General Information
Location: Gansbaai, South Africa
Driving Time from Cape Town: 2 hours
Transfer : Door to door upon request
Peak Season: March- September
Low Season: September – March
Cost: $130 - $150
Duration: 3-4 hours at sea
Water Temperature : 14- 18° C (winter), 9-11°C (summer)
Visibility : 3- 10 meters (winter) , no vis- 5 meters (summer)
Boat: 18- 40 passengers
Cage: Surface cage – 8 divers (no experience required)
Securely designed steel cage which floats on the surface and is attached to the boat at all times, with
divers no more than 1 meter below the surface
Dive: Breath hold
Dive Includes
- Safety and dive briefing
- Dive gear- wetsuit, booties and mask
- Snacks and refreshments on board
- movie of day trip (optional purchase)
Daily Program
- Meet 7 am
- Safety briefing and walk to boat
- Leave harbor (20 minute boat ride)
- Arrival at Island or Beach location
- Drop cage and Briefing on Great White
- Cage dive 2-4 hours
- Return to Gansbaai harbor, debrief and video, lunch
Gansbaai is a fishing town and popular tourist destination for shark cage diving with the Great White shark and as an added bonus – whale watching in season (May- December). But of course the main attraction is the Great White shark since the industry began in 1995. Gansbaai is located about 2 hours from Cape Town.
Dyer Island/ Geyser Rock/Shark Alley
Dyer Island is a nature reserve and a bird nesting site that is allowed to be accessed by the public. It is home to about 27 species of bird including the African Penguin.
Geyser Rock is a smaller island nearby and is home to a colony of around 60,000 Cape Fun Seals. The shallow channel between the two islands is known as the famous “Shark Alley”.
Shark cage diving in Gansbaai
Gansbaai is the busiest of the three locations in South Africa and most companies run an average of 2-3 trips a day. Winter is the high season for the great white shark when the boats work around the island – usually from mid march thru August and summer the low season (mostly due to colder water temperatures and murkier water) with the boats working inshore from about September to March.
Some of the companies here offer breaching trips as an early morning option and although we do get them it is not as consistent as those in False Bay. My honest recommendation here would be to try and do a combo between False Bay for the breaching (which would also include cage diving) and cage diving in Gansbaai if seeing a Great White breach is really at the top of your bucketlist.
In terms of the dive- most boats work on a breath hold method for the cage diving as viability is often limited and the bubbles spook the sharks off to a distance. The interaction time as they swim by the cage is only a few seconds and the Great Whites do approach much closer with this method. . The crew on the boat sees the shark approaching and they will direct the divers in the proper direction to see the shark approaching from underwater.
