South Africa Shark Diving _ Best Moments

Alright guys, so today we're going to try something a little bit different, a little bit new to the channel, which is to try and give everybody that's watching this a bit of an inside look to what it's like being on the road with the crew and with the team. You know, when you watch a show, whether it's one of our Shark Weeks, Mysterious Creatures, Extinct or Alive, you see the pretty polished finished package, but outside of that pretty polished package, what you have is, as my wife calls it, a traveling fraternity of dickheads that roll around together and hang out and spend every goddamn waking moment with each other and we get to know each other way too darn well. And so we have this very funny dynamic where the team travels around the world, all reliant on each other, hanging out with each other, literally sometimes sleeping in the same bed, sleeping on the same floors, hanging out in the same boats, and spitballing ideas and having fun. And so, you know, a lot of the stuff that you see on the shows, you don't get, well, the stuff you see on the shows is what we set out to make and the cool, serious storytelling, but the stuff you don't see is the behind the scenes, the goofing around, the pushing each other off the boat. When we're sitting there in a blind or on a boat, waiting for those sharks to show up, you don't see the nine hours of waiting for the sharks to show up. You just see the five minutes at the end when the sharks finally show up and I'm in there being all cool guy, tough guy, interacting with them, pushing them around, catching them, whatever. You don't see Johnny Harrington eating kelp or me throwing gummy drops into Christina DeSilver's mouth while we're snapping on the boat and all these fun things. So anyway, that's a very long intro, but I want to set this up. In late 2022, Discovery Channel came to us, myself and the team, and said, hey, got a really good proposition for you. How would you guys like to take over one of Discovery's most successful longstanding franchises, Alien Sharks? And I was like, hell yeah. You guys know me. You know that the main thing that I love are the underrepresented, weird, unusual creatures, edge of existence, little known about them. There are guys out there for your panda bears and your tigers and the big iconic species. I'm the guy that likes the little weird species. So I was super excited. I said, yes, pretty much blanket statement. We'd love to take over Alien Sharks. And the network said, okay, one thing, you have to put the Forrest Galante spin on it. People love tuning in for your shows. And I know how arrogant that sounded, but you've got to put the Forrest Galante spin on it. But the network literally said that, and they said, people love tuning in for your shows because you do this really fun, adventurous storytelling. We get to see the guys with the cameras and the team and the crew and fall in love with everybody and fall in love with the same stuff that you nerds all geek out about. And so I was like, yeah, let's go. So they said, where do you want to go first? And then for me, it was a simple answer, right? I grew up in Southern Africa. I grew up in Zimbabwe. My family vacations were, if they were to the beach, they were to Mozambique or South Africa. And of those two destinations, South Africa has one of the highest diversity of shark species in the world. One of the highest levels of endemism, meaning sharks that occur there and nowhere else on the planet. And so what did we do? We went, oh, well, you might be asking yourself why, actually, before we go into that. Here's why. In South Africa, you have two oceans coming together. You have the cold water Atlantic and the warm Indian smashing into each other at the horn of Africa. And that creates this crazy, violent turbidity zone. And so you ultimately have three habitats. You have cold ocean, warm ocean and mixing ocean. And because of that, it forms these bathymetric and geographical barriers that species aren't able to cross, whether it's because of thermoclines, because of temperature, because of currents, whatever it happens to be. So you get a ton of species diversity on all the different sides, all conferring in this one place in South Africa. So with that all being said, long winded as it may be, now we're going to dive into what actually happened. So it's February 2023. The team and I head to South Africa. If you want to know the order of how things unfolded and what happened and all that good stuff, go and watch the Shark Week show, Alien, Shark, Strange, New Worlds. This is more about the team and I, and as you can see right here, we open with a hilarious little skit where we're so bored and so tired of diving in murky, surgy, 44 degree water that Johnny and I started literally eating the kelp. That'll help settle the gut. How is it, Johnny? No, that one's