I am in the final days before my trip to South Africa to do a great white cage dive. This trip has taken me 2 years to plan and pay for. I have been researching cage dives for years before I decided on my final location. In researching, I wanted to make sure that I went with a company that is more about education and preserving sharks than just a deep sea fishing trip with cage dives thrown in. There was also a desire and need to go with a company that wasn't going to attract sharks in an unnatural way. I have been watching Shark Week for over 20 years and when I saw Chris Fallows and his photography of the Great White Sharks breaching - originally aired and called Air Jaws - I knew that I wanted to go to S. Africa to see the sharks jumping out of the water. Following him and seeing his love for sharks and wanting to preserve them and using more natural ways to get the sharks to breach made me look into S. Africa cage diving companies. I got lucky in my research - not for cage dives but trying to order some of his photographs - that he has a cage diving company and I KNEW that is the company I wanted to go through. Looking through the website - Apex Predators - I noticed that they do both cage diving and shark expeditions. Knowing that this is a bucket list trip and a (belated) birthday gift to myself I went big and decided to go with the Great White Trail Shark Expedition. I wish I could fully express the excitement I have for this trip.
Everyone keeps asking me what I will be doing so this post will be the itinerary that has been sent to my from Apex Sharks Expedition. As you can tell I will be spending a lot of time on the water learning about sharks. The great thing is that our time out on the water will be in the morning and I will have afternoons to do some additional activities and exploring. This is, of course, subject to change depending on weather - it's their winter. I am super thrilled about learning about the sharks, their habits, how to identify them, and learning what we can do to help protect them but I will also be in such a diverse area that I will have some opportunities to do other things and see even more wildlife. My flights are extremely long. Going to Cape Town will take about 25 hours and then coming home it will take about 28 hours. Even though I have some really cool layovers they are only about 2 hours each and so I won't get to explore some of Amsterdam or Paris. Day 1: 16 Aug...
While I was in Cape Town and Simon's Town there were water regulations set to help reduce the use of water since their reservoir was running low. Even at that time they were talking about bringing in desalination ships to help provide water for consumption. Since I have been back I have been keeping up with the water problems and how much worse they are now. Today I read an article that really shows how bad that water issues have become. This is something that we, in America, take for granted and complain about if the water is shut off for whatever reason. We complain about being able to only water our lawns once a week in the summer. Yes, we talk about water conservation when the lakes a getting low and drought is getting us so that we have to maybe water once every other week but to think about only being able to use 12 gallons of water per person or get down to a little over six gallons per person is overwhelming. In looking at how much water we waste per day makes me f...
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