Shark diaries: February 2007

Dear Ultimate Animal friend,

February is the high season for the Pelagic sharks (Blues and Mako’s), and the beginning of the intermediate season for the Great White Sharks, so in Feb we continued to do mostly “Blue Water” or pelagic trips, and pelagic birding trips.

There was a lot of red tide in False Bay, and luckily we did not have to go too far out into the deep water (around 25-30 miles), to find the “blue water”.

These trips went very well. The water visibility was very good and diving conditions where excellent. Sharks that where spotted where, Blues, Mako’s, and a few Hammerheads. On many of these trips, the tuna fishing was a treat. (We catch and release, or catch for personal consumption only).

The week ends where mainly spent on Pelagic birding trips. It is the low season for the birds, but all the regular birds where sighted, and Rob had good trips for the season.

For more info on the bird species, please see our pelagic birding trips.

With the wind and red tide we only managed to do 5 great white shark trips. We got sharks on all trips except one, which is very good. (In the intermediate season the shark sightings fluctuates a lot.)

On one of these trips our colleges, saw a hammer head shark. This was very exciting and was a first sighting ever of a hammer head at Seal Island, so you can imagine what a stir it caused.

Several shark predations (active kills) took place, mainly on young inexperienced pups.

All in all February was a quiet month, but when Blue Pointer 2 managed to get out to sea, we had lovely sightings. Unfortunately we did not manage to dive on any of the white shark trips.

In Summary our sightings for February 2007:

That is all for this month

Rob and Karen Lawrence
African Shark Eco-Charters