That's a Toothy Grin You Have: What Being Close to a Great White is Really Like
You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!
What happens when you are close up and personal with the real JAWS
Dear Reader: This adventure was in 2002, years before I had a proper camera for the elements. Therefore all photos are from Depositphotos.
African history is full of surprises, and Dyer Island is among the best. Samson Dyer, an African American emigre from America, came to the island in 1806 to harvest seabird droppings, then in high demand.
Dyer Island, one of several, is just off the southern coast of South Africa. Samson set up shop to harvest the guano, prized by farmers as fertilizer for its nitrogen content.
Originally named Isle de Fera by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century for its abundance of wildlife, these barrier islands offer key protection for the shoreline against the turgid and powerful waters off the Cape.
Dyer himself has a fascinating history which you can read here. While the exploitation of the island, the bird eggs and more is unfortunate, it was representative of the attitudes of the times. That said, the island was later named for Dyer and he became rich off its abundance.
Today the protected island is known for its remarkable seal population, some 60,000 of them as well as considerable bird life.
Most folks head to the Cape for the scenery and the wines.
I was here for the sharks.
The Great Whites came here for the seals.
Gansbaai, a fishing town east of Capetown by 101 miles, is where you'll find plenty of skippers who will happily drag you out to Shark Alley, dump a cage overboard, toss you in it and then chum the waters with shark liver for Great Whites.
You get to cope with who shows up.
Now in all fairness to the skippers, I've made this sound far more fraught than it actually is.
Truth be told, these are professional operations with excellent skippers and gear. The shark cages are part of a now very popular tourist activity: get in the (freezing cold) water with the sharks and say hello.
The Great Whites troll these areas for seals, which are plentiful. My skipper told me that some years ago a fellow skipper discovered that if you rubbed just under the snout of one of these great hunters, the sensory overload would make the shark keel over. More on that in a moment.
Don’t ask me what inspired him to try this stunt. All I know is that apparently he did, and National Geographic took notice. Nat Geo is one reason why Gansbaai is now how home to plenty of operators who are only too happy to toss bloody bait in the water to allow those of us mildly insane enough to do this trip to get face-to-face with Jaws.
While orcas have driven much of the Great White population away these days (they love Great White livers, and are fearless hunters) but back in 2002 when I was there, the sharks were plentiful.
I’d arrived on the advice of my friend Roger Whitehead, a world adventurer and PhD in sports medicine whose friends spanned a remarkable range of interesting people. One of them was a crusty skipper who ran these shark tours.
I’d just blown out my right ear diving the Sardine Run. This tour meant that I’d only be in a few feet of water.
Close to teeth, but that was the whole point.
I stayed with the skipper and his wife. He will remain unnamed out of respect; he and his wife are Afrikaans. As such I was regaled with some of the ugliest racist remarks I’ve ever heard. I had to keep my lip zipped or be tossed out on my ear. It was an excellent lesson in tolerance and learning to keep one’s counsel in other countries.
Cage diving is one of the few ways that we can experience such an apex predator in its own environment. The skipper loads up the boat and the tourists, you motor out to Shark Alley and put down anchor. Then, with all of us noobs watching, he chums the water. His trick was to use shark liver, which he bragged was the best bait.
If you’re there, as I was, in May, which was the beginning of the best of shark season, there were plenty of Great Whites around. It didn’t take long before a fin appeared. In that way that terrifies any swimmer who ever watched JAWS, the first Great White shark angled towards us.
It is impossible to describe the unholy terror that marches up your back, into your neck hairs and the nervous center of your brain upon seeing this enormous creature. As it got closer, the skipper pulled the chum closer to the boat and the shark followed.
We were terrified and fascinated.
He baited the shark to bite the chum right at the edge of the boat. She burst out of the water, jaws wide, her eyes rolled back to protect them as she extended those enormous teeth for her prize.
The skipper reached over, rubbed her right under the snout. She stopped in mid-attack, then rolled gently backwards as though stunned.
This is a thing. Read about it here.
He repeated this with several other sharks until our boat, and others nearby with more tourists, saw plenty of fins circling our small ships.
It was time to gear up. Seventeen-plus Great Whites and NOW we’re going in the water. Call me a nut job. I wanted the full experience. If thousands of other tourists had done this, so could I.
The skipper pointed me towards a dingy room in the middle of his boat. There in the phone-booth-sized toilet I tugged on my double 7mm wetsuit. The waters are about 40 degrees F, painfully cold for weenies like me. I pulled on booties and gloves. Then, along with another tourist, I eased into the cage that the skipper had dropped over the side.
The top of the cage stays above water, and you can get out at any time. Fine. And I thought, Quint thought he could get away, too.
Instructions?
DON’T STICK ANY PART OF YOU OUTSIDE THE CAGE.
DON’T HOLD ONTO THE OUTSIDE BARS
Otherwise, enjoy the view.
What a view it was, too.
By the time our skipper had finished chumming, I counted nineteen Great Whites. Some battle-scared, enormous sharks, plenty of younger, faster ones. They circled the cage, chased the chum above us, and inspected everything in the water. Including us.
It took a few minutes for the ice cream headache to disperse. I watched these great predators circle, some of them brushing up against the cage. It sometimes happens that a rogue shark will go after the cage, but it’s rare. You might see the dramatic footage but most of these magnificent animals are curious about what’s in their world.
The problem is that the only thing they have to investigate with is a mouth full of the most terrifyingly razor-sharp, serrated teeth imaginable.
Most sharks aren’t typically interested in people. When we splash, or they perceive our moving limbs off the sides of a surfboard, they may think we’re seals. The only way they find out is to bite.
