On my last day in South Africa I went cage diving with the Great White sharks. The cage looked as though it had been thrown over a cliff fifty or sixty times—there were bars broken and bent everywhere. Yet, without care or thought, we slipped into wetsuits, donned snorkels that we ended up throwing back on the deck and jumped into the cage. Like the biggest idiot of them all I went in first and was pinned in the corner of this tiny cage, crammed in with three other people. You don’t have to be claustrophobic to feel as though you are facing death at this moment. The waves periodically splashed over the top of the bars giving us no air to breathe all the while people were kicking and being thrown about into one another due to the strong currents. I couldn’t move at all, was braced by holding onto these bars on the top, could only breath periodically when the waves went down, and on top of it all the water felt about the temperature of the Antarctic. So whenever they would say to dive down to look at a shark, we would be plunging our faces into a bucket of ice.
Fortunately, you don’t much care about the cold when National Geographic is an inch in front of your face in much more vivid colors than even an HDTV can provide.
The first time our guide said ‘dive’, I pulled myself under—and was face to face with Jaws. Great White Shark, king of the oceans, oldest killer in the world... these things all cross your mind. And since there was a bit of chum which had floated next to my face, he was staring at me like I was a seal and thus a shark burger at his local McDonalds.
They really do have sharp teeth, by the way.
So the second time a shark comes by, the captain manages to have him ram straight into the cage, literally inches from us. Oh fun, the killer of the world running into us while the bars look ready to give any minute and there are two other sharks perusing the area! It is just like you see on National Geographic during Shark Week—literally because it’s the same sharks. This was the bay that they do the filming on since there are something like a thousand Great Whites on the bottom of this 100-foot deep bay. The water isn’t nearly as clear as you’d think though; the sharks have to be right there to see them. That’s why all of them on the TV are close up.
In total I think I saw four sharks in the cage, and a few more from the ship—maybe fifteen total, including possible multiple sightings of the same sharks. The most amusing moment, however, came when a baby shark bit the chum straight off the line and the captain pulled it in while muttering ‘well, this has never happened before...'. Something you never should hear the captain of a cage diving tour say out loud.
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