Reply To: Wow Palau! Trip Report

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Hey @NicolasREMY ,

Because the dropoffs in Palau have such epic current, you can position yourself quite closely for sharks to go past you or over you, often 4-5 meters away, closer or further. Blue Corner is widely rated one of the best dive sites in the world, but for me, Siaes Corner is just as good. You could easily see 10-20 or more sharks on a dive. Sometimes they’ll be just cruising past; other times they’ll be checking out schools of fish and kind of ‘dancing’ through them. They are mainly black tip reef sharks, but any shark species is possible there really.

I wouldn’t call the sharks at all skittish, but they are probably unlikely to interact with you or brush past you the way they might at Bass Point, the Bistro or Cathedral in Fiji (where you often have pretty much had bulls, tigers and others within arms reach). Definitely not Caribbean style close up shark photography unless you really fluked it!

Honestly, though, in Fiji and the Bahamas and the outer GBR, those shark encounters are baited, curated, orchestrated. You sit in the circle on the bottom and wait for sharks to cruise past. Palau is not like that at all. Palau’s shark encounters are abundant and ‘more natural’.

The real thrill of shark diving in Palau is that sharks are surrounded by an abundance of other pelagics – massive schools of jacks, barracudas and more. Sometimes you’ll get natural feeding frenzies on the reef – Napolean wrasse, reef sharks, diverse other fish coming in to feed at one concentrated spot, all so focused on feeding that they barely notice you. The challenge is how do you navigate the currents to get yourself where you want to be to get the shot. (Thankfully reef hooks were invented in Palau, so that becomes part of the equation.)

German Channel is a world renowned manta and shark cleaning station. It’s fantastic to watch the sharks on the stations, getting their teeth and gills cleaned. (I didn’t see any mantas this time though.)

There is one spot not far from Jellyfish Lake (not the mainland) where snorkel boats go and feed bread to the reef sharks and they come right up to you. The catch 22 is there are only lots of sharks there when there are lots of boats, snorkelers and bread in the water, which obviously isn’t ideal from a photography point of view. But if you set up away from the main pack you will get them swimming past at close range.

The shark images I took showing savage mating scars were a bit far away for ‘pretty shots’ (mainly because of the camera setups I was using) but I cropped in to show detail and they’re being used for some scientific research. My buddy got some pretty shots, but again, his were very wide angle shots, sometimes capturing 8 or 10 sharks in the scene (one will be used for the double page spread in next month’s Scuba Diver ANZ feature – plenty of blue water negative space).

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