Great white sharks in Cape Town are famous all over the world, bringing many visitors to the Mother City in search of adventures such as the shark cage diving tour. With not one but two oceans, the Cape is blessed with some of the best beaches on the planet. Along with beach goers, these waters are also popular with surfers, who travel from all over the city (and often, much further afield!) to ride the beautiful blue waves.
[image via Shark Spotters]
The sharing of the oceans is made a lot easier by organisations such as Shark Spotters, who offer a way for swimmers, surfers, body boarders and kayakers to enjoy the water safely. This hard-working organisation uses a flag system at major beaches across the peninsula to warn people of shark activity. While this system has worked well for many years, the one drawback is that warnings can only be seen on arriving at any given beach. An advance warning system would allow surfers and other ocean users to get real time information on shark activity as well as wale sightings, wave conditions and other valuable data… long before heading off to the beach.
Shark Spotters Shark Activity App – A Win-Win for All
This is where the Shark Spotters app is coming in to (hopefully) save the day. A basic app design has been created that will effectively allow surfers, swimmers and anyone else planning to head out to the beach a way to track shark sightings, wave conditions and various other information from a smartphone app.
As a pioneering beach safety programme situated in the southern peninsula (an area well-known for its shark sightings), this organisation works hard to help monitor shark activity around beaches in False Bay. Spotters are situated at strategic look-out points, with a warning system that uses different coloured flags to indicate whether beaches are safe, whether sharks are nearby but still far away enough to not pose any threat or whether sharks are in the area. In order to create the Shark Spotter app, some R60, 000 is needed to cover costs of mobile application development and deployment. Shark Spotters is asking for help in reaching this goal – as of posting, R15, 500 had already been raised.
This app will be free to download by locals and visitors alike, and will add an invaluable resource for surfers and anyone else who wants to safely enjoy the beaches of Muizenberg, Fish Hoek and False Bay. You can learn more about making a donation to this cause by visiting the app’s Back a Buddy page over here.
You can also have a look at this video that highlights the app, as well as the work that Shark Spotters does to keep our beaches safe.
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If you love Cape Town’s beautiful beaches, and want to help keep them safe for people and marine wildlife, the Shark Spotters app is sure to be one that will come in handy once summer returns!
