After anchoring, the crew starts to chum for the sharks. Chum is a mixture of tuna heads, pilchards and fish oil – all mixed up and blended with seawater. This mixture is thrown overboard almost continuously throughout the day in order to create an oily chum slick. The chum slick gets carried into the current and when a great white shark swims across the current and smells the chum, it swims up to the chum slick towards the boat to investigate and scavenge on this “dead animal” that it had smelled.
It’s for this purpose that the crew now also throws a tuna head on a rope into the ocean. The shark sees this and then stays interested in the boat as otherwise, it would circle the boat once or twice and then leave. The bait is NOT fed to the sharks but it is kept in the water in order to keep the sharks’ interest in the boat and cage.
