To close off Cape Town’s Shark Week, here’s the 11 second video footage that diver Vladislav Tomshinskiy (thank you Vlad!) took of the shark as it swam past the divers the second time. The bubbles at the end of the video belong to Craig (far left, with the buoy line) and Christo. Please enjoy this beautiful video of one of the ocean’s most brilliant predators, swimming curiously and gracefully past a group of awe-struck divers who are all amazed and grateful for having had the experience.
Local shark scientist Alison Kock of Shark Spotters says that from the video the shark looks to be a female (she said that if it was a male you’d expect to see claspers as it turned to swim away, which one can’t) and that she’s between 3 and 3.5 metres long. According to a recent study, most of the sharks seen at inshore locations by the Shark Spotters during the summer months are large females, who tend to be in False Bay year-round.
It’s not clear whether the shark was disturbed by the divers’ bubbles (as Christo speculates), and whether that was what caused it to swim away when it did. That flick of the tail says “I’m outta here!” and is something we’ve seen when observing these animals from the surface (on cage diving and research boats). The acceleration and turning abilities of white sharks is remarkable.
I’m interested by the bubbles because it’s an oft-repeated mantra by the shark cage diving operators (all over the country) that sharks are scared of scuba bubbles, and this is why you have to breath hold or snorkel in the cage. In July we did a cage diving trip in False Bay with African Shark Eco-Charters, who allow their clients to view sharks from the cage while on scuba, and they certainly don’t see fewer sharks than any other operator. Also, the sharks who swam past us in the cage were totally not bothered by our bubbles (of which there were many).
I therefore wouldn’t bet my reputation (or maybe I should, just to get rid of it…) on the “sharks don’t like bubbles” theory, but there may be far more nuance to it than we know. The shark in this video practically got a spa treatment on its tummy from Christo and Craig’s regulators… Perhaps to scare a shark away using air bubbles you need to get really close. But I don’t plan to test that theory unless I have to!
Yesterday we had Craig’s point of view… Here’s Christo van Schalkwyk’s account of the Clan Stuart dive on which he and his fellow divers encountered a white shark. Christo has been diving since March 2012, and in the time since then has logged over two hundred dives, most of them here in Cape Town.
About 30 seconds into the dive, just as I got to the bottom, a little to the north of the engine block, I saw the shark approach from the south. It swam past us towards the north. It turned and swam back down the wreck in a southerly direction, on the inshore side. For a while it was out of sight. We kept looking out for it, while motioning to the other divers to bunch together and stay low on the wreck. A few seconds later we saw it approaching from the south again. I could see both eyes as it swam straight at me. When it was about three metres away it veered off slightly to swim past us, parallel to the wreck. At this point it was only about two metres away from Craig and me. I remember choosing the spot where I was going to hit it if turned back towards us.
Fortunately it kept gliding past and as the pectoral fins came past, something seemed to disturb it. It flicked its tail once and shot away to the north. (Seeing the video taken by Vlad later, it seemed as if one of us exhaling was what disturbed the shark, but this is only speculation.) After a second or two, it was out of sight and we didn’t see it again.
We crouched down low on the wreck, looking around, and repeated the instructions to the other divers to keep close and low down. At this time we saw Sergey coming towards us from a rocky outcrop (or piece of wreckage) about 3-4 metres away from the main wreck, towards the deep side. We beckoned (with some urgency) to him to come closer. He swam quite slowly towards us, but when he got close enough, we pulled him down onto the wreck with us. As he was positioning himself, his weightbelt caught on a piece of the wreck and came off. I had to help him put it back on from underneath.
We stayed where we were (just north of the engine block of the wreck) for about another minute or so. I remember looking at my dive computer which read 2 minutes at that point. It didn’t seem a viable option to surface, even though I knew Tony would be close with the boat. I didn’t fancy the notion of hanging around on the surface, trying to get all 6 divers on the boat, all the while not knowing where the shark was. After another half a minute or so, Craig and I had a hand signal discussion on what to do next. He suggested heading south down the centre of the wreck, in the opposite direction to the shark’s last known heading. I thought we should go for the beach, to the north west. We agreed on the beach and started off in that direction, staying very low.
