We have handed our weekly marine life series over to renowned photographer and journalist, Stefan Beskow.
Stefan has travelled the world and dived just about every corner of it. Having chosen Emperor Divers to do much of his underwater work, we asked him to take us through some of his favourite experiences.
This week he looks at the largest fish of them all – the mighty whaleshark.
The world’s biggest shark and fish!
One fond memory of these amazing creatures is when me and my buddy Klas swam a bit outside the reef at Little Brother on our Red Sea Sharks cruise aboard the boat Emperor Echo, to see if we could see any sharks.
Suddenly we saw that several divers started pointing in our direction as they started to swim out from the reef towards us. We suspected it wasn’t because we were overly attractive and instead turned our eyes out of the blue.
A whaleshark! A whaleshark of about four metres swam straight towards us! It was probably just a cub as it was ‘only’ about 4m and they can be over 12 meters when fully grown, but it was so incredibly beautiful!
It swam very close to us and then disappeared into the blue again but, just when it was getting hard to see, it turned around! Once again we had the opportunity to see the fantastic animal up close. A wonderful experience!