encounters off coast
Corey Embree dove in the waters off the Palm Beach County coast looking for sharks, but in 20 years of diving he never thought he would encounter a great white shark.
Ben Rother thought he would have to travel to another country to swim with a whale shark but came faceto-face with one on a diving trip Wednesday off the coast of Jupiter.
The two divers on Thursday recalled their thrill, marveling at how lucky they were to find these species of sharks — rare along Florida’s Atlantic Coast.
“It was amazing. It was kind of surreal. It was unexpected,” Embree said. “We wanted to see lemon sharks, we didn’t see any — just a massive white shark.”
Of the whale shark, Rother said: “It came right up to me, opened its mouth and gave me a big kiss. It greeted me and every person in the water in the same way.”
It’s likely the sharks were migrating along the Florida coastline
while feeding, according to a marine biologist with the University of Miami.
The Gulf Stream, which serves as a highway for open-ocean organisms, may have come really close to the shore in recent days, said Neil Hammerschlag, with UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
“It’s all about being in the right place at the right time,” Hammerschlag said. “It’d be a good time to go out diving, I’m thinking.”
Embree and a group of other divers recorded the 14-foot great white shark swimming about 3 miles off the coast of Juno Beach.
The shark, which was at least 4 feet wide and could have weighed in the neighborhood of 1,500 pounds, circled the group of six divers Sunday.
“It swam very slow, almost like a submarine,” said Embree, a master dive instructor from Vero Beach who recorded the apex predator using a GoPro camera.
The shark circled three to four times at a depth of about 100 feet but never showed any aggression, Embree said. After a few minutes, the shark swam away, he said.
“He’s probably investigating us. I’d never seen one, and he’d probably never seen a human.” The shark “was just as curious as I was,” Embree said.
Luis Roman, owner of Calypso Dive Charters — the company that chartered the trip — said he ordinarily dives in the area around this time of year to spot lemon and nurse sharks, as well as sea turtles, eels and other reef sea life.
“This was a very rare occasion where divers were actually able to record a great white in the ocean,” he said.
Great white sightings usually occur once or twice a year along the Florida coast or in the Keys but it’s relatively rare, Hammerschlag said.
The great white shark is a threatened species whose population has historically declined in the Atlantic, he said. However, conservation efforts undertaken over the past 20 years have led to a rebound in population, Hammerschlag said.
Seeing sharks such as great whites is also a sign that Florida’s coastal waters are healthy, because there’s enough food for big predators, he said.
Great whites are curious, intelligent, social creatures that are strategic in their hunting, he said, adding that beachgoers have little to fear.
“They are not here for people, people are not on the menu,” Hammerschlag said. “Just be shark smart and have your wits about you, and use common sense when entering the water when you are in the wild.”
Rother, who saw the whale shark with a group of 11 divers 3 or 4 miles off the coast of Jupiter, said the chance encounter had been at the top of his bucket list.
The 30-foot shark circled the group of divers three or four times, he said.
Rother’s plan to spot a whale shark involved saving up money to travel to Mexico or Belize, areas he said have high plankton concentrations, a staple in the filter-feeder’s diet.
The 29-year-old University of Pennsylvania student, who started diving in 2013, loaded his car with scuba gear and drove 20 hours to Florida for his winter break, staying with friends in different cities along the way, he said.
When he dove with Emerald Charters on Wednesday in an area called Hole in the Wall Reef, he expected to see lemon and bull sharks. The group had dropped down to about 40 feet when he turned to the left and saw the friendly shark.
“I’ve never seen something so massive and so majestic before,” he said. “It was this 30-foot creature that just wanted to hang out with you. It felt like a miracle.”
The largest whale sharks typically max out at 40 feet, but some have been known to reach up to 60 feet. They’re typically moving “very quickly,” unlike in Rother’s encounter, in which the whale shark likely lingered in the area to feed on plankton, Hammerschlag said.
“It’s a surprise a whale shark stuck around,” he said.
For more information about UM’s Shark Research and Conservation Program, visit SharkTagging.com.