Swaraj Dweep (Havelock), Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Two minutes with a reef shark off Havelock.
A blacktip at eleven metres, a dive guide who has been counting them for nine years, and a number that has been going the wrong way.
It arrived from the left, at about eleven metres, moving with the specific unhurried economy that makes every shark documentary you have ever seen feel overscored. A blacktip reef shark, maybe a metre and a half, close enough that I could see the black tip of the dorsal fin was genuinely black in the way a marker pen is black. I had been told what to do in this situation. I did none of it. I simply stopped, and it came past, and it looked at me the way a commuter looks at a tourist standing in the wrong part of the platform.
Two minutes, more or less. My dive computer says one hundred and nine seconds between the first sight and the moment it went over the drop and I lost it against the blue. Then a very ordinary rest of the dive: a hawksbill turtle asleep under a ledge, a great many oriental sweetlips, and a moray who wanted us gone.
It looked at me the way a commuter looks at a tourist standing in the wrong part of the platform.
My guide was Sanjay, who has been diving this site since 2016 and keeps a log that is not the dive shop's log. Every dive, he writes down what he saw, in numbers. Blacktips, greys, turtles, bumphead parrotfish, the state of the coral at four specific bommies he has been photographing from the same angle for nine years. He showed me the notebook on the boat, salt-swollen, in three different pens.
The numbers are not good. In 2016 he was recording blacktips on roughly two dives in three at this site. Last season it was closer to one in five. He is careful about what he claims: he is one man with a notebook, not a survey, and he says so before you can. Fishing pressure, the two bleaching events, boat traffic that has multiplied since the airport expanded — he lists the candidates without picking one. What he will say flatly is that the thing I had just been thrilled by used to be unremarkable.
That is the part I keep returning to. I had a genuinely extraordinary two minutes, and the person who made it possible experienced the same two minutes as evidence of a decline. Both of those are true readings of the same shark. It is a strange thing to be handed on a boat at nine in the morning, with the adrenaline still going and the regulator taste still in your mouth.
Sanjay's other rule, which he enforces without discussion: nobody touches anything, nobody chases, and if an animal changes direction because of you, the encounter is over and we go up-current. On a busy day at Havelock you can watch other boats work differently. I am not going to pretend I know what the answer is for an island whose economy now substantially runs on people wanting to see what I saw. But I know which boat I would get back on, and I know he has the notebook to explain why.
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