Saturday February 19th, 2011-Great White Shark Diving

All my life I have had a heavy interest in everything to do with sharks.  Not just like that Shark Week stuff but used to read about them at a very young age.  I would consider them my favorite animal even though they are fish so this was a huge huge huge day for me.  I got a call in the morning at 6:20 telling me to get moving.  I was 5 minutes late.  So was everyone else though…a little bit of a late night the night before was.  When we all were ready to go, I noticed Aaron missing still.  I found him in Drew’s room passed out still because of course the night before he did not make it back to his own.  I woke him and told him he was 30 minutes late.  He jumped out of bed and began rifling through Drew’s top drawer throwing boxers out yelling “these don’t belong here!”  The kid needed some more sleep but there was no time to waste.  I finally convinced him after he cleared the drawer that he was not in his own room.  He ran out to go get ready. 
        It was about a 2 hour cab ride to the Shark Diving place in Gansbaai.  After a light breakfast and a short briefing, we headed out to Seal Island which was about a 45 minute ride from shore.  To attract the sharks, they put a full 3 foot tuna in a garbage pail full of water and began to stab at it with a shovel.  The fish began to shred apart as blood and little pieces overflowed in the pail and fell into the ocean water.  The captain also threw a tuna head tied to a rope and left it there for a few minutes.  We were informed that it takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours to attract the sharks.  We waited there talking and watching the water and after about 20 minutes we saw our first Great White circling the boat.  What an exciting moment it was to see that beast in the water only about 15 feet away from me.  Right away when the first one shows up they want to get people in the water right away so they asked who wanted to go first.  I right away volunteered with 7 other people who go in the cage with me.  We put on our 7mm thick full body wetsuits and climbed in.  That water is freezing.  I don’t even know what the temperature of it is but when you first climb in it is so cold until your body adjusts to it.  It makes it even freakier that you are climbing into the water with the oceans number on most deadly creature.  When all eight of us were lined up in the cage, he tossed the tuna head on a rope out in front of us.  About 5 seconds later he yelled “down on the left, down on the left!!” and all of us submerged our heads into the water and grabbed onto the bar lower in the cage.  It was pretty clear underwater with about 20 feet of visibility.  Out of the darkness on the bottom left we for the first time encountered the Great White coming in after the tuna.   It is such a scary/spectacular moment when you see it come into vision out of nowhere.  As it lunged after the tuna, the captain pulled the rope so the shark would not get it.  It chased after us right towards our cage.  It is hard to describe but the tuna head is not in the water to feed the shark so it gets pulled away every time to get the shark to chase after it.  When it does often times the shark is pulled within feet of the cage… and sometime it slams into the cage.  It is amazing they still run this the way they do because in reality, it’s like not safe.  There are numerous times that if my hand slipped out it could have been gone.  It is again so hard to describe what the situation was like but it was scarier than I even thought it would be.  When you see shark week where these Great Whites are jumping this 12 foot monster (yes they really were that large) on TV you take it for granted but when you actually see this underwater beast in person it is indescribable.  You cannot possibly know how big they actually are unless you are down there in their environment.  They are just huge.  To think it is a fish…I don’t know it is so hard to describe how crazy these things are.  I was in the cage numerous times when one of the sharks was less than a foot away from my face, directly on the other side of the cage.  My friend Sarah also caught a video when one of the sharks noses and upper jaw actually came into the cage.  Super scary stuff, we all rose above the water and started screaming and freaking out.  Each group of 8 got a turn until we finished going through the 35 people on the boat, then everyone got another chance to go.  The great thing about this trip is that we were able to go as long as we wanted and were not rushed in any way.  Over the course of the trip we saw about 9 different Great White sharks.  A great outing they told us because typically February is the worst month of the year to see sharks and often times they only see one or two.  On our trip there were times when 2-3 sharks were around us at once, the largest one being about 12 feet long.
        Honestly after I had finished these two trips I was not sure which one I had enjoyed more.  The skydiving was a few minutes of pure adrenaline while the shark diving was a few hours of the most unbelievable things I have ever seen.  I have done some pretty cool stuff in the past and honestly I must put both these experiences in the top 3 things I have ever done that I can think of.  I looked back after the Great White dive at the past 24 hours and what I had done.  I basically was able to fulfill 2 dreams I have had for a long time in only 24 hours.  Who gets to say they did something like that, in South Africa, while attending school?  Not many people I suppose.  Easy to realize in a city such as Cape Town how lucky of a person I really am, and how I need to take advantage and remember every moment of this trip that I possibly can.