As Seen On TV





So I'm sitting in a hotel in some forgettably small town watching TV when all of a sudden I see myself in a commercial. A few years back I did this show for the Discovery channel with Phil Keoghan from The Amazing Race, where we try to get my friend over his fear of sharks. Considering the show was shot back in 2004, I'd almost forgotten about it

Being SCUBA divers, the world is our ocean, well except for my friend who refused to ever leave the comforts of diving in the Great Lakes and venture out into the wonderful world of salt water due to his irrational dread of those pelagic predators. Essentially, we were to fly down to the Bahamas and spend a day or so observing and learning about the different species, their feeding habits as well as their distaste for human flesh. Then spend a few days diving in the ocean, slowly warming up to a shark dive where I was to hand feed the creatures, thus showing my friend that these fish were not the mindless killers so often portrayed by Hollywood. Everything went fine until the feeding dive. Best laid plans I guess. To his horror I was surrounded by 40 or 50 ten foot long sharks that decided to use me as a play toy, knocking me around like a hackysack, and biting me on both arms as well as my head. Thankfully I had chainmail on my arms and a hockey helmet to protect my noggin.

In all my manliness, I managed to only scream like a little girl to an audience of just myself, since the underwater mics only transmitted when the talk button was depressed, which at that moment would have been rather difficult to do since both my arms were inside the sharks' mouth. The horrified sound of my friends' voice over the intercom asking me if I was ok assured me that the brutal scene looked as bad as it felt. Remembering that I was the one who convinced him to do this show in the first place, I felt I had to downplay the whole thing, lest we lose all the progress we had made in actually getting him into the water with the sharks. "Yeah, I'm fine. They're just a bit frisky is all." Though from the picture above, signs of the attack are appearent in the half-hearted smile and vacent gaze I gave the TV cameras immediately after the dive.

Despite everything, we managed to get him to dive with sharks in the ocean, mostly removed his fear of those things that lurk below the waves and got some awesome footage for the viewers, so no permenant harm, no permenant foul. And I have to say that I'd still jump at the chance to do another shark dive. It's just kind of funny how something so seemingly momentous can slide into the background of memory until sitting in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere a commercial comes on TV. For anyone actually interested in seeing the shark episode of No Opportunity Wasted, it will be on Discovery HD channel on June 28th.