Monthly Pause 01 | August 2026
I saw my first thresher shark. A surprise in the waters of East Lombok, Indonesia.
After we surfaced from our first dive, Harly, the dive guide, asked me which site I wanted to go to next (as this was my second time diving in Lombok, I was a little familiar with the sites). He gave me two options: lots of reef or less reef but a chance to encounter big stuff. I told him I didn’t have a preference. I never really do. I’m just happy to be underwater. So, Harly chose the second option for us.
During our surface interval, we were sitting in the front of the boat under the sun, chatting about our dive experiences. Harly was telling us about the pelagics he has come across in Lombok. Mantas, mobular rays, hammerheads, threshers. Honestly, he is a very lucky dive guide. My dive buddy, a Canadian fellow I met on the boat, and I couldn’t believe him. You never hear or see anything about these types of encounters in this area. So, with our fingers crossed for some of Harly’s luck, we geared up for our second dive.
Masks on. Regulators in. 3-2-1. We backrolled into the water for our second dive of the day. The dive site is a sloping reef mix of sandy bottom with little rocky patches alive with corals, going down about 30 meters. Conditions were average. Not much current, and visibility was about 12 meters.
We began to descend to our maximum depth of 25 meters. Always on the hunt for macro (nudibranchs, flatworms, shrimps, etc.), I looked up from my search when I heard Harly use his clicker. I saw him frantically signaling shark and pointing towards the blue. I looked to where he was pointing and sped up a bit to help see better, but with the visibility, it was hard to make out. I did see the general shape of a shark and then noticed the iconic long tail of a thresher. But I thought to myself, “That couldn’t have been a thresher”, and brushed off the sighting as another reef shark. No way would we actually see a thresher shark after just talking about it on the surface interval.
Then I heard the click again and looked up to see Harly signaling, pointing, and swimming quite fast ahead. He and my dive buddy swam towards the shark, but again, it was a tad far away. I just let it go, assuming it was the same reef shark I vaguely saw earlier, and continued my macro hunt.
I heard the sound of the click one more time. I looked up to finally see the thresher shark swimming right past me, only about 2 meters away, making eye contact with me as he went by. It felt like he was assessing me, not swimming super fast, determining whether I was a threat or a friend. I was fully in the moment. Staring into his big eyes as he swam past. Turning away from me, I saw his body and then the iconic long tail, which was probably about twice the size of his body, that I spotted earlier.
Only after it passed me and I was watching its tail did it occur to me to take a video. I only captured the tail end, literally, of the encounter. But I wasn’t mad about it. This was my first time seeing a thresher shark, and I feel like I really saw it.
When I first started diving, I was filming everything. I was probably so annoying to my dive guides. Looking back, I wasn’t really experiencing the underwater world because I was so focused on documenting everything I saw.
The ocean is so cool, and not a lot of people get to experience it. That was my justification for constant filming. But was I really experiencing it? Or just using it to show off on social media?
Being present isn’t about trying harder to be mindful. Sometimes it’s simply about noticing what is already happening. And not feeling the need to capture it, but simply enjoy it.
So much in today’s world with social media, we are so focused on capturing a moment that we forget to experience it. And maybe that leaves us with an epic photo or video, but we rarely remember what it felt like to actually be there.
So while I didn’t fully capture the thresher shark, I can say I really saw it. Making it one of my highlights diving in Lombok.