Last weekend, I had the most unreal, amazing, can’t-believe-that-just-happened-to-me day.
I got up at the crack of dawn (ie: 3:45 am) and got picked up by a mini-tour bus from my house, along with two other housemates as well as some other people that I know from my program. We then all headed out to Gansbaai Bay, which is a famous Bay outside of Cape Town...to go Great White Shark diving. Unreal, right? Oh, just wait.
I passed out during the two hour bus ride and arrived at a darling little beach house right on the water before the sun was even up. We had breakfast (I had a delicious bran muffin that was hot out of the oven), signed our life away via some dumb waivers (ie: “If you lose a hand, finger, toe, you can’t sue us”) and then listened to a quick safety brief, and I was off to swim with the Great Whites.
The boat ride to our diving spot was spectacular. We left the dock right as the sun was coming up and the entire duration of our boat ride I watched the sun rise against the background of the mountain range as a host of birds flew alongside our boat. As I watched the sun come up I was really overcome with a lot of emotion. I can’t really explain what was going through my head, but for some reason I just felt like there was no other place in the world that I was supposed to be at that very moment. And it was a feeling that was about more than just seeing some cool sharks, and doing cool shit. It was the first time since I’ve been here that it actually felt right. That I made a good decision to leave home and go so far away…that this “experience” that I’m having might actually be worthwhile or life changing in some way. Make any sense? Probably not.
Halfway to our dive spot, all of a sudden the boat gave a jerk, sputtered a little bit, and then we were moving considerably slower than we were before. Everyone else thought that we had reached our dive destination, but I immediately knew we had hit something and one of our engines had died (those fishing trips as a youngster totally paid off). I looked behind the boat, and was like “OMG A WHALE!” and the whole boat turned and looked, and low and behold there was a huge Wright whale swimming in back of us. Well, turns out we hit it. And that’s what caused one of our engines to die. The whale looked fine. No obvious blood trails in the water or anything. Apparently that’s super rare…to hit a whale I guess. But then we had a little situation because we were pretty far offshore, with one engine. (More to come on that later)
We passed Duiker Island and dropped anchor not too far from its shore. Duiker Island is famous for its “Shark Alley”—which is a natural channel that was formed along a large portion of its coastline due to huge rock formations that tons of sea lions live on. It’s the same alley that’s featured on all of the Discovery Channel documentaries on Great Whites.
As soon as we dropped anchor, the crew unloaded the huge cage that we were going to dive in, and started throwing “chum” (a mix of fish blood and guts) as well as huge fish heads around the water near the boat. At this point nearly everyone on the boat was feeling a little sea sick. (Me included). Five people suited up, hopped in the cage, and I went to the upstairs viewing deck to watch out for some sharks.
It took a good 15 minutes, but then all of a sudden, BAM. There was a Great White. Around every 7 minutes or so, a new one would swim by, or the same one would make another round. I watched every other group go, and right as I was about to climb down to get my wet suit on, A GREAT WHITE BREACHED RIGHT BESIDE OUR BOAT. A Great White shark actually jumped out of the water, right next to our boat, in mid-air, flopped around, and smacked the water so hard the people at the front of the boat got wet. Apparently this is beyond rare. It basically never happens unless the sharks are provoked with like a fake sea lion cut-out/buoy. UNFREAKINGBELIEVABLE.
(Important side note: Moments before the Great White was breaching, this big ogre of a kid was puking his guts out over the side of the boat. Kid had some serious sea sickness issues. Naturally, guess who had to get squished into the cage right next to him? Yup. Me.)
So after the shark breached, I climbed down and went to go put my wet suit on. Approximately one minute after being below deck I got serious sea sickness, and felt soooooo incredibly nauseous. One of the “tricks” they have for sea sickness is to suck on lollipops. Which I don’t know if it actually worked or not, but after some struggling (since I went last I had to put someone’s cold and wet suit on) to get my wetsuit on, I went back up to the top of the boat and was pretty miserable until right before I got into the cage. (See attached picture. It’s a beauty.)
So to get into the dive cage, you sit on the edge of the boat and “walk” down the rungs of the cage to get in. We just used masks and held our breath because apparently o2 tanks and bubbles scare the sharks away. It was FREEZING. Of course I got a size too big wetsuit so I was swimming inside of my own wet suit (not okay). The protocol while in the cage is as follows: You would hover at the top of the cage, and the people on board yell: “DOWN LEFT” and then you just push off from the top of the cage, and grab onto this red bar that was inside of the cage and look around and see the sharks.
I SAW ATLEAST 7 GREAT WHITE SHARKS. In person. Not on TV. It was UNREAL. I saw a couple little ones, one giant one that looked like it was going to bite the cage, and one that had some really sad gash wounds on its fin, probably from a fishing net or something. You know how Great Whites look really sinister and mean on TV? As if they actually possess a real aggressive personality? Well, they look exactly like that in real life. Exactly. The. Same. It wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it was going to be…more just freaking awesome. If my fingers hadn’t turned blue and I could have still felt my feet, I would have stayed down there so much longer just checking them out. OH, and there were lots of cool fishes too that were feeding on the fish heads, and those were super fun to look at. I think they should get some credit too. It wasn’t all about the sharks…the fishys swam in our cage, and one even tapped my mask!
It wasn’t all fun and games in our “cage rager” as we called it. The big ogre kid next to me STARTED PUKING IN THE CAGE. And not like, one hurl and he was done. The kid was puking for a solid five minutes, at least a half dozen hurls. And his vomit was floating all up in my business, and he felt it was necessary to look at me while he was puking. I nearly got sick too. Because just seeing someone else puke and seeing vomit makes me sick enough. Then he had little pieces of vomit stuck to his mask, and on his wet suit hood. I wanted to die. I was trying not to laugh, but was absolutely disgusted at the same time. It was awful. It was also inescapable, because I tried to go underwater and look at the fishes, but his vomit was floating in little chunks all in the water, and then the fish started eating his vomit, and I was about 5 seconds away from hurling myself. And then he finally stopped. Thank God.
Fun fact: In South Africa puking/yakking/vomiting is called “chundering”. The verb form being: “to chunder”. Bring that one back home and start using it. It can also be abbreviated to describe an action that we don’t have a word for in the USA. “TC” stands for “tactical chunder”. Which is when one makes oneself throw up. Oh, the cultural things I’ve been learning!
So since I was part of the last group to dive, I got out of the cage and realized that nearly everyone on the boat had disappeared. Since one of our engines had broken, they had to get an emergency dingy to take the majority of people back to land because we couldn’t have made it on one engine. We also had to leave the cage in the water with a buoy attached to it. Crazy, huh?
This post has gone on far to long, but it was necessary to detail the entire day...the wale, the shark that jumped, the big ogre who was vomiting everywhere…it was unbelievable.
