Location: Lighthouse Bay, Guadalupe Island, Mexico
Comments: The great white shark action was hot and heavy at Guadalupe Island today. WOW!! I’ve never seen anything like it. I spent 75 minutes in the shark cages and it was quiet when I jumped in but the shark sightings quickly picked up. It got so busy towards the end of my dive that I couldn’t keep track of all the white sharks – there were too many sharks swirling around the cages!!
One very interesting animal today was a very large beautiful female. It is unusual to see such a “clean” shark – no scars, no bite marks, no disfigurations, no tags – and even more unusual to see a very large female this early in the Guadalupe season. Chatting with our guests later during cocktail hour, I was surprised to find that they all got the same spooky feeling from this shark that I did. She was one scary shark and it felt very uncomfortable when she started doing extremely close passes in front of the cage. It is very unusual to run across a white shark that is scary but there is no other way to describe this big female. Her habit of rocketing up out of the deep to take the tuna bait was exceptionally disconcerting.
We have never had a great white shark attack one of our styrofoam fishing floats before and this momma did it 3 times!! All the other sharks are far more interested in tuna! I managed to get one fabulous photo of two guests looking towards me from one of our 360view boom cages with this enormous white shark immediately behind them. She had to be 3x the length of the boom cage!
She showed some further bizarre behaviour when she started gnawing on one of the propellors on the Nautilus Explorer and then turned around and appeared to deliberately smack it with her caudal fin. Apparently, this big momma great white shark wasn’t content with that because she then smacked the hull of the Nautilus HARD with her body. Interesting times indeed.
–Captain Mike
Weather: High overcast with temps in the mid 70’s and flat calm seas. A lovely day at Guadalupe Island and the cloud cover means that nobody is getting sunburned.
Water: Water temperature 70°F, visibility 100 – 125 feet.
