DAY 6 - Great White Shark Cage Diving!

Beautiful morning, beautiful day, beautiful beasts!

Well, I will let the pictures speak for themselves...but we were on a boat by 6:15am, out 6 miles from Simon's Town near the island where all the seals hang out - and we were back on mainland by 1pm with stories for the rest of our lives. To explain the pictures: Steven and I as the sun is rising, it was a little cold out there! Yes, that weird looking person under water is ME! This is when I was in the cage diving with the Great Whites. The picture is of course of one of the beautiful beasts, taking a bite out of the bowie seal. The first video is the account told by Steven of his near death experience...ha ha ha, so proud that he got in the cage after that moment! I wanted to load a video of a shark attack, but they are too big to load here - so I will do it at another time and share with everyone, it is amazing! The sharks feed early in the morning and we saw 10 or 12 different attacks, with only one being successful. There was one seal that made it back to the island after 3 seperate attacks on the way back to the island...I called him, "The Little Seal That Could". I have tried to upload this post for almost half a day with the video of Steven telling the story of his "JAWS Moment" but for some reason it won't load! I will try to do it justice:

We were on the boat and the sun had really just crested the mountains. This is important because the sharks feed when the sun is lower because the seals can't see below without the sun, giving the sharks an advantage. As a boat we had finished the "feed chase" portion of the morning and were preparing to do the cage diving. This preparation includes the crew putting boeys out on the water - one that is just an orange ball and one that looks like a fake seal floating on the water. While they were preparing this, I was taking pictures of the "chum" aka. bait that they were going to tie to the boey. Steven is bent over watching me take the picture (keep in mind that they chum is on the back portion of the boat inbetween the engines with no boat wall) and all of the sudden there is water noise, I look to my left and behind Steven is a 4.3 meter Great White cresting and coming out of the water quite high to attack the boey (which didn't even have bait on it!) All Steven saw was the face of another passenger get HUGE and he was scared to death because his back was to it...! The video does a MUCH better job than my small story, but man...the entire boat was surprised he got in after that episode!

All in all, we were super lucky - the day couldn't have been more beautiful, and per the boats captain that day was the most active they have had all year!!

Thank the Good Lord we came out alive!!