It wasn’t that long ago that a dive with bull sharks on Koh Tao was an achievable tick off your bucket list for most scuba divers. But that seems like a long distant childhood memory these days. But the Koh Tao rumor mill went nuts at the weekend when a report came out from a Divemaster at another Dive center that they had encountered a huge Bull Shark at Chumphon Pinnacle yesterday! I’m not sure who the DM was, I’ve never met him but apparently he was cruising around on his DPV with his customers so maybe slightly off the south end of Barracuda Rock when he witnessed it for just a few seconds, swimming towards him & then veering off into the shadows and gone! The Koh Tao naysayers immediately jumped on the pessimistic wagon and said no photo means it didn’t happen. Fair enough however there are elements of this story that make me think he might just be bang on the nose!
Bull sharks on Koh Tao are not strangers here.
There once was a time when you could dive around Chumphon Pinnacle and encounter 40-50 of them, some over 2 meters in size. They were there for months at a time for a fair few years starting around February as the post-monsoon visibility cleared out & then hung around till about May when the winds would come in from the west. Suddenly they’d be gone! What would often happen as the sightings became more frequent in early Feb was that you’d have a long-distance encounter with maybe 1 or 2 bull sharks one day and over the week the numbers would increase to maybe 5-10. The theory was that the Bull sharks weren’t sure what us divers were and were checking us out and then as they got more comfortable with us would become a little bolder and closer till come April you could literally swim in a soup of 40-50 bull sharks.
The other thing was that those first encounters nearly almost always came from the south of Barracuda Rock, which is exactly where yesterday’s shark appeared from.
And the final thing that makes me think this is a true encounter is that the divers were on DPV’s and that propeller noise given off by the Diver propelled vehicle definitely attracts sharks. You are probably aware that the sound of a diver squeezing an empty plastic bottle of water draws sharks in and so too does the sound of low toned propeller engine. Don’t know why. It might have something to do with the similarities of the sounds made by the food they eat.
So my opinion despite the hundreds of naysayers is that yesterday we had a Bull Shark at Chumphon Pinnacle. The following days dives at Barracuda Rock will be exciting! You might just want to join us if you are here on Koh Tao! Small groups, excellent dive guides, experienced dive professionals, large dive boats and…Bull sharks!
