THOMAS P. PESCHAK

Sometimes even the best laid plans are thwarted by mother nature, as was such when I set out with Mark Addison (Blue Wilderness), Cheryl-Samantha Owen and Charles Maxwell to photograph Zambezi (Bull) sharks on a remote and rarely dived reef of the Maputaland coast. For one week the wind blew from the wrong direction, the game fish were not running and while seeing many zambezi sharks on every dive, they were shy and always retreated to the inky depths below on every approach.  However after almost one week of  not getting any Zambezi shark images, my persistence was rewarded by the best whale and raggedtooth shark encounters of my career. A incredibly playful whale shark stayed with the boat for more than 1 hour and regularly approached and tried to gently bump me. She hung vertically and stationary in the water for minutes at a time, gulp feeding on dense assemblages of plankton. At one stage she almost swallowed the camerea in her cavenous mouth, resulting in a unique set of whale shark images to be published later this year. I also had the priviledge of diving with a dozen or so raggedtooth sharks in crystal clear waters for two hours.