We were originally going to try the visibility at a different spot from the usual area the operators do the dives at, however once we arrived there they had gotten calls that there had indeed been spottings at the other location so we headed back out there. They asked for the first 8 volunteers and of course Kyle and I were the first in to get suited up! They worked on the chum and had sharks around before we even had time to get in our wet suits. Brian is the owner who is famous for being on every dive himself, and also famous for the best chum in the industry drawing more sharks than anyone else- he knows his stuff! So we jump in our areas of the cage, and all I was thinking was "holy shit the water is FREEZING" (as there are sharks all around)!!! It was 13 degrees Celsius, or 55 degrees Fahrenheit... That is VERY cold water! On a side note, we learned that the water around the cape is actually colder in the summer months than in the winter... This is due to the melting of ice in the Antarctic and that water moving in. So Brian would start saying "Get down, get down, coming from the right/left"... We would all dunk under and watch as the shark attacked the bait in front of our cage... It was pretty rad! And it just kept getting better as the day went on. The water visibility was terrible, that was certainly true. You could not see the sharks unless they were within 3-4 feet from you (max). The good side of this was when Brian originally threw out the bait and asked us to go under to see if we could spot it and we all said no he moved it in MUCH closer to us.... On a day with good visibility it would be kept much further from the cage. This is what made the experience though... The sharks were running into & rattling the cage, and coming right at you on the surface, mouths open. Female sharks are bigger than males, and we had a couple very aggressive females come around which game some good shows!!! Unfortunately with the visibility being so bad the underwater camera pictures are not so great, but the best shows were on the water surface anyways, and we have video and pictures of many good moments. We were able to go back in the water a few times as well which was cool. Those creatures are actually very intriguing- just not sure after I saw their aggression that I would want to be hanging out with them without metal bars between us. Do you hear jaws music when you look at the below pictures (1st one take on the boat, 2nd one from inside the cage)???
We made friends with people on the ride, one lives in Manhattan and is in the film industry- she is now a producer but used to be a film editor and has asked for both the video taken by the guy on the boat who you buy it from in it's original format, and we plan to send her our video as well... She is going to compile a cool video also using my pictures and make something much better than the crap they tried to sell. Also on board was an 80 year old lady from New Jersey, haha, I think they told her she was the 2nd oldest to have done it. When we were back in Cape Town getting dropped off one nice guy from Israel who had seen some of the pictures I took kindly asked if I would mind sending them to him because all he could think about on the way home were the pictures I took, haha. Maybe I should copyright them, and then maybe I could land a job photographing sharks for a living, haha. I would love to go back in the winter when the sharks do the breaching, I could be on a boat all day watching and photographing that, it is amazing stuff!!
Anyways.... When we got back the rest of the evening was pretty uneventful. We went to eat at a delicious Portuguese Italian restaurant, and then hit the sack... It had been a long day in the sun!
No comments:
Post a Comment