Sitting in her daughter Joan’s home north of Auckland, 88-year-old Joyce Bradnam has the bronze glow and rested appearance of someone who has just got home from a relaxing month in an island paradise. Her love of the people and marine life in Fiji takes her back to the Coral Coast every year, where her passion for scuba diving has earned her somewhat of a celebrity status.
Since taking up the extreme sport at the age of 64, Joyce has completed more than 1000 dives and has been dubbed “Super Shark Nana”. The crew at her favourite dive spot, the Beqa Passage, has even named her favourite shark after her.
“We were diving on my 80th birthday and that’s when the tiger shark came up for the first time, so they named her “Lady Joyce,’” she tells. “When everybody gets on the boat, they always ask, ‘Joyce, is the tiger coming up today?’ and I just say, ‘I really don’t know.’”
Unfortunately, Joyce was diagnosed with a second degree heart block last year and had to have a pacemaker put in. This has meant she had to give up diving and can no longer experience the thrill of being so close to ocean predators.
“There’s something magic about standing among these great big bull sharks, between their great big fat bodies, and they’re not going to get out of your way!” she tells.
Joyce first visited Fiji in the 1950s to work as a nurse in Suva. She met and married her Fijian-born husband Lance, who was 18 years her senior. The couple left Fiji and moved back to New Zealand when their children, John (56) and Joan (57) were old enough to start school, but they returned almost every year to visit.
In 1993, Joyce was snorkelling in Yanuca when she decided she would like to see further down. A friend recommended she complete an open-water dive course at Malolo Lailai Island, off Nadi. After Lance passed away in 2002 at the age of 91, Joyce continued to visit the island to go diving.
“Lance wasn’t a diver, he didn’t like the salt water, but he never stopped me from doing it – in fact, he encouraged me,” she tells. “He was a wonderful husband. He was 18 years older than me, but I always told people our marriage was made in heaven, and I’m sure it was.”
Joyce did persuade a young Joan to give diving a try – despite her fear of sharks.
“When we would swim, I’d ask Mum to swim on the outside because I was so scared of seeing these dorsal fins,” Joan tells. “The first time I went on the shark dive, Mum and I went down the rope first. I thought, ‘This isn’t a good situation – they haven’t put the food down yet, so here are all the sharks waiting for their food and we’re sitting here!’”
However, she soon learned they were so well fed she could touch them. She overcame her fear, got her certification in 1996 and is now a diving instructor.
Joyce and Joan went on lots of underwater adventures afterwards – making their way through the old sunken WWII ship SS President Coolidge in Vanuatu, looking for manta rays in Hawaii and seeing the Rainbow Warrior from the ocean floor in Auckland.
Joan joined her mum on many deep-sea adventures.
While it is an extreme sport, they say diving is only dangerous if you don’t follow the rules. Out of her 1000 dives, Joyce has run out of air just once and she remained cool, calm and collected, taking some air from another diver.
“You see these young men and women diving and they think, ‘Oh, I’ll just do this or I’ll just do that,’ but it doesn’t work like that, the rules have all been worked out for you.”
Joan too had a close call while training to be an instructor in Auckland’s Lake Pupuke. She suddenly experienced zero visibility when another diver hit the thick mud on the lake floor. But thankfully, she stayed calm and followed the correct procedure.
“That’s what the training is all about – it seems a bit laborious, but it’s to educate you so if you do get into a situation, then you don’t panic and you can think it through,” she tells.
While she’ll always return to her island home, doctors have advised Joyce that with her pacemaker, she can only dive down to 11 metres safely, which for this shark nana isn’t much of a thrill, so she’s resigned herself to the fact that at the age of 88, it’s time to hang up her flippers.
Joyce made the front cover of The Fiji Times after her 1000th dive.
“I’d often hear of all the different places other people had been diving and wish I could go. That’s the trouble, if you miss these things when you have the opportunity, you never have it again later,” Joyce tells.
“But I suppose I have seen more things than most – a place where many other people never go. That’s what fascinates me and really stimulates my imagination.”
Words: Anastasia Hedge
Watch: Grandma deadlifts 102 kg
