Rachel Riley wrote will before filming Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters
Rachel Riley stars on the new ITV1 reality series Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters.
Rachel Riley wrote her will before she began filming Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters.
The 39-year-old TV star appears on the new ITV1 reality series alongside the likes of Helen George, Lucy Punch, Sir Lenny Henry, Ross Noble, Ade Adepitan and Dougie Poynter - but Rachel confessed to feeling terrified before the cameras started rolling.
She told the Daily Mail newspaper's Weekend Magazine: "I wrote my will before we went. This trip made me want to make sure everything was signed, just in case. They're wild animals. You're scuba diving. Anything could happen."
On the show, the celebrities are tasked with a series of shark-themed challenges. And Rachel was fully aware of the dangers because Pasha Kovalev, her husband and former Strictly Come Dancing partner, previously had a close encounter with a shark while they were on holiday together.
Rachel shared: "We were in the Galapagos islands and we saw a bright pink thing in the water. We thought it was a discarded life jacket. It was a sea lion that had just been bitten in half by a bull shark, and it was trying to crawl out of the water.
"We had been snorkelling off the boat in those same waters."
Rachel has daughters Noa, three, and Maven, five, with Pasha. But she kept her kids in the dark about her latest adventure, because she didn't want to scare them.
She said: "I didn't tell them what I was going away to do because I didn't want to scare them.
"It was only when I was in Bimini on a video call by the water that I said, 'Do you want to see some sharks?' They said, 'Yeah!' If you fall in the water with a bull shark you're a goner, but the girls said, 'You've got to go swimming with them, Mummy! They were too young to have any fear about what I was doing."
Rachel now acknowledges that things could easily have taken a turn for the worse.
She said: "Swimming with sharks was like being with the Mafia. Everything is fine while everything's fine and everyone's laughing, but they could turn in an instant and there would be nothing you could do about it."
