Our World – Underwater Scholarship Society in North America

The first episode in the Underwater Updates series has arrived!  Please give me feedback!  Is it too slow, too boring, is my hair too long?  Tips and comments welcome!  Constructive criticism is preferred, of course..!  Click on the title to watch a higher resolution version.

Enjoy!

Special Thanks:

Steve Benjamin
animalocean.co.za/

The Great White House/Marine Dynamics
thegreatwhitehouse.co.za/

Dyer Island Conservation Trust
dict.org.za/

Marine Dynamics

www.sharkwatchsa.com

What an entirely unbelievable experience!  On Friday I had the privilege of diving with the most famous fish in the sea – the great white shark!  Gansbaai, three hours south of Cape Town, is arguably the great white shark diving capital of the world.  And it wouldn’t take much arguing.  Discovery Channel, Nat Geo, BBC’s Planet Earth – they all film their white shark footage there!  And with good reason – I saw FIFTEEN white sharks!  I was completely floored when I caught a glimpse of the first one in the water.  It’s been my dream to see one!  They’re the most incredible animals I’ve ever seen – despite their ferocious appearance they’re actually stunningly graceful.  I got tons of great footage in slow motion with my Light & Motion housing, and when you see their actions slowed down it adds a whole new depth to their appearance and the way they move.  I have to say it was over entirely too quickly – even though I was out on the boat for upwards of six hours!

What was just as great, if not better to see than the sharks themselves, was the way ecotourism functions in Gansbaai.  Ecotourism promises a lot of results – benefits to the environment and to communities associated with whatever the ‘eco’ is – but it seems that as often than not, it doesn’t deliver.  In fact, many times the only party that ‘ecotourism’ benefits is the tour operators themselves!  In Gansbaai, however, ecotourism is everything you could ever hope it to be!  I went diving with Marine Dynamics, one of the two dive operators out of The Great White House.  Closely associated with The Great White House is the Dyer Island Conservation Trust (DICT).  In fact, the Trust is funded entirely by charitable donations from several dive operations in Gansbaai – it’s independent of any governmental support.  DICT is involved in everything from penguin rehabilitation and artificial nest creation, to white shark research, to recycling and educational programs in the local communities, and local craftsmen and -women sell their souvenirs in the dive centers gift shop.  Every boat that goes out with tourists from The Great White House to dive with the white sharks has a marine biologist on board who is both responsible for educating the divers and also for collecting valuable data on the sharks that do come to the boat.  The data collection and resulting research is funded directly by the dive operators and DICT, establishing a perfect harmony between ecotourism, research and conservation!  Not to mention the fact that it would be impossible to afford to send out three boats daily simply to collect data!  The tourism industry funds both the Conservation Trust’s work and the shark research which results in better management and protection of the white sharks, along with a number of other conservation and education initiatives.  The situation in Gansbaai is the perfect example of how ecotourism should work – something I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite to this extent!

I had an excursion to Langebaan this weekend as well to help some UCT researchers collect sand sharks for a population study.  I’ll post some photos from that in my next entry!  Right now I’m in Durban and tomorrow I’ll be meeting up with the famous Michael Aw to head to Aliwal Shoal for some tiger shark diving before heading south to Mboyti for the sardine run!  I’m editing my Cape Town video and it’s getting close, so you shouldn’t have to wait long now to see the white shark footage!

The weather in Cape Town has not been conducive to diving!  There have been some absolutely massive storms in the mornings which have made the seas so rough that it would just be silly to try to go out in them.  Believe it or not, Cape Town actually got snow. Okay, the snow was only in the mountains outside of the city, but still – I never thought I’d go home talking about the snow capped peaks of South Africa!  Whilst trapped on shore I’ve been keeping myself busy, checking out the Two Oceans Aquarium, helping University of Cape Town researchers with some baboon data collection and visiting the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Centre, which is doing so much to help protect great whites and other sharks in Cape Town and to improve public understanding of the importance of ocean ecosystems.  I’ve also done a bit of sightseeing in the evenings when the light becomes absolutely stunning, so I hope you enjoy these photos!

Two Oceans Aquarium

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It’s been an awesome couple of days, and I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking for this post!  We went out for a dive near Hout Bay with the Cape Fur Seals.  It was absolutely mental!  There were hundreds of seals sunning themselves on the rocks, and there must have been a hundred with us in the water!  They’re incredible playful and inquisitive, and they have absolutely no problem swimming up and gnawing on a camera light or a fin (or my head) to find out what exactly it is!  These are the same seals that are eaten by the great whites nearby at Seal Island all winter long, but the water in Hout Bay is too cold and too shallow for the great whites, and there’s way too much kelp for them to make their way in to where we were diving.  Good news for both the seals and for us!  Here are a few photos from the dives and a few photos that I took my sweet time posting (probably more relevant to the last blog entry).  So far the underwater shots are all freeze captures from my video footage, but I promise I’ll post some real underwater photos soon!  And I’ll also be posting videos soon enough!

