Christo mentioned Creche as his favourite dive of the nine dives we did, because everywhere one looked there was something to see. An abundance of juvenile fish, as well as large congregations of red fang trigger fish, yellow snapper, dusky sweepers and other colourful reef fish made this a very special dive. Unfortunately my photos don’t really do this dive site justice, but I promise it was lovely.
Creche is a compact, shallow reef with depth ranging from 9-14 metres, so you can spend a lot of time on it. The reef itself didn’t seem to be in particularly good condition (compared to, say, Three Sisters) – a lot of the coral seemed to be covered by sand, and on the edges of the reef we found lots of vegetation that I think must have been blown out to sea during the hurricane season this year.
Skipper Wayne warned us to stay off the bottom on this reef, as there are a couple of resident stonefish. We didn’t seen them, but we did see a large raggy scorpion fish. You can find Creche on this map of Ponta do Ouro/Ponta Malongane dive sites. It’s a shallow dive, ranging from about 10-12 metres’ depth and is a really easy dive as long as you don’t try and dive it when there’s a big swell.
Dive date: 10 May 2012
Air temperature: 25 degrees
Water temperature: 25 degrees
Maximum depth: 12.6 metres
Visibility: 10 metres
Dive duration: 51 minutes
