Every trip is different. I always say that, but this trip was VERY different from the norm. It took me a while to finally sit down and try to type this report up. I had no real reason for it, other than it took me a while to try and digest the experience as a whole. My trip reports are normally about my observations of our guests and their experiences, how many sharks showed up. How they behaved and so on. This trip to Tiger Beach was hands down one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had going out there and I knew that trying to write down what I saw and experienced was going to be hard...

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 begining of another roll. It was amazing.

A special thanks to the crew of the Dolphin Dream and our guests for a great trip to Tiger Beach...