Is Shark Cage Diving Safe?

The pros and cons for you and the sharks.

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Shark cage diving is one of those experiences that are either towards the top of your bucket list, or that you think you will never do in a million lifetimes. If you are among the first, maybe you have asked yourself if it’s good for the sharks — and safe for you.

Let me share my experience.

You can dive with different types of sharks in various places in the world. I did it in a town called Gansbaii, which is about two hours south of Cape Town in South Africa, where you dive with great white sharks.

You can do it as a day trip from Cape Town. But it’s quite easy, and more relaxed, to incorporate it in a longer itinerary, so you can also visit Hermanus nearby — which is a great place for whale-watching — and return to Cape Town via the Cape winelands.

But to get straight to the diving, what happens is — you don’t actually dive.

You get inside a cage that is alongside the boat. You don’t have any diving equipment, not even a snorkel — all you have is a mask. The cage has enough bars so that the sharks can’t get in, and it’s got bars running along the top and bottom for your hands and feet.

You go in, you put your hands and feet there, and the spotters on the boat call you down to the left, which means a shark is coming to the left. You take a big gulp of air, go in the water, hold on with your hands and look out.

And there’s the great white shark, swimming past the cage.

When I was in the cage a shark bashed into it. Scary. The good thing is, even though the sharks can smell something, they can’t see you as an individual inside the cage — and in principle they can’t get through the bars.

So you are a very safe in there — in principle. (I’ll come back to this in a minute.)

Inside the cage, one person gets out of the cage from the left, and you all shuffle down. The next person goes in from the right. And the guides make sure that everybody’s had enough time to get some good experiences with the sharks.

For me, the most incredible part of the experience was a shark that swam slowly, almost sinking.

It was poetic, the way it went down really slowly to twenty meters below, to a point where I could only just see it. And then it accelerated upwards to attack a seal. The speed with which the shark came out of the water — that was incredible.

He went from twenty meters below, to above the surface, in what felt like a single second.

The sharks live there because one of the world’s biggest seal colonies is in the area. And that seal colony is there because there’s abundant fish. Every day, the seals have to cross the channel so they can go out to fish, and as they cross the channel, they risk being eaten by the great white sharks.

It’s nature at its finest. And from the boat, I saw many sharks leaping out of the water to take seals.

So the sharks are definitely not there for people, and in order to give people a better chance to be with them, what the guides do is use something that’s like fish stock. It’s called “chum”. They put that in the water, and that attracts the sharks to where the boat is.

There’s a lot of controversy over whether chumming is a good or a bad thing. Generally it’s not considered ideal to chum the water, because it’s not completely natural.

And to come back to the safety issue, shark cage diving has not always been 100% safe in South Africa or in other countries. Nor has it always been good for the sharks.

Because unfortunately, the industry has spawned tour operators who have cashed in on the sharks, rather than help to protect them.

There have been bad incidents. There have been sharks that got stuck between the cage’s bars, and in struggling to free themselves got hurt or even ended up inside the cage. There were sharks that got inside the cage while people were in there.

However, I strongly believe shark diving can be positive for both visitors and sharks, provided it is done responsibly.

So it’s essential to do your research before booking a shark dive. Does the operator have a conservation program? Have they had any incidents in the past?

The bigger boats have got shark conservationists, and a lot of the money you pay goes into shark conservation. You will pay more to be on that boat — maybe 40% more than on the other boats — but that money is directly supporting shark conservation.

So if done responsibly, this experience ultimately helps preserve a rare, misunderstood and incredibly beautiful species.

By Stephen Bailey. Edited by Beatriz Becker.

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