What the Work Costs
Who We AreRockHopper exists to Work for the Ocean.
Every booking already carries a conservation contribution — between R500 and R10,000 depending on the experience. It pays for the boat, the fuel, the permits, the paperwork.
If you've been out with us - in person or online - that's what your day did.
What follows is what bookings don't stretch to.
Eleven sharks have been tracked continuously since January 2026.
Their detections feed ATAP, South Africa's national acoustic array, which connects to global tracking networks.
The handling protocols took eighteen years to develop.
They're approved by SAIAB, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, SANParks, and wildlife veterinary authorities.
No chemicals, no anaesthesia — a shark is gently inverted into tonic immobility, a natural reflex state, and released within minutes.
Emma
Three years of PhD fieldwork, 2027 to 2030, R30,000 a month.
She came through the Ocean Academy and now guides with us.
Her PhD arrived with no fieldwork funding attached, so we're covering all three years of it through experiences.
Where this goes
We're not short of work worth doing. We're short of the stability to say yes to it.
Funding in this field is scarce, and that's the bottleneck — not ideas, talent or willingness. So we solve that first.
Every year we're steady is a year we can carry another student, widen the view from single animals to the whole system, and take on the work that we attract through impact, rather than just the work we can afford.
The Units
R15,000 ZAR
Tags one shark for ten years. That's R1,500 a year of one animal's life.
Five receivers are already in the water, listening. You get its detections for the whole decade.
R12,500 ZAR
Carries one Ocean Academy student for a year.
Cape Town children who live twenty minutes from one of the great kelp forests on earth and have never been in it.
R25,000 ZAR
A month of a working field vehicle. We run on a 2009 car that's near the end.
Nothing about this is romantic.
It's the difference between fieldwork happening and fieldwork not happening.
R35,000 ZAR
One month of fieldwork. One researcher, full time, in the water and on the data.
What you get back
Exactly what your money bought — which tag, which animal, which month, which student
Photographs from the field. The actual work on the actual day.
A short note from the field twice a year. Not more.
The record stays. Two years from now you can still see where your shark went.
Tax
South African donors receive a Section 18A certificate.
Donors outside South Africa don't — a South African certificate is no use to a foreign taxpayer, and we'd rather say so here than have you find out afterwards.
If you're considering something substantial from abroad, email me.
Establishing a US entity is worth doing at the right size, and that conversation is better had early.