Cristina Zenato – Dive Trainer and Shark Handler
Cristina Zenato’s career qualifies her to be in the category of world’s most dangerous jobs. If handling wild sharks is not enough, she is also a recognized cave diving explorer and instructor. Yet although she operates in a decidedly male world, she places a high value on authenticity, tenacity and celebration of her femininity.
Cristina moved from Italy to the Bahamas in 1994 and decided to make it her home and diving her life. She manages a team of eighteen divers, teaches hundreds of students at all levels from Open Water to Full Cave and specializes in teaching a program on shark handling. While weighted down in a heavily armored chain mail suit, she gracefully coaxes a shark into a status of tonic immobility through gentle touch. She explores and maps cave systems, providing the Bahamian government with vital information for natural resource protection and is the first woman to have connected a land cave with an ocean blue hole. She consults with organizations for the creation of marine parks with an emphasis on protecting sharks. Cristina believes there is great power in education and volunteers her time to host foreign students and teach local Bahamian school children to dive as part of sharing her vision.
One of the greatest challenges Cristina faces as a woman diver seeking equality is learning how to demonstrate strength and resilience without sacrificing her femininity. Uniquely connecting well with both women and men students has been rewarding to Cristina.
Cristina has spent years fighting with dive gear that did not fit. Instead of it working for her, she felt overpowered by it. She had to find unique solutions especially with her drysuit and sidemount harness. In the most recent years those issues have been resolved and now she has gear to suit her body size.
She recalls an awkward moment years ago when she was in a grocery store with a visibly older cave diving colleague. He was buying adult diapers and lubricating jelly for his drysuit seals. “The facial expression of the cashier was priceless!”
With the increase of women in our sport it is evident that we need equipment that both fits and performs. Fortunately, the attitude that women are inferior and weak seems to be declining.. Cristina Zenato believes that women can be strong and feminine at the same time. This new perception is exemplified by her lifestyle, career and passion for the environment that screams, “Be who you are!”
– Renee Power
Read more about other women mentors in “Women Underwater” which will be released November 1, 2014
