Adventure Guru Travel Stories

We started the month with literally an explosion of shark activity and the first half of the month was filled with all behaviour.

Daily natural predations, good breaches on the decoy and then really busy activity of sharks around the boat seeing between 8 and 15 sharks per trip in the early to mid part of the month.

For almost all guests that visit Seal Island with us their main hope and expectation is to see a breaching Great white shark. This is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular sights in all of nature…an almost one ton animal being able to launch itself completely clear of the water. But as this is hunting behaviour it only forms a small part of what the Great white shark is all about. My favourite way to see the sharks is on a glassy calm day with a shark just gently cruising around the boat.

On these days, with the sun shining giving great visibility, I believe one is able to make a very special connection with the sharks and become completely taken with these magnificent creatures. On these good days it is possible to take in all their detail and also start to learn the character of each animal.

We have noted that in general we are seeing less natural predation this season. Having said this we have still had a number of days where we have recorded 25 plus events and many with more than 10 events. The predations have varied from the sharks being deadly accurate with just the initial strike on the seal to a number of protracted events with the shark in continuous pursuit of a seal.

The sharks have also had days where they have had almost no success at all. All our notes and observations show that weather conditions seem to greatly affect the success rate. Tough when one’s life could actually depend on the weather…

Most of the attacks take place on single seals and it is not that common to see events of large groups of seals. This July we have seen more events on groups than what is normal even though the poor success rate on groups has remained the same.

Breaches on the decoy were seen on most trips in the early part of the month but after a 2 day bout of bad weather around the 23rd a large part of the activity has tailed off.

Once again we have had the fascinating experience of seeing a large number of natural breaches. These are normally spectacular breaches for no apparent reason. They often happen very close to the boat and Chris thinks they may either be trying to have a better look at us or are trying to communicate something. My feeling is that as these breaches often happen when we have a lot of activity around the boat this may be some sort of social reaction of sharks being too close to one another.

I can still clearly see a number of the breaches in my mind. For these events you just have to be looking in the right spot at the right time. Very often we will hear someone shout out in amazement and we will know that we have missed something pretty spectacular. They only breach once, so lucky for those that see it.

Now the bad thing is as that these natural breaches tend to happen close to the boat there is a real possibility of a shark landing in the boat with us. This would probably be a fatal event for the shark and a good possibility of terrible injuries for us on board. On one of our trips in July a 4 meter male did a full breach a meter from our boat and landed against the side of it. Very fortunately, the shark landed back in the water but it gave us all a big scare. We have had a guest spend the whole month with us and he was the one who was eye-ball to eye-ball with the shark…I did not see him spending too much time sitting on the gunnels of the boat after that!

As we do not know the reason for this kind of breaching and because there is no warning, there is not much we can do about preventing this.

-Monique Fallows