As you drive into Simon’s Town, the first row of shops on your right hand side is home to a small shop belonging to Andre Botha, a well-respected Cape Town diver and SDI diving instructor who now concentrates on more land-based activities… Including assisting divers of all levels of experience with their purchases of dive gear. His shop doesn’t have much signage outside, but it’s the very first shop in the row and you will probably realise it’s associated with diving from the banners and maps in the window!
Andre stocks or can order equipment from Seac Sub, ScubaPro, Mares, Tusa, and several other dive gear manufacturers. He is also the person you want to speak to if you want to do full face mask diving in Cape Town. He can take you on a full face mask “try dive” to convince you how cool it is, or sell you Ocean Reef full face masks and communication sets. He also sells shark shields for surfers and divers.
He has led an adventurous life and has travelled to some wild places (most recently to Marion Island), and seen and done some amazing things. If you stop by at his shop, he can give you advice and insight born from a wealth of experience over many years. What I also appreciate very much about dealing with Andre is his absolute integrity, and in this he is an example to the entire dive industry.
You can email Andre or call him on 082 324 3157. His shop is in the Squires Building, Station Road (the Main road), Simon’s Town.
Clare and I took a tour of the National Hyperbarics facility at Kingsbury Hospital earlier this year. This is a specialised clinical hyperbarics facility, where they use a recompression chamber to treat diving injuries as well as to provide wound care. Breathing oxygen at an elevated pressure (higher than atmospheric pressure) is beneficial to healing of wounds, and also part of the first aid for decompression sickness.
In contrast to the chamber we did our chamber dive in at UCT, the National Hyperbarics chamber is for medical purposes. It’s equipped with comfortable seats for eight patients, and oxygen masks and monitoring equipment for each patient. It’s rated to 30 metres so actually wouldn’t provide a very exciting chamber dive experience despite the creature comforts!
Interior of the chamber
The team at National Hyperbarics are almost all (I think) scuba divers, and on occasion I have referred my students to them for assessment before signing up for a dive course. In addition to providing and monitoring hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the doctors are able to advise and prescribe treatment for divers with asthma and other concerns which may require medical clearance before getting in the water.
Control panel for the hyperbaric chamber
In the event that you have a diving accident in Cape Town, this is probably the chamber you’ll end up in. If you’re a DAN member (which you should be), DAN will arrange transfer to National Hyperbarics for you. If you’re not, you’ll have to contact them yourself to arrange for a medical technician to meet you at their Claremont facility should you require recompression treatment. So if you aren’t a member of DAN, visit the National Hyperbarics website immediately and save their contact number in your cellphone.
Update (February 2012): National Hyperbarics is moving from Claremont to Tokai. Their new facility is currently not open, so you can’t use their chamber in the event of an accident. Dive safely!
Update (March 2014): It doesn’t look as though National Hyperbarics is going to open for business again. If you’re concerned about which hyperbaric chamber you’ll go to if you have a diving accident in Cape Town, read this post.
Veteran war correspondent (and veteran scuba diver) Al J. Venter has written over 35 books – chiefly about the various conflicts and wars he has covered, but also several about diving. Where to Dive, The Ultimate Handbook on Diving in Southern Africa, and The South African Handbook for Divers are long out of print, but his most recent volume, Dive South Africa, was published in 2009 and is available in many dive shops. I have a feeling I picked up my copy at Lightley’s Houseboats in Knysna. I read it just after I started diving, and I fear it gave me a rather skewed view of what scuba diving can be about. I reread it recently, with a little more knowledge and slightly higher expectations of the sport, and humans in general.
This book is basically about overgrown boys shooting stuff and looting things. An aggressive, macho diving culture is portrayed here, and many beautiful reefs are described in terms of what you can find there to kill with your speargun (and, presumably, feel terribly manly afterwards). FIST BUMP! Women are not mentioned without the qualifier “pretty” or “attractive” – no other attribute apparently matters. Sharks are uniformly referred to as “beasts”, “monsters” or “brutes”.
Venter covers dive locations such as Port Elizabeth, Durban, Plettenberg Bay, Knysna, Arniston, East London, Port Alfred, the Mossel Bay area and a number of other destinations with good diving. These destinations sometimes get poor exposure – local divingmagazines are particularly guilty of this – at the expense of Sodwana and Aliwal Shoal (which also feature in some detail). A lot of the focus – in the coverage of all these locations – is on where to go to shoot big fish, but these are somewhat useful chapters for divers who want to go off the beaten track a little bit, and experience even more of the diving that South Africa has to offer. Use of this book as a reference – perhaps in conjunction with the Atlas of Dive Sites of Southern Africa and Mozambique is probably ideal for the explorer at heart. It is the chapters on particular destinations – some of them off the beaten track and even lacking dive centres within a hundred kilometres – that are the most useful part of this book. There is even a chapter on diving a wreck in Mozambican waters, with the attendant difficulties of operating in what was then a guerilla state.
