Reef Encounters
GQ Active Magazine (UK, 1999)

The sea off Burma is the perfect place to get really close to sharks, says Gill Williams.

Until 1997, Mergui in Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma) was a fiercely guarded military zone. There are garrisons on most of the larger islands and, apart from the military, the only other people sailing through these waters are Mokens, sea gypsies who spend up to five days at a time at sea on long-tail boats. Now, a handful of divers have been admitted into the region on expeditions led by a company called SEAL. Few foreigners visit Myanmar and contact with local people is limited to a couple of hours in the port town of Kawthaung. ...

Mergui’s underwater safaris attract the sort of adventure-seekers who appreciate sharks as magnificent predators rather than natural enemies. Sightings are rare in most parts of the world – Greenpeace estimates that fishing fleets take at least 100 million sharks every year, slicing off the fins and tossing the rest of the animal back into the sea – but here, far from the factory ships, the natural order still reigns.

In the past, I’ve had to work hard to meet sharks, spending days shivering in the twilight zones of the Southern Ocean and Sea of Cortez in the hope of a fleeting glimpse. In Mergui, I came face to face with a bull shark on my first dive and he left no one in doubt who was the boss. A gang of delinquent white tips had been circling the dive party swam clear and a shoal of barracuda bolted.

Bull sharks deserve serious respect. Extreme levels of testosterone have been found in bull sharks during the breeding season and this may account for their particularly antisocial behavior. ...

We hugged the reef, peering into the blue as we circled towards the surface. I saw the bull shark far below. Trawling above our heads was a one-and-a-half meter white-tip reef shark flanked by a shoal of youngsters hoping for pickings from the boss’ table. This is where you must keep your nerve, as you hove unprotected at six meters on a slow ascent in shark-infested sea. An attack was possible but the bends were a certainty if we came up to fast, and we were two days from the nearest decompression center.

Brendon inflated an orange marker buoy to attract the attention of Dan Tai, the Burmese deck hand, and I slipped just beneath the surface to watch for wildlife as we waited to be picked up by the dive boat. A small shoal of pygmy devil rays swam near, beautiful and harmless. I watched them glide gently past and I felt my heart rate slow. ...

As often happens, the sea was much calmer beneath the surface and the water was the clearest we’d seen in several days. It was a joy to be able to fin through space, floating gently above a sandy bottom, past purple coral and iridescent blue sponges. A baby shark practiced menacing looks on a shoal of little orange fusiliers. They ignored him. ...

I flashed my torch into a crack in the rock at a moray eel, which snapped at the camera, and I turned the spotlight on a colony of lobsters. It was a gentle dive and we ascended slowly through a shoal of snapper silhouetted against the light. We were quite low on air, having stayed down as long as possible and expecting an easy fin back to the boat.

Between the storm and the marauding bull sharks, diving off Mergui gave new meaning to the phrase "caught between the devil and the deep blue sea." But, if you are quite an experienced diver, the unspoiled Myanmar coast is a true last frontier of adventure diving and, of course, the perfect place to get really close to those elusive sharks.