Through the years, I have seen so many changes take place here, from the types of sharks seen, to the number of sharks that have called this special place home. This place has morphed and changed and it is so amazing to be able to continue to vist this site year after year. I have to give props to the guy who created, named and developed this place. Jim Abernethy is the guy who opened it up to sport divers and deserves this credit. I don"t travel with him or talk about him much because we don"t see eye to eye on anything, other than a love for sharks. But its important that it goes down in shark diving"s history that he is the founding father of Tiger Beach.

Our December trip was amazing. We had the typical 30 plus lemon sharks hanging around, and we averaged 3 tiger sharks everyday, all day. Which that in itself is not normal. Tigers usually come in for short visits. We normally start the dives with nothing but lemon sharks, then a tiger or two will show up to see whats going on, then gradually fade away leaving us wanting more. On this trip however, the tigers were hanging around all day, giving eveyone more images and video footage then anyone knows what to do with.

What this allowed me to do was observe the tiger and lemon sharks relationship in more intimate details because the tigers were hanging around for a lot longer. I was also able to learn more about them because of this as well, and because we offered up snacks to encourage the sharks to hang around the tigers stayed close, and I witnessed amazing things during this adventure.

I am used to working intimately with these sharks, because I sometimes hand feed the sharks. What working with sharks like this has done is opened up this new world that I have never paid attention to before. Especially with lemon sharks. What I have learned is that lemon sharks have different personalities, different responsibilites within this family of sharks, and there is order in what is seemingly chaos. Some sharks are on patrol, possibly keeping an eye out for potential danger or different species of sharks moving into the area, others guard the best feeding areas from other species of sharks, pushing away the tigers when they come in to feed.

For example in this above image a tiger comes in to seek out scraps at the bait box and two lemons move in to try and angle the tiger away. Its easy to say its a fluke, but I have witnessed this behavior over and over again, and always by the same lemon sharks. It was always lemon sharks I named, Scratch, or Wart, or Gills, or a few others that do the pushing around. Always it seemed that the big females were the ones doing the work. During one of our sessions I witnessed, (and it was captured on stills, not film damn it!) Scratch, a big dominate female lemon shark move under and straight up at a big tiger, forcing her up a bit. Scratch turned her head towards the tiger"s gill area and snapped a warning that sent the tiger moving away rather quickly.

She was aggressively pushing the tiger away from the bait box, and I was on fire inside, excited by what I had just seen. Witnessing that event was and is one of my most cherished moments in the water. However this love/hate relationship between the tigers and lemons was not the highlight of this trip, nore what I had difficulty putting into words. As I said I had a few tigers hanging around and I was able to interact and feed these tigers for a few days, which was a great way to get to know these sharks better.

But it was during these interactions that a new behavior that none of us (guests included) had ever seen before started happening. For whatever reason, unknown to me, upon touching the tigers, the tigers would begin flipping upside down for me?

Why I have no idea?

I wish I could say that I had a real good understanding of it, and that I knew what happened or what I did for the tigers to begin the roll, but I am not going to pretend I know, because I didn"t. What did happen was it created an opportunity to photograph some interesting interaction shots that are pretty unique, and it raised new questions that I am hoping to figure out in one of my future visits to this beautiful and amazing place...Until then here are a few more images for you all to check out till our next session at Tiger Beach in 2010.

The following morning, more bad news. We again woke up to gusting winds, and terrible vis, and no tiger sharks. The good news was that we had around 15 lemon sharks hanging around. Sometime during the morning hours, something had cut the line on one of our bait crates. It was a metal line, and lemon sharks teeth are not strong enough to cut through metal like that. I am sure they could if they set their mind to it, but their teeth are not really designed for that kind of work, and tiger sharks are notorious for cutting lines and swimming off with bait crates. I took this as a good sign that tiger sharks were already lurking around. We began chumming a little bit harder to see if a tiger shark was in the area. However, even if there was a tiger shark out there, with the vis being pea soup, we would of never seen it. We managed one dive with lemons in so-so vis at high tide, but by 1 PM, we had enough, the visability was getting worse, so we pulled anchor and tried a spot that may possibly reward us with great hammerheads.

Within a few minutes of arriving at the new dive site, a bunch of reef sharks came in for the snacks we were offering. The reef at this site was around 60 feet, but it was so blown out with sand, none of us bothered to spend any time down there. We stayed in the water column around 20 feet or so where the vis was beautiful, and hung out the frisky reef sharks that bounced off our dome ports a few times. reefies can be nasty little buggers when they want to be.

Becky shooting reef sharks.

We pulled anchor at the end of the day and headed back to tb. Everyone had fun with the reefies, but here we were at the end of our 3rd day and no tiger sharks. Granted this was only our 2nd day of diving, as we spent the first stuck in port, and the weather has taken a toll on this trip, and it was out of my hands, I was still stressing. This was a tiger shark trip and I wanted my guests to see and intereact with some tiger sharks. I do understand this is not a zoo, and there is always a strong possibilty that we may not see any sharks, we had already spent plenty of time with 2 different species of sharks. I still wanted that tiger. We always come back with the stories and the photos! I did not want this to be the first time we came home without a tiger tale.

reef shark dropping down. Just a cool looking pic.