pretty good. The young stuff's nice. What's that? It's a little more tender. How's the kelp? The kelp? How is it? Yeah, I think the horse is right. It needs to be pickled. Yeah. If you pickled it, it would be bomb. Plenty of it growing. All right. And have a little midday snack. These two are full of ----. Now, you might be asking yourself, why on earth are you idiots chewing on seaweed? And the answer is because it's actually not that bad. So kelp is highly nutritious. They use it to make all kinds of stuff, toothpaste and all kinds of weird stuff. And it's actually very good when pickled. So check it out. Pull up some pickled kelp recipes if you're interested. I'll tell you what's not good when you and your cameraman are so bored that you just start chewing on sea slime because you have nothing better to do, which is what you're seeing there. All right. So we arrive in South Africa. You can see we just have these mountains of gear. We've got all these boats. The crew's getting together. We're figuring out the cameras. We're figuring out the scuba gear. The first thing you do when you go on a shoot like this is try and dust the cobwebs off because it really doesn't matter how much scuba diving you do, where you're doing it, what's going on. When you're in a new environment using different equipment, which we were because I don't typically go diving with the full face mask. That's a shark week thing so that we can talk underwater. When you're in these situations, you've got to get in and dust the cobwebs off. Something's going to leak. Something's going to break. It's all going to be a mess. And so what you're seeing here is us splashing in and giving the gear a good old fashioned test. So as you can see here, it looks beautiful. The ocean looks fantastic. It is not. So that is a testament to how good the camera team is, right? It's freezing. I mean, high to mid 40s, we're in seven and a half mil Farmer John wetsuits, which means there's a bottom and a top and on your core, you have 15 millimeters because there's two layers of seven and a half mil neoprene and you're still freezing cold. And if you're Johnny or JQ, if you're the camera team, no gloves. So your hands are just hanging out. It's like being in one of these new fangled cold plunge things that you see all the celebrities and liver kings and ---- of the world sitting in freezing their asses off, except you think those guys are tough for doing it for three minutes. My guys are doing it for 60 minutes at a time with their hands out while operating a camera. If you want to see some arthritic looking hands, you watch these guys try and turn their dials and focus while they're filming underwater. I mean, it's, it's, it's honestly really funny as the host, cause I'm sitting there with my nice cushy warm gloves being like, ha ha, this is the kelp forest. Now there are only a handful of kelp forests in the world. New Zealand, Japan, South America, South Africa, and California. I think those are the five actual kelp forests in the world. Real ones, right? And uh, I've dove a handful of them, dove New Zealand, I've dove California all the time and literally I can see kelp forest over my shoulder here and it is spectacular. I love kelp diving. I think it's most comparable to walking through the redwoods, except you're doing it underwater with all of this life around. It's such a magnificent thing, but when it's cold like this, you're fighting currents, you're fighting conditions. You can see the viz is really, really bad. It's tough. It's the toughest because everything, your fins, your BC, your regs, your weight, your cameras getting caught and stuck on the kelp. It looks way better on camera. Not that much. That's whatever. Oh, it's so much worse in real life. Watch, watch, watch. That was some of the worst visibility I've... He's coming through my legs and I'm like, hey you. Come here. That was probably the worst shark week visibility I've ever experienced. 50 fish in front of me. There's like five fish in front of the thing. So I'm like, all right, here's the shot. You can't see the screen because there's fish everywhere. So you see Johnny is explaining there, you look at the pictures and you're like, wow, it looks pretty good. And you hear Johnny going, that is some of the worst visibility I've ever dove into my life. Literally the first week that we dove in South Africa and we dove every day, it was raining. It was ripping wind. I don't mean like, oh, we shouldn't go out boating today. I mean like 45, 50 mile an hour winds where the captains were like, okay, you can only dive if we're a hundred feet from shore because as you leave the safety, you know, like the little lee of the shore, the boats are just going to get like tossed over. So we are fighting it and you don't see any of this in the show, which is such a bummer. But literally that first week with all that major