Shark Chronicles 011 – Tracking Zulu – 1st team

This is a report of the most exciting moments from the recent 72 hour-tracking straight from the interns’ mouths.

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Ryan's team:

we began our day tracking Zulu as she travelled up the coast towards Grootbrak. In the afternoon sun, she favoured basking close to shore in the breakers. This tendency proved to be an annoyance to our tracking ability because our boat could not go very close to shore and the strength of the tracking signal was interrupted by the aeration of the waves.

During the period that Zulu travelled close to the shoreline, our tracking team was entertained by pods of common dolphins surfing the breakers and was aware that enormous waves were brewing out at sea.

Zulu turned around and was heading towards Seal Island, however, she was in no hurry to get to Seal Island, and favoured the deeper waters off the coast during her 3-4 hour trek to the island. While tracking, we noticed her speed begin to increase as the darkness fell.
As Zulu finally arrived at Seal Island the team was on high alert and all of at sudden we saw two blue torpedo-like shapes in the water. We quickly realized it was two seals that were coming to check us out and the blue colour was attributed to bioluminescence. The seals went under our boat and paused on the other side looking upside down into the water to eventually disappear into the deep blue sea.

To be continued…