Maybe you’ve been on a whale watch, or you know someone who has. But what about a trip to see great white sharks? CAI’s Jennette Barnes joined one of a growing number of tours open to the public.
The water at Ryder’s Cove in Chatham gleams with September morning sun. Five guests, all women, board a vessel captained by Alexandre Carrier.
“Life jackets are in this bench right here,” he says after a brief introduction. He shows them how to open the white boat seat and find the life jackets in an emergency.
The 35-foot boat is the type often used for charter fishing, but the only thing they’ll be fishing for today is an eyeful of a feared and fascinating ocean predator: the great white shark.
“Three rules on the boat,” the captain says. “Rule number one: Don't fall in. Rule number two: If you fall in, don't pet the sharks.” The women laugh. “And then rule number three: Anytime we're moving, especially fast, you just wanna stay seated.”
Trips to see white sharks on a small boat like this typically set you back about $2,000 for a private charter.
But in recent years, some companies and the nonprofit Atlantic White Shark Conservancy have started offering a ticket-based trip. This one, with the conservancy, costs $500 per person.
One thing driving the cost is the spotter plane. The pilot finds sharks from above and radios the boat captain.
Carrier starts up the engine. We will, indeed, be going fast.
We make it through the cut in the Chatham sandbar, heading down toward Monomoy.
Our spotter plane comes into view.
“It’s straight ahead,” says Hannah Leary, our guide for this trip. She’s the ecotourism coordinator for the shark conservancy.
Even with a spotter plane, it can take a few minutes to sync the boat’s path with a moving shark.
“They can move up to 25 miles an hour when they're hunting,” she says, “but when they're just swimming around, they average five miles an hour. It's like a game of Marco Polo between us, the plane, the shark. And all three of us are moving.”
The pilot advises the captain to change the position of the boat to cut down on glare. And then, there it is, one-and-a-half boat lengths away.
“One-and-a-half away,” the pilot says over the radio. “One away. At the boat, on your right.”
Leary helps the guests locate the shark in the water.
“It's off our one o'clock here guys, but it's kind of deep, so you can just see the contrast in the water,” she says. “You guys all see that?”
They do. But there will be more to come.
AN UNUSUAL SHARK SEASON
This is the height of white shark season. Peak sightings off the Outer Cape have shifted later in the last couple of years, from August toward September, said state shark biologist Greg Skomal. He tags sharks for research.
“One of the things we did in the last several months was, we published a paper showing that the number of white sharks going to Canada is increasing,” he said in an interview.
Although water temperature affects the movement of sharks, Skomal said they’re also following their food. Waters off Canada and Maine offer plenty of what sharks like to eat — especially seals.
“Perhaps some of the sharks we would typically see on Cape Cod in July and August, as they migrate north, just bypass us,” he said. “But then they come through on their way south. So that's the working hypothesis we've got right now. And we'll see how the numbers bear out when we start to exchange information with our Canadian colleagues.”
A LONG JOURNEY — ALL FOR SHARKS
Back on the tour, Brigette Young has been kneeling on a seat in the bow to get a better view of each white shark.
In her work life, she’s a mental health therapist. She traveled solo all the way from Madison, Wisconsin, just to see great whites in the wild.
She’s originally from the Pacific Northwest — a place that inspired her love of sharks.
“Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, like, we had the mythical, huge octopus that lived under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,” she says. “So there's a lot of, like, lore around sea animals. And I think that was what sparked my interest the most.”
Next up: A shark the captain says is 11 or 12 feet long.
“This is a big shark, guys. This is a big shark,” he says.
The guests line the right side of the bow, looking down into the water, where they see the outline of the shark.
“Oh yeah, my gosh!” someone says.
The swells of ocean waves are large enough that some passengers grab the seat or gunwale to steady themselves.
“Ooh! Whoa!”
“No falling in, not here, not now!” another guest says.
When the water flattens out, our guide lowers a hydrophone — like an underwater microphone — beneath the surface to check the shark for an acoustic tag.
“If the shark is tagged, it will start to make these clicking noises, and that's the pings that the acoustic tag is putting off,” she says. “So it's almost like a serial number. They each put off different frequencies.”
No tag on this one. But we get to see the shark in just 10 feet of water — and nearby, a huge seal haul-out. Gray seals crowd together on the beach at Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge.
That’s a big reason the sharks are here in shallow water.
Young says seeing them in the wild has been surreal.
“I think it's such a neat experience to get to see animals that might not exist forever. … To me, it just feels very cool,” she says.
The day’s sightings will contribute to research by scientists for the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the state of Massachusetts, which work closely together on shark science.
They’re studying sharks’ predatory behavior off Cape Cod, aiming to minimize conflicts between humans and the great white.
