You can come face to face with the sea’s most fearsome predator in South Australia’s Neptune Islands – sometimes a bit too close as my video clip shows…
As I’ve previously mentioned, I recently went cage diving with great white sharks in South Australia with Rodney Fox expeditions. As you might expect, it was a truly spectacular experience and I managed to get a few decent video clips using my Canon IXUS 800, which is proving to be an excellent all round travel camera, especially with its small underwater housing. These clips are very short, only about 20 seconds or so, but I think they’re still pretty evocative of what we saw…
Great White Shark Gives Me The Evil Eye
The great white shark comes so close to me in the cage that I could have reached out and touched it. As it swept by, its big, blank, black eye looked straight at me – if you’ve got your computer’s sound switched on, you can a loud clang of metal at the 10 second mark as I step backwards when the shark’s eye is right by me, and then quietly swearing in an awe struck fashion into my regulator at the end – I’d just been hexed by a great white!
Great White Shark Sneak Attack
The above clip has a long intro where nothing actually happens, but I think this provides a better lead in to what does happen. There’s just a tuna head swinging in the current for the first 15 seconds, but keep your eye on the bottom right corner of the screen…
I’ll say without hesitation that diving with the great whites was one of the most intense and memorable experiences of my life thus far, and while I was there writing a report for a scuba diving magazine, you don’t even need to be a certified scuba diver to see the great whites for yourself. There are two cages – the scuba cage which gets lowered 10 metres to the ocean floor, and thesurface cage which is attached to the back of the boat itself. The surface cage lets you breathe through a hookah which pumps air straight in from the boat’s compressor and you are literally just below the surface, so you can’t get into trouble. There were 12 of us on the boat and only four of us were scuba divers, so seeing the great whites is definitely not just for divers.
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Amazing, Chris! Cage diving w/ sharks is definitely on my shortlist of things-to-do.
Thanks Mike! I cannot emphasise how awesome it is. Let me know if you need any more info nearer the time. Looking forward to reading your take on all this stuff when your travels begin!