Great White Florida migration

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McGriffin

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Location
Rhode Island, USA
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What months do the great whites typically arrive and depart Florida for their annual migration? I'm from New England and we have a ton of them on Cape Cod during the summer months. I would like to dive Florida when there are not as many around. Thanks.
 
It would be highly unlikely you would ever see a Great White off Florida. Not that they don't come down here, but we don't have any seals and so their source of food is limited. Nevertheless, when they do come down it's usually in the colder months and they head back north in the warmer months.

I thought I read in the mainstream news of one being sighted just recently? I got the impression a sighting is very rare.
 
I thought I read in the mainstream news of one being sighted just recently? I got the impression a sighting is very rare.
Sightings are indeed rare. I've only seen one. That was in the Keys around 2002 or 2003. It looked so out of place.
 
Yeah great whites, not so much ( thats why it made the news )..
Now lemon sharks, yeap they come here Jan - Feb Jupiter area.
I highly recommend it!!
 
What months do the great whites typically arrive and depart Florida for their annual migration? I'm from New England and we have a ton of them on Cape Cod during the summer months. I would like to dive Florida when there are not as many around. Thanks.

If your concern is to avoid diving around potentially dangerous sharks, GWS is not the species you should be most concerned about.

Bull sharks which are literally thousands of times more common and the much less common tiger sharks come to mind as potential concerns, but the reality is that if there is no fishing or shark feeding occurring in the area, your chance for a negative encounter while diving is extremely low.
 
Sharks are way down the list of concerns while diving here, and the odds of running into a white shark are pretty slim. We're not sure what they're doing in FL waters; while there was one acoustic tag record back in 2015 of a white shark hanging around Palm Beach Inlet for about three months most of the satellite tag tracks have them booking it down the coast, into the Gulf, and then back around.

Whatever the case may be, I'm only aware of one instance off St. Augustine almost five years ago where a white shark made a remotely serious pass at a diver (bumped his tank from behind, kept going, then came back to circle a few times before getting poked in the jaw and bugging out). The majority of sightings down here, they just mosey on past and leave a bunch of shocked and ecstatic divers in their wake. I know the DM and one of the customers on The Wetter the Better who saw the one off Palm Beach the other week and even with Guadalupe Island under my belt I'm insanely jealous of them.

If there's a time of year to avoid sharks while diving down here, it's probably mid-fall ... which is when your dive trip is most likely to be scotched by a hurricane. Depends on the location too; Jupiter/West Palm for instance is pretty sharky, but to date aside from "cartilaginous catfish" (nurse sharks) I have to date only seen one juvenile Caribbean reef shark on the Key Largo reefs. Guess which way I go for diving?
 
Almost every single diver I know that dives NE FL regularly has seen one or more. Literally a couple dozen people. Generally in winter and around 100 feet deep but year round out deeper. I'd say maybe a 1 in 1000 or 2000 dives odds here. My buddy Jeff has 3 or 4 gopro videos on YouTube of the off Ponce. They are far more prevalent than most people think, but still nowhere as many as tigers and bulls.
 
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