Exciting news is that the first humpback whale has been sighted for the season with a lovely breach that gave it away!!!!! We have been squinting out at the ocean for days now, waiting for the first arrival of the large numbers of humpback whales that we get along the eastern coastline and which symbolizes winter for us. 

These amazing animals visit our coastline en route between the winter calving grounds of Mozambique and the summer feeding grounds of Antartica.

They are a beautiful sight to see as they travel and frolic along the way with their magnificent breaches, spy hopping, tail slapping and general fun behaviour.

We usually see them en route to Mozambique from May until July, even August and then sight them on their return journey later in the year, which is hugely lucky for us!!!!!

It also symbolizes the start of many, many exciting things along with it.

The first ragged tooth sharks (Carcharias taurus) have been spotted on the dive sites of Cathedral and Raggie Cave, and this is now the start of our ragged tooth shark sighting season.  This season usually starts early to mid May and lasts until mid to late November.  These sharks are incredible to spend time with as they are not reliant on movement to breathe, which is called the buccal pump method.  They are able to spend a lot of time neautrally buoyant just off the bottom, swimming slowly as they spend their day chilling, which makes research work on them hugely interesting as we are able to gather a lot of data on these sharks due to their slow movement.

Don’t get me wrong, they can move, for sure, but prefer to chill out and take things slow.

And along with the onset of winter is the sardine run, which is almost upon us and we are also keeping our eyes peeled for any slight sign that the sardine migration has begun.  We have already seen quite a few Cape gannets and juvenile cape gannets, which goes hand in hand with the feeding frenzy, as well as juvenile Wilson’s storm petrel birds.

So it’s all starting to happen, thanks to Mother Nature and all that she has to offer us in this magnificent ocean realm.

We will keep you posted on all that is going down this season and it seems like it’s going to be an exciting one!!!