wind, there's crazy upwelling, there's huge wind surge and it's just making the ocean pea soup, which sucks to dive in, especially in South Africa, which is the capital of great white shark attacks in the world. And we're at any time where you're watching this footage or you're watching alien sharks, we can see seal Island, the infamous seal Island where the white sharks breach and hammer the seals that every other boring shark week show is about. Yeah. We're looking at that the whole time. And you know, you watch those shows and the guys are like, we're down here. It's so dangerous in this cage. Good thing I have a metal tank around me. Fuck that noise. Like we're out there with nothing, man, nothing. We're just swimming around out in the open, literally eyeballing seal Island the whole time we're doing these dives and no other moron in the world would be scuba diving in these conditions. The wind, the cold, the turbidity, the terrible visibility right by seal Island. It felt creepy and I never promote creepy because I think the ocean is the most magnificent place on the planet. We should all experience it unless it's like this. And then if you want to add insult to injury, we are literally in a white out of fish. There are so many of these fish, um, not Cobb, I'm blanking on their name. There's a South African name. They're basically a perch that they are just like swarming us. They're all over us because we're diving in an area that they often do fish feeding. So these fish think that we're there to feed them and they are all over us. And guess what? As I mentioned before, the freezing pasty ass, white arthritic hands of my camera guys look like bait. They look like white squid tentacles and these fish are just nailing the guy's hands the whole time. And I'm trying my hardest not to crack up because every 15 seconds over the comms I just hear, oh ----, Oh Johnny, there's one coming. And it's like so funny. And I'm like, I'm a serious hardcore shark week presenter, you know, like trying to keep in tone and like match what's going on. And meanwhile, we're just cracking up as these fish are a pest in the way and biting the crap out of the guys. So in the show, you see a little bit of when Christine and I head out to drop bruvs and then she sort of goes off on her own. That is how it all went down except for the first day. The first day, Christine and I went out and dropped bruvs and then just had to wait. Because if you think about it, like if you look at Simon's town, it's this giant Bay, the offshore canyons are way out there, like 40 miles out, right? So we run out, we drop the bruvs and then it would be like 40 miles back and then 40 miles back out to retrieve them like six hours later. So it doesn't make sense. Not from a time standpoint, not from a fuel standpoint. So instead we run out to the furthest point that we can get to where the canyon starts, drop the bruvs and then Christine goes, okay, we've got six hours to wait. And I'm like, oh, well that sucks. So we look at the charts and Seal Island, the same one I mentioned earlier, is only like 18 miles away instead of 40 or whatever. And we're like, **** it, let's go to Seal Island. So we run the boats over and not at Seal Island, but offshore Seal Island there's a high spot, right? Which is like, it's not right at Seal, it's pretty far offshore. It's like, we're pretty far off Seal Island. It's probably five miles off Seal Island. There's a high spot where the bronze whalers have moved in. And for whatever reason, Port and Starboard, the two famous orcas don't seem to harass the bronze whalers. I have my theory on that. My theory is bronze whalers are really cheeky and there's a lot of them. So imagine you're, I'm trying to think of a good example. Imagine you're an anaconda. No, imagine you're a caiman, okay? You can either, as a caiman, you can either choose, and I'm referring to the caiman as the orca in this, you can either choose to go after the big, sloppish, easy to kill catfish to eat. Or you could potentially go after a single piranha, but there's gonna be hundreds of other piranhas in the school to deal with. And honestly, even though you're much bigger and a better predator, the piranha are probably gonna pester the ---- out of you and you're gonna leave them alone. And I think that's what's going on with the dynamic between the orcas, the white sharks, and seven gills, which are big and slow and relatively solitary. And versus the bronze whalers, which are these sort of packed up, crazy, aggressive sharks. Anyway, I tell you all this because we go to this high spot where the bronze whaler, like ecotourism diving takes place. We don't have a cage on board. Why would we? We're not there for your typical cage diving shark week. We pull up, bronze whalers are everywhere. They're all around the boat. We're throwing them chum. We're feeding them. It's awesome. Don't