Day 06 Spring Break

“Shark in the Water” - V V Brown
Thursday September 5^th 2013

6 AM the alarm goes off and Caite, Gillian, and I are out of our beds at the Stumble Inn. We stumble in (see what I did?) and out of our room and the bathroom down the hall preparing for our Shark Diving venture ahead. My mind still hasn’t processed the fact that today I will be in the water with Great White Sharks. This is something I’ve been looking forward to since I knew it existed.

A year ago, when I was trying to decide where I wanted to study abroad, I was reading the surly and jaded blog of a girl from Washington College who had gone to Rhodes. Gently put, I got a general sense of displeasure from her entire experience, but, if I’m really honest, I also got the sense that if we met in person we wouldn’t be friends. I was about to start looking at another blog when I got to her post about shark diving. THAT’S A THING?!?! Boom! DONE! Going to South Africa.

Our hostel that morning was freezing. I put on a couple thousand layers of clothing, anticipating the boat to be even colder. We won’t be coming back to this hostel so we pack up everything, and by 6:45 we are out the door. I say goodbye to Jungle Cat, who, bless his heart, has brought us a dead rat this morning. Good omen? Definitely.

Welcome to the 2 hour car ride to Kleinbaai. I will be your driver today. We made pretty good time until we got to a strange little town made of roundabouts. Our directions seemed a bit out of date and we kept questioning where we were still with 30 minutes of driving to go. We back tracked a lot and retraced our steps (tire marks?) not wanting to drive half an hour in the wrong direction. It was stressful and awful, BUT We. Figured. It. out.

Travel tip: When lost…remind yourself hundreds of people do this every day and you have to be smarter than at least one of those people. When you are lost in a car, your whole car is lost. Don’t yell at your car DJ or passenger about which way to go. When no one knows. No one knows. It’s okay to ask for directions. Once you pick a direction to go, find ways to keep reaffirming you are going the right way. You will feel a bit dumb later. Just laugh.

As we reached the next, less confusing town, Gillian blasted some good ol’ One Direction and we car danced like the adolescent boy band crazed girls we are. Into the town we saw a giant GREAT WHITE SHARK adventures mural on the side of a building and drove through a town full of stop signs before driving down into a seaside residential like area. There were shark diving tour companies everywhere along this strip, but I’m pretty convinced we got the best one.

Despite our worrisome directional failure earlier that morning, we were the first divers to arrive at the company. We walked into a building that was kind of like a North Carolina beach house converted into a bed and breakfast. We took a seat and looked around at all the impressive pictures of sharks. I got some (awful) coffee while other divers gradually arrived. We were served an impressive breakfast spread which we were all grateful for. They had grapes! A fruit I’d almost forgotten existed.

After a sufficient stuffing of our faces we received a briefing on the day’s activities. We were told to use the restrooms on land over the one on the boat and to change into our swimming costumes and have them under our clothes.

Brian Macfarlane, the face of the sharking operation, talked to us outside on the patio about how to properly dive. He demonstrated on a model piece of the cage we’d be using. He also told us that we had a horrible day for shark diving ahead, and that sorry, there was nothing he could really do about it. The seas were really rough, and recent rainstorms meant that the water was really turbid. With one meter of visibility, our chances of seeing a shark really well in the water were not good. But damnit if I wasn’t still excited. I practically skipped all the way down to the boat.

model of the cage. practicing!

The boat took off from the dock very quickly and we cruised across the water. The waves were huge but we were on a mission. Gillian and I both love being on boats and we were having a great time up on the top deck. We got tossed from our seats a couple times as we went over some ridiculous waves. Caitie, poor thing, was below, trying not to get too sea sick. (She was hilarious in the car after putting on her sea sickness patch. We think she got a little high)

Suddenly the boat slowed down and we started to feel the full force of how rough the ocean would be that day. We floated around a bit until Brian was satisfied with our coordinates. They released the cage and attached it to the port side of the boat. For some reason I had imagined it as a being more separate from the boat, but in this choppy water I was glad to see that stability of the set up. Brian climbed up on a structure of the boat right next to us and told us we had the best seats on the whole boat. The chum (chopped up fish to lure sharks) was released from a giant trashcan at the bow of the boat just behind us. Most of the sharks would be appearing near us and Brian. He showed us a silhouette cut out of a seal, that he had named Gladys. Someone else below us attached a giant fish head to a large bob and lobbed it into the water next to Gladys. Fishing for sharks. WEEEEE!

Just to give you an idea of how prime my seat was. That's the cage below my feet.

We waited for about 20 minutes. A whale watching boat came by and tried to see our sharks, but they got impatient. Just as they were cruising away, Brian shouted out “Oy oy oy!!” And there was our first shark!!!! He ripped the fish head right off of the line and disappeared. It was amazing! I love sharks so much and here I was watching the in real life, not on TV, not at an aquarium, here! In the Indian Ocean. Shark Week is filmed here! Aaaaaaaaasdghoetjgsitrjpogdhsjgopjte

This went on for a long time. We waited and waited, then Brian would get excited, and the other workers on the boat would try and tease the bait just so, so that the sharks would breach the water for us. A couple did and It. Was. AWESOME!

