The Tiger Sharks of Tiger Beach
See our SCUBA pages for some background to this trip made in January 2007 with famed shark specialist, Jim Abernethy.
This short video gives some idea of the excitement of being in the water face to face with one of the world’s alpha predators. All the ‘small’ sharks in these takes are Lemon Sharks and in any other circumstance would have been a great reason to dive. However, when a large Tiger Shark makes its entrance and starts a lazy swim towards you, the Lemon Sharks just become a minor irritation - especially when they swim into the frame of a good shot.
Tiger Beach is a beautiful beach off the coast in the Northern Bahamas. It’s exact location is not publicized to protect the sharks from fishing. Unfortunately every year Jim notices that several known ‘player’ tiger sharks do not return and have either ended up as a trophy on some wall or as a mercury rich helping of shark fish soup.
This three minute video sample is a Quicktime .MOV file encoded to 640x360 at 800bps in Apple’s Compressor from the original HDV material shot with a Sony FX1 housed in an LMI BlueFin housing. White balance was set off the surface. With visibility at around 30m and sun streaming down into relatively shallow water the conditions for shooting quality video were about as good as one could hope for. After Jim’s confidence building briefings, camera shake was also kept to a surprisingly small percentage of the takes, despite the toothsome close encounters.
This .MOV file plays best with a QuickTime plug-in, and should start streaming after a few minutes depending on your connection speed. The file is quite large (17meg) so be patient while it loads.
