Sharks in a Blue Ocean

Every single student of the Master in Imagineering class is very busy: attending lectures, preparing lectures with reading (academic) articles and books, finding an application company (or even already visiting one), learning for the oral exam, working on the Research Methodology Course (RMC), editing the Individual Transformation Report (ITR) and as a relief: planning the trip to South-Africa!
There are quite a few of us who already booked their flight to Johannesburg. The dilemma is to choose for celebrating ‘carnaval’ in The Netherlands or using the spring holiday to have a vacation in South-Africa.
Some things that we can already dream of doing over there are; visiting the Kruger Park, cage diving with sharks, the highest bungeejump in the world, riding an ostrich, visiting Mandela’s prison island, climbing the Table mountain, attending a football match of Ajax Capetown, having a ‘braai’, etcetera.

To continue on the White-shark-cage-diving. Let me explain this, you do it in an ocean of course, the Indian Ocean. It is quite a bloody ocean actually, because the tour operators throw in blood and guts to attract the nasty-looking Great Whites. The tourist dives in the cage underwater when they see a dorsal fin approaching, probably to get one of the greatest thrills of their lives; seeing a Great White Shark alive and in the wild! The controversy is that in this area the sharks started to associate humans with food now. But only the little pieces of fish that the boatmen throw in is not enough. They must still be hunting for their own food of course; seals.
In South-Africa, more precisely around Seal Island (close to False Bay), the seals are many! So there are many sharks as well! In this 'red ocean' sharks need to hunt with ‘surprise’ as main element, because the seals are much faster and (when escaping from an attack) can easily outrun their competition. The easiest option to surprise a seal is a vertical approach when they enter the water. This is possible because the physical environment is perfectly shaped for this. The main leaving and entering point of Seal Island is very close to deep waters, which gives the sharks the option of a vertical-approach-surprise-attack. With all the brutal force the sharks attack the seals from underneath and with this torpedo-like technique they fire themselves out of the water!
This is the most likely theory why Seal Island (South-Africa) is the only place in the world where sharks have this behavior. You could say they found a ‘blue ocean’ in hunting. Of course it is not really ‘an uncontested market space’, because the seals might change their behavior to evade the ‘jumping’ sharks, but in the world of hunting one would possibly not find another specie of animal that is not hunted on by any other animal… Let’s hope that in February 2010 the sharks will still be torpedoing themselves so we can be amazed then!