When I moved to the UAE 11 months ago I was warned by many that the diving here is not very good. “Expect to have 5 m viz and you will not be disappointed” is what many said. I was also told that there’s not much marine life. Living and working in Malta

for 3 years I was used to the lack of marine life, bad visibility I was used to from the diving I did when I lived in Sweden.I and Scott looked at many diving videos on YouTube from UAE before we came and some of them showed us that there might be more marine life than what people said. We decided to give the place a chance.
Diving for me is all about the marine life encounters. I am not a person who dives for the adrenaline or the excitement. I love observing what the underwater organisms are up to. I can sit watching the same damselfish polishing its nesting- rock for a very long time. But of course my main love is with sharks. The more I learn about sharks the more beautiful I think they are. And it really is the perfect predator; the “design” of it has not changed in millions of years.
I had heard some people say that they occasionally saw blacktip reef sharks in the area and that during summer months we had the very occasional Whaleshark. I did not expect to see any sharks and for the first 2-3 months I did not see any at all, nor did I hear anyone say that they did. One day in mid-March I was guiding a family of 3 people around a divesite called Dibba rock. In the end of our dive I decided to go up shallow and enjoy some of the beautiful corals that we have there. And then it happened, a blacktip! It was swimming slowly towards my group but turned as soon as it heard us breathe. I came up feeling very excited.
After that dive I went up shallow every time we went to Dibba rock, and every time I found sharks. Very soon I learned exactly where to find them; in about 60 cm of water. Now I could almost guarantee our customers sharks on our Dibba dives, and on some dives we found ourselves surrounded by 20 or so sharks. I could never get enough time with them!
Summer came with the heat and the visibility got better, some dives we had about 20-30 m. Sharks started to go deeper and I could now find them at around 10 m or so.
One day Iwas teaching a 13 year old girl her Open Water course, doing her 3rd dive ever at Dibba. It was very murky so I explained that probably we would not find any sharks since they tend to stay a few meters away from us. About 10 minutes in to our dive I turned back to ask the girl how much air she had left, and when I turned back around it happened! At first I could only see a very large black hole swimming towards me, and then I understood; this was a feeding Whaleshark coming straight towards me. It swam pass me 2 m away. I had never seen an animal that big underwater but somehow I did not freak out, I grabbed the girl just in case she would get scared.
“Lucky” everyone told me, and I really thought that was a once in a lifetime experience. But the UAE waters was going to surprise me yet again just a month later. On another teaching dive me and the rest of our divecenter found ourselves surrounded by no less than 4 Whalesharks. We swam around with them for about 20 minutes and it seemed like they liked the attention because we saw them on all our 3 dives that day.
My love for sharks has only grown since I came here and I am very surprised how much sharks we have here. Unfortunately I have seen even more species of sharks in the fish markets here, both hammerheads and leopards. It is very sad for a shark-lover like me to hear that these waters use to have a lot more sharks that what we have now.
One of the most common things I hear when I am teaching is that people are scared of the sharks and that they might get attacked when we are diving. And I have to say most people forget very quickly that they were scared when they see the sharks for the first time, because they very soon realize that the situation is quite the opposite: sharks are very scared of us.
I wrote this post mainly to make people aware of what the UAE have in terms of marine life (not as little as people told me), but also to say that I spend a lot of time swimming with sharks, and never have I thought that I was not safe.
So let’s go see some of these amazing creatures.