“Don’t worry honey, whale sharks are more like whales than sharks.”

Sometimes when an adult shares a fact with a child it can cement in their mind as the indisputable truth.

“Some people think whale sharks are more whale than shark, but that’s exactly wrong!”

And sometimes it’s disproven within the hour.

David, our official whale shark expert, and guide for the day, had offered definitive contradiction to the words I’d just shared with my partner’s daughter, Cleo. Ol’wise David, with all his twentyish years and heavy bias towards biology over psychology, was whipping our nerves into quite the frenzy with his “facts”. After explaining that a whale shark’s tale sways side to side like a shark’s, compared to a whale’s tale that smacks up and down, he followed up with, “People think they don’t have any teeth, but they actually have millions of teeth.” I was waiting for, “people think they don’t hunt humans for sport, but actually it’s their favourite pastime.”

Although, not backed up by our whale shark guru, I still felt the spirit of my comment was made from a good place. Most of us have a primal fear associated with the word “shark”. Even swimming in a fish baren lake in the middle of land locked Ontario we can still hear the iconic John Williams score, “dona, dona, dona” playing in the back of our mind. In Cleo’s mind, and frankly most people’s, a whale is friendly, or at least friendlier than a shark. I guess until we meet a whale, we won’t be qualified to weigh in on the shark vs. whale friendliness debate, but I can tell you on this day, we met a shark and I’m not sure I’d describe it as friendly.

A few days earlier, my partner Brendine, her daughter Cleo, and I made the exhausting journey from Ontario to our little ocean front villa on the pacific side of Baja California Del Sur, Mexico. Before anyone jumps to any child endangerment conclusions, the driving force behind the whole “swimming with sharks” idea, wasn’t the two adults in this situation. It was the little blonde, thrill seeker in training ten-year old. After the fourteen-hour journey to our temporary casa, with the timing that only a ten-year-old could deliver, she exclaimed, “when are we swimming with whale sharks?”.  

We’d eventually arrange to meet up with a tour company on the opposite side of the peninsula in the Sea of Cortez. It’d be about a ninety-minute drive in our rental car to the city of La Paz, the capital and most populous city in the region, just a bit bigger than it’s more famous drunk cousin to the south, Cabo San Lucas.  

On the drive we talked about our hopes for the experience and to a much lesser degree our fears. Brendine said she hoped we’d see other marine life as well, ideally dolphins. I said, I hoped we found buried treasure worth the exact cost of this trip, and fingers crossed maybe a bit extra for the next one. Cleo agreed that treasure and dolphins would be cool, but the main topic she wanted to discuss was whether she would be forced to wear a lifejacket. Cleo was an excellent swimmer and took pride in that, as she should. In her mind, this was not only an opportunity to swim with a whale shark, but also an opportunity to showcase her swimming abilities to animals, both land and water, or any other creature we may encounter. A lifejacket was an embarrassment she was not willing to suffer and was adamant she be unencumbered in the water. Another factor was the photographic evidence. Her elementary school teacher had asked her to do a presentation on her trip and she wanted a picture not only of her swimming with the shark but doing so unaided by any perceived aquatic training wheels. I think in her mind, there was an outside chance she could get a picture riding this shark.

We said, it would be up to the tour people, but hinted at the possibility that jumping off the side of a boat into the ocean, wasn’t exactly like doing a cannonball into the deep end at the YMCA. Like most ten-year olds, or any-year olds, she chose to ignore information that ran afoul of her hopes for the experience.

In travel vernacular, our trip was called an “excursion”, which we adopted as well. I tried to push the term “adventure”, but it failed to catch on. Back home, adventure was something Brendine and I talked around a lot. She’d lived a whole other life before having Cleo, travelling throughout Australia, South America, doing a homestay in a rural Peruvian village and completing multiple yoga trainings not far from where we were now. Within five minutes of arriving in Mexico, she was speaking semi-fluent Spanish to the customs officials, as Cleo and I stood frozen, our jaws massively ajar, as mummy revealed a secret superpower.   

A part of her had gone dormant in the last decade. Kids need routine and stability, but for the adults who provide that, there is a weight, which in the last few years had grown particularly heavy. Coming out of the pandemic, with the loss of a parent, and serious health concerns with another, it felt like we needed to break an extended bad luck streak. Amidst all the dance classes, picky eating, never-ending expenses and 9-5 office drudgery, we would try to have a big adventure. Rightly or wrongly, the trip had become a referendum on whether this was possible, and at least for today, the electorate included a pancake faced, dinosaur fish.

We arrived in La Paz and made our way along the boardwalk to the marina to meet a representative from our tour company. After some quick introductions and an exchange of pesos, we were provided wetsuits and told to suit up. Lifejackets, fins and snorkels would be provided once we were on board. The lifejacket protocol wasn’t discussed, but I think we all sensed the hubris fading from our previous discussion as we faced the reality of wetsuits, boats, waves and sharks.

