A group of divers off the coast of Lions Bay got more than they ever thought possible with the sighting of a rare shark on Thursday night.
It is possible to catch sight of a bluntnose sixgill shark off the coast during a night dive in August and September. But it is still rare.
However, during their first dive, while the sun was still up, the group spotted her: a juvenile female about nine feet long.
“It was quite amazing,” Mitchell Hewitt, a marine biologist and commercial diver, told Global News.
“We weren’t expecting it. And you see … a giant grey-white shape come out of the darkness straight at you. It was pretty amazing.”
Hewitt said the group was diving with the shark for about 10 minutes.
“She was very friendly,” he said.
“It was really amazing. Very playful. She actually swam between my legs, and I had, like, a dog, like a big dog, and I had to push her away, just so you know, just like she didn’t accidentally hurt me.”
Hewitt said when he first saw the shark, his heart started racing and he struggled to keep calm.
“Normally our dives would be about an hour,” he said.
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“This one was about 30 minutes because I was breathing twice as fast as I normally was. And it was honestly breathtaking, right? It was amazing. It was everything that we were hoping for.”
Hewitt said that bluntnose sixgill sharks are usually deep-water sharks. They tend to swim in water from 500 feet deep to 7,000 feet deep but in August and September, the juvenile sharks will swim up into shallower waters.
“We had far warmer water this year than we typically do,” he said.
“So I think that might be part of it as well. We didn’t get as much snow as we typically did. So visibility has been significantly better, at least in the Howe Sound area.”
Steve LaRochelle, a recreational diver, was part of the group that saw the shark and described it as “beautiful.”
“People aren’t aware of all the different diversity of life that’s down in the Howe Sound especially,” he said.
“Life’s really come back there. And there’s always great things to see and to see something like this that normally is way down in the deep and only comes up basically in the summertime, the juveniles. It was a great stroke of luck.”
LaRochelle said sea lions, whales and dolphins have been seen in Howe Sound this year and it shows how the cleanup of the area has helped the biodiversity of life in the region.
Hewitt hopes people learn more about the sharks and the marine life of B.C. and how important it is to preserve it.
“I just want everybody to be able to experience the beauty of these sharks,” he said.
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