It was Labor Day weekend back in 1985, or was it 1986? I was invited to crew on my friend Steve’s 33-foot sailboat Matahari on the trip back from Nassau to Ft. Lauderdale. 

Steve and his girlfriend, Karina, took me to Rose Island for a little snorkeling before our return; he told me he knew of a little shallow spot that had incredible lobsters. Once we arrived, we anchored and dove down to find three great lobsters waiting to become our breakfast. 

After the short plunge, we returned to the sailboat galley, where Karina and I made an incredible lobster omelet that I can still taste after all these years. Soon after breakfast, we started our sail back home. 

Beautiful summer weather and a light-though-firm breeze took us to Cat Cay, where we stopped at Honeymoon Beach, a dreamy and picture-perfect anchorage where we spent the night.

In the morning, Steve said, “Why not go out for a swim to shore and look at the other side of this bay?” He had been there before and said there was a great snorkeling reef on the other side, which happens to be the open reef to the deep shipping lane between the Bahamas and the U.S. mainland.

We made it to shore and walked to the other side of the thin beach to the reef. We got in the water and started our exploration. The reef was alive with all kinds of fish doing their “fishy” things: chasing each other and swimming fast from one spot to another. 

Steve and Karina separated from me and went a little farther out; I was left by myself, with mask, fins and snorkel, looking for something different. 

Suddenly, I felt a presence but I did not see anything immediately, so I kept on swimming parallel to the beach, looking down on the magnificent reef.

I turned around briefly to get my bearings and I saw this big black shark following me. I could not believe my eyes; my heart stopped. 

In my many years of commercial diving, I had seen many sharks. Not very big, just what I would call “regular” sharks. We were always watchful, diving in teams, and sharks were not much of a concern. We were always fully suited with several knives and, in those days, had bang-sticks while diving with scuba gear or surface-supplied air. 

It felt different here than it did working with other divers at off-shore oil rigs out of Talara near the northern coast of Peru. This time, I felt really helpless and alone. 

As I looked face-to-face with this huge, black Mako shark, I raised my head out of the water and looked for my friends. They were 60 or 70 yards away. I shouted, “Steve, there is a big shark in the water.”

“We saw him,” he calmly said. “Take it easy and swim back to the beach.”

I swam very fast back to the beach and, after a while, stopped and looked back. There he was again, right behind me, maybe 20 feet from my fins. As I looked, he got closer. We looked at each other in the eyes. I knew he was looking me straight in the eyes. 

All of a sudden, he veered away and swam swiftly into the darker and deeper water. Everything happened so quickly that I didn’t realize I was swimming so fast. I saw my friends swimming toward me. When I made it to the beach, my heart was pumping so hard that I thought it was going to burst out of my chest.

“Did you guys see that shark?” I gasped.

“It was a big one, buddy,” Steve laughed. Karina guessed it was 10-12 feet long. 

I could not believe what had just happened, but Steve said that he was not worried. When he saw the fish in the reef going about their business without any concern, he realized that this shark was not feeding or interested in us. He was just cruising and checking out the reef, just like we were.

After a while, we went to the other side of the island and made our way back to our sailboat. At lunch time, safely back on the boat, I told them I had never felt so alone or at the mercy of a predator before.

Steve looked at me and Karina and said, “You see Roli, that’s what happens when you miss church on Sunday.”