The CIEE adventure field trip this Saturday was a field trip to the quaint, coastal town of Hermanus. Just an hour and a half’s drive from Cape Town, the smoggy, sometimes scary sentiement of Cape Town proper transforms slowly to a bussling town on the water, laden with outdoor restaurants, coffee and ice cream shoppes, post card stands and music playing, among families and tourists with children’s faces ice cream-clad and parents too blissful to care to wipe it off.

In Hermanus, Quinton and Felicity, our surrogate parents, signed us all up for sea kayaking.  In our amnesic moment of the weather on the Western Cape as often sunny and still in the morning to hurricane –style winds in the afternoon, we sidned up for the latest slot at 1:15 pm, so we could gallivant in town and bask in the sun on a grassy knoll. 

At 1:45pm (1:15pm South Africa time), we headed down to the brightly coloured kayaks.  The guides warned us that it might be a tad windy on the ocean and we would have to paddle hard, but hey I’ve been at the UCT gym, I can pump it up in a kayak!

About ten minutes into the ocean, Tam and I were ahead of the group, eager to see the seal colony just ahead, when our guides informed us that gale force winds were upon us and we had to turn around right away. 

Unfortunately, our eager attitudes caused the wind to take us quite far away from the rest of the group, and where we had to steer to land.  But we paddled hectically against the wind and against the waves that were growing larger by the second.  At least we were not the other group that had completely gone astray.  The guide yelled at that group like they were about to die. 

We made it back safely, without seeing any seals or whales.  But hey, now I can tell people I kayaked in gale force winds, in an ocean highly invested with sharks and whales, right?

My alarm obnoxiously sang to me at five am on the dot. I thought I was dreaming, and then I remembered that I am a crazy and wake up before sunrise so I can risk my life in front of great white sharks. Our van pulls up outside of Liesbeeck filled with strangers with the same thrill-seeking sentiment as ours.

After a two-hour drive, a hardy breakfast and a Discovery video about sharks, we were off to the boat in overcast skies and wind pushing us around. The boat drives us to “shark alley,” where, with some bait and some patience, we would see many enormous Great White Sharks circling our boat, seeking food.

Suited up in the wet suit (after some struggle of course) I hopped into the cage attached to the boat. Our instructions were to sit with our head outside the water and then when they tell us, we take a deep breath and submerge our bodies under the water to become face to face with the shark, and do not put our limbs outside of the cage. No other directions, emergency procedures or anything, of course, this is Africa.

After a bit of waiting and listening to an obnoxiously nervous English woman talk my ear off and taking pictures of her on her over-priced underwater camera to show her nephew, I became face to face with some sharks. They were enormous and hungry, but as Laura and I agreed, it was too surreal to be frightening. When coming face to face with a highly deadly animal, there is nothing at that point that anyone could probably do to keep it from taking a limb, so what is the point to being afraid?

At one point, the shark came in contact with the cage, almost smacking its tail into me, and with that, my thrill-seeking quota was immediately satisfied.