Shark Man Riley Elliott. Photo / Greg Bowker

Kiwi zoologist Riley Elliott, known as the Shark Man, is crusading to reshape the image of one of our most feared predators. With a new TV show and book, he talks to Alan Perrott about about swimming with feeding sharks, his scariest encounter, and why he’ll never surf alone.

Riley Elliott is bobbing about on a boat off the South African coast, on water riddled with blood, guts and feeding sharks. The last thing any sane person should want to do is jump in.

"There were about 50 of them, blacktip and dusky sharks mostly, about 3m long. It was like making your first bungy jump, everything in you is saying, 'No way, this is wrong'."

In he went regardless - cageless and with nothing more to protect him than the advice of his boatmate who'd done the same thing many times before with paying thrillseekers.

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"I'll always remember the moment when I realised they [the sharks] really didn't give a shit about me. They were happy swimming around, ripping into these big lumps of meat and as long as I did the right things and stuck to the rules they ignored me completely. That's when all the fear I'd had turned to utter fascination."

Which is a rather different reaction to Elliott's first shark encounter, but then the panicked young man clinging to a cliff face in Doubtful Sound hadn't yet become Shark Man, the 29-year-old zoologist crusading to reshape the image of a creature that not only sees us as food, it comes with its own ominous soundtrack. All the same, with a book due next week and a television show kicking off late this month, Elliott could become to sharks what Steve Irwin was to crocodiles.

It helps that he seems to be one of those people who finds revelation in danger. It's a trait that stretches back to when he was a 5-year-old, walking his dog Kia in the backblocks around Vancouver, Canada.

"That's my only memory of growing up there. We turned a corner and there was this grizzly bear, it seemed more scared of the dog than we were of him."

The encounter helped spark his love of nature, a passion he indulged as often as possible after his parents headed to New Zealand to be closer to his mother's family in Hamilton.

By his early teens, Elliott was a straight-A student and competitive swimmer who was threatening to go off the rails. "I had no choice in swimming, Dad was a lifeguard. He taught us to swim by throwing us in the pool. But the training, 10 times a week, was horrible. I hated it. It did give me some solo time though, it's meditative and it wasn't 'til later that I realised it gave me discipline as well."

Still, by 14 he had became so disruptive that the deputy principal at Hillcrest High School threatened to suspend him unless he finished the year top of his English class (which he duly did).

Then friends of his older brothers introduced him to the Christian Surfers. "I'll never forget catching my first wave all the way into the beach at Whangamata. It's just one of the most magnificent things in the world and it really became a lifestyle for me. Sitting out there watching a sunrise, seeing the animals, even if your arms are jelly from the effort. You feel part of nature."

After school Elliott washed up at the elite Selwyn College at Otago University, still unsure of what to do with his life aside from taking every opportunity to hit the region's bone-chilling surf. While his housemates seemed content with doing whatever their parents did, that didn't appeal to Elliott, whose Canadian father was a doctor, his Kiwi mum a lab technician, and his brothers and sister would become lawyers and doctors. "My parents gave me some great advice: "Never follow success, follow your passion and success will come." Elliott's fondness for aphorisms almost rivals his love of critters.

So he took a broad spectrum approach to his subject choices and gradually whittled them down until zoology was all that was left. Then, in 2008 and needing a post-graduate project, he joined a team researching bottlenose dolphins in Doubtful Sound. It wasn't easy work given the remote location, but the team leader decided that anyone who willingly gets up at 5am to go surfing in polar waters could deal with the conditions.

Elliott's biggest challenge was internal. "I've seen Jaws. [The danger] is something surfers simply don't talk about because there's nothing you can do to prevent it, that's the rule. But I've had the hairs go up on the back of my neck at times. Even if we can't see them, we all know we've had sharks around us.

"That fear is an interesting thing, you can try to push it aside, but that's naive, you have to recognise it and give it respect because it can become real very quickly."

That happened the day he went down to retrieve a sound probe and a 1m school shark emerged from the darkness. Never having encountered a shark before, Elliott panicked, shot to the surface and grabbed the nearest rock. His shaking quickly gave way to laughing, he'd known the shark was a harmless tiddler the moment he saw it, but his response had been immediate and uncontrollable. Which set him thinking: what is our instinctive fear of sharks based on?

"I saw Jaws when I was 12, I get that, but the thing is not to behave like food around them. I don't ocean swim and I don't surf alone, I'm too scared, but many do and given there are only about six attacks a year I'd say it's kudos to the sharks for not biting us more often."

