Shark Alley is locat­ed just a few kilo­me­ters south of the small fish­ing vil­lage of Gans­baai, and is a nar­row water chan­nel (about 200 m) run­ning between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock. The name of the chan­nel was giv­en by 60,000 fur seals on Dyer Island. These fur­ry mam­mals are a favorite food of great white sharks. As a result, sharks prowl here in large num­bers in search of lunch.

How­ev­er, old leg­ends say that the canal was actu­al­ly called “Shark Alley” for a dif­fer­ent rea­son. These two islands were once a seal hunt­ing ground — if you look close­ly you can still see the poles to which ziplines were attached to trans­port seal skins from Geyser Rock to Dyer Island. When the seal skins crossed the strait, great white sharks jumped out of the water and tore the skins off the fish­ing line! And when load­ing the skins into boats, peo­ple had to push the sharks away with sticks, since the sharks were attract­ed to the blood and fat of the seals flow­ing into the sea.

In addi­tion, Dyer Island is a pro­tect­ed bird sanc­tu­ary for a large colony of African pen­guins — approx­i­mate­ly 25,000 pairs. Today, due to human inter­ven­tion, only about 900 pairs of pen­guins remain.

The area around Dyer Island and Shark Alley is ide­al for shark cage div­ing and pro­vides excel­lent shark watch­ing and hunt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence to watch a great white shark jump straight out of the water to catch a seal.

The depth of Shark Alley is about 28 meters.

Shark Alley was fea­tured in the movie Dark Tide with Halle Berry, where a wealthy busi­ness­man pays a pro­fes­sion­al shark div­er to dive out­side a cage of great white sharks.