The Great White Misconception
False Bay is the world’s best location for viewing great white sharks and learning to appreciate them.
The sun is about to set across False Bay as the evening takes an unexpected twist. An agitated crowd of people gathers next to me on the beach; one of the fisherman’s lines is tense and his friend jumps into the waves to help him pull out his catch. Excited, we wonder what giant of the sea this man could be coercing out of the water.
The crowd grows by the minute and gasps when the catch turns out to be a splendid bronze whaler shark. The fisherman opens the shark’s mouth with his bare hands and reveals a multiple range of impressive teeth, designed to catch fast and hold tight. We touch this stunning creature’s shiny skin before the fisherman releases it back into the rolling waves.
I am truly blessed to experience such extraordinary beauty right on my doorstep and am glad to see there are people, especially children, who care about the shark’s safe return to the ocean. “Wait until you see a great white close up,” says Theunis Esterhuizen (aka Essie), a passionate shark lover from Gordon’s Bay. Theunis takes people to Seal Island to watch great whites breach and to experience shark cage diving. “I don’t do shark cage diving,” I tell him. “And I’m against using bait too.”
“Well, then you’re exactly the type of person I’d like to take with me, because you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” he bites back.
Friends of his had warned me that once he starts talking about sharks, he’s unstoppable. “The very first time I saw a great white breaching was on a fishing trip in False Bay,” Theunis says. “It was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen. Over time I came to realise that sharks are not the aggressors that movies such as Jaws condition us to believe.”
Seal Island is situated in False Bay and is arguably the best spot in the world to witness this extraordinary predator in action. It is home to a colony of 50 000 Cape Fur Seals, but it’s the island’s unique topography that contributes to the high occurrence of breaching and predation in this area. The steep drop-offs of the ocean surrounding the island enable the sharks to shoot up from the depths to surprise their unsuspecting victims.The seals have no kelp forests in which they can seek refuge.
“The best time for breaching is 20 minutes before and after sunrise, when the light is too dim for the seals to detect the shark’s dark back as it lurks at the bottom,” explains Theunis. Seals look for safety in numbers, and by swimming like porpoises, diving up and down, they make sure they have eyes in and out the water at all times. But when suddenly the seals scatter and a shark explodes in their midst, the hunt is on.
“The shark forcefully hits its prey and if the seal gets away, the shark will pursue the chosen one,” says Theunis. “The chase offers an awesome spectacle of unbelievable aerial acrobatics where seals change direction in mid air and great whites fly up to 2,5 metres above the waves! The show is over when the water starts bubbling red.”
The seal’s acrobatics make catching them hard work, so sharks understandably prefer easy, young seals – or will scavenge dead prey to minimise energy expended. “The younger, less experienced sharks in particular are attracted by a decoy foam seal behind the boat,” he continues. “They perceive it as an easy, isolated seal and the result is an impressive breach within 30 metres of the boat!”
He tells me how he releases a liquid mixture of sardines and pilchards into the water to leave a light scent trail. “It attracts sharks that come to investigate the source of the smell.” But as soon as Theunis mentions the word ‘bait’ I become wary. His great admiration for sharks is contagious, so I really don’t want to feel disappointed by eco-unfriendly practices.
“I thought you didn’t use bait?” I enquire.
“We only use a fish head on a rope to lure the shark. It’s certainly not meant to feed it, but sometimes the shark does get away with it and then I have to go to the trouble of getting myself new bait!” Theunis isn’t worried about influencing their behaviour. “They migrate and only stay here for a short while, so the interaction is very limited. And remember, if they’re not hungry, they’re just not going to be interested.” I wish my brain worked the same way with chocolate…
In his book Sharks:The Perfect Predators, Dr Alessandro De Maddalena – one of Europe’s leading shark experts – confirms that sharks are not voracious monsters. According to him, sharks don’t eat all the time and when they do, they only consume small amounts of food. A shark’s stomach comprises of two compartments: one for storage and the other for digestion. Some sharks have been known to survive without eating for up to a month and a half.
When I tell Theunis I’m perfectly happy with surface viewing and don’t feel the urge to immerse myself in 16°C water to get a view from a cage, he’s thinking ‘this too shall pass.’
“Many people only want to watch at first and not go in,” he replies. “But once they see the others do it, they change their minds. What I enjoy the most about the cage is that I can just sit back, relax and admire the magnificence of the sharks, without having to watch my back.”
I like this guy: he’s not an adrenaline-driven macho.
He tells me that some people stay as long as half an hour in the cage, and that if a shark bites the cage, it’s merely to investigate the metal. “Cage diving is an unique and exhilarating experience,” he says. “Most people stay calm and say the experience positively changes their perception of sharks. But for some the first sight of a dorsal fin is enough to make them climb up the highest point of the boat…”
“What worries me is that each year we see fewer and fewer sharks,” says Theunis. Unfortunately, sharks are threatened with extinction due to overfishing and unfounded belief in their medicinal properties.
“In less than half a century humans are going to wipe out a species that evolved long before dinosaurs,” says Alessandro, when I meet him at a talk on sharks. According to The Save Our Seas Foundation over 100 million sharks are being purged from the oceans each year.
Half of the world’s shark catch is accidental due to long-line fishing for tuna or swordfish. “China is one of the biggest consumers of shark meat” Alessandro continues. “Shark fins command high prices and so vast numbers of sharks are being caught Their fins are cut off while they are still alive, and the finless animals are thrown back into the water where they die.”
Sharks have the reputation of being merciless killers, roaming the coasts in search of a human snack. But it turns out that it is far more often the sharks that are killed by us, and in ways that leave a bitter taste in the mouth. If sharks do disappear from our oceans, the marine ecosystems will take a knock resulting in great distress for the millions of people who depend on the oceans for food.
If only more people could experience these splendid creatures in their natural habitat, then maybe public perception would change. Come to think of it I’ve been living in Gordon’s Bay for 13 years and also had no idea of what I was missing.
But now I can’t wait to be blown away by the great white’s hunting prowess near Seal Island. I’ll even get into the cage to admire this magnificent master of the oceans. It’s actually not the shark that I’m worried about, it’s the cage. What if it drops down and I find myself all alone at the bottom of the ocean?
“I hear this fear all the time”, Theunis grins. “This too is a mental thing.”
Shark Adventures
Theunis Esterhuizen, Gordon’s Bay (50 km from Cape Town), 083 225 7227
Save Our Seas Shark Centre
www.saveourseas.com
Text by Petra Vandecasteele. Pictures by Paul Godard.
This article is featured courtesy of the August 2010 edition of Country Life magazine.
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