SHARK CAGE DIVING

Heeeey Big Fella!

Just off the coast of Gaansbai, South Africa sits an island that hosts approximately 35000 beleaguered cape seals.

And surrounding this island, in the ridiculously cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean – or the Indian Ocean, depending on who you ask – are an unknown number of the world’s greatest predators. Dauntingly known as SHARK ALLEY (I’VE YET TO COME ACROSS TWO WORDS THAT DESERVE CAPSLOCK MORE THAN THOSE), this area consequently hosts an increasingly popular tourist activity in which idiots like you or I can pay good money to be removed from a perfectly good boat and into the house of this subject of many a nightmare, the GREAT WHITE SHARK (ALSO A DESERVED CAPS LOCK) (and that shudder you just felt was Mama Fin… shuddering)..

People more erudite (I learned this word, meaning, “educated” or “learned”, from Dilton Doiley in an Archie comic – time well spent) than I validly suggest that diving with GREAT WHITE SHARKS disrupts the natural order and potentially contributes to an increased number of shark attacks on humans. This bothersome little concern is based on the hypothesis that the practices used to attract GREAT WHITE SHARKS to boats may teach them to associate humans with food.

Not wanting to contribute to the evisceration of innocent swimmers by GREAT WHITE SHARKS, I consulted the interweb for opinions, including that of a potentially legendary ship captain who refers to himself as “The Sharkman”, a name that obviously provides him with equal credibility to “scientists”. Several valid points were made. First, it is relatively unknown that sharks of all kinds are currently being wiped off the face of the earth. Why? Mostly to meet the demand out of China for shark fins, which are then boiled into a reportedly terrible soup so that the consumers of said soup can show others how rich, powerful and virile they are. (I’m not even making that up). This has mostly gone ignored in the West due to our innate fear of sharks and well-founded confusion over why the hell Chinese people eat soup that tastes like garbage because they are rich, not because they are poor. As a result, it could easily be argued that the more people who go shark cage diving, the more people there are that realize that these are among the world’s most incredible creatures, that they are (mostly) not dangerous to humans and that they must be conserved.

Second, I was comforted to learn that the sharks are never actually fed by the diving boats, only drawn closer by the scent of the chum (a.k.a. disgusting fish heads mashed up in a garbage bin at the back of the boat by a champ who smiles for 5 hours straight despite having one of the world's worst jobs)

, fake seals put near the boat, and a big fish attached to a rope that is always pulled away from them at the last moment. If anything, in my admittedly confused calculus, wouldn’t this teach the shark to associate humans with not being fed?

After all this careful research, just before I came to South Africa there was a breathless news report of a man who was plucked out of waist-deep water by what was described as “a dinosaur-sized shark” on an eyewitness’s Twitter account. Ignoring the fact that describing the shark as “dinosaur-sized” could simply mean it was a normal-sized or even under-sized shark, upon hearing about this story I was much more concerned about human obsession with ridiculous social media such as Twitter than I was about being eaten whole by a shark, leaving behind only my bathing suit (which was, incidentally, the case in the above incident). The day I watch a shark consume a human-being, leaving behind only board shorts and a cloud of blood, and believe that the best course of action is to run home to my computer and twat on my Twitter account about it, is the day I should be euthanized.

Anyhoo, there is no clear indication that either of the camps are correct in denouncing or embracing shark cage diving. It is possible that shark attacks have increased or that the practice of shark cage diving affects them in some other way, but nobody really knows. More importantly, what is clear is that shark attacks on humans are blown WAY out of proportion. It is incredibly, incredibly rare for a GREAT WHITE SHARK to attack a human. Statistics show that an average of five people worldwide are killed in shark attacks each year, and that an average of approximately sixty to seventy are injured (or maimed…I don’t like that word). You are more likely to be killed or maimed by the following:

-Vending machines

-Toasters (Approximately 750 ppl die worldwide from freak toaster incidents each year)

-Lost airplane parts that fall out of the sky

-Tripping over your cat

You get the picture. I am of course aware of the shortcomings of relying on the above statistics. First and foremost, pointing out that a person is incredibly unlikely to be devoured by a shark doesn’t assuage fears, as people are still terrified that they may happen to look like a seal for all they know and thus will perish in unfamiliar surroundings at the teeth of a really goddamn big fish. And second, despite the stats, people aren’t scared of housecats (although maybe they should be) – cats are just (incredibly useless) hunks of matter that sometimes cause people to trip and die. They (probably) don’t trip you on purpose and then eat you. And death by vending machine, well that’s just natural selection. BUT, give the GREAT WHITE SHARKS a break; we don’t taste good to them, so they almost always spit us out (except for the delicious man referred to above) and it’s not their fault we sometimes look like seals when we ride surfboards.

ANYWAYS, with all of that in mind, when you have the chance to swim with big fucking sharks, you swim with big fucking sharks

So, along with visiting Brother-in-law Alex and friend-from-school Alex, we set off at 6AM with expectations of Planet Earth-style demolitions of jumping seals or a few lost limbs. I had also heard that sharks sometimes devour seagulls as they jump out of the water, only to spit them out because they taste so terrible. If presented with that alternative, I would have been pretty happy.

The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli. But we persevered, and despite not seeing any crazy jumping sharks or partially eaten seagulls, we were lucky enough to get up close and personal views of six GREAT WHITE SHARKS, ranging in size from a wimpy 2ish metres and 1500 pounds to Rita McNeil scales of 4 metres and 3200 pounds.

What do I mean by up close and personal? Something along the lines of a GREAT WHITE SHARK opening wide and chomping on the cage bars approximately an inanimate carbon rod’s length away from me. Oh. My. Fuck. I was in shock for most of the rest of the day, before suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder up until about right now.

Needless to say, you should definitely, definitely do this.

Evidence (I’m waiting to see if pictures from my underwater disposable camera turned out. We thought we also had an underwater digital camera to use, as this is what one thinks when a male model acquaintance loans one a camera saying “here, use my underwater digital camera”. However, this kindly-loaned camera turned out to be the exact opposite of underwater-capable, and basically dissipated into a fine dust after taking these first two pictures, which are admittedly rad):

Duh nuh duh nuh duh nuh duh nuh

Lookin' good, feelin' good










The beasts in the water weren't the only beasts on-site




Fake Seal-chasin'