Visitors to Halifax can get up close to local shark species thanks to a new commercial shark tour experience.
Shark expeditions pick up and drop off at the Halifax waterfront, beginning mid-July.
The first and only shark cage-diving operation in Canada, the company launched in 2023, taking visitors to Halifax’s south shore in a 40-foot long vessel. Mr. Hammerschlag said the company decided on a new area for the upcoming season where there’s a better chance of seeing sharks.
“Because there’s deeper water closer to Halifax, it opens us up to a greater diversity of shark species, including some that are more common, like the blue shark,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.
New this year are some customized features, including a special eight-foot-wide cage for people to get close to sharks.
“We have a special cage that we lower into the water, a custom-built cage, and we have a boat with a custom-built crane that lowers and raises the cage in the water,” said Mr. Hammerschlag.
The top part of the cage sticks out of the water, which allows people to slide into the cage and stick their heads underwater for a better view, he said. They’ve also attached hoses and mouthpieces that allow people to breathe under the water so they can spend as much time as they want gazing at the different species.
Guests can book a one-day, three-day or five-day expeditions, where they will be taken out for up to seven hours a day to see sharks up close.
Mr. Hammerschlag said guests would also be contributing to scientific research while ticking shark-watching off of their bucket list.
“We are on board conducting scientific research, and we bring people out on the boat to be able to observe that as well as participate in it,” he said.
“The photographs and imagery that they actually get from the cage dives help us with our scientific studies,” he said, adding that photos of the creatures will help researchers identify threats to sharks and monitor their health as well as other demographic data.
Having fallen in love with the ocean while growing up in South Africa, Mr. Hammerschlag said he thought about becoming a marine biologist as a child, but when his family moved to Toronto when he was 7 years old, there wasn’t much opportunity to gain experience.
“So I volunteered with different research groups and not sharks specifically, just all different things. And I ended up getting field courses and internships, working on corals and other species and marine invertebrates,” he said, adding it was an internship tagging sharks in California that cemented his love of the marine animal.
He pursued his master’s degree and a PhD and took a job as a professor at the University of Miami. He then decided to head back to Canada and started Atlantic Shark Expeditions.
Mr. Hammerschlag has also started up a nonprofit that focuses on shark research, called the Shark Research Foundation.
