Diving enthusiasts are swapping South Yorkshire for Scotland as they prepare to go swimming with sharks for a conservation project.
Members of Dearne Valley Divers are heading north to take a dip with a shiver of tope sharks and help marine biologists understand the fish.
Each year dozens of tope sharks gather off the Inner Hebrides for a month – but experts say they cannot understand why.
The sharks are critically endangered and the divers have teamed up with university academics to understand why they gather at the location and how they can be protected.
Rob Mason, one of the instructors at Dearne Valley Divers, was on a family holiday in Tiree, the most westerly island in the Inner Hebrides, when he first became aware of the sharks.
“We were walking around some of the absolutely gorgeous sands and landscapes up there, ivory-coloured sands and azure-coloured seas, when we stumbled across a quite isolated bay,” he says.
“One of the locals asked me if I was there to see the sharks, which raised my eyebrows, and he then started telling me about all of these sharks which aggregate together in this bay late evening in the middle of summer.
“I was intrigued so I came back and was mesmerised by literally hundreds of sharks in this bay. You could see all the black slits in the water, they ranged from one to two metres in size.
“It struck me as being really unusual as I’ve conducted more than 700 dives across the world but I’ve never come across anything like that. I came away with an idea to investigate further and when I told the club, it seemed to spark so much enthusiasm and interest.”
