The Travel Journalist

Earlier that bright summer’s afternoon, twenty tourists get onto the Predator II boat at Gansbaai, a coastal village just past Hermanus and 160km from Cape Town. This specialised boat carries them out to sea, where they will encounter one of the ocean’s most feared inhabitants: the Great White shark.

Brian McFarlane, owner of Great White Shark Tours, is the skipper of the trip, taking out his second boatload of the day. Two excited Belgian men and numerous British adventurers sit wind-blown and shivering in anticipation as Brian explains how they attract the sharks to the boat.

“We put minced tuna in the water, and the smell goes out,” he says, his tanned arm pointing in the direction of an oily trail behind the boat. “A shark is an animal that never sleeps, it moves all the time, swims all the time. So we lie in one spot and hope he comes across our chum line.”

But nothing happens. Brian has been out earlier this morning and had great success in the spot they are in, but now it seems the sharks have moved. “What has happened since this morning is that the wind and the current have changed, so if we don’t get anything in about half an hour we’ll move to a different spot,” he explains.

The crew stamped their feet and hit the side of the boat, and whistle, as if the sharks can be called like dogs to dinner. And it works. Just then, crewman Gert gives a yell from his vantage point above us, indicating a small (a mere 3 meters long) shark on its way to the floating bait attached to a buoy. Time to don the wetsuits provided as part of the package.

You’re holding onto the bars inside the cage, taking care not to grab the steel tubing exposed to the shark swimming underneath of you. All you’re wearing is a pair of goggles and have no snorkel. You have no protection aside from the cage, which now that you’re down here feels bizarrely flimsy. “Down, down, down!” shout the crewmen, and you shove yourself underwater and stare ahead at a massive beast nibbling the frozen chunk of tuna.

This practice is popular and thrilling, but not without controversy. Surfers and sections of the marine community argue that shark cage diving increases numbers of Great Whites in certain areas and brings the animals closer to shore, thus encouraging more attacks on people. The cage operators counter-claim this, saying they are educating the masses, debunking myths surrounding an animal demonised by Hollywood. They also say Great Whites are too nomadic to be trained and people go where the sharks are, not the other way round.

Craig Ferreira, a former director of the White Shark Conservation group and Discovery Channel shark expert, is all for cage diving, as long as it’s done correctly and in a balanced way. As a former shark cage operator, he feels the practice does a lot to encourage the conservation of sharks.

“I’m pro-shark tourism, because it’s a non-consumptive use of sharks,” he says. “At the moment, nearly everything in the sea is fished: tuna, hake, abalone. So anywhere that we use the sea without damaging it is fine by me, as long as it’s done correctly.”

Ferreira is vehemently against the assertion that cage diving increases attacks on people and says it is very difficult to train a Great White shark like a pet. “It’s very difficult to condition them because they have a strong natural urge to move all the time,” he says.

“They move between sites, and I suppose they have a degree of conditioning, but you have to ask what kind. Is it conditioning to attack people, or to come up to boats because they think there might be food?

“As to the question whether they become conditioned to attack people, that idea is absolute nonsense. There’s no correlation between a boat with a cage, and a surfer. They don’t even look the same. The shark comes along and it can’t mentally separate the boat and the cage and the divers. All it sees is one big object. It’s the same as a lion who walks up to a Land Rover in a game park. It doesn’t jump and attack an individual in the vehicle. It’s like saying that going on a game drive teaches lions to attack people.”

In the other boat, if you will, is Gavin Hau, a Cape Town resident, surfer and fisherman with strong views about shark conservation. He says sharks are obviously conditioned to follow boats, opining, “They’ve done tests on feeding sharks, and there is a presence and reward correlation for them. If you don’t feed them, they’ll come around your boat then leave to find another one. If you do feed them, they’ll come back.

“The most bizarre thing is, I know you can’t get a shark to come to your boat if someone else is chumming and you’re not. There are usually five or six boats out at one time, each with 20 tourists on it paying R1000. Multiply that out and you’ll establish they make a lot of money.”

You can hear your heart pounding in your ears as the glistening creature glides past you again. But now you’re relaxing, enjoying the moment. The shark is calm. It’s having a look at you, nothing more. Its scary eye, black and unblinking, seems trained on you as much as you stare at it. And now that you look at it, the shark is rather beautiful. It’s as though someone dunked it halfway into a vat of white paint, as the bottom half is pure white and the top is blue-ish black.

Hau does concede that the link between shark diving and human attacks is slim, saying, “The biggest controversy with shark cage diving is whether or not there is a causal link between it and attacks on humans. I would say it’s very slight, but probably not.

“If you believe that a great white feeds once every two weeks, and because it’s so docile and it’s low body temperature, it doesn’t need to feed more than that.

