Shaaaark

Note: Unfortunately sand and salt froze my camera so these pics will go up when I get home. Borrowing Edge's point and shoot until then.

Just off the coast of Hermanus in Gansbay there is one of the highest concentrations of great white sharks in the world. They cruise in and stay for about 2 or 3 weeks, often feeding on the seal colony and the delicacy of baby seal in an area called "Shark Alley"...I'm sure the seals hate that name. There are seals on one island and a bunch of penguins on another and tons of great whites in between. If you've seen pictures of Great Whites breaching out of the water as they attack a seal, it's almost certainly from this location. "Planet Earth" put together some incredible footage of an attack a few years ago that a lot of you may have seen. Around mid-September as the seal pups move on the sharks start to move into a sandy bay...for some reason mostly females. The best thing is that someone will take you out in a boat, drop anchor, chum the water with anchovy oil and ground tuna, drop a cage overboard, stick you in a wetsuit, and throw you in the cage in the water with the sharks. For this people like me will pay them handsomely. While the visibility wasn't great they did make a couple passes right by the cage, one just as we were about to get out cruised by about 18 inches away staring eye to eye with those triangular teeth jutting in all directions...it was pretty amazing. They were pretty clearly just minding their own business and not particularly interested in us, so there wasn't as much of a fright factor as I thought. From the boat we could see them even better as they came to the surface. I think we spotted 8 different in all with the biggest being a female of about 4 meters...and Tim's yell of "dude, I just saw a @#$%ing shark!" even made the crew, who have seen just about every reaction, laugh . The cage dive company dangled a wooden cutout of a baby seal (again, not too sure the seals we consulted on this) and a tuna head on the end of a rope and used them to bait the sharks closer and get them to break the surface. It was a pretty cool experience. I wished it was the right season to be out there in shark alley watching them breach naturally, but we saw some pretty amazing examples by the boat. On a side note, the cage diving is a bit controversial and I thought twice about doing it before I went on the trip...but after the trip I think that at least some of the criticism is unwarranted, and felt much less conflicted after the experience...it's nice to placate guilt like that isn't it. But I think the bottom line is that surprisingly little is known about great white behavior patterns and so theories abound.