Thursday, August 07, 2008
We took quite a bit of video of our white shark cage diving experience outside of Cape Town, but it took me a long time to figure out how to edit videos filmed with my new Canon camera. The way I understand it, new Canon cameras shoot in a format called m2ts, and this format is currently not supported by any of the major media players. Anyway, you can see the result of my video experiment below.
Our shark dive was arranged by a company called "White Shark Ecoventures", which picked us up from our hotel at 4:45 AM in the morning. We had just arrived in Cape Town the previous evening, and were therefore shocked when notified in the hotel reception about the pick up time. There are several different operators that arrange white shark dives, and some start later in the morning. However, the benefit of starting early is that the sea is calmer and you can return to Cape Town well before it gets dark.
The shark dives all take place in Gansbaai, which is a fishing village located in the Western Cape. It takes a couple of hours to get there from Cape Town. Gansbaai is the world's capital for great white shark viewing.
While we were very lucky with the weather, most people on board our small vessel managed to get sea sick, and a few members even threw up. Yuka got sick very early on, though she did not throw. As a result, we did not manage to take many photos. Also, I decided not to buy a disposable underwater camera from the White Shark Ecoventures people, and this turned out to be a bad idea. The preferred option would of course be to bring a digital camera equipped for underwater filming, but I unfortunately did not think that far ahead.
In total, we saw five different white sharks, the largest being about 3 meters long. One individual writing on Tripadvisor.com commented that he saw over 20 great whites, thus it is possible that we were not particularly lucky in terms of the number of sharks that we saw. Seeing a shark is virtually guaranteed, the only issue to worry about is the weather, and I would hate to do shark diving on a day with crappy weather.
Being in the cage is not the least bit scary. The white sharks simply glide by beautifully and have zero interest in you. In order to make the sharks come close to us, the crew used a tuna head as bait, but it was pretty clear that the shark was interested in the tuna bait and not in us. However, I assume this is not always true, otherwise we would not have needed a cage.
After returning to shore, our guide took us to a viewpoint from which we could see some right whales. The right whale is one of the only types of whale that will swim within sight from shore and thus allow for land based viewing.
Here are some pictures from our Shark Dive.
Our shark dive was arranged by a company called "White Shark Ecoventures", which picked us up from our hotel at 4:45 AM in the morning. We had just arrived in Cape Town the previous evening, and were therefore shocked when notified in the hotel reception about the pick up time. There are several different operators that arrange white shark dives, and some start later in the morning. However, the benefit of starting early is that the sea is calmer and you can return to Cape Town well before it gets dark.
The shark dives all take place in Gansbaai, which is a fishing village located in the Western Cape. It takes a couple of hours to get there from Cape Town. Gansbaai is the world's capital for great white shark viewing.
While we were very lucky with the weather, most people on board our small vessel managed to get sea sick, and a few members even threw up. Yuka got sick very early on, though she did not throw. As a result, we did not manage to take many photos. Also, I decided not to buy a disposable underwater camera from the White Shark Ecoventures people, and this turned out to be a bad idea. The preferred option would of course be to bring a digital camera equipped for underwater filming, but I unfortunately did not think that far ahead.
In total, we saw five different white sharks, the largest being about 3 meters long. One individual writing on Tripadvisor.com commented that he saw over 20 great whites, thus it is possible that we were not particularly lucky in terms of the number of sharks that we saw. Seeing a shark is virtually guaranteed, the only issue to worry about is the weather, and I would hate to do shark diving on a day with crappy weather.
Being in the cage is not the least bit scary. The white sharks simply glide by beautifully and have zero interest in you. In order to make the sharks come close to us, the crew used a tuna head as bait, but it was pretty clear that the shark was interested in the tuna bait and not in us. However, I assume this is not always true, otherwise we would not have needed a cage.
After returning to shore, our guide took us to a viewpoint from which we could see some right whales. The right whale is one of the only types of whale that will swim within sight from shore and thus allow for land based viewing.
Here are some pictures from our Shark Dive.
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