“They feed infrequently, so there can’t be a link with chumming. Sharks will be attracted to the scent of the chum trail, but the link between the trail and the solid food is so slim. It’s not going to attack a person just because it’s smelled tuna oil in the water.”

The issue of chumming is also a contentious one, as Hau maintains it is illegal to use big bait. “As I understand it, they’re not allowed to chum,” he says. “The difference between a bag letting out bits of smell and rewarding them with big chunks of food is a thin line. Sometimes they’ll just eat the bag, so are you or are you not feeding them? I know they’re not allowed to feed them, so it’s a marginal decision as to whether chumming is feeding. Either way, the shark’s senses are turned from cruising mode to feeding mode.”

Ferreira, on the other hand, doesn’t see the problem with the practice of letting out tuna oil and tiny bits of mince (which is not illegal). “As far as food and chumming goes, I don’t think that’s a problem. There’s so much dead bio debris in the ocean as it is, what the boats add doesn’t make a difference. One dead whale floating around for a week chums a lot more than all the shark boats together put out in a month,” he explains graphically.

One crucial point these shark aficionados differ on is whether or not sharks retain a taste for people once biting them. Ferreira insists sharks do not want to bite people and do so when mistakenly thinking a surfer is a seal. Hau, on the other hand, says there are rogue “man-eater” sharks off the cape coast that should be destroyed.

Ferreira explains: “The fact is that sharks don’t perceive humans as normal prey. If they did then no-one would swim. Most of the time it’s an accident. A shark is swimming around and someone put s a leg in front of him, and he grabs the leg because he thinks it’s food. He’ll let it go once he realizes what it is and that it’s not what it’s looking for.”

While Hau concedes that most of the time the sharks are not looking to bite people, he insists there should be concessions made for sharks that attack people repeatedly. “In Cape Town there are two rogue sharks, one in False Bay and one on the Atlantic side. Both of them have killed people,” he says.

“There has been one fatality, and another guy lost his hand when the shark tried to pull him off his paddle ski. Both sharks are over five meters, they are fully adult. They shot the one shark at Miller’s Point, but the next day it was seen swimming with the spear still attached. Those sharks have been patrolling that coast and there are regular sightings of them. From time to time, they have taken people.

“It’s normally the big sharks who will bite to feed, and it’s not a case of mistaken identity. The authorities can’t make a decision to go and hunt those two sharks. No-one is prepared to do it, and for me that sucks because I have a constitutional right to protected swimming around the Cape peninsula.”

Ferreira does admit that because sharks have personalities (Hau agrees), you do get one out of every 200 that has a “bad attitude,” but he won’t give in to the Jaws stereotype. He says: “They aren’t man-eaters, that’s total nonsense. People also think that they are dumb eating machines, which they’re not. They are intelligent and have strong personalities, as well as complex behaviours. People think they are anti-social things that just hunt and eat alone, which is not true.”

You’re freezing. Bits of tuna are sticking to your goggles and the sharks are starting to move away. The sun is starting to set and the other adventurers are keen to get back on dry land. The crewmen haul you out of the water and hand you a towel as you continue to stare down at the water. He’s still there, circling the now-melted tuna head, before it is hauled into the boat and refrozen. You’re exhilarated. You smell of the ocean and taste salt on your lips.

On the way back to shore, Brian races the boat through the calm waters and a shout goes up from one of the Belgians on the fly deck. It’s a Southern Right Whale, breaching ahead of the boat. Over and over it rises from the water, putting on a display no-one has ever seen before. “In the 12 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a whale do that,” Brian exclaims, stopping the boat so that everyone can film and take pictures.

SIDEBAR:

While Hau and Ferreira differ on certain points, both are keen to protect swimmer and surfers from getting into potential danger. Here are some of their pointers to help yourself steer clear of a curious Great White.

1. Don’t use a dark surfboard, because it’s a silhouette.
2. You shouldn’t wear a dark wetsuit if you’re swimming where seals are, because you can be mistaken for one. Rather use a colourful one, bright yellow or orange so that a shark can see you’re clearly not a seal and he’ll swim off.
3. Don’t surf when there’s a lot of fish in the area. If you see fishing boats off the coast, don’t surf because where there is fish, there will be predators.
4. Don’t surf on a point break, rather surf on a beach break.
5. Use a long board instead of a short board, because the long board is bigger and will need a bigger, rarer shark to attack it.
6. Don’t surf near river mouths, as Tiger and Bull sharks are found there in warmer climates.
7. Don’t surf at dusk or dawn. Those are proven high attack times.
8. If currents are strong out to sea, sharks tend to move into bays so dive in relatively strong currents. Swim in clear water.
9. Be clever, don’t surf with seals! Just make yourself easily distinguishable from normal prey.