Just before leaving the wreck, Craig’s weight belt came loose as well. I took the reel from him and held on to his BCD with one hand and the wreck and reel with the other, while he tried to put the weight belt back on. This seemed to take forever – I remember seeing Vlad sliding in under a raised sheet of steel and hiding there (and feeling a bit jealous of his nice cover…). Eventually I gave the reel back to Craig and got him to hold on to the wreck and got in underneath him to try and see what the problem with the belt was. Once the belt was back on, we dropped down onto the sand on the shore side of the wreck.
Then we had to swim over the sand, without cover, towards the beach. It took a while to gather the group together to do this. We stayed very low, flat on the bottom. As we swam the group seemed to fan out, so we stopped once or twice to reassemble. Craig kept watch to the north, while I scanned the southern arc. Once we got into shallower water the surge took us along quite quickly and the group spread out even more, but it wasn’t possible to do anything about that any more. We got tumbled a bit in the breakers on the beach, but in the end managed to help each other to the beach unscathed with only the loss of one mask.
Total dive time: 13 minutes
Boat entry, shore exit.
Christo’s diagram of the dive site, with indications of what happened where, is below. Click on the image to enlarge it!
Here’s Craig Killops’s account of the dive at the Clan Stuart last Saturday. Craig (on the far left in the photo above) is just about to qualify as a Divemaster, and has just passed one of the most stressful tests any DM will have to face!
3, 2, 1…. Backward roll! Four divers perform a negative entry whilst I and a diver with drysuit remain at the surface after a positive entry. Diver with drysuit starts drifting slowly away from me, about 4 metres, whilst trying to organise himself. We give each other the okay signal and go down. I see the all too familiar silhouette , as seen on documentaries, glide between myself and the diver wearing the drysuit. I keep an eye on drysuit diver and try signal but diver too busy with equipment.
I head off to the rest of the group to signal that a shark has been spotted. Before the message has even been conveyed I see all eyes enlarged and focused behind me, the now clearly visible shark circled back showing its true inquisitive nature. Now with the group I notice that the drysuit diver is not with us and Christo also discovers this whilst we carry out a head count. We lay low on the sandy bottom at 10 metres and make our way quickly and calmly to the wreck.
As we are seeking cover in the kelp on the wreck a sillouette approaches again – it is not the shark but the drysuit diver, mid water. We signal him to stay low and to quickly come join the group as he is still oblivious to the presence of the shark. About ten seconds after he joins us the now very curious shark makes a full frontal approach towards Christo and myself ,we are up front to the left hand side of the group. When we blow bubbles (tactically or nervously…?) the shark makes a sudden turn at most two metres away from us into the green haze.
We calmed ourselves and ensured everybody was okay and accounted for. After brief comms Christo and I agree to stay low and take the group back for a shore exit roughly 150 metres away, which was probably the longest swim I have experienced mentally. Staying low on the wreck caused myself and another diver to drop our weight belts due to snagging. Big thank you to Christo for his prompt assistance in getting my weight belt back on. Not exactly the time you want to be floating to the surface.
Tucked up in a huddle formation we headed off , Christo keeping a left lookout whilst I keep a right lookout and both of ensuring the group is in close pursuit . With a 3 metre swell running into the bay there were fair sized shorebreakers on the beach which made shore exit interesting. Once we were all safely ashore we signaled the boat to say we were okay. Tony needed no explanation of what had happened – he had a front row seat to watch the dark shadow circling the group. Big thank you to shore support Clare Lindeque who arrived to transport some excited divers back to the harbour for a repetitive dive at Roman Rock, I think the Clan Stuart had provided its entertainment and blissful memories for the day.
Will definitely be keeping an extra wary eye out when diving the Clan Stuart from now on.
I would never consider myself an expert on wild animals, but I have been diving for a while and no matter how long you spend underwater or on the water, every day can bring something new to look at. We had a very interesting experience on Saturday 14 September at one of our local dive sites. The Clan Stuart, an inshore wreck in 10 metres of water about 100 metres offshore, can be dived as a shore entry as well as a boat dive. Our group were all very experienced and mostly in their forties and fifties. Diving the wreck from the beach requires a challenging climb over the train tracks as well as a rock embankment plus a trip through the shore break. It is not for everyone, so we offer this site as a boat dive.
