Les Stroud Online

Thursday Dec 13th 2007, 7:55am What a difference a day makes! The last two days have been incredible. We headed out at midday by speedboat to meet up with the Dolphin Dream, our ninety-foot boat that we will use as our filming base. As we pulled up to the larger vessel we could see a mass of fins at the back of the boat. The crew had already been chumming and had a huge school of lemon sharks, along with a few tiger sharks, circling the boat. As we only had a few hours we got right into the filming and the sharks didn't let us down. Mayhem always ensued whenever a fish carcass was thrown into the water, giving us a chance to film a lot of the ‘topside' segments of my hosting. Yesterday was the big day. We left the hotel and got out to the big boat early enough that the water was still clear from the high tide. Once the low tide comes in the water gets milky and is not very good for filming, so we only have a short window of opportunity to get great images. I, along with Andy, the camera crew extraordinaire, as well as Stuart Cove, the shark expert from the Bahamas, Laura Bombier, the still photographer and Eli Martinez, the editor/publisher of Shark Diver magazine, spent the entire day in and out of the water in scuba gear. The big lemon sharks did not disappoint. We conducted a number of tests that had Stuart and I in the middle of the action, getting bumped and jostled by these big sharks. Don't let the name fool you, they can be very aggressive and could rip a human apart at any time without much effort — especially since there were up to thirty of them coming in for the stringers of fish we took down to the bottom of the reef with us. Let's see how today goes! They are calling me to get on the boat. Later that day We got an early start again, and made it out to the Dolphin Dream (the big boat that hails from West Palm Beach, Florida) for a good morning of shooting. The water was perfectly clear in the high tide and the sharks were ready. One of our tests didn't film that well yesterday due to the milky, low-tide water so we decided to recreate it this morning. Money! The big lemon sharks came in and bumped and circled all around me while I was trying to figure out a way to get live and dead fish trapped in a milk carton. These lemon sharks are around eight to ten feet long and can rip off a human leg without much effort at all. To get them to back off a bit, I gave them a sharp hit on the nose with a stick or my fist; it did seem to scare them off fairly well. Though, when I tried punching them in the side to keep them away, it felt like hitting a big tarp. Their sides just absorbed my fist, as if they didn't even know I was there. The nose is the key. It's a sensitive area for them and they don't like being hit there at all. A few times, when punching them to keep them away, I swear the look they gave me was definitely ticked off, as if to say: do that again and I'm taking a piece out of you. Then came the test with the tiger sharks — three or four of these fourteen-foot giants moved in and stayed on the perimeter of the school of lemon sharks. We set up a manikin to float out to the tigers and put two cameramen on the bottom (about thirty feet down) to film it. Unbelievable! One huge tiger came in slowly and after a bit of a wait he figured out that the manikin was not going to hit back, not going to defend itself. While the divers used their cameras to keep the shark from attacking them, it ripped that dummy apart! It was a full on tiger shark attack in the scariest way. No mercy. No relenting. Ok - now we have to set up for the next test and I have to get back in the water.
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