Most people wouldn’t choose hopping into a tank with five sharks each day as a safer career option.
But for Philip Peters it was.
The performer in Shark Encounter, which will be showcased at Westerner Days from Wednesday to Sunday, once did daredevil stunts and worked with tigers, lions and elephants in the circus.
He performed the flying trapeze and the human cannonball, but his showstopping routine was the one he and his brother Marco became known for, the Wheel of Death. The brothers would do the aerial routine far above the circus floor on loops without the use of safety nets. After falling 30 feet and being unconscious in the hospital for two days, Peters decided it was time to try something new.
“I was in the ambulance too much. I needed something safer so I came up with this,” he said.
During the Shark Encounter show, Peters, 47, will wear little more than a wetsuit as his jumps in the tank with four nurse sharks, up to two metres long, and one lemon shark, around a metre long.
“It’s nice once you’re in there. You hear nothing and you’re pretty much on your own,” Peters said. “It’s nice quiet me time. It’s relaxing.”
In one of the tricks he will turn the largest shark on its belly and dance with it, in another he’ll hold one and appear to play it like a guitar.
He has been doing the show for 15 years and has learned a thing or two about the creatures during that time. Smell is the most important thing to sharks and so he has learned over the years to make sure his hands aren’t smelling of fish when he jumps in the tank with them. But he hasn’t gotten out totally unscathed.
Asked how many times he has been bitten by the fiendish-looking beasts, Peters said he stopped counting after a dozen or so bites.
He first became interested in the circus as a little boy living in the Netherlands. His father was a TV producer who made shows on circus routines and other nightclub acts. Peters and his brother would sometimes travel with their father when he produced the show. By age 16, Peters started to get involved with the circus himself. His first job involved setting up and tearing down tents. He eventually travelled around the world with a number of different routines, moving to the United States in 1986 to work for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
“It’s fairly satisfying. When you’re a performer you live for your art. The better you do it the more applause you get.”
Peters favourite part of doing the show is getting to travel to new places, with this being his first visit to Red Deer. His company Haai Inc. — which means shark in Dutch — is based in Florida, but he has travelled throughout Canada, the U.S. and Mexico with the Shark Encounter Show. He lives with his wife Evelyn in Florida.
Four shows are scheduled a day, at the blue tent near the Centrium, starting today until Sunday from 2:30 to 9 p.m. each day.
There are plenty of other Westerner Days festivities set for today as well. The parade starts at 9:30 a.m., leaving from the Red Deer Arena, then travelling north along 47 Ave., west on 53rd Street and down south along 51 Ave. It then goes onto 48 St. to 48 Ave. and back to the Red Deer Arena. The parade will include special guests Cindy and Grant Marvin and son, Ian, of Victoria, B.C., who were “apprehended” as part of the Arrest-A Guest program.
Trooper will be here for a good time not a long time tonight when they take to the stage at 8:30 p.m. to raise a little hell and don’t miss the Fas Gas Plus Northern Lights Fireworks Show, which is scheduled for tonight at 10:45 p.m. near the racetrack. More information on times and activities is available at www.westernerdays.ca.
sobrien@www.reddeeradvocate.com