When John Brooks stepped into his wetsuit and strapped on his scuba tank to go diving on Wednesday near Hubbards, N.S., the 75-year-old never expected to find himself within reach of an apex predator.
“We gotta get out of here,” Brooks remembers thinking as a great white shark entered his line of vision, close enough to touch. “This is his home. This is not ours.”
Brooks, who was born and raised in Massachusetts but now lives in Florida, is visiting Nova Scotia for the first time with his wife.
WATCH | The moment 2 scuba divers spot a great white shark
A great white shark was spotted by two scuba divers near Hubbards, Nova Scotia earlier this week. Divers John Brooks and Eric Peterson encountered the shark in waters near Fox Point Beach, saying it was the sighting of a lifetime.
A relative novice with less than 50 dives under his belt, he was on a guided dive in waters near Fox Point Beach, about a 40-minute drive from Halifax, N.S., with Torpedo Rays instructor Eric Peterson when they encountered the shark.
“We’re swimming along, all of a sudden Eric pulls me by my strap there and he points and I look and there was this amazing creature, it was just beautiful, but at the same time, it’s like, ‘That’s a shark! What the heck?'”
Peterson has completed at least 500 dives, in locales as far-flung as Indonesia, Thailand and the Caribbean. But until Wednesday, he had never seen a great white shark in the wild.
“It just kind of came up out in the murk, and [we] just saw these big black eyes and this Cheshire grin,” he recalled on Thursday.
Peterson believes the shark was likely a juvenile and estimated it to be about three metres long.
The key when encountering one, he said, is to remain calm and motionless.
“We just sat on the bottom on our knees and just let the shark come up and sniff us,” said Peterson.
“It came straight up to us, like playing a game of chicken, had to stare ’em down, and then she passed to the left, disappeared, and came out of the murk two more times, but this time she went up and over us, and we think she was sniffing our bubbles.”
The rendezvous lasted just two or three minutes, Peterson reckons, but the memory will linger for a lifetime.
His colleagues, however, are feeling a bit jealous, he said. In his first year at Torpedo Rays, luck has been on his side.
“The dive site we were at … that’s where we teach,” he said. “We must have been there 1,000 times and no one’s ever seen a great white before, so the rest of the shop is burning with envy right now.”
According to Chris Harvey-Clark, a shark researcher and veterinarian who recently retired from Dalhousie University, great white shark sightings have been increasingly common in Nova Scotia over the past few years.
“This will be the ninth diver encounter now in the Maritimes in three years, which is just unprecedented,” he said in an interview with Maritime Noon on Thursday.
There was even another great white sighting on Wednesday, off Paddys Head in Indian Harbour, said Harvey-Clark.
He said that while researchers have multiple hypotheses on why we may be seeing more great white sharks, more research needs to be done.
“We don’t have a lot of good science on the numbers that we’re seeing, but just the observation frequency seems to indicate that we’re seeing more than we did see, say, a decade ago.”
Still feeling the excitement
A day after the surprise sighting, Brooks was still feeling the buzz.
“I [still] get shivers … up and down my spine,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find one here. Or it found me.”
It’s just the latest jolt in a life filled with adventure for Brooks. He’s served in the Vietnam War, run multiple marathons, driven across the United States and parts of Canada on his motorcycle, and even survived a nasty crash and lived to tell the tale.
Meeting a great white shark wasn’t on his bucket list — perhaps because of how unlikely it was — but he’s happy to check it off now.
As for what’s next?
He’d like to combine his love of diving with something he’s never done before — parachuting.
“Wouldn’t that be awesome?” he said.
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