Bye Bye White Sharks!!

On Friday night, we had a pizza night at the volunteer house! Rene (one of the owners of WSP) and her husband brought ingredients and a stone-baked pizza maker and we all made our own pizzas! It was great evening and it was also a good bonding session for the new volunteers!

Yesterday morning, we all went out on the boat, except one of the new volunteers who wasn’t very well. We laid anchor but soon after that moved as the skipper wasn’t happy with our spot. I helped two of the newbies with the initial data collection and then left them to it while I helped with getting clients in and out of the cage. We didn’t have many sharks this morning and there were long periods of time when there were none about so not such a good shark morning.

I was a bit worried that we would not be back in time for me to catch my lift back after the second trip so I wasn’t going to go on it but the lovely WSP crowd said that they would send a RIB out to get me if we didn’t get back in time – I was soooooooooo happy! They also gave me a WSP Crew T-shirt as a special leaving present and I nearly cried! We had an exclusive trip for 20 clients so there was only one crew space left so I was the only volunteer on this trip. It was hard work as the clients were a group of Russians and quite demanding. Lots of them wanted to go in the cage so I was kept very busy and didn’t manage to do much data collection. BUT we had a beautiful 4m+ female shark who stayed with us for ages around the boat. And at one point, we had a seal swimming around with her – amazing! We were convinced we would see a predation but the seal managed to stay safe and got away!

When we got back, I got myself sorted, said my goodbyes (which was really hard!) and promised I would definitely come back. I got a lift to Cape Town with a bus from one of the other shark boats and was dropped of at my friends Andrew and Janet’s house. I used to work with Andrew years ago so it was a great pleasure to see him again and to meet Janet! I was pretty tired last night but managed to stay up til 10pm chatting and catching up!

I can’t express how much I enjoyed my 3 weeks at the White Shark Projects. It was a huge privilege to see so many white sharks and to learn so much about them and work with such a fantastic group of people. I am missing them all so much already and I’m already making plans to go back again.