The anchor hasn’t hit the water yet but we have already spotted a big, white-tipped fin slicing through the waves. The cobalt blue sea is foaming and boiling under our boat. After a few seconds we now see a broad, shiny, olive-green back emerging along the side of our motorsailer “Colona II”, swimming just under the surface with powerful, fast undulations. It’s a shark! Big one!

I cannot believe my eyes – but that white tipped dorsal fin leaves no doubts! It’s an Oceanic Whitetip Carcharinus longimanus at least three metres long, the legendary and universally feared “Long Armed Lord”, every shipwrecked sailor’s nemesis. How could anybody forget the reverential tone used by captain Jacques –Yves Cousteau in his famous book “Requins – sauvages de la mer” when relating his encounters with this beautiful and fearsome predator of the high seas?

This shark is a pelagic hunter which never comes close to the mainland, very rarely encountered, if not by pure chance. It is considered very dangerous, stubborn and aggressive. It fears nothing: in many cases it has been responsible for deadly attacks on fishermens’ boats and shipwreck victims. Once the commonest of large-sized predators on Earth, it has now been hunted almost to extinction by man.

Abdul (our Saudi dive buddy) and I can’t believe our luck. We immediately strap on our tanks, shaking with excitement and with little time to wear dive suits. Antonella watches us apprehensively, shaking her heard: “No, thanks, I’m staying on the boat this time!”. Abdul slides in the water with his baseball cap still on. We try not to splash around, we don’t want to draw its attention or, even worse, scare it away (an hour later we shall have a big laugh about this last “precaution”…).

We are mooring at Little Brother’s reef; it took us twelve hours of nasty navigation to reach it. We left yesterday evening from Careless Reef and we have been seasick all night. To finally be in the water is a relief, even with this big oceanic shark swimming below us. These two islands, Big Brother and Little Brother - not much more than two bare rocks lost in the middle of the Red Sea - are legendary for the encounters they guarantee.

The islands are extremely difficult to reach, it takes a long journey at sea, they are hit by strong currents (which make dropping anchor a difficult proposition at best) and they are more or less safely accessible for two months of the year only. Lucky divers who got here before us report all sorts of encounters: schools of hammerheads, pilot whales, mantas, whale sharks and dolphins. Today we can add to the list the legendary longimanus.

Suspended in midwater, we gaze at it, hypnotized; a group of large black and white pilot fishNaucrates ductor swims around its nose, skimming its enormous pectoral fins, which fully justify the nickname “Long Armed Lord”. It looks immobile, suspended in the impossibly clear blue water, but suddenly it’s swimming towards us: perfect, elegant, no hesitation, nor indecision.

It is close and it is getting closer. There it is! He almost touched us. I follow him through my Nikon’s viewfinder; its so big I can barely frame it, even with the 20mm wide-angle lens I am using today. Its yellow eyes are fixing me with a cold, unrelenting stare. It keeps swimming towards us; its movements are both powerful and elegant. An ancient machine, adapted perfectly to a solitary life and to the ocean’s depths.

I find myself thinking: “this is perfection”. After a while it calmly drifts away, disappearing into the dark blue. Abdul and I look at each other with beaming eyes, suspended at fifteen meters in the bottomless, gin-clear water. Bottom here is out of sight, an abyss of dark blue void yawns beneath our fins. We’re feeling timeless. Only the sun’s rays scythe through the calm water.

After a few moments of unreal quiet something suddenly changes. There it is, again…it’s coming back; no…that’s two of them now! Abdul can’t contain himself. We start taking shots with my camera and his video and time drifts by, unnoticed. The big sharks hover in the distance, turn gracefully, glide straight towards us, avoiding impact at the last possible second. Again, and again. Every time they dodge us a fraction of a second later.

We have been in the water for half an hour now. This encounter with longimanus is perceptibly becoming more tense. We feel kind of nervous; now the sharks seem to aim right at us instead of just swimming by, as they were doing earlier. I am considering hitting one of them hard on the nose with my metal camera housing, when Abdul gets really excited: surprise, surprise! The sharks are now three.

The last one is a gigantic specimen, four metres long. Its stomach is painted bright white, its back a light olive-green; a long nylon fishing-line dangling from its mouth, giving him the looks of an an old, grizzled, dangerous pirate. I can see the white of its teeth gleaming in its half-closed mouth. Seen from the front, its huge pectorals spread, pilot fish buzzing around, it looks like a lumbering B-17 bomber from a WWII movie newsreel.

We turn round, checking for the boat’s ladder and we realize that we have drifted almost forty metres away from it. This is getting difficult; three sharks together instead of just one make a big difference, especially when you are trying to swim away from them. There’s no doubt they are following a strategy: two come in from the sides while the other one comes straight at us from below or behind. For a second we share a horrible feeling: they are pushing us towards the surface, to attack us as soon as we reach it and we’ll be less free in our movements. I suddenly realize one can get to get sweating palms under water.

Finally, a glare in the water, it is the Colona’s aluminium ladder and after few seconds we are on the boat shaking, hugging and laughing. We then discover that - while we were under water surrounded by the sharks - some Italians on a boat nearby were having fun throwing blood and fish chunks in the water, completely ignoring our skippers’ frantic warnings. With this new information our encounter with the sharks suddenly gets a more sinister meaning, considering that longimanus is known to be a very voracious feeder. It eats almost anything: fish, marine birds, turtles, marine mammals, offal, rubbish… and sometimes humans. Now we understand why they were getting so insistent!

But, luckily, our adventure has had a happy end and the experience with longimanus will be one of the most memorable of our holiday in the Brothers. However it won’t be the only one: indeed, these little islands gather the most incredible variety of Red Sea denizens. The same afternoon Abdul, during his fourth dive of the day, films an amazing giant hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) almost four metres long.

On our part, we meet some more beautiful species such as hawksbill turtles, gigantic groupers, barracudas, schools of silver jacks, dogtooth tunas and a two meter leopard shark (Stegostoma fasciatum). We also admire a dazzling lot of technicolored inhabitants of the shallower reef: nudibranchs, fire basslets, Pterois and Pomacanthus are literally everywhere.

The Brothers Islands truly are the perfect introduction to the stunningly beautiful bottoms of Southern Egypt and Sudan; they are a prelude to many more incredible locations such as Fury Shoal, Daedalus, Rocky Island and Zabargad and all the rest of the southern destinations. In this part of the Red Sea, it is really possible to have some of the most spectacular dives of your life.