By Harper Williams, Semester at Sea, Spring 2017
While I was spending time in South Africa, I was able to travel about five hours outside of cape town to a town called Mossel Bay. I traveled here to do some of the adrenaline activities I had heard about in South Africa. One of my favorite activities was the Great White Shark Cage Diving. This is a very popular tourism attraction in South Africa because of the large population of sharks in this area. We first arrived to the attraction companies building to change into our bathing suits. After changing a staff member walked us out of the office and down the street to the closest dock. It was about a ten-minute walk to the boat we were getting on to. We arrived at the dock and boarded a medium sized boat with a large steel cage hanging off the back and chum buckets in the mezzanine. After about a thirty-minute ride out into the bay we anchored near a small island covered in seals. The diving company choose this location because the sharks are naturally attracted to this area due to the surplus supply of seals, which are the sharks’ main food source.
Overall the company was absolute pros when it came to the logistics of the day. There was never a moment where I felt unsafe in the cage in the water or on the boat. They also were all extremely keen on providing us with information on the sharks and educating us on their habitat and their roles in the ecosystem. The company I would consider to be a top notch tourism company. I would highly recommend them to fellow Semester at Sea students or family members traveling to South Africa.
