two years on – the Maldives - Bracknell Sub Aqua Club

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how great is the
Great White?
Nic Hallett
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The phone rang. “Tomorrow’s pick
up for the Great White Shark cage.
Diving is at 4.30am... OK?”
It is downtown Cape Town, South
Africa. This early the sky is truly black,
the moon almost over-bright and the
stars like halogen pinpricks. George
is waiting by our transport and as we
fill the mini-bus with sleepy faces you
notice the handful of people already
striding purposefully to or from work.
And on street corners the purposeless
gather, a human high tide mark.
Gansbaai is a <strong>two</strong> hour drive east,
over fractured mountains and into the
sunrise. A great breakfast awaits at
the dive centre and by 8am our boat,
a 15m catamaran, is towed over by
tractor and trailer and we board via
aircraft style steps. Fully laden, it is
reversed down the slipway into the
2m swell of the southern Atlantic.
on the crest of a wave
A 20 minute high speed trip, bouncing
off the crests of the waves is both
exhilarating and nauseating in equal
measures and we anchor off shallow
waters in a bay where nomadic ‘Great
Whites’ are known to pass through.
This is not a captive school of
regular, domesticated animals –
90% of daily sightings are of truly wild,
first-timers. They are tempted towards
us and the other four boats by a trail of
decomposing shark livers which are,
unsurprisingly, sensed by the sharks
up to a kilometre away. I can also
sense them and breakfast no longer
seems like such a good idea but
when, after only 30 minutes, the iconic
twin-fin of a breaching ‘Great White’
is spotted, the first four of us kit up in
7mm wetsuits and masks with glee.
setting the bait
The final lure is a 5kg lump of tuna
head which is pitched off the portside
on the end of a float and rope to tempt
the shark towards the cage.
The cage is a heavy duty, welded
steel affair, 1 x 2.5 x 3m which has
been hoisted off the back of the boat
and tied up alongside. Four divers
climb in the top and the lid closed.
We sit, head and shoulders out of the
water, ready to breathe deeply and
duck down when the skipper calls.
So it’s a gas mix of 21% at 1 bar with
a bottom time of about one minute,
but what a minute!
close encounter
Unlike the Jaws caricature ‘Great
Whites’ don’t skim along the surface