shark breaches water on 'Shark Women'

shark breaches water on 'Shark Women'
Holding her breath underwater for four minutes at a time, 33-year-old Zandile Ndhlovu bravely gets up close and personal with menacing great white sharks to undertake a treacherous, turbocharged investigation into the mysterious disappearance of the endangered species

Remarkably, along with shark biologists Alison Towner, 37, and Leigh de Necker, 31, sporting striking thigh-skimming blue braids, Zandile doesn't just free dive with sharks in the murky depths of their feeding zones.

She also single-handedly wrestles the sharks to hold them on 'bait ropes' to tag them and observe their new migration patterns.

Entering South Africa's Shark Alley, the great white capital of the world, known as 'the McDonald's drive through' for sharks, would be a nightmare for most.
But as a new television documentary which is part of Discovery's Shark Week reveals, this perilous dive is a thrilling challenge. Her mission? To recover an acoustic receiver lying at the bottom of Shark Alley which has been gathering data from any tagged sharks passing through.
'When you're underwater, there are no words to describe how massive great white sharks are. They are no child's play. Anything can happen and if it's your time you will know it,' explains Zandile, who is South Africa's first black African free diving instructor and the founder of The Black Mermaid Foundation, an organization seeking to make the ocean a more diverse and inclusive place.

One of the best ways to find an apex predator like the great white is to follow its prey so Zandile takes a perilous dive in the kelp forest where great whites regularly patrol. It's peak hunting season and the waters are dark.

'I will not lie, I was scared. I've never been so nervous. People think that the kelp forests prevent great white sharks entering the space. But that's not true and I was terrified because you're in this place with an abundance of food and you don't want to be right next to the food truck when one turns up.

'I came face to face with pajama sharks and leopard sharks. But every single moment, when this strong swell comes through, you don't know what else is coming. I recognize every time I enter the ocean that I'm on borrowed time.'

She describes her 'superpower' as being able to hold her breath for four minutes underwater.

'It's called free diving and its enables you to get closer to nature, in silence and with no bubbles and the distraction of shiny diving equipment for the marine life. You need to find a way to react if anything dangerous approaches as sharks taste with their teeth,' explains Zandile.
'So you have to able to manage your heart beat because the minute your heart is racing you are burning valuable energy and oxygen reserves. So whatever happens that freaks you out, you need to pause, calm down and get out of it safely, often with a slow ascent so as not to alarm the sharks
For 15 years, her colleague Alison, who was born in Lancashire in the UK, has studied, tagged and written about hundreds of great white sharks. She has a particular connection with the observation of six of them but in 2017, the great whites began to mysteriously disappear from the Gansbaai coast, a world-renowned place for spotting this legendary shark.

As such she is determined to track down her missing killer family so the team attempts to implant a satellite tag onto a passing large great white shark to provide invaluable information about her movements in real time which could potentially lead them to the others.

After some time, the female team hit gold and tag a massive female shark, weighing around two tons. Leigh takes the responsibility for working the bait line and luring a great white to the boat, while Zandile is in the shark diving cage taking research photos while Alison uses all her strength to get the satellite tag into a female white shark.

'It was terrifying to see a huge 16 foot shark's jaws wide-open, snapping at the bait just at the side of the boat, just a few feet away. She faced me and she was so massive, her girth alone was the size of the cage. I don't think we fully comprehend how big white sharks are until you see one so close and you realize that it really is just a bite and you're dead.

'It was a moment like no other when the shark grabbed the bait and started smacking her tail against the cage - so much that I thought it would be snapped off the line and that I was going to fall to the bottom of the ocean. I've never seen anything like it. I kept falling over but I had one job - and that was to find my footing and keeping filming even though I was freaking out.'

Leigh agrees: 'You're looking at an animal which is at least one ton in size with a strength that a human can never comprehend. I'm a 115lb girl so battling a great white single-handedly on a bait line is quite a story. But the great thing about this documentary is that it shows that girls can do it just as well as men.