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Forget Gators, Donovan checks out bigger game
Most college coaches head to the beach and soak in the sun for a few days to recharge their battery in the offseason.
Donovan, who has won two national championships at Florida, swam with great white sharks and hung out with lions in Kruger National Park.
Donovan, along with his 12-year-old son, Bryan, and mother, Joan, returned from a week-long excursion to South Africa in which he jumped into a cage and got an up-close-and-personal look at sharks.
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| Bryan Donovan and his dad, Billy, planned their trip to Africa for years. ( / Special to FOXSports.com) |
"It was un-freaking-believable," Donovan said of the trip, which also included three days on safari. "Incredible."
Nuts.
Donovan had talked about taking the trip with his son — an avid viewer of the Discovery Channel — for the last few years.
The trip, which began May 29, from Gainesville to Capetown took 22 hours. He also went with a close friend of his from Lexington, Ky., who had recently lost his wife to cancer, and his daughter.
Donovan was told to book four days on the boat in hopes of getting just one with the sharks because of the high seas and heavy winds.
Donovan was excited the first morning as he and the rest of the party awoke before 6 a.m.
"I'm juiced up, ready to go," he said. "We got to the dock and the captain said there were 15-foot swells, so we can't go out."
Day Two was more of the same. The weather wouldn't cooperate and Donovan and his group were basically house-ridden.
Finally, Donovan was given the OK on the third day. He got in the boat and left for Cape Point and Seal Island, where he said it was freezing even bundled up with a winter ski hat.
"We went out and all you could hear are the seals," Donovan said. "They were hopping along the water and pods of them were popping out. There are 55,000 on the island and the sharks chase the seals."
Soon, Donovan would be in the two-person cage after a pair of sharks swam up right next to the boat.
"Who wants to go in?" one of the men who ran the tour shouted.
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| Billy Donovan said it wasn't the length of the sharks that scared him so much as the girth. ( / Special to FOXSports.com) |
Donovan started ripping off his clothes and jumped in. By the time he got in, the sharks were already gone.
A little while later, another one appeared.
"It was 10 feet away," Donovan said. "I saw the whole silhouette and then it cruised by."
"You can't believe the size of these things," he added. "It's ridiculous. I saw it from the boat before I got in and I'm like, 'I don't know if I'm going in.' It wasn't the length, but the girth. They were as wide as an SUV."
Donovan ended up going back out later that afternoon and again the next day and saw a shark trying to attack a seal.
"All of the sudden, the shark lunged his entire body out of the water," Donovan said. "He didn't get it, but it went on for about three minutes. It was incredible."
The last three days of the trip were spent at Kruger National Park, where they needed an escort each night just to walk back to their huts.
One night, he awoke to the sound of a lion at 4 a.m.
"It sounded like it was at my front door," he said.
Donovan and his group were in an open Jeep about 15 feet away from more than a half-dozen lions.
"If they wanted to, they could have jumped in the Jeep," he said. "Sometimes I was nervous. We were so close."
Donovan saw lions and Cape Buffalo have a virtual standoff. He witnessed a cheetah chasing after a zebra in the high grass. There were elephants just feet away grazing from his hut.
He left on a dirt runway that Donovan had no clue was even a runway.
"It was in the middle of the jungle and was just a long patch of dirt," he said. "There was elephant dung all over the runway."
Donovan could only describe it as the "trip of a lifetime" and something that can be topped by only one thing.
"Win games."
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