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Now what about the thresher sharks?
They used to be at a site known as Monad Shoal, but in 2023 they moved to another one called Kimud Shoal.
Kimud is the top of an underwater hill, a plateau at about 12 meters depth, gently sloping down to 18m and then more vertical walls take the depth to over 200 meters. The thresher sharks spend most of their time at depth, but they ascend every day on the plateau to get pampered by cleaning wrasses which live up there. They sometimes go as far as jumping out of the water to get rid of unobliging remoras!
Kimud is a 40mins boat ride from Malapascua (bangkas aren’t the fastest boats) and there were already 7 dive boats when we got there, 12 during our surface interval. The most we’ve seen in a week of diving was 20 boats. With about 10 divers per boat, that’s a lot of people looking for the same thing on a not-so-huge dive site!
I started to wonder if we’d be able to capture that close-up thresher shark portrait I had in mind. Most of the encounters happen on the plateau where the sharks get cleaned, and from the aerial photo I took, assuming one boat is about 16m long, I’d say the plateau is maybe 150m long by 100 m wide. I knew there could be several sharks wandering around the rock at one time, but I reckon there often was more than 100 divers in the water, when we were there.
