Week in Review – 29-14-20th July

Gansbaai

We have had a bumpy week on the sea but fortunately not bad enough to cancel trips. Even though it has been overcast most days and choppy on the water the Great White Sharks were amazing!! The visibility has been excellent all week at Dyer Island and Shark Alley and many happy clients have come and gone with a new perspective on sharks! The largest shark seen this week was a whopping 4.3m long but please remember every meter that they are long they are also proportionately wide in girth!! The most sharks seen on a single trip this week was 17! And the average visibility was 8-10 meters. The sharks were really performing and we had a mixed week with some sharks being very relaxed with others feisty. The juvenile sharks are normally much more ‘twitchy’ and keen with multiple lunges on the bait line making the viewing exceptional. Have a look at the video of the week and you will see a stunning shark we had that was much keener on the seal decoy than the bait. One of our clients took a stunning video of the shark thrashing around the seal decoy which you will see on our ‘review of the week 29’ video.

Cape Town

The visibility in False bay has been excellent all week and the shark activity has been unbeatable with an average of 5 Great White Sharks attracted to the boat for the cage diving. The main feature of these trips in False Bay by Seal Island is the breaching and natural predations early morning. This week did not disappoint with a plethora of natural predations daily with one particular day (July 18th) we had 38 predations on seals on a single trip! Many of the predations ended with the seal getting away but there were also many kills. The breaching has been fairly consistent with breaching on the decoy seen daily. The largest shark at seal island this week has been a huge 4.8m female.

Sardine Run

The Sardine Run is on it’s last legs as far as the calendar schedule goes but it looks like the Sardines and predators are unaware of this as the action is still kicking off! There have been multiple sightings of small bait balls and many sharks and dolphins hunting the sardines. This year has been an exceptional year for some of the boats who struck it lucky with fantastic bait balls. One of the bait balls had 6 Sailfish feeding amongst the other predators. What has been the most memorable about this year was the sheer abundance of Whales migrating up the coastline. There were hundreds of Whales in the waters off the coast and there were basically too many to bother counting and through the week and other weeks it was impossible not to be able to have an interaction with a Whale on snorkel. There were some excellent experiences gained with close and prolonged interaction between snorkelers and Whales with some good visibility most of the time making for excellent photographic opportunities.

Video of the week