The first time I came face to face with a great white shark I felt something shift inside me. One look into those eyes darker than a planet-sucking black hole really does humble you.

But it wasn’t the eyes.

Getting a closeup look at its face, all gnarled and freshly scarred from the last desperate bites and scratches of an unlucky seal, is one of life’s brutal reality checks.

But it wasn’t the scars.

Prior to my encounter I had spent years as a plucky, overconfident spearfisher, even once etching my name into a national New Zealand kingfish trophy. Dealing with sharks simply comes with the territory. I’ve had fish ripped off me by bronze whalers, I’ve been surrounded by bull sharks, shadowed by silvertips, surprised by sevengillers and charged by an aggressive mako.

Now, it’s not something that happens on the first day you go spearfishing, but, as your skill set develops and you dive deeper into more critical areas with increased activity, well, it turns out that sharks like those places too. You get used to it, sort of. And dare I say it, you can actually enjoy some of the encounters.

With zero bycatch, spearfishing or “spare-fishing” is an extremely selective, low-impact pursuit that for me has never been about the catch but about the entirety of the wild experience possible anytime you pull on a wetsuit.

Submerged with the clock running down on your inhaled breath, you have zero capacity to think about anything else. It’s an unusual juxtaposition where you exist in an........

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