Great White Shark Cage Diving - Steve and Lis, Mossel Bay South Africa

Highlight reel from cage diving with great white sharks in Mossel Bay, South Africa, just off Seal Island, with White Shark Africa. We were the only two customers (plus a friend of one of the staff) and were in the cage for about an hour. We saw four different sharks up to 4M (12') long; was amazing!! True bucket list experience, especially barely an hour after finishing up our 2nd safari game drive at nearby Godwana, where we saw tons of awesome African animals include the Big Five over the previous 24hrs. We're both SCUBA certified and have dove with sharks before, but never great whites. The video does not do it justice, this was just an incredible experience!!

As you watch this, please notice: the sharks never attacked us. In fact, they basically completely ignored us. They're not maneaters, not by nature. They didn't come to the boat to feed on divers, they were deliberately tricked/lured to us by chumming the water up-current of the hunting grounds near their favorite food (seals), and then lured specifically to the area in front of the cage by a bunch of tuna-heads fastened to a rope. They're not even really going after any of the other fish swarming around us. You can see very clearly in the video that most of the time they were simply swimming right past us (just like every other shark I've seen in the wild while diving or snorkeling). In fact, I cut out a ton of other video we had of these sharks swimming peacefully past us to keep it reasonably short. The crew would give us dramatic views by yanking the fish heads away just as they opened up to bite (great white are basically blind just before a strike), and the sharks only struck the cage at the very end of the dive when they let the sharks actually get the bait, which was still fastened to the rope and hindered their ability to avoid hitting the cage. Which are all the videos you see during shark week, because ordinary video would just be boring! In fact, during the safety briefing, we were told to make sure to keep our hands and feet in the cage - not because we were in danger of attacked (we weren't), but risked broken fingers if a shark accidentally hit us! The captain was very concerned about conservation efforts and the endangered population and asked us all to pass the word - these sharks are to be appreciated and protected, not feared! You can see how close these great whites are to shore - and there were people swimming in the beach right in front of White Shark Africa's shop - yet unprovoked attacks by great whites are super rare, only a few dozen recorded in this part of South Africa in the last 115 years since records began, and almost always a case of mistaken identity.

And a final note: we are just ordinary people. We booked flights, rented a car, and reserved spots on the boat with https://whitesharkafrica.com/ to go shark diving. Wasn't even all that expensive, all things considered. (Now, the safari lodges, on the other hand... yeah... they were pretty expensive. But also super amazing!)