We boarded our moderately sized skiff, which was just big enough for our group of around twenty people. We were mostly a mix of families and adventurous looking younger couples, and I’d like to think our little trio looked like a combination of the two. It was then that we were first introduced to our guide David. Despite my earlier gripes, David was exactly the type of young, fit dude you want in this situation. Despite having a clearly well-practiced spiel of safety protocols and whale shark 101, his passion rang true, and he had just the right amount of enthusiasm to help calm our shark-inexperienced nerves. The whale shark tattoo on his forearm was indeed, not just for show.

David was keen to explain the local conservation efforts that helped ensure the health of the whale shark population. He explained that whale sharks were listed as endangered, and we were headed into a protected area where only a few small boats were allowed. Each boat was required to have a permit and before entering the area we had to take a circuitous route for a mandatory check-in with the local coastal authority. He even pointed out a boat being escorted from the area for not having a permit.

The whale sharks traveled to this area of Baja to feed off the plankton collecting in the shallower parts of the sandy bay. David explained that people weren’t sure of their ranges, but a whale shark from this area had once been spotted as far away as Hawaii. He also explained whale sharks didn’t travel in pods, or groups, and were essentially loners.

As we approached the protected area, our boat moved at a creeping pace. Boat strikes were mentioned as one of the main threats to whale sharks. David said whales don’t care about imaginary lines drawn by humans, so they always take a precautionary approach. I think anytime you do an activity like this, you wonder about the ethics of it all. David made me feel better that they were doing everything in their power to make sure the welfare of these animals and the protection of this area were paramount.

Once we entered the protected area, I could only see one other boat, which we kept a far distance from. It was one shark per boat, and we were looking for “our shark”. Our boat puttered along in mostly silence with the occasional exchange in Spanish between David and the crew. We all stared off into the horizon, searching the waters, but with my eyesight the shark would’ve had to jump into the boat for me to have a 50/50 chance of spotting it.

Thankfully, the eyes of our crew were much better, and within a few minutes, the spotter yelled from the bow of the boat and signaled to his right. We had found our shark.

It was a teenager, approximately 12-13 ft in length. They could get as big as 60 feet, but this region typically only got younger sharks for a reason I can’t remember. David said that no one really knows how old a whale shark can get, but perhaps as old as 120. If there was any sort of pre-excursion survey on what aged shark I’d prefer, I would’ve checked an old-timer as my first preference and put N/A beside teenager. In my mind that would’ve signaled to our tour guides that I didn’t even consider a teenager as an option. We already had a pretty temperamental ten-year-old on our hands, and I wasn’t interested in any overly hormonal sea beast telling me I had crap taste in music.  

I’m pretty confident half the people on our boat were expecting some version of shark snorkeling, where we leisurely swam around, maybe occasionally scratching the shark’s belly only to return to the boat in our own time for a refreshing pina colada. What happened was something much closer to shark racing. There was nothing leisurely about the clip this shark was moving at. Let’s just say, there was zero chance of swimming beside it, while balancing a drink in your hand. The young adventurous couples embraced this, but right about now, I found myself more akin with the family from Idaho who was wondering if they’d gotten on the wrong boat. We were looking for adventure, but perhaps we should’ve warmed up with that glass bottom boat tour of tropical fish, before literally jumping into shark infested waters.  

To be fair, fitness wasn’t the issue as Brendine and I were both lifeguards in another life, and Cleo was easily a better swimmer than most adults. It was the more powerful f-word, fear which took hold, threatening to smother our hopes for sharks, dolphins, treasure, and ocean-rodeo. Cleo and the one other little girl on the boat immediately bonded over their shared second thoughts on this whole operation. As soon as she saw that shark’s dorsal fin a few feet from our boat, her little fingers gripped deep into the foam of that lifejacket, and we knew, that lifejacket was staying on and she was staying in the boat.

Taking the temperature of the situation, David explained that there’d be plenty of opportunities to swim with the shark and no one had to go immediately. We’d be swimming in small groups of four or five for short periods of time and David would be in the water the whole time. After a mini-family pep talk, we agreed that Cleo would watch us go first, and if there were relatively low casualties, say only a limb or two, she would consider going. 

It all felt very militaristic and intense. David was already in the water in hot pursuit of the shark as Brendine and I put our fins on and dangled our legs over the side of the boat, like little drumstick appetizers. The plan was, when the shark was close, David would signal the boat spotter from the water, and then the spotter would yell to us, “GO! GO!” and we would slip casually into most people’s worst nightmare.

Once we heard “Go”, everything was a blur. I could tell you there were hand signals, none of which I understood, Brendine was around, somewhere, most likely not eaten by the shark, but don’t ask me to confirm that. All I know for sure, is at some point I put my face in the water and a beady-eyed sea monster was barreling straight towards me.  

I remembered subsection b of point thirty-seven of David’s safety briefing, that under no circumstances were we supposed to touch the shark. Unfortunately, I don’t think the shark received the same briefing, because as it pivoted around me, it’s non-whale like tail gave me a nice smack in the head.