Riley Elliott's fear of sharks morphed into a lifelong fascination and career. Photo / Robin Smith

He remembered a university flyer advertising a research position in Mossel Bay, South Africa, a place which - unfortunately for the offshore seal colony - is the nexus for all things great white shark-related.

For three months every year the bay is heaving with teeth as the juvenile fur seal pups leave their island home. The adult seals use a mass exodus to minimise the risk, but the pups head off solo, leaving them hopelessly vulnerable to the awful jaws that explode around them without warning.

It's also the bay where freediving ecotourists enjoy joining the melee themselves. To Elliott it was paradise: "I could look out from my house on to one of the most perfect point breaks in the world and hear every splash of every shark." They'd feed around the nearby Seal Island each morning and evening, then spend the rest of the day sunbathing in that lovely point break. "They'd be full of seals and they'd just relax there in the current, it helped them breathe and digest until they headed out again."

By 2010 Elliott was running the tourist operation and in need of a break. As a travel nut (60 countries and counting), a relaxing surf trip to Mexico seemed in order. He and some mates packed into a van and unwittingly drove into the middle of a drug war. America had taken out the region's big players, which left the lower tier gangs to go spectacularly feral. With the death toll into the tens of thousands it wasn't a great place for blond-haired surfers in a California-plated car.

After multiple scares, Elliott and his surf buddy were finally within sight of an American flag over a border checkpoint when they were held up by balaclava-clad men. Elliott was dragged to the back of the van with a machete to his throat, his mate was pushed over the bonnet with two guns pressed into the back of his bag-shrouded head. Knowing they were likely to be ransomed or casually murdered, Elliott used halting and non-American accented Spanish to claim they were orphans (meaning no wealthy parents to pay up) before they scrabbled under the car to untape their hidden stash, a princely US$20.

It worked. The Mexicans fell about laughing and then drove off, leaving the New Zealanders to go as fast as possible in the opposite direction and not stop until they reached a friend in San Diego, 1200km away, where they broke down and wept.

Sharks, Elliott realised, have nothing on people. He was soon on the phone to his parents back in New Zealand, bawling his eyes out as he explained what had happened, before catching a flight home the next day.

Back in "the safest place in the world", he took some time out on the Coromandel. His experience told him he needed to get moving - you never know what's around the corner - and he wanted to complete a PhD. Preferably on sharks and in New Zealand, which was an unlikely combination until he discovered this country was one of the top 10 exporters of shark fins. Harvesting basically involves lopping the fins (they sell for about $500 a kg) from a still living beast and tossing the body back into the sea. Finning - to make soup - accounts for 90 per cent of all shark deaths around the world in the past 30 years.

Yes, there is a point of view that the only good shark is a dead one, but ecosystems are an ancient balancing act. Take the apex predator out and its prey flourishes, putting increased pressure on the next rung down. For instance, fewer sharks can mean more stingrays, which means fewer shellfish. Or more locally, fewer snapper means more kina which means less kelp. Everything is connected.

Elliott's work on the shark's decline and their migratory habits has provided a better understanding of their place in the oceanic world and put him to the fore of the anti-finning campaign that, on October 1, finally celebrated a new ban on the practice in New Zealand waters. He's also part of a drive to end the fear-driven shark cull in Western Australia.

It's been, he says, a depressing road to a depressing fight. Funding has been almost impossible to find - he was determined to avoid any relationship with the fishing industry - so for a while he relied on a weekly loan from his parents. But he has begun getting sponsors for the costly tracking tags (donors get to name their shark and the tag allows them to follow them anywhere in the world) and he has found a benefactor to part-fund his work.

"Money has been the most emotional part of this for me because this issue is black and white, finning is evil, but it's out of sight, out of mind, no one cares until you spell it out to them. But to not be supported by your own country in something that helps our country, that's been hard to deal with."

On the other hand, the profile his work has provided has led to a book deal and the upcoming television show, although he still has that doctorate to finish as well. And he remains determined to redress the harm of cultural touchstones like Jaws and reduce our instinctive flaming-torch-and-pitchforks response to his sharp-toothed totem.

"Because you know what? My generation is really sick of hearing 'Oh, you should have seen what it used to be like'." That's the most bullshit kick in the balls you can get. Well, why didn't you do something about it then? I don't want to be saying the same thing to the next generation when it comes to sharks. I know they are nasty monsters that can kill you, that's the reality of their world. We choose to enter that world. If you can't handle the risk then it's pretty simple, don't go out there."

Shark Man: One Kiwi Man's Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator by Riley Elliott (Random House $39.99) is out now. His TV show, Shark Man, starts on TV One on November 29 at 4.30pm.