Coming face to face with a mako shark

I’ve found the cure for seasickness, and it doesn’t involve drugs, pressure points or herbal remedies. But I’d recommend this therapy only to the truly adventurous.

All I had to do was jump in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego and go eyeball to eyeball with a mako shark that was at least my size or perhaps a bit bigger.

When this big fish — sporting a mouth full of snaggly teeth — charged out of the bubbles of a breaking whitecap, the nausea that was plaguing me disappeared in a flash.

It was replaced by a laser-like focus on the 6-foot mako, which was swimming around chunks of frozen fish from the chum bucket, which my group of snorkelers had used to attract it. At one point, the mako opened its jaws wide and snapped up a mackerel head.

What, might you ask, was I doing nine miles off the coast, swimming among scattered fish parts with a mako, which happens to be in the same family (I discovered later) as the great white?

Call it research, call it foolishness or blame it on testosterone. But when I read on the SD Expeditions website (www.sdexpeditions.com) that dive masters Nick LeBeouf and Kyle McBurnie were offering snorkeling trips with blue and mako sharks, I mulled over the opportunity for a couple of days, then signed on for an outing last August. As my 13-year-old scuba-diving daughter is fond of saying, “Yolo,” which stands for “You only live once.”

I’ve seen dozens of sharks while scuba diving around the globe — including sevengills off La Jolla Shores, blacktips in the Caribbean and gray reef sharks off Palau in the western Pacific.

But I’d never seen a mako up close and personal, nor a great white.

Swimming with a mako, a blue or a more docile whale shark is something I’d never consider doing by myself. But I’d dived with LeBeouf two years ago in the kelp beds off La Jolla, where we’d seen several shy sevengill sharks.

I also knew that LeBeouf had guided trips off Baja for six years in which clients, protected by cages, got exceedingly close to great whites. But in this case, in our search for blues and makos, there wouldn’t be a cage. So trusting my guide was paramount.

In any case, I planned my adventure to coincide with a family trip to San Diego that included visits to Legoland for our two youngest kids and the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for the whole family.

After we toured the aquarium, where we saw beautiful golden-hued jellyfish, tiny filigreed sea horses, green-skinned moray eels and bright orange Garibaldi damselfish, I sat in the lobby and gazed at a pair of large sharks mounted on the wall. One was a great white, and the second — only slightly smaller — was a mako. With a mouth full of sharp teeth and a thick body, it didn’t look a lot different to me from a great white. (And truth be told, it isn’t.)

Early the next morning I met up with LeBeouf, McBurnie and several other adventurers at a bait shop on Mission Bay. After a briefing, we hopped on Capt. Danny Howard’s aptly named Yellow Charter Boat and headed out into the ocean.

LeBeouf, who has been offering these trips since March 2013, said shark populations off the coast used to be much larger.

“In the 1980s, people would go out with cages and sometimes see 60 blue sharks and some makos,” he explained. “Then long-lining came in and decimated their numbers. In 2001, they finally banned that practice off our coasts and now the populations seem to be coming back — which is nice — but not anywhere like it used to be.”

LeBeouf said after six years of diving with great whites off Baja’s Guadalupe Island, he wanted to offer “something different” for divers visiting San Diego. He and McBurnie have run about 30 trips and seen as many as eight blues and five makos at one time on an outing. And an occasional mola — also known as the ocean sunfish. Great whites have shown up several times too.

LeBeouf said that although numbers may be increasing slowly off California, the worldwide population continues to decline because of the continued popularity in Asia of shark fin soup.

“I’m hoping that by getting people more aware of sharks and actually seeing them out in the ocean, that they’ll appreciate them more,” he said. “So, in part, this is an educational effort to create more awareness, besides a great adventure.”

We motored about nine miles off the coast and began chumming and waiting. After about four hours of napping and chatting with our boat captain, I was beginning to worry we might not see any sharks.

“Sometimes they show up in 45 minutes, sometimes it takes a lot longer,” LeBeouf said. “But once they come across the chum line, they usually rise to find the source.” Makos, like great whites, live offshore at depths of about 500 feet, while whites tend to cruise much closer to the coast and have more contact with humans. Makos can grow to 12 feet and swim more than 45 mph. Great whites grow to 20 feet but aren’t as speedy.

When nearly five hours had passed, LeBeouf hopped in and slapped the ocean’s surface to see if he could scare up some interest. All I could do was trust his judgment and watch.

Within a few minutes, the strategy paid off. I saw LeBeouf’s head snap around as he sighted and then followed a mako cruising nearby.

“The mako was curious, not what I’d call aggressive,” he said. “It wanted to see if we were friend or foe. Once they show up, they’ll often stick around for 45 minutes to an hour.”

Once LeBeouf felt comfortable with the shark, the four snorkelers in our group slipped into the water. We were “armed” with 2-foot-long PVC pipes (a.k.a. shark sticks) to steer the mako away if it got too close. For the next half-hour, the silver and blue fish cruised in, around and out of our group.

Although I never felt threatened, all my senses were on high alert.

The key to making these shark dives safe, LeBeouf said, is to understand the sharks’ behavior and know when it is safe to be in the water with them. I figured it was somewhat akin to being around a dog you don’t know. Having a stick helps.

“As long as you let the shark know from the beginning not to get in your space, you’re most likely all right,” he said. “It also depends some on their size. You have to let them know what is a comfortable distance, and once they break that barrier, you should probably exit the water, which we have done a few times.

“You simply have to know when it’s not OK to interact with them,” he said. “Our job — and we take it seriously — is to keep people safe and let them see the sharks in their natural habitat without a cage.”

If they come too close, he said he uses the PVC pipe to gently glide the shark away.

“You don’t have to poke them. And if you are shooting with a big camera, they can be mouthy and will even bite the lens. As long as your camera gear is bigger than their mouth, you’re OK.”

When the mako got bored with us and moved away, it was time to climb back into the boat. My nausea returned. As we motored back to San Diego, I fed the fishes over a side railing. But it was worth it. I still want to go back and dive with a blue shark. Maybe a mola too.

If you go

For more information on diving with SD Expeditions and its shark-viewing excursion, go to https://www.sdexpeditions.com or call (858) 707-5666. Trip price is $350. Another San Diego-area outfitter that offers similar trips is Shark Chums, (760) 574-8632, https://www.sharkchums.org.

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