Sharks and Cages

Day 3: Today we went cage diving with great whites. What a rush. We took a two-hour bus ride from Cape Town down the coast. We arrived at the bay that is home to Dyer Island, the place where they filmed the epic Planet Earth shots of Great Whites getting airborne. Basically this is the world's best place to see great whites because the males travel from around the world each year to meet there with the females where they can reproduce. VERY NICE!!!




We anchored in the middle of the bay just south of the island in "Shark Alley" and started to chum. It is actually pretty hard to attract great whites even when they are nearby. One randomly swam by our boat just as we got out there but he swam away before he caught the scent of our chum. The goal is to drift with the wind and create a chum line that will draw the sharks right where you want them. When they are close the crew throw a hunk of tuna meat attached to a rope and try to entice them to bite it so that the divers can see the sharks in action. Its basically fishing for sharks but I think the role of fisherman gets switched sometimes when the sharks get a hold of the bait and practically pull the crew in the water. Its fun messing with with something higher up on the food chain than you.


We ended up attracting about nine different sharks, and each of us got a couple of dives in. On the second dive we baited a real winner. He was huge. He got a hold of the bait and started thrashing right towards the cage. I remember seeing his verocious smile as he swam right towards me and head butted the cage literally a foot from my face. I could have punched him in the teeth. The guides said your not a man until you've captured a sharks tooth and a lion's tail. Oh well. With the force of his head hitting the cage I was jerked back and lost my grip on the place that your supposed to hold. As I was free-floating there the shark started thrashing the cage with his lower body and gave us all a pretty good ride. When he swam away with the bait you can see the true bursts of speed that these animals are capable of.


The guides were not happy that we may have hurt a shark, but the experience was a rush like no other. On the way back we stopped at a smaller island nearby called Geyser Rock which is the home to tens of thousands of Cape Fur Seals. They stay in big groups to lessen the risk of shark encounters.


It turned out that the most dangerous part of the whole day was the bus ride back to Cape Town. I awoke from my slumber in the back of the bus as it jerked to a halt in the middle of a freeway in front of a blind corner at 5:30 p.m. Our driver hurried out without saying a word to us and stood behind the bus as cars and bikes zipped by. We sat in the bus just waiting for a car to slam into the back of us (It nearly happened many times). Finally the police showed up to get us off the road and we got another bus to pick us up to go back to the ship. We cleaned up and went and had a couple of cold beers.