I took this photo of the Clan Stuart engine block while the divers were kitting up on the boat
The conditions were good. The water temperature was 15 degrees, visibility 6-8 metres and there was a manageable 2-3 metre swell (it wouldn’t have been manageable if we’d done it as a shore entry). The divers rolled into the water and head over the stern of the wreck. From our boat you dive with a buoy and a reel or you stay at home. There is far too much boat traffic in Cape Town to dive any other way. I always stay very close to the the divers in the first few minutes to ensure I can attend to problems quickly.
Five to seven minutes into the dive the buoy turned sharply and headed for shore at quite a pace. I moved in a little closer and a white shark surfaced perhaps 10 metres in front of the boat and about 10 metres behind the divers. It then disappeared briefly and came back heading for the divers. I started to head towards the shark to get between it and the divers, but it swam straight for them and simply swam through the group.
It then turned and came towards the boat and surfaced again, and I tossed a weight at it, not really knowing if it would help. The shark went below the boat and I never saw it again. By this time the group had reached the shallows and two of the group, Christo and Craig, were busy getting the others out of the water. I then went back to the jetty, left the boat there and drove to pick them up assisted by Clare as we were not getting six divers with kit into either of our cars.
As with any such interesting experience there are always a lot of helpful and insightful questions, comments and observations.
The first question posed to me was from the Divemaster, Craig. Did they do the right thing? Most definitely. I think he and Christo made an excellent decision in a very stressful situation. In our briefings I always touch lightly on the recommended course of action if you see a shark or any other large wild animal, and between Christo and Craig, both regular divers on our boat, they followed that plan to the letter. I tell the divers to get into a small group, stay close together, and – if possible – stay on the sea floor. They must wait until the shark has moved away before attempting to swim off in a calm manner. On no account should they surface while the shark is still in the area.
Interestingly, everyone agreed that the shark’s size was between 3-4 metres, and that it was very inquisitive but not overly aggressive. The shark had a fair amount of time to display any aggression as the swim from the wreck to the beach can take several minutes and in fact took a fair while as Christo and Craig kept the group tightly together despite the inclination from one diver to wander off. I asked if anyone had noticed if it was a male or female as I know our resident scientist and shark expert would like that info, and got this response from Christo: “It swam straight at me, I could see both its eyes, and when it was less than two metres away it turned so suddenly that I felt the wash from its tail.”
This comment from Christo impressed me the most. “I have had no interest in seeing a white shark underwater but having seen one I can understand why people find them to be beautiful and graceful.”
Last Saturday, 14 September, Tony took a group of four Russian tourists (all very experienced divers in their forties and fifties), Divemaster trainee Craig, and experienced Cape Town diver Christo, for some boat dives. Their first dive was an hour-long dip at Photographer’s Reef, in very nice visibility. By the time they were ready to do a second dive, the wind had come up a bit, and they decided to visit the wreck of the Clan Stuart, which is close to shore and relatively sheltered.
The dive site
The Clan Stuart is most often dived from shore, but involves a crossing of a busy road in full dive gear, climbing over a low wall, crossing small dunes and a railway line, and then a scramble over some rocks onto the beach. Then there’s usually a breaker to get through – no mean feat at the best of times. One of the Russian divers has a prosthetic leg, which would have complicated the surf entry somewhat (and ended up complicating their exit slightly).
It should be mentioned that according to the Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay page about the Clan Stuart on wikivoyage, scuba divers have reported seeing white sharks on the Clan Stuart in 2010 and 2011. We did a very uncomfortable dive there in early 2012 during which we were swarmed by white steenbras, behaving in a manner which made us suspect shark presence, although we didn’t see a shark (and we couldn’t get out of the water fast enough). I’ve added the Clan Stuart to my winter-only dive site list, which includes anything near Fish Hoek or Glencairn, and especially Sunny Cove.
The dive
Very shortly after rolling into the water at the Clan Stuart, the divers encountered a curious great white shark, which circled them twice and then swam off. It was not aggressive at all. Tony saw the shark on the surface after it had circled the divers, as it came quite close to the boat. One of the Russian divers, Vladislav Tomshinskiy, had a video camera and the presence of mind to film the shark as she swam past, both times. The first bit of footage is very blurry; in the second, the shark is clearly visible as well as the bubbles of Christo and Craig, who was holding the buoy line. From the footage local shark expert Alison Kock estimates the shark to be 3 to 3.5 metres long, and a female.
