Dave Solon remembers the evening two years ago when he casually flipped to the Discovery Channel, one of his favorites on TV.

It was Shark Week and three men were diving to the ocean bottom to feed sharks by hand.

"Gee, these guys are nuts!" he remembers thinking.

But as he watched, he learned the divers weren't extreme thrill seekers but bent on learning what was unknown about Caribbean reef sharks.

Exploding the myth that sharks will attack and eat anything, the sharks turned up their toothy snouts at beef and chicken, only going into feeding-frenzy mode at fish.

The 38-year-old Manheim-area resident felt his mindset shift. A week later, he saw another program in which a 13-year-old boy dove down and fed the sharks.

That sealed it. He wanted to see the spectacle for himself, and if a kid could do it, certainly he also could muster the aplomb.

The first step was to learn to dive. Even though he snorkeled and his four older brothers were all divers, the assistant manager of computer services for the Conestoga Valley School District had never had the inclination to join them.

He signed up with Smokey's Divers Den in Lancaster and took diving courses over three weekends. He got his certification in the Bainbridge Quarry.

Next — last February — he contacted Stuart Cove's Dive Bahamas, the Nassau-based outfit that had guided the scientists he had seen on the tube feeding sharks that enchanted evening.

 Stuart Cove, the owner, has been a diving guide, stunt diver and shark wrangler for four James Bonds films.

Yes, they had an opening on a dive on June 12.

Solon prepared with some short dives in Aruba. Then he planned a cruise with his wife, Connie, making sure the boat docked all day in Nassau.

Finally, the day arrived. Solon and about a dozen other customers from all over the world were boated to a spot about 8 miles off the coast of Providence Island.

The first dive was at a place called the Shark Wall, a site with a high population of reef sharks. The goal is to let divers see lots of sharks at a distance and determine if anyone is too freaked out to progress to the full-tilt shark feed.

A couple people indeed quit after the checkout dive.

But the encounter only inspired Solon. "These massive 9-foot sharks come right alongside us and give us the eye and kind of said, 'What are you doing here?'

"Here we are with funny suits, masks, fake flippers, making all sorts of bubbles, and they silently and effortlessly glide through the water," Solon recalls. "They were incredibly graceful."

Depending on the species of shark, some shark dives around the world require customers to be in cages. Others position divers on the bottom so they can look up and watch sharks feeding on chum above them.

But the Dive Bahamas operation places divers, without protective chain mail suits, smack in the middle of the feeding sharks.

That's mostly because Caribbean reef sharks, like most sharks, are not aggressive. There have been only 26 recorded attacks on humans and only four of them were unprovoked.

Dive Bahamas has performed many dives and a staffer told Solon that only once was the feeding diver nipped on the head inadvertently. He wears a helmet now.

The getting-to-know-you phase over, the group members were taken to the main attraction. At a spot known as the Shark Arena, the group put leaded weights in their pockets and sank to the bottom.

As instructed, they formed a circle and knelt on the sandy bottom, about 50 feet under the water. They were told to keep movement to a minimum and keep their limbs close to the body. If a shark knocks you over, stay down and someone will be by to lift you up, Solon was told.

"As soon as my eyes got below the water line, you could see them circling around us," he recalls.

Then the feeder-diver dropped down in the middle of the group with a couple crates of sea bass and grunt.

The sharks answered the dinner bell. The diver was quickly enveloped in a small tornado-like ball as he placed the first fish on a 4-foot spear and offered it to the frenzied sharks.

The feeder took turns holding the shishkebabs near the divers for in-your-mask photos.

"They would swim by and smack you in the mask with their tail inadvertently," Solon says. "Or they would approach from behind and a pectoral fin would wipe across your head or mask.

"There was only one point where I thought, "Hmm, maybe I shouldn't be here.' They would come straight at you with their mouths open, literally eye to eye, and turn within a foot of your face.

"It was just so neat."

Later, in a blog for friends, Solon wrote, "Thanks, Discovery Channel, for making me want to learn more about the earth we live on, and the creatures we live with."

Back at the ship, wife Connie nervously read an entire book. As the minutes ticked past her husband's promised return time, she wondered when it would be appropriate to start worrying.

A few minutes later, he returned, talking a mile a minute and pointing to the digital photos and video he took.

"Of course I had reservations about my wonderful husband of almost 10 years going diving with man-eating very large sharks," she says.

"I knew it was something — a guy thing — that he really wanted and needed to do in his lifetime, so I would not consider talking him out of it.

"There are things that we need to do in our lifetime or we will always say, 'I should have...' and I did not want that for him."

Good for you, Connie. Hold that thought when he tells you his next life achievement is to go sky diving.