Seeing sharks in the ocean is an experience generally limited to divers, fishermen, surfers and customers of controversial submerged cage tours.
That’s expected to change as a former Maui cruise boat operator prepares to offer a novel way to see the fearsome creatures: at night. Underwater. In a boat.
The roughly $25 million venture is the "illuminating" idea of Curtiss Jackson, CEO of Semisub Inc.
Jackson is putting the finishing touches on a 74-foot custom-designed catamaran that can partially submerge to give passengers underwater views lit up by green lights that Jackson says simulate a full moon on a clear night. The underwater glow, he said, attracts fish, which in turn attract sharks that primarily feed at night.
"You’re going to see what a shark does naturally," Jackson said. "You’re going to see them in their natural, everyday habitat. There’s nothing that compares to this."
Jackson is packaging the tour as a $140 dinner cruise that stops about three miles off Oahu’s South Shore for the shark-viewing stop. More conventional day tours to popular reefs also are planned for $80.
The 149-passenger boat is undergoing Coast Guard certification, and Jackson anticipates starting operations by the end of next month out of Kewalo Harbor.
Toni Davis, executive director of the Activities & Attractions Association of Hawaii, said she’s not aware of anyone in Hawaii offering nighttime cruises to see sharks. "It’s very unique," she said. "It’s definitely a niche."
The shark tour business has been quite controversial in Hawaii, with companies that put people into submerged cages to see sharks.
The cage operations have been accused of attracting sharks by illegally feeding them.
Feeding sharks is illegal in state waters within three miles of shore. Last year, five employees of two companies — North Shore Shark Adventures and Hawaii Shark Encounters — were arrested for feeding sharks within the three-mile limit, but a state judge threw out the charges in January just before the case went to trial.
Since January, three shark tour boats at Haleiwa Harbor have been burned in suspected cases of arson.
Opponents of shark feeding say the practice disturbs the environment, including fisheries, and is disrespectful to Native Hawaiians who believe sharks are aumakua, or ancestral gods.
In another case, an East Oahu businessman canceled a plan to start shark tours off Maunalua Bay in Hawaii Kai two years ago after a community outcry over potential dangers to recreational bay users and canoe paddlers further offshore.
On Maui the county banned commercial tours that feed or otherwise attract sharks in 2009.
Jackson said his tours will neither feed nor attract sharks where people are in the water. "We’re not doing anything to the environment that doesn’t happen naturally," he said.
Jackson, a retired military helicopter pilot from Los Angeles who served in Vietnam, said his plan for Semisub has been in the works nearly a decade.
The 59-year-old built a similar vessel in the early 1990s called the Maui E-Ticket, which ran daytime reef tours out of Lahaina. Jackson sold that boat in the mid-1990s, and it later was destroyed by a storm while moored.
Jackson designed his new boat, Semisub One, with 40 seats in the catamaran hulls outfitted with windows. Ballast tanks allow the boat to descend about five feet to put the windows underwater.
Originally, Jackson planned to operate Semisub One out of Key Largo, Fla. But after close to four years of ship development delays, he decided to return to Hawaii and operate the business out of Honolulu.
