Steven Surina

When and why did you start diving? Scuba diving, for me, is above all a family story. I grew up with diver parents and started diving at the age of 5 in Corsica. At 8, I joined a children's diving club in the suburbs of Paris. Later, at 13, my family and I moved to Egypt, where my parents managed a diving club in Safaga. This experience gave me unlimited access to scuba diving. Raised on Cousteau’s films, I have always seen diving as a way to explore marine biodiversity and live out my own underwater adventures.

What is your favorite fish or mammal? My totem animal is the shark, and more specifically the oceanic shark (Carcharhinus longimanus), because I have more than 4500 dives with it. No other marine species has the ability to make me forget my daily problems and live in the present moment like the shark.

Your dream dive: where and with whom? Since I had the chance to dip my fins in the four corners of the world, I have been dreaming for a few years of diving in the Arctic with Alban Michon and Nathalie Lasselin to encounter the enigmatic Greenland shark, a true dinosaur that can live for more than 400 years.

The most memorable diving experience? There are so many! Between my cage-free dives with great white sharks in Mexico, to finding myself in the middle of feeding frenzies during the Sardine Run in South Africa, or swimming above a 15-meter-long whale shark in the Galapagos, I could name so many experiences! But none compare to the incredible dive in the far south of Suakin, Sudan, near the Eritrea border, where I dove for 30 minutes in a group of more than 300 hammerhead sharks, alongside silky sharks and a few tiger sharks. Returning to the reef, I encountered a pelagic thresher shark at a cleaning station, followed by safety stops with a black manta ray and the passage of a young whale shark... all in just 45 minutes underwater! And of course, this is without mentioning the virgin, wild, and untouched marine life of the southern Red Sea.