Another successful trip with good memories at the Nautilus Explorer. I’m always amaze with these living fossils. Our first day of suspended cage diving was exhilarating with 4 plus Great White Sharks and 100 ft visibility, water cold for me as warm water diver – this is far and away the coldest water I have ever experienced at Guadalupe Island – but with my brand new 7mm wetsuit I just do fine. Temperature was around 65F. Diving in a suspended cage give you the opportunity of observe their normal behavior of this amazing predators, how they maintain the hierarchy, example parallel swimming that means they swim side by side of each other checking who is the bigger so the biggest remain in the territory as the other keeps more distance. If they have the same thinking of size then they fight and can get a serious injury as our very well known shark Bruce famous worldwide because a controversial tagging by drilling his dorsal fin and bolting a transmitter for scientific, documented by National Geographic. So in this dive we saw Bruce who weighs more than 1.5 tons and 5 meters with a big bite where you can see the gills through the bite hole. The good thing is they have a fast healing and recovery.
Our second day was really poor in observing sharks, 1 every now and then would pass by for a look. On that day there were 3 more shark tour boats. Our guests asked if that affected the dives with so declined shark observations. Probably that is what logically you will say yes but wrong! Other boats do not affect the flow of shark around our boat but I explained them strong current was occurring on that time and a big school of tuna were at the very bottom that affect the day not only on our boat but the other boats, too. The third day, today, the other boats were still here, it was calm again and wow! They were back to sneaking around the cages again giving to our photographer guests the very best smile, fantastic!
Divemaster Pedro
Surface conditions: Overcast with sunny periods around midday, air temp 70-75F, light wind and calm
Diving conditions: Water temp 64-66F, visibility 50-80 ft (below avg)
Bruce is one of our favourite white sharks and has a big bite where you can see his gills through the bite hole – diveguide log – 08 SEPT 2010
1 reply on “Bruce is one of our favourite white sharks and has a big bite where you can see his gills through the bite hole – diveguide log – 08 SEPT 2010”
I assume that Bruce is named after the mechanical shark used in Jaws? Who in turn was named after Steven Spielberg’s lawyer?