An early morning for the crew and guests of Slashfin with the boat launching at 7am from Kleinbaai harbour in time for the stunning sunrise, one of the benefits of waking up before the sun does! Another benefit of being out on the water early is being able to have our choice of anchor sites and hopefully sharks! We were lucky this morning with the sharks turning up very quickly with our first shark hurtling into sight. The activity did not stop with multiple sharks paying Slashfin a visit throughout the trip. We had some smaller sharks around and whilst they may have lacked the impressive size of the larger ones they made up for it with their fantastic activity in including one of our favourite small females in the bay currently ‘Sarko’. The stand out of the trip was one of these smaller sharks and a larger male, one we refer to as ‘Feisty’ due to his lively behaviour. This is one of our acoustically tagged animals from September last year, the team are very happy to see him back in the bay for the first time since 2016. Unfortunately, with his return to the bay we have seen that he has sadly been entangled in what appears to be discarded plastic, the Marine Dynamics and Dyer Island Conservation team will monitor this shark as much as possible whilst he still appears at the boat. We briefly encountered the largest shark of the trip towards the end as ‘Scarlett’ made an appearance, showed off her signature move of slow approaches and spy-hopping before leaving us. We also had a few Copper sharks present, however with the presence of these larger, active sharks around they did not seem to be fussed to get in the way and disappeared as soon as they appeared.
The second trip of the day was off to a great start with a White shark present very soon after the boat returned to anchor. This trip saw the exact five sharks that the first did, and experienced just as exciting activity as the first as well.
A JAWSome day out on the water!
