The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
The sky was gray and reflected in the water. The morning was bitterly cold and foreboding, a day better suited to sitting around a fire. The offshore wind carried a bite and the swell surged. I was petrified.
I took my 7’2″ out of the truck with trembling hands. It was a great board—thick and fast, made for the kind of big, hollow waves I was looking at. At that moment, though, I hated it. Its existence removed all excuses. The only way out was self-admitted cowardice, which I couldn’t face.
The wave itself was a left-hand slab, throwing out barrels. It was far offshore and the approach entailed a crawling paddle over thick weed, then a long slog in a deep-water channel before alighting next to the reef. While the swell looked a very heavy 6- to 8-feet, it wasn’t the waves that had me so terrified. It was that this slab was located along the sharkiest stretch of coast in South Africa, near one of the most notorious white shark cage diving locations in the world.
Dyer Island sits five nautical miles off Gansbaai, which is in the Overberg District Municipality of the Western Cape in South Africa. The area is home to one of the densest known great white shark populations. According to the Dyer Island Conservation Trust, which conducted a 5-year study of the local population numbers using dorsal-fin data and a program called “Darwin,” they were able to identify 532 individual white sharks in the surrounding waters. The channel running between Dyer Island and neighboring Geyser Rock is known as “Shark Alley” and is renowned as one of the best places on Earth to study great white behavior. Nearby, visitors from all over the world pay top dollar to dive into the ocean (whilst behind bars, of course) to view these creatures up close. YouTube videos of these charters go viral whenever an aggressive encounter occurs, attracting more people to the town.
I launched into the weed on my 7’2″, the freezing water presumably teeming with white sharks. My heart was thumping as my friend Lash led the way. He was calm, even Zen-like about the situation, focused on the excellent waves that were booming through. All I could think of was how this seemed like the least intelligent thing I had done in more than 30 years of surfing.
Gansbaai has numerous setups for quality surf. There are slabs, sand-bottom runners, a fading point, a superfast reef, a double-up insider, etcetera. All are fickle and require various combinations to work. Some are difficult to access while others have a few too many rocks or weed. The waves do get good though, as a quick Google search will reveal, but many visiting surfers also decide to go cage diving. It’s an experience, I’m told, which will ensure that you will never paddle out at any of these spots again for the rest of your life.
Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.
[William Shakespeare]
“There are some heavy waves here,” says five-time World Kneeboard Champion and World Surf League event commentator Gigs Cilliers, who lives down the road and is a constant in the area. “Many years back we towed a day at the right hander outside the harbor that was just jaw-dropping at 25-foot plus. That was scary—but not nearly as scary as breaking a board at a nearby slab. I was washed out to sea with just the tail pad and leg rope attached, which had me feeling like a meal with a price tag. We’d arrived by boat and I was swept out way beyond the craft, and my waving and whistles into a stiff offshore breeze were useless. Of all my ocean experiences over nearly 40 years, that was my scariest from a shark vulnerability perspective.”
Yet with nature in flux, this all might change.
In the first half of 2017, a number of dead great white sharks began to wash ashore. All had had their oil-rich livers removed by predation, with wounds consistent with orca attacks. The first two measured at 16 and 11 feet in length, respectively. The third was smaller. Then there were a number of cow sharks that washed up in False Bay with similar wounds and their livers missing. Unsubstantiated reports surfaced of a handful of orca pods, consisting of between two and four whales each, which were spotted around the times of the deaths.
After the attacks, the cage diving industry experienced a massive drop in shark sightings for the next few months, with boats returning more often than not disappointed.
The orcas had arrived, and the great white sharks had moved on. This part of the ocean wasn’t big enough for the two of them. The diving operations persisted, with visitors encountering copper sharks, whales, and other incredible marine life. But with the presence of orcas, which are the only natural predator to the great white, the normal balance of white shark sightings was radically diminished.
I paddled as hard as I could over the channel, feeling exposed and expecting a hit from below at any moment. I simply wanted to get to the reef as fast as possible while making the least amount of disturbance along the way. I was convinced I was still alive only because they had yet to spot me.
I reasoned that when they did—because it was, after all, a simple matter of time—they would come for me. To make matters worse, the wave was much heavier than I’d estimated. It was going to take an extra effort of courage to get down the face.
Sharks, and the great white shark population, in South Africa have been studied for decades. Shark protection projects from the Kwazulu Natal Sharks Board date back to 1907. The previously mentioned Dyer Island Conservation Trust research began in 2007. More recently, in 2016, several shark population studies from the University of Stellenbosch were published. Thus, scientists have a fairly broad understanding of shark migration patterns.
This year, however, came a surprise: the sharks that were known and tagged had all but disappeared. This went on for weeks, with cage diving operations cutting down on their daily trips. So developed a general pattern. When orcas were spotted, white sharks disappeared. When the orcas disappeared, whites were spotted, but less of them. It also seemed the orcas had come to understand that there is a great food source nearby. Instead of moving on, they lingered in the area.
A few sets came through, but we were out of position. We missed the first because we were too far on the shoulder. We missed the second because we went and sat too deep as compensation. Then there was a lull, with nothing to interrupt our view of the open ocean.
The patterns of predation and changing marine life populations have recently affected other surf-rich destinations. Reunion Island is home to a glut of perfect setups—reefs, beaches, points, and slabs. The most famous, St. Leu, was the venue of a championship tour event under the former Association of Surfing Professionals. Nowadays, surfing and swimming are banned. The island has seen 23 shark attacks since 2011, with nine of them being fatal. Something changed. In Reunion, the sharks have come to roost. In Gansbaai, they have run scared.
Existentially, if the sharks leave, will surfers arrive?
What will become of a destination with a surplus of swell, a variety of different setups, and few crowds (precisely because of the shark factor) if it suddenly experiences an exodus of the resident shark population?
From what I saw, it seems the stigma of the great white shark capital remains overwhelming. The local offshore winds still blow through mostly empty lineups. While other Cape Town surf hubs have flourishing surf schools, surf shops, and restaurants with surf friendly names, Gansbaai features numerous larger-than-life billboards selling harrowing cage diving experiences. Thus far, a surfer migration has not activated.
Conversely, the people who surf here regularly know the risks. They’re aware of what lurks beneath, but still they paddle out. In 2004 there was a non-fatal attack in the area. A pair of Gansbaai attacks in 2009 and 2010 were both fatal. Another surfer who was attacked in 2013 at Die Plaat Beach at Gansbaai survived the encounter.
As a regular surfer, and an Overberg District resident, Cilliers isn’t sold on the idea that white sharks have become a moot issue.
“I still can’t think of a more risky area in South Africa,” he says. “Simple fact.”
Additionally one or two great whites were recently spotted. And there are still plenty of pull factors to the area. The local pinniped population, the regular diet of the great white, is estimated to be in the region of 50,000 Cape fur seals. Plus there are always the waste streams from the local fishing industry.
Finally a set came. Lash and I both paddled for the first one, which he caught, leaving me in the lineup alone. I missed the next one, but in the aftermath I noticed he was holding onto half of his broken board. I needed no further incentive.
As I began paddling in, a little wave popped up on the inside ledge and I caught it. I stood up on the takeoff, then promptly lay prone and rode to where he was on the inside. We then proceeded to get washed in, to the weed bank, and clambered over the rocks to shore with one-and-a-half boards between us. It was an unsuccessful mission and, in my eyes, a foolhardy one. I’d already decided
I was never going to return. I swore my first act thereafter would be to sell the 7’2″. Therefore, I’d never have the right equipment to surf that spot again.
[Feature image: Photo by Alan Van Gysen.]
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