Weekend Adventure: Diving With Sharks
March 27, 2009— -- Isla Guadalupe is a volcanic island rising about 4,200 feet out of the Pacific Ocean. It's a stark, forbidding setting, more than 20 hours by boat from the California coast. Yet for some, it's a destination, perhaps the best place in the world for an up-close experience with great white sharks.
"We're 140 miles off Baja, 225 miles south of San Diego," Capt. Lawrence Groth of Shark Diving International says. "It's completely pristine environment here. There's nobody out here but us and the sharks."
They're some of the biggest white sharks on the planet. They hunt in the large Northern elephant seal colony on the northeast shore of Guadalupe; Prison Beach, named for an old federal prison colony whose stony, scorpion-ridden remnants can still be seen on the cliffs. Its waters are some of the clearest in the world, with visibility exceeding 100 feet on most days.
The Mexican island is both a National Biosphere Reserve (since 1928) and a pinniped sanctuary, home to not only the elephant seals but also the last refuge on earth for highly endangered Northern fur seals and Guadalupe fur seals. Seals and sea lions are protected under Mexican law, from all but the white sharks. They feed heartily here, and grow as large as 21½ feet and 7,300 pounds.
This is where the 95-foot Searcher lays anchored, well within earshot of the anxious cacophony of seals ashore. On board are 16 crew members and nine divers, gearing up to get into stainless steel cages and face-to-face with sharks, most for the first time.
And they will see white sharks. Groth has a 100 percent success rate in the six years he has been taking divers to Isla Guadalupe.