A seasoned wreck diver, Venter devotes several chapters to important wrecks in South African waters. An entire chapter – with atmospheric photographs – is dedicated to the wreck of the Maori. Chapters are also devoted to the Colebrooke, the Klipfontein, and the City of Hankow in Saldanha. Much mention is made of the Birkenhead near Arniston. Venter has an interest both in the wrecks as they are now, and the stories behind their sinking and the rescue of their crew and passengers (if that took place). Some of the wrecks are not permitted to be dived any more, so the oral histories recorded here of what the condition of the wrecks are (and even their location) are important. The extensive looting of many of the shipwrecks Venter describes (many in False Bay and Table Bay), however, would make an archaeologist (a proper one) tear his hair out. SAHRA, the body meant to regulate these activities, doesn’t seem to care, and actually didn’t exist when a lot of the plunder and pilfering took place.
There are several chapters about sharks, including a lengthy one about Walter Bernardis of African Watersports, a veteran baited shark dive operator. Bernardis describes in detail the process for doing baited dives with large sharks such as tigers and bull (Zambezi) sharks, as well as an incident in 2006 when he himself was bitten. Strong respect and awe for the sharks is clearly present in both Venter and Bernardis, but the feeling I was left with after reading the chapter on baited tiger shark dives was that it’s a completely stupid idea, and extremely dangerous – both to the divers and to the sharks. Pictures such as the horrible one in this blog post, depicting sharks hurting themselves on the mechanisms used to chum – often involving steel cable and washing machine drums – show that this exploitation cannot be good for the sharks. It is purely a money-making racket and there is very little actual regard for the animals themselves.
Moreover, there are just too many caveats – dive briefings must take HOURS – and the sharks are not in a state that is conducive to calm interaction, which is not good for the divers’ peace of mind either. Venter’s endorsement of Bernardis’ practice of riding the sharks is disappointing, but shouldn’t surprise me I suppose! It has been extremely lucky, thus far, that no one has been badly injured by a shark in – understandably – a frustrated feeding frenzy. There have been incidents, and recently, but the practice continues and is extremely lucrative for the often completely unethical and fame-hungry operators that offer it.
Beautiful colour photographs by Peter Pinnock, Andrew Woodburn and others appear in plates in three sections of the book. Throughout the rest of the book, black and white images taken both above and below the water are featured. There is a brief chapter on underwater photography in which Venter interviews some of the more renowned practitioners of the art, and Thomas Peschak gets a mention.
The book has no index, which makes finding a piece of information after the fact – such as the chapter on diving in Knysna in preparation for our second visit there – completely impossible.
Venter has clearly led a rich, full life and enjoyed a variety of thrilling and hair-raising experiences underwater. His knowledge of our coastline is top notch. For the information on diving conditions and locations around our coast it’s a far more useful reference, however, than The Dive Spots of Southern Africa, for example, even if the information (depths, distances, etc) is slightly less comprehensive. It should NOT be the first book on South African diving that you read (purely from the perspective of the outdated “dive culture” that it presents), but it WILL expand your knowledge – of both facts and the origins of South African diving culture – if you do decide to add it to your library.
I recently participated in an interview on the Cape Town Active website. They are running an interview series on Cape Town bloggers. The full article can be found here, but – for your amusement – here are my answers to their questions:
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
We live in Cape Town – my wife Clare was born and bred here, and I ended up here after growing up in Durban and then living in Botswana, Jordan and Mozambique. We love the outdoors, and the ocean in particular, and consider ourselves extremely fortunate to be able to enjoy the lifestyle we do in such a big city. You don’t have to drive very far from home to find space, fresh air, and all sorts of wonderful creatures when you need to get away from the noise and traffic and shopping malls.
How you first got involved in with blogging?
I moved to Cape Town just over two years ago, and started a scuba diving training business (Learn to Dive Today) from scratch. With no marketing budget (well, no budget, full stop!) we looked at every kind of free advertising we could find.
We saw that a lot of bloggers use their blogs for promotional purposes – some tastefully, others in completely tacky ways. After running a competition with a dive adventure as a prize on a popular local blog, I thought “Why can’t we have our own blog?” Clare’s job revolves around numbers but she loves photography, words and writing, so she was very keen on the idea.
The intention was to provide a resource for current and potential students, to answer their questions about diving, and to showcase what diving in the Cape – which is exceptional – can be like. It’s evolved into a broader spread of topics, but at the centre of it all is enjoying and caring for the ocean.
Tell me about some of the people you’ve met while working on your blog?
Because we write about ocean-related events and activities with a special focus on Cape Town, we’ve become a bit more deliberate about attending relevant meetings, talks and festivals (in our personal capacity – no one sponsors us anything!) and writing about them.
We’re both a bit shy so we meet people really slowly, but we have gradually built up a network of fascinating people with various special interests in marine conservation. There is a lot of work and study that takes place in South Africa on marine subjects, and unfortunately the most vocal and self-promotional people are usually those who aren’t doing anything.
We’ve been lucky to meet some of the folk behind the scenes who are carrying out the real work.
How would (someone) describe your blogging style?
Varied subject matter, lots of words (if it’s Clare that wrote the post!), image-rich, and opinionated… But then that’s what a blog is good for: expressing your opinion!
