Shark diaries: May 2009

Dear Ultimate Animal friend,

May was a great month and we have lots to share with you. Rob is a keen birder and was thrilled to have captured a picture of a Franklin's Gull, whilst on a recent shark trip at Seal Island. Its Status is Vagrant, meaning rare and accidental to the region. It is common to North America. It is a very pretty gull, with a full black hood and a white eye-ring, and pinkish breast. It also has black tips on its wings.

There have been a lot of dolphins in the bay and we have been seeing large schools of them very regularly. On one of our trips, we spotted a dead dolphin, so we headed off to it and took it on board for inspection. There were no shark bites and no propeller marks, so we assume it died from natural causes.

The visibility has been really good at the moment with some days being 15m+. In the first half of May we didn’t have a lot of sharks around the boat, averaging 2 per day, but most of them stayed with us for most mornings. They also stayed quite deep, meaning those cage diving had great dives.

The big storm of the week end of the 16/17th/18th May, prevented us from going to sea, but it was just what we needed to bring the sharks to the island.

After that storm the predations increased dramatically and the very next day,we had 7 predations and witnessed 5 kills and I managed to get a great pic of a female white shark breaching.

Some days we have been getting good breaches on the seal decoy, other days we saw no breaches, with the sharks followed our decoy with much interest. It all depends on the sharks and it varies from day to day.

This week-end, around 55 False Killer whales, beached themselves of Kommetjie beach. Rob arrived early on the scene and tried to help. They started to move them back into the water, and getting them to try swim out to sea, but by the end of the day most where back on the beach. The decision was made by the authorities to euthanize them to prevent them from further suffering. It was a sad situation, but in the end what was done, was for the best.

We head off into June, very busy with various film crews, so we should have some interesting news to report in June’s newsletter.

Until next month, keep hugging sharks,
Rob and Karen Lawrence