Since a Great White exerts some 4,000 pounds of force per square inch, most of us wouldn’t survive an investigative nibble.
That said, these incredible animals, hated and feared by too many, play a key part in the ocean’s ecosystem and deserve our protection.
It’s fair to say I might not have felt that way before I entered the cage.
Yet here I was, in intimate proximity to one of the most terrifying animals on earth. They were docile, curious, occasionally testing the cage with their teeth.
I took off a glove, and as one female came by brushing the cage, ran my hand along her body. Sandpapery. She came round and round over and over, same place, as though she appreciated the touch. If nothing else, simply curious.
I’m not going to embarrass myself by projecting some human characteristic onto this female shark, but the fact that she continued to return and keep her body close to where I could rub her skin was instructive. Think of it as you will. I was entranced. The second she was gone I jerked my hand back in.
Once, when a shark tail bumped the cage and l lost my grip on the inside bar, I grabbed one of the outside bars. Right then, a young male had decided to explore the metal, bare inches above my fingers. He bit it ever so gently.
Ever so gently for a Great White is relative.
If nothing else, he was simply curious. But I could have lost my entire hand.
At one point, I was watching several of the males chase chum off to my right. My cage partner was filming while I was watching. He tapped me on my right shoulder.
When I turned around I was looking straight into the gaping maw of an enormous female who had been following the chum right over our heads.
I was perhaps a few feet away from this:
She didn’t attack the cage. I am very glad I’d relieved myself before climbing into my wetsuit. What I was looking at was the last thing you see before you’re lunch if you’re a seal. Looking into that gaping maw was transfixing.
These animals hunt seals by using incredible amounts of energy to launch themselves from below at their prey. If they don’t get the seals in their mouths they might stun them long enough to catch them. If they miss, they have to rest, for the energy expenditure to breach is huge.
Mature Great Whites can weigh anywhere from 1700 to 5000 lbs. Imagine what it takes to get that kind of bulk out of the water high enough to achieve this kind of leap. A miss for lunch can be brutal on their bodies.
Belowdecks, my cage partner and I luxuriated in the company of the nineteen Great Whites. Over and over, a shark would scrape close to the cage, I would stroke its skin, and it would return. It was a wholly different experience from what you’d expect.
You come away with deep and abiding appreciation for this creature. This magnificent animal is key to biodiversity, the same way wolves are key to the success of places like Yellowstone. Remove the Great White or the wolf and the biosphere collapses.
Nobody cares if they scare you for what frankly are ridiculous reasons.
They belong on earth, they have a job. Our fear and loathing kill them for simply being who they are and supporting the natural biosphere we claim we care about.
Getting into a cage and being this close is a fine lesson in respecting these incredible creatures and backing off the Hollywood-induced fear. They belong here.
By the time I clambered out of the cage, my hands and feet pruned with salt water, I was transformed. Like so many others, JAWS had scared the pants off me back in 1976. The movie, while hugely successful, was also fundamentally flawed, and did considerable damage to the understanding of sharks worldwide.
Every copycat film since has done little to allow us to better appreciate what they do for our undersea world.
Upon watching it again after having done the cage dive, I could appreciate how little the producers understood-or cared- about these animals and the potential damage such a movie could wreak.
Profits above all, especially Great Nature.
We are ignorant of the role sharks play and why they deserve protection like any other creature.
And this, kindly: more people die taking selfies than from shark attacks.
My friend Dr. Carl Safina of The Safina Center wrote this article about his own experience with the Great Whites, courtesy National Geographic.
Safina’s work to preserve our world informs much of my opinion about nature, and it’s why I support their work. If you care it’s worth investigating. You don’t have to love sharks to care about the plastics in the ocean, over-fishing and many more of the issues we face to preserve what so many would continue to plunder.
Just because they’re scary, that doesn’t justify wiping sharks or spiders or snakes or anything else off the face of the earth. But that’s man’s arrogance; we want to remove what is inconvenient- or more accurately, what we refuse to understand and respect.
These days orcas have discouraged much of the shark activity around Gansbaai. You can still go cage diving there and in plenty of other places around the world. I strongly recommend it. You might not fall in love with sharks, but you will be utterly transformed by the experience.
If nothing else, immersing yourself this way allows you to be part of their world, and perhaps better understand the key role they play in it.
Let’s play.
Thanks as always for joining me on this journey. I hope you learned something new and I also hope you got inspired to try something new or think a new way. If it was useful to you please consider
If you know someone who might enjoy this please also consider
Either way, I hope you support organizations which protect our world for ourselves and for those who are coming up behind us.
.. BlowAway Tale .. ! Takes a giant flyin leap right into the Running Collection from my Childhood to This Morning .. that’s my bottomless Orca level hunger for the Great Sportin Editorial STUFF.. that i maintain to have Baleen Whale capacity to hunt & filter & find.. this since my early daze of Sea Hunt, Cousteau, Jules Verne, the Angela Doria..
bye th bye i gots a question for you.. A previous post I wus floored by enchanted by was about the dude running the Safari .. the ‘frisky guides n .. well no spoilers from me ever eh !
My odd question ? What was the ‘substack response.. ie ‘Likes or ReStacks or Comments’ ? Shared it via Notes.. and periodically revisit to put that giant grin on my face.. and from my access point cannot see evidence of ‘response - This is an immediate FLAG for a spy from hypermedia - will tell you straight - aint on the warpath today - just ‘takin no prisoners today & BBQ’n Sacred Cow .. n that’s me ‘in a generous mood.. not even close to ‘gruntled … 🦎🏴☠️
I have enormous respect and appreciation for all of the apex predators, sharks included. But I'm pretty sure if I were in that cage and saw that set of teeth coming at me, there'd be something way more gross than chum in the water.