The crew are putting the shark diving cages in the water and getting ready for us. This is the opposite of a zoo where you walk around and look at animals in cages...Here the animals swim around and look at people in cages!
As the crew is busy setting up Divemaster Rana gathers everyone for a pre-dive briefing.
Rana tells us that he has made a schedule of times for the 15 of us who will be going into the shark diving cages. On our Australia Great White Shark Expedition we had only a single two-person cage. Socorro Aggressor has two four-person surface shark diving cages and one three-person submersible cage. That means all of us can't go into the cages at the same time. Rana has made a schedule so each one of us will several 45-minute blocks of time in the cages throughout the day. Rana has made our four-person group to include with our nephew, Matt, and another diver from Florida.
Rana also explains the equipment we will be using to dive in the cages. On our Australia Great White Shark Expedition in the cage we wore all of our SCUBA diving equipment except for our fins. This time we will be wearing very little SCUBA diving equipment in the cage! We will just be wearing our wet suits, hoods and booties, dive mask, and a very heavy weight belt! Underwater we will NOT be wearing an air tank! Instead our regulator mouthpiece will have a long hose that is connected to air tanks onboard the yacht! This way of doing things should work well because without a tank on our backs we will have more room in the cage and it will be easier to move around in the cage!
Rana has scheduled us to be the first group into a cage! We have already gotten all of our camera equipment ready to dive! After quickly putting on our wet suits and masks we walk down the stairs to the stern dive deck where the crew is ready and waiting for us!
The crew equips us one at a time to go into the cage. The first piece of gear the crew puts on us is a very heavy weight belt filled with lead weights. (Wayne: 40 lbs. Karen: 30 lbs.) We need a heavy weight belt because with the movement of the water the cage is bouncing up and down so we need heavy weights to keep us from bouncing around in the cage!
Next the crew gives us the regulator mouthpiece that we will be breathing from underwater. (The letters in SCUBA stand for Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus. SCUBA means wearing a tank of air on your back. We will not be using SCUBA because our air supply will be coming from the boat above water! This called surface-supplied diving or Hookah diving. This type of diving will give us an unlimited supply of air so we can stay underwater for as long as we want without having to worry about running out of air!)
We are now ready to get into the cage and face the Great White Sharks!
And there are already Great White Sharks here next to the cages!
While the crew were preparing our cages two of the crew were busy attracting the sharks for us! These crew are the "Shark Wranglers"! They take a large dead fish, called a "bonito" and tie the tail onto a long grope with a float at the end. They each take their fish to the opposite sides of the dive platform and toss the tied fish away from the boat in front and to the sides of the cages. Sharks can smell the dead fish and try to grab it off the line. When the Great White Shark almost has it in its mouth the wranglers quickly pull the fish back to the boat! The wranglers are not trying to tease the sharks! They know that if a Great White Shark eats a big meal it won't be hungry and the shark will swim away and not come back! The wranglers' goal is to give the Great White Sharks enough fish to keep them around the boat and cages but not too much where they are not hungry any more!
Now that we see there are Great White Sharks around the cages we are even morre excited about getting into the cages to start filming the sharks!
Getting into cage here is a lot safer than on our Australia expedition. In Australia our cage was tied next to a step on the side of the boat. To enter the cage the cage lid was opened and we just stepped into the open hole and sank to the bottom of the cage! If we tripped getting in the cage we would sink to the bottom of the sea like a rock because we wore a very heavy weight belt!
Here the cages are actually bolted to the back of the boat!There are walkways from the boat to the cages with safety railings on each side. The top of the cages have no lid but there are railings surrounding the opening at the top of the cage. There is no way anyone can trip and fall into the water!
We slowly climb down into the cage and the crew hands us our underwater cameras! Now settled safely on the bottom of the cage we are ready for our first Great White Shark encounter of the expedition!
Day 2b