Craig and Christo acted calmly, got the divers into a small group, and when the shark had left them alone, swam them close to the bottom, over the wreck and onto the beach, where Tony and I fetched them in our cars. Our Russian visitors were thrilled to have seen a white shark and perhaps would have liked to continue the dive at the Clan Stuart, but we judged it prudent to go elsewhere and they finished the day at Roman Rock.
Advisory issued by City of Cape Town
We notified Shark Spotters, who informed the City of Cape Town and issued a shark advisory. If something similar happens to you, please let Shark Spotters know – they log all encounters between people and white sharks, for public awareness and research purposes.
Why talk about it?
There is always the chance that scuba divers in Cape Town waters will encounter a white shark, but very few such encounters actually occur. Tony almost always mentions sharks in his dive briefings (if I close my eyes I can practically recite the shark bit: “This is Cape Town, and we do have great white sharks here. It’s very unlikely that we’ll see one, but if we do, this is the plan…”). He speaks from experience, having encountered white sharks at Long Beach on two separate occasions. He’s been told by one or two of his divers that talking about sharks in a dive briefing is scary and they don’t want to hear that there’s a chance of seeing one – but ignoring the fact that encounters like this one at the Clan Stuart can happen is short sighted. Both Craig and Christo have heard the shark briefing tens of (and in Christo’s case possibly more than a hundred) times, and as a result had some idea of what to do because they can probably also recite Tony’s briefing to themselves without having to think too hard about it.
Hopefully the example set by the divers on this particular day will provide comfort that an encounter with a curious white shark need not be catastrophic, and show that there are things you can do to minimise your chances of a negative outcome. Also, it serves as a reminder that sharks don’t swim around looking for people to eat. This shark had probably never seen a diver before, and was understandably curious about these noisy creatures in its realm. It wasn’t looking for a meal. All six the divers behaved calmly and with discipline, not panicking or doing anything that would endanger themselves or their buddies. They were also all completely awe-struck by the experience of seeing the shark in its natural habitat, and variously remarked upon its grace, how quickly it turned, the powerful wash of water from its tail fin, and how majestic it looked.
Over the next few days we’ll feature accounts of the event from Tony, Christo and Craig, as well as the video footage that Vlad took of the shark. I hope that this can contribute to white shark awareness and safety in the diving community.
I think it’s a timely occasion to do this, as the City of Cape Town has recently released its annual safety tips and reminder that white sharks move inshore during the summer months. This inshore movement is related to the availability of fish such as white steenbras, and a number of other factors. Sharks are a reality of life and scuba diving (and surfing and swimming…) in Cape Town; an informed community of water users will enable us to appreciate and protect these animals whilst promoting water safety and a realistic assessment of the risks.
What’s coming up?
We’ll have reports on the incident from a few different perspectives. Also, I’ll post the video of the sighting taken by Vlad. I’ll update these links as the posts go live over the next few days:
It’s not often that an article in the business pages dovetails with my interest in the ocean, but once in a long while there is a connection. A 2012 Business Week article about Odyssey Marine Exploration, the company featured in Treasure Quest and the Treasure Quest – HMS Victory Special, relates the outcome of a protracted battle between Odyssey and the Spanish government over 17 tons of silver coins, retrieved from a shipwreck off the coast of Portugal. Odyssey spent $2.6 million retrieving the coins; the only compensation it received from the Spanish government was $20 apiece for the white plastic buckets in which the coins were transported to Spain.
Yesterday’s article (written in 2008) describes in more detail the events that led to the conflict between Spain and Odyssey, and profiles both the company and its founder and CEO, Greg Stemm. Today’s one provides a good introduction to what the company does (if you’re not in the mood for a long New Yorker read), and fills in what happened since 2008 – and things did not turn out particularly well for Odyssey.
The Odyssey share price (OMEX US Equity) hasn’t really gone anywhere since the company listed, which suggests to me that they still haven’t had their big break yet. That said, it must be remarkably interesting work, finding and researching long forgotten wrecks. Plundering them… not so much.