Turns out a good tail-whacking was exactly what I needed, as I proceeded to swim, lock-stroke with this shark for forty or fifty feet. My field of vision through this turquoise fog seemed strangely limited to the exact dimensions of this shark. It felt like we were swimming in tandem inside of our own private fish tank. I could clearly see this shark from tip to tail, naked as the day it was born and every day since. What had started out in our minds as a whale, then morphed into a shark, had now reached its final form, a really big trout. People who say, a shark is technically a fish, this is the shark they’re talking about.

Whatever Steven Spielberg implanted thoughts I had on the menacing nature of sharks had all been gulped away this apparent goofball of the sea. It seemed gentle, perhaps even a bit timid as it rambled its way along the surface looking for a meal that I was pretty sure wasn’t me. It was clear to me now, that face whip was actually a gentle love tap and my spirit animal and were destined to roam the seas, together, but alone.

I was lucky enough to see the whole banana, but others seemed to focus on specific parts. People would swim back to the boat and say, “oh, I saw the tail. You simply must see the tail”, or “I saw the dorsal fin. It’s all about the dorsal fin. The soul of the shark is in the fin.” Boat bonds were inevitably formed between the various tail and fin people. One guy got a view of the front of the boat and stuck his head out of the water to ask, “did I see it?” Only a few people had the heart, or lack thereof, to answer him truthfully.  

After witnessing our apparent survival, Cleo’s fear subsided a bit and she agreed to go with me in the next wave. When we got the abrupt “GO!” we slid in and immediately heard, “The shark’s coming right for you”. Even as I type that, I can’t believe it was intended to be good news. We both put our faces in the water, but we must’ve looked left when we should’ve looked right, and before we knew it the shark and its entourage of humans had passed us by. We tried to catch up, but we weren’t exactly streamlined as Cleo clung to me, both of us stiff with nerves. It was a valiant effort on all parts, but after a few failed attempts to catch up Cleo said, “I wanna go back”.

We made our way back to the boat, and although technically “sharkless”, Cleo was greeted with a hero’s welcome. We’d assumed she’d have at least a few minutes to gather her strength before potentially going again, but our guide quickly boarded the boat and said the next group would be just Cleo and him and he would swim her right up to the shark.

It was less of a question and more of a declaration on his part, and in a moment, Cleo was back in the water. David zoomed her right beside our little teenager and this time when she put her face in the water, left or right, she was gonna see shark. Cleo eventually made her way back to the boat, transformed into a “fin person”. She was greeted with a second round of applause from the adults and total awe from the other little girl on the boat.  

Towards the end of our swim, as if cued by Spielberg himself, a pod of bottle nose dolphins playfully swam up and performed a little water circus act for us. I imagined Spielberg trying to make up for his shark smear job in the 80s, with this feel-good sequel where Jimmy Buffet did the soundtrack and the tourists had just the right sized boat.

I swam alongside the shark one more time, and it ended up being just me and David fifty or so meters away from the boat. David asked if I’d seen the dolphins and I said, absolutely and we shared a moment of amazement at the whole experience. He said, we were lucky the dolphins didn’t spook our shark as sharks couldn’t recognize playfulness in other animals and only perceived it as aggression. I remarked, “they must be paranoid”. He laughed but I wasn’t sure if he thought it was funny, or he just thought the English word sounded funny. Although, I guess a laugh is a laugh.

Back on the boat we took our wetsuits off and began the slow motor back to land. As a sugary reward for our efforts, one of the crew handed out these frozen wagon wheel type treats. There was universal agreement that this was a delicious way to end a truly unforgettable day.

As incredible as I found this whole experience, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I also felt a nagging sense of failure. As much as I felt the sensations of the wind, the saltwater, the fear, the excitement, something about it still seemed unreal to me. I wondered if I had just spent too many years watching videos or wildlife documentaries through a screen, that that had become the reality I was used to. I was able to perceive that as real, despite it only being an image of someone else’s past experience I could never truly know. They say, most lifelong memories only begin around the age of ten. I hoped that for Cleo, this experience would become a benchmark for what she considered the real world of nature. I guess, I won’t know either way for years, but I can say the plastic of her goggles was nothing like the screen of her Ipad.

Back on land, one good treat deserved another, so we grabbed ice cream along the boardwalk and ate it quickly with minimal meltage and brain freezing. On the way home, we talked about how brave Cleo had been and how she inspired the other little girl on the boat to eventually take her own turn in the water. Cleo had given her a gift with her bravery, and that girl would always have that memory because of it. Cleo seemed to like that thought, as she smiled and finished the last few slurps of her ice cream.

We had to stop at a grocery store on the way home to provision for the remainder of our trip. Walking down the less-than-healthy aisle we found the very wagon wheel delicacy we’d been treated to less than an hour ago. Cleo and I agreed we had to buy the biggest sized one. When we eventually chomped down on our chocolatey marshmallow wafer thing, we realized there was something different. Cleo said, she liked the one on the boat better and I couldn’t help but agree. I guess, some things are just better when you’re swimming with sharks. Now, who do we talk to about a whale charter?