As I closed my eyes to block out the water, my brain held the image of the last thing I’d seen: 56 of the largest, whitest teeth I’d seen in my life, bared menacingly as the shark they were attached to barrelled toward me.
The open mouth gave me no time to think twice before I reacted. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and hopped on. Pride, fear, and adrenaline all rose to my chest as we raced along the coast. This was it: even in the pouring rain, the shark bus was everything I had hoped for.
Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium in Auckland, New Zealand, while small (it’s no Shedd), is full of experiences that make every penny worth it. There is an appearance of true contentment in the workers, and the size contributes to a more familiar surrounding. From start to finish, this aquarium proved to be the best day I spent in New Zealand.
Basil, our bus driver, picked us up with the free shark bus. On our 20-minute ride, he told us about Kelly Tarlton, his kiwi accent made the story 10 times more exhilarating. Excitement filled the bus as he spoke over the intercom, and everyone, from ages 5 to 50, listened eagerly.
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Kelly Tarlton was a world-renowned marine archaeologist who spent his spare moments treasure-hunting. His hobby was shipwreck diving, searching throughout the Caribbean for Spanish galleons that had sunk with Inca gold in their holds, and in the Netherlands, searching for the 32-gun frigate Lutine that had struck a sandbar in 1799 with a reputed cargo of 914 gold bars.
And if he loved finding shipwrecks, then he adored diving. He spent more time underwater than at home with his wife, Rosemary, who loved him in spite of their struggling finances and his large investments that literally sank. Perhaps what she was drawn to was an innovativeness and a deep passion, a flame that could not be extinguished by any amount of failure…or water.
Throughout his career, Kelly created answers to problems in the diving world that others would take years to invent. He didn’t bother patenting any of them, because he didn’t see them as anything other than temporary solutions to achieve his end goal. He constructed the first buoyancy compensator seen in New Zealand, using waterproof canvas for the body and a piece of garden hose to connect to the snorkel mouthpiece.
He played with the design and testing of manta boards — underwater wings on which a diver could be towed to explore the seafloor. One manta board was a clear, shark-proof wing that enclosed the diver with a joystick to steer. He built his own scuba gear and his own decompression chamber.
But Kelly Tarlton’s greatest build was his curved aquarium tunnel, the first in the world of its kind. The curved acrylic tunnels were molded in a kiln he built in his backyard. He wanted a place where people could experience sea life like a diver did, without the difficulty or the expense.
The result was 200 people in the first hour of opening on January 25, 1985, and since then, the most visited attraction in New Zealand.
However, Kelly passed at age 47 just seven weeks later on March 17, 1985, after he’d welcomed the 100,000th visitor. He had accomplished what he had set out to do in giving his country an experience, and the aquarium was left under his wife’s ownership.
His legacy of care and steadfast dedication lives on in the crew of hardworking individuals who love what they do, the daily ice replacement for the penguins, the cafeteria where the windows are fully submerged at high tide, and the 2 million liters of water that hold everything from local New Zealand fish to Barb, the 440-pound short-tail South African stingray.
Lastly, his legacy lives on in my memory. I have Kelly Tarlton to thank for crossing off the top item on my bucket list: swimming with wobbegong, school, bronze whaler and sand tiger sharks (cousins of the great white).
And yet, of all those, the most thrilling one was the shark bus.
