Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Kicking the Shark Diving Industry

Interesting. A chop shop comes up with two iterations of a new shark show concept called either "Shark Divers" or "Shark Business". They are both posted on You Tube to see who's interested and what, if any, ensuing media hits these two concept shows get.

Sounds familiar? It should we invented the idea.

The problem with this is that what you are watching is damaging our industry and whoever is behind this cares nothing for the many hard working operators worldwide who are trying, on a daily basis, to show our industry in a positive light. These operators care about sharks, they support research, and work tirelessly for local and regional shark causes.We spoke with Mike Lever (featured in "Shark Divers") owner of Nautilus Explorer today who has no idea how these videos came to pass - quote:

"There's no way we would do this kind of televised crap, we agree that divers should remain in cages, those are not our divers outside the cages at Isla Guadalupe"

That's it. While Hawaii decides the fate of two operations in their waters, Mexico continues to debate having shark operations in their waters, and the Bahamas has the fate of Tiger Beach in committee - one misguided media chop shop decided, alone and all by themselves, it was in the best interests of our 100 million dollar commercial shark diving industry to show the entire planet its worst face.

What a difference a "few clips" can make to the perception of a global industry.

4 comments:

DaShark said...

Thanks for pointing this out!

My take on it is different: yes it's very unfortunate for the Industry, but the culprit is not the shooter: he's only the messenger and I can very much relate to what he says.

The real scumbags are the operators who enabled those visuals and who allowed those yahoos to engage in extreme Shark encounters.

Richard Krumm said...

I cannot believe these people. Did they even get permission to use that footage??

Horizon Charters Guadalupe Cage Diving said...

Hi DaShark,

Have to agree without the visuals our industry sails along, with the visuals the media and lawmakers have the tools they need to make the case against what we do.

I am reminded of your take on Kevin Harris many months ago...what was it you called him?

Oh, I know:

Shark Hating Voyeuristic Parasite

Richard Krumm said...

I stand corrected. I didn't realize this was an actual video done with the seperate dive operators.

Regards,
Richard