This view reminded me a bit of working in Grand Teton National Park last summer
I love when they stick their heads out of the water following the bait
I didn’t
make a blog post yesterday since I didn’t have a lot of news to share.
Yesterday was a pretty relaxing day here at the white shark projects volunteer
house. We’d all gone out the previous night to celebrate for Aurelie’s
birthday, so we were actually pretty relieved when we learned that yesterday
was a no sea day. After we all let ourselves sleep in, someone mentioned pizza
around lunchtime and we all jumped at the idea. We ordered pizza from a place
in town and, with some help from Maarten, got it picked up and brought back
here to the house, where we quickly devoured it while watching Jurassic Park
(we learned that, amazingly enough, Alina had never seen it, and immediately
decided to change that). That evening was another night of load shedding, so we
made a fire, lit some candles, and all sat around the living room, relaxing and
talking. I don’t really know why it’s called load shedding, but here in
Gansbaai and surrounding areas the power is intentionally shut down for a
couple of hours about every other night. It’s typically shut off between 8 and
10:30, but sometimes it comes back on closer to 10. All the volunteers have
said that we actually kind of like load shedding, and are going to miss it when
we leave South Africa. During that time, there’s no lights, no television, and
no wifi connection, so we just kind of sit around the square of couches in the
living room with some candles and talk. At first we thought load shedding would
be kind of annoying, but when we’re sitting around talking to each other, the
time usually goes by pretty quickly. I think I’ve gotten to know the other
volunteers a lot better than I would have if load shedding didn’t happen.
We knew by
early evening yesterday that today would be a sea day. We got a text from Karla,
the volunteer coordinator, on the volunteer phone, saying that there would be
two trips out today. The second one was full, but the first trip had room for
five volunteers. Beth wasn’t feeling very good, so she volunteered to stay
home. So, at six o’clock this morning, Alina, Ryan, Aurelie, Lizzy and I were
in the garage packing up the wetsuits, life jackets and other gear, then
heading back to the house to have breakfast before meeting the crew and clients
at the boat at about 7:15. I decided to bring my camera out on this trip to see
if I could get any good shots of the sharks. We went back out to the dam, where
the water visibility was still good, thankfully. Today was the last day that we
were on reduced capacity, so the boat contained seven guests, five volunteers,
and five crew members. Of the seven guests, six of them wanted to get in the
cage, while the other guest and five volunteers watched from the boat. We saw a
total of ten beautiful sharks in the nearly two hours that we were out on the
water, and I got some decent pictures of them, as well as a few short videos.
The Shark
Team boat pulled back into the harbor at about 9:30 this morning. After helping
the guests out of the boat, we walked back up to the house, washed the used
wetsuits, and went inside to clean up, look at the pictures we took, and relax.
We’ve
already heard that tomorrow will be a no sea day, so we’ll get to stay up and
later tonight. Maarten’s already over here at the house hanging out, and he’s
off tomorrow, so he’s said he’ll stay over and have fun with us. It’ll be
another great evening here in the white shark projects volunteer house.
This post’s
food for thought: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for
travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”- Robert Louis Stevenson
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