Location: Shark Bay, Guadalupe Island, Baja California, Mexico
Divemaster Buzz at the laptop here as Captain Mike is still on time off.. We are having a superb trip with lots of excellent white shark sightings and loads of interesting behaviour. It’s funny how variable the diving can be as our last trip was the quietest in recent memory and yet 2 days later, we are once again inundated with great whites. Had a good mix of animals today with one very large female great white shark and a couple of surprisingly large males. At one point, 2 males were very close to each other and actually crossed right in front of the cages to our photographers’ delight!! They even touched briefly before speeding off in separate directions and resuming their swim patterns. None of us have ever witnessed behaviour like that before and in fact, Sam our shark wrangler from South Africa, insists that it simply doesn’t happen. We are extremely fortunate on this trip to have film maker Ralf Kiefner onboard and he treated us last night to a film that he and Andrea, his biologist partner, have been working on for the last 7 years. The productions shows some very rare and interesting interaction between divers and great white sharks and tiger sharks. Amazing stuff and totally debunks the myth that sharks are mindless killing machines. Even our shoreline tours were super hot on this trip with 400 dolphins swimming past the Nautilus Explorer this morning. We were also joined on this trip by our great friend Mauricio Hoyes who is now in his 6th year of researching the great white sharks of Guadalupe Island. His evening presentation was well received and generated many questions from our guests. To top it all off, we have been seeing tuna buzzing through the school of mackeral that are always hanging out around the ship AND a very large female great white. Her girth is so enormous that we suspect (and hope!!) that she is pregnant. There has been a lot of speculation as to whether Guadalupe Island is a white shark nursery and perhaps we will finally get the “evidence”!!!
Weather: Sunny and flat calm seas and no wind.
Water: Water temperature 70 degrees. Visibility 100 – 125 feet.
Pregnant great white shark???
