JAWS!

Thanks for the comments & emails! It’s so nice to come home after a long and usually overwhelming day, to find notes from home.

This’ll be a quick update but I just HAD to tell you all about shark diving!! We drove about two hours from Cape Town to the Gansbaai area where the great white sharks all seem to hang out. There is a place in the Atlantic between two islands that’s known as ‘shark alley’ because of the fact that there are so many sharks there. The reason for this is that on these islands are about 30-50,000 seals on a regular basis. Thus, good old great white has guaranteed dinner. Nifty fact about the great white shark: You can only find them here and in Australia and ONLY here are they known for breaching (Planet Earth anyone?? Yeah…). Exciting stuff! So about 12 from our group and some other people we didn’t know headed out to sea on a boat named ‘The Barracuda’ early this morning.

Sometimes it takes minutes to find sharks, sometimes it takes hours. They do NOT feed the shark; they just bait them with some chum (fish guts and heads of fish that already exist in their diet). Lucky for us, we were the first boat out there and found a shark right away. Four other girls and I jumped in the cage first because I was afraid that if I waited too long and actually saw the shark first, I would chicken out. So I went in blindly… The cage is a large one, attached to the boat with an open top. Essentially you sit up top and wait for the shark to swim by the cage while the crew is chumming and when they yell something like “go down, to your left” you take a deep breath and go under and wait for it coming from the left. I went in twice. The first time, the shark kept his distance but it was beautiful. I was terrified above water, but under the water it was absolutely serene. I was just completely in awe of its wonder. Then, the second time we had TWO sharks. They came VERY close to the cage and I even saw inside one’s mouth (yes, scary!). It was sooo amazing. I cannot even describe it in words. I feel different, like I did something totally new and way out of character for me. It’s awesome.



Today is the first beautiful day we’ve had in Cape Town. The sun is out and it is not raining—it’s even about 63 degrees out right now. It’s really nice. South Africa has such beauty and as we were driving to Gansbaai it was just full of green and mountains. Oh! I forgot to mention the baboons. There are a lot of wild baboons outside of Gansbaai and we were fortunate enough to see like 12 of them hanging out on the side of the road. I got some pictures but it was just so awesome that they were wild and we were seeing them in their habitat. I don’t have pictures of my own from the shark diving( I was too nervous to multitask!) but a lot of other people do so I will just steal some from them whenever they upload them. It’s hard to upload photos here because it eats up all of our bites and we pay for internet by the bite. That’s why I haven’t uploaded any yet—they’ll be up when I get home though!

This week: teaching the third graders about snow, making cut out snowflakes and pasting their photos on them as a craft. I want to talk to them about individuality and how people are all unique and different, yet beautiful (just like the snowflakes!) Plus since they don’t get snow here, it’ll be something new for them. It’s cheesy… but hey you can do that stuff with the little ones.

Love you all!
--Shark Bait