A TYPICAL DAY

Wake up at and get ready any time between 6:30 – 8:00. After breakfast, assuming that the boat trip will take place that day (because the trips are subject to weather conditions, the day will start with making your way to the ‘Great White House’ where, once the tourists have had their briefing, you will help to dress them in their jackets and life vests or go and prepare the boat for the trip.

You'll walk the tourists down to the boat. Once the boat leaves the harbour you’ll spend between 3 and 6 hours out at sea. The Shark Boat will go out once or twice a day depending on numbers and time of year and the Whale Boat normally goes out four times a day (for a duration of roughly 2 hours for each trip).

During your time on the shark boat, Shark Fever, you'll participate in data collection. Once a shark is spotted, you will need to record as much information as you can about it, including data such as size, sex, any scars or other identifying marks, the length of time it remains around the boat, behaviour, and if it is a re-sight, etc.  You'll be informed about what information you need to collect.

If it is decided that it is a ‘good’ shark, the cage will be lowered into the sea and you'll help with preparing the tourists for the cage dives. This will include getting them into their wetsuits.

You may not participate in a cage dive on each occasion, but you should have the opportunity on couple of occasions. Not every boat trip ends in a cage dive – it will depend on whether there are any sharks around at that time, whether the sea conditions are conducive to lowering a cage, and other similar factors. Just to give you an example, though, a very recent volunteer on a one-month placement went out to sea on 20 occasions, but the cage was only lowered on 9 of those occasions.

At the end of the 5 hours, you will return to the shore and here your work will continue. Once back in shore you might have to wash the boat down and pack all the kit up.  The equipment needs to be washed and hung to dry for the next day.  If it is busy there might be a second boat trip so all the above is repeated.  If not, they have the rest of the day off.

The work you do will ideally be split between the two boats, Shark Fever and Whale Whisperer, and work on land or in the office. It will largely depend on what is happening at the time of your placement and where the most help is needed. This is only a rough idea of the work that you will be doing.

You'll be given information and the necessary material to help you answer any general questions that the tourists on the boats might ask you and you will be expected to know and provide basic information.

Lectures and Activities
During your placement you might have the opportunity to attend some lectures on various aspects of shark and marine conservation. The number of lectures will vary at different times of the year.

Tube-feeding an injured Giant Petrel

ABOUT THE GREAT WHITE SHARK

Sharks are intelligent and vulnerable, deserving of sympathy and respect. Education helps people to lose the Jaws phenomenon and gain the realisation that sharks are a complex and precious species, living in the water – just doing their best to survive.

100,000,000 sharks are killed each year by humans, usually through fishing. They are, as a result, on a collision course with extinction. Great White Sharks are the last wild predator on earth that we cannot tame; from that point of view alone it deserves our respect and attention.

How could our oceans be the same without the glorious Great White beneath its surface.

Great White Sharks are very stable animals, displaying stable and predictable behaviour. They do not like to fight with or bite one another. They are highly intelligent animals, able to learn quickly and to remember. This is all new and contradictory evidence in the field and it is apparent that the Shark Team are just scratching the surface now.

Finding the Great White, or letting them find you, is a skill, involving years of practice, the water temperature, depth, visibility, swell height, current and wind direction are all major factors. Once the site is found, the bait is prepared and the team awaits the shark, respecting it as a free animal. A recent tagging project was very successful allowing a number of Great Whites to be tracked.

Possible Extinction:
Considering the incredible number of between 150 - 200 million sharks destroyed each year, there is a potential threat of extinction to these species. Most sharks are slow growing, have late maturation and low fecundity and this is the shark's downfall. They cannot replace their stocks to keep up with human exploitation, such as say, sardines can.

Lets look at the Great White Shark. The Great White Shark female takes approximately 15 years to become sexually mature, and the male about 8 years. At these ages the female will be around five meters long and the male around four meters long. The Great White Sharks' fecundity is low, so the female may possibly only give birth to several litters of pups in a lifetime and these litters are relatively small, ranging from about seven to eleven pups in a litter.

So due to the shark's inability to reproduce quickly, stock replacement is not occurring and subsequently the populations of the world are fast diminishing. In fact, they are being wiped out far quicker than most people realise, with many species critically endangered and some species literally on the brink of extinction.

The Great White Shark is now protected in South Africa, California, South Australia and Tasmania, and although this is only one of almost 400 species of shark, its protection is a step in the right direction.

The Great White is a key stone species on this planet and its protection, subsequent media attention and high public profile allows us to use it as a battering ram to push for the protection of other shark species.