I can't...I can't even... I just....look at him!!

After a long long while, the wetsuit guy announced again how bad the conditions were, but that if we were really really keen we could still go in the cage. He basically guaranteed we wouldn’t see anything. Gillian and I looked at each other, silently agreed we didn’t care, and raised our hands to suit up!

(Mere moments after we climbed down the ladder to the lower deck for our suits, someone on the top level got seasick and chundered over everything. It was awful!! So glad I wasn’t up there to witness it)

The wet suit was comfy and super flattering (heavy, awkward, and awful). The fabric was really hard to tug on especially not knowing if I was doing it properly whilst being bucked and buffeted by the boat. It took me a while and I felt stupid and cold trying to make it happen, but I was so determined. I was given a belt of weights and some goggles, and then I was helped down into the frigid water in the cage next to Gillian. I’d be lying if I said we were totally composed and chilled about the whole thing. We may or may not have freaked out like school girls in homeroom/ Miss America pageant contestants.

In the cage you are meant to stand on a little bar, hold onto another little bar about waist height, and just stand with your head and a bit of your shoulders above the water. When someone on the boat shouts “Now! Now! Now! Go down Go down Go down Go down Go down!” you take a big gulp of air and plunge your head under the water to look through a cut out of the cage at (hopefully) the shark passing by.

After what felt like hours of waiting, there were a few adrenaline pumping false alarms before they told us to climb out and sit on the cage above the surface of the water. Normally, you only get about 20 minutes in the cage, to ensure everyone gets a fair chance to see sharks, but because today 1) the visibility was horrendous 2) not many people really wanted to go we could stay in the cage as long as we wanted/ could stand the cold.

We eventually started seeing sharks one after the other. Some of them crashed up against the cage. Others were at the very edge of our visibility. I saw one breach the water for the bait just before I sank below the surface to see him again. They were magnificent! Not for one minute was I scared. I was just so full of awe for these amazing creatures in their natural environment. I felt so small and insignificant (and chewy) in the cage just witnessing the power and grace and enormity of these sharks. Just seeing the sharks from the top level of the boat was well worth the money. THIS was priceless. I stayed in the cage probably much longer than was advisable, but I just couldn’t make myself leave. I kept saying to myself “One more. One more and then I’ll get out.” Gillian got out a bit earlier than I did, to avoid popsiclization. I saw about five more sharks and called a day too. Those last five were so incredible though. One of them actually swam straight towards me, completely level with the hole in the cage. And when I say straight at me, I don’t mean straight at me the way people say it after a 3-D movie experience. It was right in front of ME. My section of the cage. One of the luckiest most amazing moments of my life. Another one gently glided alongside the cage gazing at each of us individually for a brief moment with its giant unblinking eye.

Back on the boat, my wetsuit was unceremoniously yanked off me, exposing me to the full force of the cold wind. I wobbled around the boat willing the feeling back into my legs so I could get dressed. Gillian and I grabbed some chips and drinks and went back up to the top level for the boat ride back to shore.

Back on land we were served soup and more tea and biscuits. Note: Shark diving makes you ravenous. They showed us a kind of homemade video of the whole trip. It was cool to see the overhead view of a lot of the sharks I had only kind of glimpsed whilst in the water. We stayed for a really long time, eating and warming up.

Post diving. We are freezing and wet but golly we are happy

Brian MacFarlane himself came over to our table and apologized for the poor conditions of the day. Gillian and I had just been talking about how incredible the whole thing had been, and we were taken aback by house disappointed he seemed. Thankfully we kept our mouths shut, because the next thing we knew he was offering us free vouchers to come again on a better day. KA-CHING!!! Best day ever. Best freaking shark filled day ever.

A little while later we were back in the car for a 4-5 car ride to our next hostel in Plettenberg Bay. I assumed my position as car DJ and off we went. The view of the countryside was just as amazing as ever. We joked that we were inside a Pinterest board. None of this is real!!!

While we were driving along some winding back roads, we kept coming across couples of guinea hens trying to cross the road. They always got out of our way...well…most of them. We rounded a curve and about 30 meters straight ahead of us were two guinea hens. One of them got out of the way, but the other ran back and forth and back and forth in the road, heading straight for the car no matter which way Gillian tried to swerve. At the last second it took flight and kind of rolled up the windshield and continued to fly off. The damn bird was fine, but to say it was a bit traumatizing is putting it nicely. It became hilarious a second later when Gillian screamed, “I’ve never seen a bird do THE. MOST. WRONG. THING!!!” The rest of the drive was uneventful.

About an hour after the sun set we arrived at Amakaya Backpackers.

This was taken the next day. It was dark when we arrived. 

 Mary, Nora, and Becca were still traveling our way, but hadn’t arrived yet. We were greeted by an enormous man and his giant puppy, Sky. We checked in and then rushed off to find food before all the restaurants closed.

To our surprise we were just down the road for the strip of shops in Plettenberg where we had had breakfast with Jess a few weeks before! It was such a cool feeling to recognize the town from our magical women’s weekend. We had a quick bite to eat then returned to the hostel to recuperate. It was a long, very long, very amazing day.