Meet Mr. Shark

By Patrick Daugherty

‘We never know who the client is until the last possible second. Their front men contact us.”

On the phone is Patric Douglas, 42, CEO of Shark Diver, a commercial shark-cage diving outfit offering five-day excursions to Isla Guadalupe, a volcanic island off the Pacific coast of Baja, 210 miles — about a 20-hour boat ride — from San Diego.

For $3100 you get five days onboard an 88-foot vessel, fancy food, adult beverages, plus the opportunity to hang out in a 100-square-foot aluminum shark cage. Said cage is dropped four feet below the water’s surface, where you suck air, hookah style, from a tube that runs up to an air compressor on the ship’s deck, while waiting for 1800-pound white sharks, who will, if things go right, come nose to nose and scare the bejesus out of you.

There’s no room here to go into cage diving for tiger sharks in the Bahamas or deep-water submarine trips out of Roatan, Honduras, or the Guadalupe Island Conservation Fund or Shark Divers, a production-consulting firm (CEO Patric Douglas) for film and television, and more, more, more. Many interlocking balls in the air.

The preceding business résumé matches Douglas’s published bio. You can fill in the blanks. Exotic. Tour guide. Virgin Islands. Vietnam. China. Bali. Peru. New Zealand. Saltwater crocodiles. CBS outdoor reporter. Fly fishing. Skeet and trap shooting. Discovery Channel.

Douglas has said he works with two PR companies (“If you’re not spending at least $50,000 a year on PR, you’re not getting the word out”), so it’s not surprising to see his tracks all over the Internet. But, what you find are the same stories, copied, pasted, and reused. I did see one item, one time, that was different. It was a 2008 interview with Entrepreneurship Interviews. He was asked about his Corporate Yacht package, priced at $100,000-plus.

Douglas answered, “It’s a high price tag for sure, but when your personal expedition yacht is worth $60 million and carries more than $15 million in rare art work and has a $400,000 wine cellar on board...these are not clients you advertise for.”

That’s what I want to talk about.

Douglas tells me, “I’ll give you one of the classic stories. I got a call out of the blue. Some guy says, ‘You build shark cages?’ I say, ‘Yeah, of course we do.’ So, we built a [custom] cage, had it shipped out to Kansas. There aren’t any sharks in Kansas, but that’s where they wanted it shipped because they didn’t want us to know where it was going to be transshipped.

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