Odyssey engages in “commercial marine archaeology”, a practice that (rightly) makes many people uneasy. Odyssey is a listed company and aims to profit from sharing in the treasure retrieved from the wrecks it finds and plunders. They make use of ROVs and sophisticated sidescan sonar technology to sweep the ocean floor for potential targets. The company’s founder and CEO, Greg Stemm, is extensively profiled in this article.
Interestingly, the article refers to exploratory work that Stemm did in the Dry Tortugas in the 1980s. Daniel Lenihan rants about the plundering of underwater resources in this area in his gripping book Submerged. He worked in the region at around about the same time as Stemm was working wrecks there… Later, James Delgado, a colleague of Lenihan’s and author of Adventures of a Sea Hunter, challenged Odyssey’s claim that they are more than just treasure hunters, interested solely in commercial gain:
“The issue is one where the flash of gold and silver obscure or overwhelm the type of careful work that yields treasures of a different sort,” Delgado wrote. “We base our opposition to treasure hunting on the track record of those years of lost opportunities and lost history, and the challenge we issue to Odyssey is to show how they are different.”
Read the full article here. There’s more on this tomorrow…
A Top Gear special about James Bond’s cars put us in a frame of mind to enjoy some vintage Bond. Tony thinks Roger Moore was the best Bond; I am torn between Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, and Daniel Craig. For me, Roger Moore is at the bottom of the list (jostling for position with George Lazenby). Chronology, Tony’s fondness for Moore, and the fact that we only have about three James Bond DVDs swayed us towards a re-viewing of For Your Eyes Only.
For Your Eyes Only doesn’t only feature a convoluted plot, ridiculous foreign villains with hilarious accents, and a ridculous foreign Bond girl – also with an hilarious accent. It also contains extensive underwater footage that can teach us about the behaviour of sharks, what to wear when diving (yellow PVC overalls and gumboots), and how to manoeuvre a hard diving suit inside a shipwreck.
That said, the underwater scenes are surprisingly slick and well-shot for a movie made in 1981. They were filmed in the Bahamas. Carol Bouquet, the actress who plays Bond’s main squeeze, Melina, apparently had a sinus condition that prevented her from doing underwater stunt work, so the close-ups of Moore and Bouquet were filmed on a sound stage with fans blowing and special lighting. Bubbles were added afterwards. If I’d had this knowledge when I watched the film I’d have looked more closely at those sequences; without knowing they were filmed on dry land, I admit that they are very convincing.
In the screen capture below, I’ve grabbed a moment of the action as Bond and Melina take a submersible down to a shipwreck (the St Georges) lying over 100 metres under the sea, and exit at depth to penetrate the wreck and retrieve a very important computer. They run across the sand in their yellow gumboots. While inside the wreck they encounter a villain in a hard one-man diving suit, and a vigorous battle ensues. They blow him up, but are unaffected by the concussion despite being only a couple of metres away when his suit explodes. Upon returning, victorious, to their submersible, they are set upon by another villain in a one-man submersible with various pointy bits and cutting devices. There is an extended wrestling match between Bond’s submersible and the villain’s.
The divers race across the ocean floor from their submersible
Curiously, although both Bond and Melina are breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen (because they’re diving so deep), their voices are unaffected by the helium, and sound completely normal. They also move through the water with remarkable ease, and – mysteriously – a large amount of light penetrates down to the shipwreck at 100 metres. No mention is made of the decompression obligation they’d have after their underwater high jinks.
If you want to combine a love of diving with a fondness (or love) for James Bond, you could do a lot worse than For Your Eyes Only. You can also check out Thunderball. You can get the DVD here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.
I attended a talk about the Brunswick, which is wrecked off the end of Long Beach in Simon’s Town, at the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT), in August. It was given by Jake Harding, who has just completed a thesis on the wreck for his Honours degree at the University of Cape Town. Considering that all I know about the Brunswick (even with reference to Shipwrecks and Salvage in South Africa) can be summed up in two sentences, it was extremely interesting to hear from someone who has researched the ship, and examined the wreck for further information.
