Shark Diving

Out into the bay close to Seal Island

Today (we just ignored our colds – thanks to Aspirin provided by my mom) we went shark diving! Actually Sebastian wanted to dive, I just wanted to see. So we spent R1350 (around 100€) to go on a boat and Sebastian in a Cage with great white sharks around us.

Getting ready to dive

I didn’t go in the cage – it was awesome anyway! I had a wonderful time watching the seals on Seal Island while waiting for the white sharks to catch the scent of the disgusting mixture they purred into the water. I was wondering about the difference to the sea lions in San Francisco before, now I know one difference: they sound different! The Californian sea lions make very distinct loud sounds. A little bit like birds maybe. The seals here sound like a whole farm! Mostly like sheep, a large herd of them, but there was a little cow and chicken in the sound cloud as well! I tried to capture that with my little camera, we will see how that turns out! But it was very windy, so I don’t have high hopes for the sound quality. It was amazing! Seal Island is a tini-tiny island in the middle of the bay and in their high times there are up to 4000 seals on that tiny spot of land.

Sebastian in the cage

Because of that there also are a lot of sharks living in this area permanently. The population of white sharks here is around 350! Normally white sharks move from one place to another. Here they took a residence, because of the never ending supply of seals. There are some even bigger great whites that only come on the peaks of the seal population and rove around the rest of the African shore of the Indian Ocean the rest of the year. But the “smaller” great whites live here permanently.

Nr. 6

White Shark Africa set anchor right next to Seal Island. They brought fish heads as bite and a disgusting mixture of sardines and something to tip in the water to attract the sharks via scent. It took maybe 20 minutes before the first little shark arrived, little meaning maybe 2-3m. They let the cage down into the water and the first group of divers put on their wetsuits. The crew consisted of 5 men: a skipper, one shooting a video of the trip, one who purred the mixture into the water and one that played with the bite for the sharks. The last one also gave the commands for the divers, when to get down. I didn’t see one single shark coming the way they do in the movies – with their flapper cutting through the water. They approached under the surface. Over the trip I learn to look for the right things and I could see them coming from underneath.

Nr. 7

We saw 7 different sharks. The last two were very big, around 8m. The crew knew them and they had names. And they actually fought for the bite! One got caught with his teeth in the cage the second set of divers where in. It was kind of a climax! The two guys from Cologne (besides some Belgians, there were only Gemans on that boat… - guess shark diving is something only Germans do) who did the trip a few weeks ago but didn’t get to see sharks and got a voucher to go again for it, were well rewarded!

We were in the water for maybe 2-3 hours, afterwards we had “lunch” (the most crappiest sandwiches we had ever had) at the office of organization and watched the video that was shot while on the boat. Pretty simple trick to get even more money out of us, but we did get it anyway – I guess we will never go shark diving again :)

on the way back