Simon's Town from False Bay

Air Jaws on YouTube

We were picked up at our hotel around 10:45 AM and were soon on our way to Simon's Town. Once at the shop we finished signing in, the usual waivers in case we died,  and then headed for the boat. The boat was small, not that much longer than the sharks, but it had a comfortable inside cabin. En route to the island we saw many groups of African or Jackass penguins floating on the water.

  False Bay

 

Sailors arriving from the east could see Table Mountain in the distance and mistakenly thought they were in Table Bay near Cape Town. Hence the name False Bay. Today it is known internationally thanks to the Discovery Channel. Shark Week has featured several documentaries about the Great White Sharks that occasionally are seen to jump out of the water in False Bay. While this behavior is rarely seen in other parts of the world, it seems to be a standard hunting and recreational activity for the sharks here. These enormous creatures launch themselves into the air at tremendous speed with only a few flicks of their tails. A young naturalist with an interest in shark behavior, Chris Fallows, noticed this behavior and started documenting it in the 1990s.

 

Chris had worked on a documentary with the BBC in 1993 at Dyer Island where he had his first Great White Shark dive without a cage. It wasn't until 1996 that he first observed the behavior of the sharks jumping out of the water, at Seal Island in the northern end of False Bay. This is home to roughly 60,00 Cape fur seals. From April through August each year, The Great Whites hunt the seals as they go out to feed and return. Chris developed a small business, Apex Shark Expeditions, (www.apexpredators.com)  taking tourists to see the behavior and by 1999, National geographic booked him as a guide for a special they would film. The crew for this event, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the film JAWS, included author Peter Benchley and National Geographic photographer David Doubilet. In 2000, filming started for the Discovery Channel's Air Jaws, which made this behavior world famous.

 

This behavior is most often observed around dawn. We weren't able to book a morning excursion because of the high demand, so we settled for an afternoon tour. It was just as well because we were jet lagged from our journey the previous day and the folks who went out that morning did not observe a breach. To our amazing good fortune, our captain that day was Chris Fallows, himself. Despite his world wide fame, he is just the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. Dennie was having a really hard time with her left leg and didn't think she could get on the boat. He was having none of that and moved the boat to a different docking area and made sure she was as comfortable as possible on the boat and could enjoy the experience.

Cape Fur Seals heading out from Seal Island to feed

African Penguins

Seal Island, home to tens of thousands of Cape Fur Seals

My first experience cage diving with Great White Sharks was at Isla Guadalupe of the west coast of Mexico. There, after a 240 mile drive out to sea you anchor on the leeward side of a large island where the water is calm and the visibility is quite good. You can see many of the sharks 110 feet down circling around the boat. You bring your own exposure protection and air is supplied via hoses and an air compressor on the boat to regulators in the cage. Properly weighted, you stay submerged for an hour. In False Bay, it's a short drive out to a small island which does not protect you from the wind. The swells were about ten feet which had many of the passengers chumming the water and the visibility was no more than about 20 feet horizontal. There is no supplied air in the cage. It floats so that there is about three feet of the cage above the water. You hold onto the side of the cage waiting for a shark to appear. You're wearing a 5 mil wet suit which is barely adequate for the 50 degree Fahrenheit water. When Chris signals you, you hold your breath and go below the surface for as long as you can hold your breath. You're wearing a weight belt which is less than optimally weighted for fear you'll never come back up so you have to work to stay submerged. The cage is rocking and getting even a bad photo of the shark is a challenge. Despite all that, it was exciting to see the Great White sharks of South Africa up close.