The ship
The Brunswick was an East Indiaman, a merchant ship that transported goods between Britain and the East Indies. She was captured by the French vessel Marengo in 1805, and brought to Simon’s Town as a prize of war. She was captured on her sixth voyage and was in quite poor shape. Five or six voyages was considered a good lifespan for an East Indiaman. They travelled very long distances on each voyage and were away from their home ports for over a year at a time, sometimes much longer. During the time she was at anchor in Simon’s Bay, strong winds caused her anchor cables to part, and she ran aground. She was carrying a cargo of sandalwood and cotton, which was sold along with the wreck in an auction. Most of it was salvaged, although archaeologists have spotted the odd piece of sandalwood on the wreck site.
She had 30 guns, which is apparently quite a small number – warships of the time would have had hundreds of guns. At the time when the Brunswick was constructed (late 18th century), iron was used instead of hardwood for the braces or “knees” that held the hull of the ship out in its characteristic shape. She was about 40 metres long and 13 metres wide with three decks. Her hull was sheathed in copper, and the drift bolts holding the parts of the ship together are copper and iron.
The wreck
The wreck was officially discovered and identified as the Brunswick in 1993, although her rudder was found and salvaged in 1967. It can be seen in the courtyard of the Slave Lodge in central Cape Town, formerly the South African Cultural History Museum. It used to be covered with copper sheets, but those were mostly stripped off. It’s huge – over 4 metres long, but with all the original fittings it was likely over 5 metres in length.
The rudder of the Brunswick
It’s clear when you dive the site that there’s quite a lot of wreck hidden under the sand, and even in the few times we’ve dived her we’ve been able to see how the sand shifts and covers and uncovers various parts of the ship. The Simon’s Town harbour wall has led to a lot of sediment build up in the area. When the wreck was surveyed in 1994-1995 for Project Sandalwood, a survey done by IMT and the South African Cultural History Museum, they recorded pieces three metres high sticking out of the sand. There’s nothing like that today. Longshore currents also cause periodic sediment build up and removal, and the cryptic little fish called steentjies annually uncover huge areas of the wreck during their mating displays.
According to Jake, the keelson (like a keel strip), part of the copper strap attaching the rudder to the boat, and a large number of iron knees (we have only seen a couple), and one or two pieces of sandalwood are still on the wreck site. We will be looking carefully for these elements next time we dive there.
Until his retirement, Daniel Lenihan had a dream job, combining diving and archaeology, at the US National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Unit (formerly the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit or SCRU, and renamed in 1999 to include natural resources). He cut his teeth diving during the heydays of the sport, and became a skilled cave diver working with Sheck Exley in Florida in the 1960s and 70s, and deployed many of the principles of that sport when penetrating historical shipwrecks in the United States and around the world.
Submerged, a memoir of Lenihan’s time in the National Parks Service, is a cracker of a book – CliveCussler wishes he could write like this, and it isn’t even fiction. A competing volume (if you will), Adventures of a Sea Hunter, by James Delgado – a sometime colleague of Lenihan – covers some of the same ground, but with far less impact and immediacy. Lenihan is clearly a doer, and has the requisite ego and charisma to make things happen, even in a bureaucratic setting.
The SCRU team dives and maps wrecks all over the world, from freezing, rough conditions in the Great Lakes in the United States, to a war grave in Pearl Harbour, Micronesia, the Aleutian Islands, and Bikini Atoll, where the US conducted multiple nuclear weapons tests. The chapter that made the greatest impression on me, however, was Lenihan’s account of a body retrieval that he and a buddy did of a diver who had gotten lost and drowned inside an old building that is now submerged in a dam. His account of diving in visibility measured in centimetres, trying to figure out where the diver could have gone in that confined, dark space, is riveting and terrifying. I was also very interested by the tests his team did on submerged motor vehicles, to determine how quickly a car fills up when it is driven into water. Lenihan himself drove a car into a dam, with scuba gear on the seat beside him, and his team attempted a rescue. Because of the air pockets in the vehicle, it was far less stable and much harder to access while submerged than the team initially expected.
The toughness, rigour, safety awareness and innovation that the SCRU team brought to their work is marvellous to me, particularly as they were technically part of an arm of the US government. None of the arms of government are particularly effective in South Africa! This is a fascinating, wide-ranging read that will interest divers and those fascinated by history, particularly its relics that lie underwater.
If you’re in South Africa you can get the book here, otherwise try here or here. For a kindle copy, go here.