Penguins

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Penguins in Simonstown

Well I made it through a relatively painless 2 day set of flights from NYC-Dubai-Cape Town and arrived all in one piece!  The flights were long but comfortable, it was the overnight layover in Dubai which left something to be desired… I realize now that I should’ve taken a photo of myself curled up in a half-reclined airport seat with my feet on my pelican case propped up in a duty-free push-cart.  There’s no way to accurately describe the discomfort!

I arrived in Cape Town in the late afternoon but, as it’s winter here, it was already dark.  It was also pouring rain.  And they drive on the left in South Africa.  Oh, and the only rental cars available have manual transmission, which is also on the left side.  Needless to say it was an interesting night, driving up and over the mountains separating the city of Cape Town from the False Bay area and Noordhoek, where I’m staying!  But nonetheless, probably due to some incredible stroke of luck, I arrived without crashing even once!   I’m staying with Vicci Turpin and Sean Ryan, who are good family friends of the family I used to babysit for, believe it or not.  Really makes you wonder if even six degrees of separation are necessary before you know everyone in the world!

Cape town is absolutely gorgeous. It might be literally the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.  The mountains are incredibly dramatic and the ocean views entirely stunning.  It’s a pleasure just driving around the mountains to have a look at the scenery.  This is my first time in Africa and I’m absolutely hooked!  Unfortunately (I use that word lightly..) I’m not here just to sightsee!  For the next two weeks I’ll be working with Steve Benjamin before I head to Durban for the sardine run.  Steve is the founder and owner of the one-man ecotourism operation Animal Ocean.  What does Animal Ocean do, you ask?  Well everything, of course!  The website gives a much better explanation than I could (http://animalocean.co.za), but essentially Steve will take you out to do anything from sevengill cowshark diving to big wave surfing and surf skiing to diving in the bay with blue sharks, cape fur seals or dolphins!  There’s so much to see and do just in the ocean around Cape Town that it could keep you busy for years!

View from Simonstown harbor

I met up with Steve the day after I arrived and he immediately took me to see the penguins which have only just moved into Cape Town in the last few years.  We had a great chat about the importance of ecotourism for the local environment (raising awareness about the various ocean critters, assisting with their continuing protection, etc.) on our way to Miller’s Point, where we hopped in the water for some freediving with cowsharks.  The cowsharks tend to hang out between two large kelp beds, and it was no trouble at all finding them, especially with such an experienced guide!  Cowsharks can get as long as 3m, but they’re incredibly docile and they don’t seem to mind people getting close at all.  The Save Our Seas foundation is currently working on a project to determine whether or not cowsharks can be easily photo ID’d using the same software that whale sharks are ID’d with, so Steve snapped photos of the sharks while I tested out my new underwater video setup.  We managed to get photos of 21 individuals, and we definitely saw more than that!  Afterwards we drove up to one of the Shark Spotters’ posts high up on one of the mountains overlooking the beach.  Shark Spotters is a great organization which is making huge steps for shark conservation in Cape Town.  Shark Spotters is essentially an alternative to shark netting, which kills tons of sharks every year.  One spotter, high above the beach, can see if a Great White is anywhere near shore or near bathers and surfers.  If a shark swims in, the spotter pushes a button on his or her radio transmitter which sounds an alarm on the beach and within about a minute everyone is out of the water!  The more commonly used option, shark netting, is both lethal and most likely ineffective.  Shark nets are large nets that are essentially scattered around the openings of bays – it would be entirely too expensive to close off an entire bay with nets.  The purpose of shark nets is to catch sharks before they enter the bay, but once a shark is caught it will typically suffocate and die.  As far as I understand, most sharks are found on the inside of these nets, which probably means that they were already in the bay and were caught and killed on their way out!  The Shark Spotters are obviously a much more favorable method for protecting bathers and surfers from shark attacks, which in reality are incredibly rare already.

Today we attempted to go back out to Millers point for another freedive with the cowsharks, but unlike yesterday the entrance was extraordinarily rough!  Laden with videocamera in one hand and fins in the other, scrambling over wet rocks, I got absolutely smashed by a swell and took a nasty spill!  The videocamera was ripped out of my hand momentarily and while I scrambled to find it, images of smashed dome ports and flooded housings flashing through my head, my heart rate must have jumped tenfold!  Luckily the water was deep enough that the housing sustained only a couple of small scratches and the lens was left unscathed!  The swell had dropped the visibility enough that we drove over to Simonstown Harbor instead and went for a snorkel with the incredibly friendly catsharks.  There were loads of them swimming around a couple of small shipwrecks in the harbor so we had a look until we were too cold and too hungry to go on!

Tomorrow we’re heading out for some surf skiing which should be a blast.