To shark dive or not to shark dive?

So I’ll paint you a little picture. It is freezing cold on the East Coast at the moment -not my ‘normal’ kind of freezing, i.e. it’s no English winter that’s for sure, but for South Africa, the last few winter days have been pretty nippy. We are in Umkomaas, an area famous in diving circles as being one of the top places to dive in the world, mainly due to the unbeatable Aliwal Shoal that attracts thousands of visitors each year. So we can all appreciate that these hardcore divers aren't put off by a little wind and cold.

We thought it’d be a good idea for the project, as well as an interesting thing for us, to go out on one of the dive boats and take some footage of the action. We were promised sightings of dolphins, sharks and turtles and if we were lucky, whales. So you can imagine our excitement at the prospect and the sly addition of the early rise of 6am didn't even faze us as this point.

The next morning the alarm yelled out that it was 6 and we headed out a bit before 7. On arrival to the center, I had begun to notice the angry looking clouds looming before us but tried not to let it worry me, reasoning with myself that the sun would burn through and it would clear up. That it did not do. We were told to come back tomorrow when the weather conditions were not forecasted as ‘dangerous’. 2 early mornings, ouch.

This morning when we dragged ourselves out of bed again (fairly reluctantly I may add), I was relieved to see that the day was ever so slightly more cheerful looking. When we got there they asked us if we’d like to do a shark cage dive and I readily accepted, it being something I had always wanted to do. Rog, being a touch anti cage diving (for reasons I wasn’t yet sure of) said he’d film it instead. We were told we’d be going out with a group of divers and that we’d head to the sharks after they had begun their dive.

So there we were, rammed into a sturdy looking rib, the skipper tearing through the waves like a mad man. The divers suited up and before we knew it were throwing themselves backwards off the side of the boat into the cold Indian Ocean. So now our turn for some fun right?

Wrong. We had been left on the boat with the guy in charge of monitoring the water and ensuring the divers were safe. He had no knowledge of our shark dive and couldn’t exactly take us back to shore while he had a very critical job to do. Safe to say, we were pissed off. And cold. We were pissed off and cold. Pretty soon we’d be pissed off, cold and feeling considerably ropey. It is one thing whizzing around on a speed boat, or even casually gliding through the water on a sail boat. But bobbing around on pretty ‘gnarly’ waves certainly wasn’t any of the above. Rog is a pretty experienced waterman, having worked on and with boats for a good portion of his life and I am certainly not a sea virgin, so when we reached a peak of definitive seasickness, we began to regret the trip.

In an attempt to make light of a pretty crappy situation, we decided to take some GoPro underwater footage (consisting of GoPro in hand under the water, hoping to god the sharks weren't hungry) and interview skippy. I was quite naive to the controversy that circles the subject of shark diving and the idea of ‘baiting’. Baiting is when sharks are lured in to coming very close to divers in underwater cages by the attractive sight of a meal. There is concern that these sharks are beginning to associate humans with food and that as a result they are more likely to attack, when otherwise they wouldn't have done so. When we asked skippy about the subject, he seemed to negate it quite firmly. In retrospect, of course he did -he has the dive centre’s reputation to uphold.

In any case, we finally headed back to shore feeling quite disappointed and thoroughly bilious. 

Better luck next time...