An off-duty lifeguard, Sikhanyiso Bangilizwe, 26, was killed by what the Natal Sharks Board says was a Bull shark while body-surfing at Second Beach in Port St Johns on Saturday.
Wavescape have formed a donation fund to raise money for his family and we at the Save Our Seas Shark Centre have donated R2500 to this fund. We extend our condolences to Sikhanyiso’s family.
To find out more and to make a donation for Sikhanyiso’s family go to http://www.wavescape.co.za/sharks/port-st-johns-shark-death.html
While this is a terrible tragedy it is important to remember that deaths by sharks are less than 5 per annum.
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In the next few weeks, we will deploy a number of tags to bull sharks in Fiji. This includes pop-up satellite archival tags as well as acoustic tags. The satellite tags will be attached externally by approaching the shark underwater using SCUBA and a simple speargun. The tags are programmed to stay on the sharks for a few weeks up to three months. Experience from previous years tells me that this might be challenging! Bull sharks are good in getting rid of pop-up tags! Some of them only were attached to the sharks for a few days before they detached prematurely for unknown reasons. So keep your fingers crossed that they stay on the sharks for as long as they are programmed this time!
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One of the unfortunate and inevitable implications of mounting filming expeditions is excess baggage fines. A typical set of equipment that I take on location weighs in at around 350kgs. This consists of cameras, housings, support equipment, tripods, dive gear, lighting, monitors; the list goes on. Its not really possible to reduce this weight at all, pretty much everything is essential. Obviously we have to pay to get this equipment to and from wherever we’re filming; sometimes it’s possible to send the gear by cargo, which can be cheaper. Other times we have to take it on the flight with us, and here we can choose to take a gamble between prepaying the excess on-line, which means paying the full price (either per kg or per bag), or we can take a gamble, go to the airport and see if we can get the charges reduced by smiling and being friendly at the check-in desk.
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One of the great cliché’s of wildlife film-making is the ‘final day’ scenario. We’ve all heard it before; it’s the last day of an expedition, a disheartened film crew hasn’t managed to document the rare / endemic / endangered creature in remote / hostile / inaccessible location its been sent to. We reach the final day, and miraculously everything comes together, and in perfect light the crew end up filming more than they could ever have wished for.
Call me a cynic, but I think that sometimes the ‘final day’ scenarios we’re told about involve a healthy dose of poetic license and clever editing. Nevertheless, its fun and interesting viewing. At times however, the final day really does offer up all that history has made it out to be, and our last day on the water in Djibouti did just that.
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Wow, what a busy summer holiday period we have had! It began with the Wavescape Film Festival that the Save Our Seas Foundation sponsored, and continued until now with hundreds of kids and adults coming to the Centre, either just to see what we are up to, meet up with one of us, watch a video screening of one of our great documentaries, or bringing their children to attend our exciting kiddies summer holiday program.
With a very successful 2008 behind us, and the New Year promising good things, we are ready to continue giving it all we can to help save our seas and our sharks.
Till later, Lesley Rochat
Manager and Director Education and Awareness, SOSSC
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