judge us. It's what you do on shark week. It's what all the ecotourism operators do. We're there to film them. And we don't have a cage. So these huge, like eight foot whalers are like cruising by, smashing each other, covered in mating scars. And I look at Johnny, look at Christine, look at Jakey. I'm like, we got to get in, right? And they're like, well, yeah. So we all start gearing up to jump in, in a cage dive spot, couple miles off of Seal Island with no cage in five foot visibility. So you see here, we had all these like salmon and fish carcasses. We're like hand feeding them right off the boat. I mean, these sharks are used to people. They're all cruising around. Their backs are breaking. It's super fun. It's super exciting. And everybody's just stoked to jump in the water. None of this, of course, made the show. Rips in the neoprene must have been yesterday, because like my suit flooded almost immediately. So you're cold today? I was definitely chilly today. Not unmanageable, but it was definitely much colder than yesterday's dive. How's that mango? So good. My favorite fruit in the whole world. And now Liam thought it was funny to just show me shoving mango into my gullet. You know, like I'm starving to death and I've never eaten before. So thanks, Liam. You're the best. So just a bunch more shots here of the team and I gearing up, doing our dive briefings, talking with the operators, figuring out how we're going to do it. Everything you see in a show like this is coordinated. While it's usually chaos and it's captured chaos on the cameras, we always have a plan going in. Two boats. One's a camera boat. One's a picture boat. You know, a dive master who potentially knows the area or maybe just someone who's a local. I mean, I'm also a dive master, but I don't even pretend to have the knowledge and understanding that the locals do. So we always bring people on. Sometimes they're on cameras. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they pop in for a second. You know, we set it up for success, but you just never know what's going to happen. Each other, because when I would get pushed off, I was trying to like, I can't hold on to anything because it's all urchins. So I was trying to like stay in my position as best as possible. But I would get pushed off and then he would be right there to have like another angle on it. So I know it felt like we were on top of each other, but even if you go like two feet back, you lose you. It's completely green. Look, I'm happy if you're happy. I just, it just felt like a mess. It was. I think we just give each other, give ourselves a little bit more space next time. So once again, we're back in shore. We're looking for these seven gills, which were the main target of this episode, if you haven't seen it. And you can see it's just a mess. The conditions are still brutal. And I don't know if you look closely, you can probably notice it. We're still jovial, but the guys are cold. Our body language looks defeated. This is what happens at the end of nine straight days of diving in freezing cold water with brutal topside weather conditions. Like everybody's deflated. Nobody's actually having fun. And we're sort of forcing the fun at this point to try and keep ourselves happy to move through it. Just hoping that we get a break in the sea conditions. And voila, just like that, we get our break in the weather. Now what you don't realize is this is on the very last day in South Africa, which of course I had promised the entire crew was going to be an off day before we fly on to Australia, travel for 40 something hours, and then shoot for the next three weeks straight. And it wasn't because literally the day that we're supposed to fly out that night, the conditions are perfect. The weather breaks, the sea turns over, and we get these immaculate dive conditions, which you guys saw in the show. You know, things are often shot out of order, but some of the kelp forest stuff, that clear, beautiful kelp forest stuff, that's all from the last day. We got seven gills on the last day. It was an amazing day and everybody was absolutely exhausted. So, you know, I hope that... First of all, shout out to Liam, because this is all done by our junior producer Liam who captured all this stuff on his personal camera and on his phone. Good job, buddy. If people like this, what we'll do is we'll do this more on our future shoots. Get to see more behind the scenes. We'll try and do it with some of our other shows, because some of them we have a ton of iPhone stuff and camera stuff. And yeah, you know, that's just a little look into some of the stuff we did in South Africa. Just some of the BTS-y moments that, of course, never made the show. The crew and I laughing, having fun, everybody being cold. And yeah, I don't know. See what you guys think of this behind-the-scenes look at Alien Sharks' Strange New Worlds.