By the morning of our third day of diving at tb, I was praying for something different...we got our wish. The weather cleared up and when high tide rolled we had gin clear water. Over 20 lemon sharks were hanging around, and within 30 minutes of the first divers entering the water, someone popped their head out and yelled "tiger shark!" We spent the day with 2 tiger sharks. One was a solid player, and the second was just a wingman and would not come in. She just hung around in the distance, sometimes coming into view. The tiger was small, maybe around 8 feet long. But she was conficent and came in close, giving everyone an opportunity to shoot plenty of pictures of her.

Our young tiger coming in for a visit. Everyone thought this was awesome, until Fluffy showed up and showed them what a full grown tiger looks like.

She stayed with us for more than 3 hours and eveyone pretty much hung out in the water with her as well. When someone would run out of air, they would come up, refill their tank and then drop back in. It was a fun day and I felt some of the pressure ease up. But we still had two days of diving left, and out here everyday is different, we needed more tiger shark action.

Lemons are entertaining when the tiger shark acion is slow.

We woke up to our 4th day of diving; beautiful ocean conditions. The wind was still blowing but not as bad, and the visability was amazing when high tide hit. Again we got the shout out "tiger shark!" However there was something extra added into the shout. It was "HUGE TIGER SHARK!" A 12-13 foot female tiger shark showed up, she looked like she was upwards of 1,200 lbs. She was big girl with signs that she was pregnant. She had old mating scars and a swollen belly. A good sign for the future.

Fluffy was a solid player and just a very well behaved shark.

I decided to bring down a crate to interact with her and see if she would stick around. She was interested in what we were doing and stayed with us for over 4 hours and everyone had amazing moments with her. I was so happy with the day. One of our guests climbed out of the water saying that after that dive, we could go home, he was so thrilled with the trip. That made me happy.

Bump-Bump!

She was a very well behaved shark and allowed us to interact with her. I was having a blast, between our tiger which we named Fluffy, and all the lemon sharks I was also interacting with, it was an amazing dive.


Fluffy was a big girl, when she would open her mouth, she would just suck the food in, not even exposing her teeth. She was just a good girl.

I really had fun interacting with the lemons. Here I was trying different things to see how the lemons would behave being nosed by a gloved hand and an ungloved hand. I wanted to feel their reactions, and see if they differed.

We spent the whole day diving with Fluffy and a bunch of lemon sharks which I named a bunch on this trip; Cindy, Scar, Slash, Wart, Browncoat. Those lemons were the dominant sharks and were the ones I would interact with and feed the most. They were the first on the scene, and the ones who got to eat first. And since I was familiar with the way they moved, I felt more comfortable feeding them. Every once in a while the lemons would get all fired up and they all wanted scraps so they would come in and things would go western.

It really is a sight to see when lemons just get into their pack scavenging mentality. Its awesome to watch.

I would just move away until the scene would settle down, then the pecking order would be back in place and my lemons would take over again. This trip was just amazing and I learned so much about the sharks that call TB their part-time home, I am looking forward to going back in December and seeing my friends again.

The lemons spend so much time here, they have created tiger beach into not only a part time feeding station, but also a cleaning station as well.

Stacey spent so much time underwater she gave up trying to get a tan up on the boat, and decided to try and get one on the ocean floor. Kidding

Stefan decided he did not want to surface at all and decided to try and catch his own dinner. Kidding, it was wild, all these lobsters were marching around in the sand. Some were marching single file. I had no idea where they came from but they were all over tb.

Our last day of diving was spent the same way, with incredible interaction, Fluffy came back in for an hour or so to visit with us, and all our guests had plenty of photo opportunities. We dove until everyone was just exhausted, it was great. Our evenings were spent chatting, eating like kings, and watching great shows like Firefly, and Summer of the Sharks, (both were everyones favorite! hehe -ok maybe I threw that last one in.). I spent the end of each day helping Andy Murch trying to get the classic Mouth open shot, above and below water at sunset. Which is crazy hard work to do by the way, that is why those images are so prized. Andy shot an image that I predict will become an award winning image in any photo contest. It is an amazing shot. I wish I could show it to you all. You will see it later on...Someday.

Thank you again to everyone who joined me on this trip. It was a real pleasure and a blast. I look forward to seeing you somewhere out in the world again. The only two people I was worried about not having a good time, was our couple from Russia, (Vladamir and Maria) they were very well travelled (4 trips to Cocos alone) but did not speak much english, so I was concerned they did not have fun. 5 days after the trip I recieved word, that this was one of the best trips they had ever been on. Which made me really happy to hear