Sea World Encounter: C’Est Finny : Attractions: A new exhibit gives you an up-close and personal look at the underside of sharks. Who are not interested in eating you. Really.

You’re standing on a tropical island. You stare across a coral lagoon, at a barrier reef and the open ocean beyond. You walk through a cool, winding cave, into an underwater tunnel, and suddenly, you’re surrounded by . . .

Lawyers!

No, silly, those are sharks, dozens of them, swimming, circling, dive-bombing--directly above your scalp. Your eyeballs are mere inches from the jagged edge of a tiger shark’s menacing scowl.

You’re moving at a snail’s pace, on a walkway sloping downward, and every moment you’re feeling like bait. Thank somebody for acrylic tubing!

This paranoid sensation is the focal point of the new Shark Encounter, which opens Saturday at Sea World. It’s the first of its kind at any Sea World park--packs of sharks cruising in a vat filled with 680,000 gallons of salt water. And the cost?

“Millions,” muttered a Sea World official, declining to be specific.

Given the new owner of Sea World--Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of Budweiser beer--the latest “encounter” is a way of saying, “This shark’s for you.” For those who remember the old shark exhibit, well, it’s still there. It’s just been dramatically overhauled.

The previous display is now part of a theater. After entering the tropical atoll, you proceed to a frigid screening room, where you learn sharks really aren’t as keen to munch your thighs or arms as a certain Steven Spielberg movie may have led you to believe.

On the other hand, if provoked, these critters can be downright nasty.

After the film, the screen lifts up and-- voila! --the old shark exhibit is immediately recognizable. It’s simply an appetizer for what comes next--the underwater-tunnel experience that allows you an up-close-and-personal look at . . .

Pacific black-tip sharks. White-tip reef sharks. Bonnethead sharks. Australian leopard sharks. Zebra sharks. Brown-banded bamboo and slender bamboo sharks. Bull sharks. Sandtiger sharks. And wobbegongs (those are sharks too).

The tunnel, which is encased by the acrylic protecting you and your loved ones, is also surrounded by cow-nose rays, southern and pelagic stingrays and yellowtail surgeonfish, as well as tropical moray eels and “hundreds of tropical fishes,” say Sea World officials.

Mike Shaw, who calls himself the curator of fishes at Sea World, says the Shark Encounter is the largest collection of sharks in the world. Shaw says part of the mission of the new exhibit is to dispel the “Jaws”-like myths about sharks.

“What would be the circumstances under which a shark would attack a person? Well, I don’t consider myself a shark-attack expert, but I’ll tell you what I know,” Shaw said. “A major factor is, a shark mistakes a person in the water--whether it’s a surfer, a diver, whatever--as a marine mammal, their natural food.

“So, he takes a bite. And usually, he does not come back, because it, the person, just doesn’t taste right. But the damage done is so severe that the person frequently dies.”

And this is supposed to be reassuring!

“In other cases, it appears that territoriality is involved,” Shaw said. “The shark has his territory, and here’s this big figure intruding in his space. He then assumes a posture of a hunched back, with the pectoral fins down, which means you better boogie--right now.”

It’s obvious after spending any time with Shaw that he truly loves sharks, as he does all the other fishes in the sea. He admits the lure of the Shark Encounter is partly the same as that of “Jaws”--knowing that such an animal can kill you with one chomp.

But sharks are also beautiful, in their way--sleek, predatory animals, moving gracefully, always inching forward, albeit with circumspect eyes and active mouths.

The three-part presentation features more than two dozen sharks and rays sharing a 400,000-gallon holding tank (the previous exhibit). The others--and more than 100 sharks and rays coexist in the entire encounter--are visible from the acrylic tunnel, which passes through a separate tank of 280,000 gallons of water.

Several species are also visible in the so-called first phase, the makeshift tropical isle, which visitors see immediately upon entering.

Outside, where lines are likely to snake for hundreds of yards most of the summer, a waterfall splashes amid the sounds of squawking macaws and parrots. There’s even an airy place for “stroller parking.”

Inside, the walls of the cave are lined with fossilized shells or windows chock-full of shark facts, such as, “A shark’s skin is protected by tiny, toothlike scales.”

But it’s the tunnel that offers the loudest punctuation to the Shark Encounter, which has existed in one form or another since 1976. (The park itself opened in 1964.) There’s nothing quite like being at the center of a storm of sharks, surrounded by a dreamy, bluish sea and strands of orange and purple reefs.

The very end of the walk-through offers up the teeth of a prehistoric Megalodon shark, which lived 50 million years ago and was 45 feet long. The Megalodon is extinct, but no one knows how or why its passing occurred, notes the text next to the teeth.

But, as a teen-age boy said to his girlfriend at a recent preview showing of the Shark Encounter: “How do we really know it’s extinct, if we don’t know how or why it occurred? Maybe the Megalodon is still alive, and living somewhere off the shores of Pacific Beach. Hey, baby, wanna surf tomorrow?”