Heart of the Nation: Coral Bay 6701
When he found himself in the water with up to a hundred sharks feeding on a “baitball”, Daniel Nicholson knew just what to do.
Daniel Nicholson was two years into a business and accounting degree when he had an epiphany. The uni was holding a careers day, and a bunch of suits had been brought in to tell the students about their working lives. As they droned on about audits and tax brackets and balance sheets, a radical notion took hold in his 20-year-old mind. “I looked at them all and thought, ‘I just don’t want that sort of life. I want a life of adventure’,” Nicholson says. That very day, he decided to quit uni. “I saved up money from hospitality jobs, took off backpacking – and didn’t come back for five years.”
These days Nicholson, 31, is a photographer on the dive boats in Coral Bay, WA, shooting the creatures of Ningaloo Reef – whale sharks, humpbacks and manta rays, chiefly – and the tourists who come to swim with them. Working in the dive industry has taken him all over the world in recent years, from Honduras to French Polynesia, Vietnam to Indonesia. Every day is an adventure; every day brings moments of wonder and excitement. Nothing quite compares, though, to the evening dive on Ningaloo when he found himself in the water with up to a hundred sharks feeding on a giant school of baitfish.
The sharks had corralled the baitfish in shallow water inside the reef; trapped and desperate, they’d bunched up tight into a swirling, silvery mass known as a “baitball”. In extremis, these millions of fish were suddenly behaving like a single organism, shapeshifting to avoid the lunges of those hundred snapping jaws. “The sharks were in full-on hunting mode, with fast, erratic movements,” Nicholson says. He was mindful to project a confident, assertive body language of his own, but he still had to fend off a couple of sharks that started paying a bit too much attention to him. Finally, he plucked up the courage to swim intothe baitball – “the biggest adrenalin rush I’ve ever had” – and shot this amazing image of a grey reef shark lunging through it.
After witnessing this drama for a couple of hours, the sun was setting so he got out. The next day, the baitfish were gone. What happened? Nicholson thinks the survivors probably escaped to deep water under cover of darkness. “But who knows? Maybe every last one of them got eaten.”
To see more of Daniel Nicholson’s photography, go to:
https://www.danielnicholsonphoto.com/