We set out for Tiger Beach at 9.00am, with some of the group still a little bleary-eyed from discovering where the airline crew stowed the wine during their flight!

It is a one and a half hour journey from the hotel to Tiger Beach, which provided ample opportunity for people to chat about what was to come, get to know each other better, and discuss best camera configurations to achieve the images they wanted.

The boat anchored at Tiger Beach, and Epic Diving’s Vincent and Debra started chumming. This involved releasing a slick of “tasty” smelling water that would appeal to any sharks in the vicinity and get them to came and have a closer look. Within a few short minutes, the boats was surrounded by lemon (Negaprion brevirostris) and Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi). These provided an excellent opportunity to use a GoPro on a pole to film them as they circled the dive platform.

Pretty soon, the first tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) started appearing. Once they did, Vincent descended with a “crate” of food that would be used to keep the sharks interested around the area and give us all the opportunity to photograph and interact with the animals.

The diving here is very straightforward, with the depth at around 30’/10m and the water clear. Epic judge dive length by air supply, which meant for nice long dives! Throughout the 80 minute dive, there were tigers, lemons and reef sharks in abundance. Sometimes, it was hard to choose photographic subjects as there were too many!

The tigers, although some of them are big, exhibited no signs of stress or menace. They simply moved around us, taking an interest and being quite comfortable with our presence.

Our second dive of the day in many ways, echoed the first. Perhaps the major difference was that we now had 5 big tigers around us! Once again, the possibility of doing longer dive times with so many great photographic subjects meant that everyone captured some stunning images.

As we started later today, we returned in the dark to the jetty. Tomorrow will have an 8.00am start to avoid this! I will report back tomorrow on how things go on day 2 of the Wetpixel Tiger Sharks trip 2015….

1. Introduction.
2. Getting to Tiger Beach and diving at UNEXSO.
3. Tiger Beach day 1.
4. Tiger Beach day 2.
5. Tiger Beach day 3.
6. Tiger Beach days 4 +5.