Author Peter Benchley spent years repenting the serious damage he did to the reputation of sharks. Apparently, following his book and the movie, the American population of great white sharks diminished rapidly, with great white hunters looking to grab a trophy "killing machine".I remember Jaws well. I watched it more than once, as well as its progressively ridiculous sequels. Yet here I was, 40 years after its release, on a rubber duck, in the middle of the ocean dressed in a wetsuit, looking unnervingly like a well-fed seal and about to plunge into shark-infested waters.Between me and a shiver of sharks would be, thankfully, a metal cage, which was what I signed up for when I put myself in the hands of John Miller, of Shark Cage Diving KZN, near Scottburgh.Miller has 25 years of experience in the scuba-diving industry. He is a pioneer of shark-cage diving in KwaZulu-Natal and a fervent champion of sharks.There are five of us on this trip, all women, all giggling with fear, all listening deferentially to a litany of instructions."I see your hand out of the cage and it's the end of the dive," barks Miller. I'd sooner mess with a great white.It takes 20 minutes to rear and buck the 8km from shore to an area just past Aliwal Shoal. The engine is turned off and the chumming begins, bits of sardine tossed into the ocean to entice the hungry.It couldn't have been a minute later that the sharks arrived. When I saw that first fin, mere inches away, I stopped breathing.They were huge, their teeth were large, and their eyes were beady. And there were lots of them.How I slid over the side of the boat and directly into the cage remains a blur but, once in, I took a breath, went down, and wished that I had done this instead of watching Sharknado.Mellow black tips and spinners milled about; a single dusky darted past. It was thrilling - anything but scary.Sharks, says Miller, are critical to the health of our oceans."The cage-diving experience," he says, "is a way to connect people with healthy shark populations, to increase the public's level of compassion for these animals."Surprisingly, he says his favourite customers are children, some as young as six. "They are not filled with prejudice. Not one has been scared by the experience. Afterwards they are full of smiles."Miller started working with tiger sharks at Aliwal Reef 15 years ago."When we started snorkelling there was a fear factor, but the more you do it the more you relax. You learn to read their behaviour. If their pectoral fins are down, if they swim on their sides or start gaping then you have to be careful."It was a mellow lot that surrounded my cage and they took little notice of Miller swimming outside the cage to take the photo that would end up as my screensaver.See www.sharkcagedivingkzn.com..