What do you do when you aren’t working on your blog?
I teach scuba diving courses from beginner (Open Water) to Divemaster, and take divers (sometimes tourists, sometimes locals) on guided shore and boat dives. Clare works in finance – a desk job involving lots of numbers – and tags along with me and my students on weekends.
When we’re not working or blogging, Clare is reading or napping and I am feeding the squirrels in our garden or working on my car. We also try and dive for pleasure as much as possible, just the two of us, although in the busy season it can be difficult!
How do you keep coming up with material/content for your blog?
Our mandate to ourselves with the blog is to cover “everything ocean-related”, and since the two of us spend so much time either in, next to or thinking about the sea, we don’t have a problem with content generation.
A dive at a new site, a question I get from a student, a dive trip (overseas or upcountry), something interesting we’ve see underwater, or a book/DVD/talk we’ve seen about the ocean are all fodder for a new post!
Where do you go for news and information online?
The Underwater Times (www.underwatertimes.com) is a fantastic news aggregator for ocean-related news. We are also active on Twitter (@learn2divetoday) and pick up a lot of news there, too.
Whats your strategy with your blog in general?
The original intention, as I mentioned, was for the blog to act as a marketing tool and supplementary resource to customers of my scuba diving business. We do still keep that in mind, but it’s now also a lot about self-expression, sharing the things we’ve seen and enjoyed, and showcasing the marine diversity we have on our doorstep as Capetonians (and South Africans).
On the technical front, we’re in the process of figuring out how to move the blog from wordpress.com to a self-hosted WordPress site, and quite excited about the flexibility that will bring.
Everyone has a favorite post. Name yours and why? One of Clare’s posts, about the recent shark bite that happened in Fish Hoek, got quite a lot of attention and was republished on the Shark Spotters website.
Her favourite one, however, is called “Shark Huggers”, and is a rant about people who pretend to care about shark conservation but are actually only interested in using sharks to raise their own profile.
My favourite post would have to be a toss up between one entitled “How to Clean a Stinky Wetsuit” (self explanatory title, I think) and one called “What’s in My Dive Bag“, which is about all the little gadgets that can make the difference between a terrible dive and a fantastic dive.
Name some of the bloggers whom you look up to and why?
I really admire Chris Mills from imod.co.za. His was one of the first local blogs I found, and thank goodness for that! He posts on all kinds of things, but we’ve found his material on social networking, online marketing, search engine optimization and developments in technology extremely helpful in figuring out our own online strategy.
We’re still total newbies in this arena, but Chris has a way of explaining things really clearly and showing how they’re relevant to your business. He’s also a really approachable, helpful guy and has answered some specific questions of mine too. If you’re not following imod.co.za, you should be.
I’ve been using the Suunto D6 dive computer for about eight months now, having finally got my grubby paws on it just after returning from our last trip to Sodwana. I think it’s about time I write a little review of it, because Suunto have just released the D6i and before you know it my computer will be a museum relic.
Specifications and appearance
The D6 is near the upper end of the range of Suunto dive computers – the model I have will now set you back in the region of R10,000 and there are several cheaper but no less effective offerings. The USB interface cable that will enable your dive computer to talk to your computer will set you back up to a further R1,500 – although this item is frequently advertised on special by Suunto stockists and occasionally as a special bundled with the dive computer, so keep your eyes open. It’s far more usual, however, to have to buy this innocuous-looking cable separately, and gasp at the price.
You can choose an elastomer strap or a metal strap (for about R2,000 more). Although the metal strap looks really cool, it’s not really practical if you dive in varying water temperatures and change the amount of neoprene on your wrist frequently. The computer functions as a dress watch if you want to use it as one – it displays the time constantly when not in dive or memory mode – but it weighs more than a slab of chocolate (130g) and is far too large for the average lady’s wrist, so I don’t use it for this purpose except when travelling (to deny the baggage handlers at OR Tambo Airport the privilege of stealing it).
The computer has a four button interface that I find very intuitive, and I could figure it out to a large degree without reading the manual. That said, if you buy a dive computer, YOU MUST READ THE MANUAL! Don’t be a fool – you want to know EXACTLY why the thing is beeping at you, what it looks like when you go into deco, and be very sure (as one clown – who was buddied with us once because he didn’t know anyone on the boat – wasn’t) whether the “3” you see on the screen indicates a time in minutes, your current depth, or the number of brain cells you have. Read the manual!
Air integration and the D6i
The D6 has actually been replaced by the D6i, which is functionally identical but has more internal memory, and is capable of air integration with an optional (heart-stoppingly expensive) dongle that you attach to your cylinder and reads remaining air. The computer will then give you an estimate of remaing dive time based on air consumption to date. I have no interest in this (at the time I bought the D6, air integration was the main distinguishing feature from the D9) – I’d use a pressure gauge regardless, and wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting what I see as an physical, analogue process (displaying the air remaining in my cylinder) to a potentially failure-prone piece of electronics.
I know I may sound like a luddite here, but an experience Tony had on the boat a few months ago confirmed my reservations. Another instructor’s student had an air integrated computer and no pressure gauge (why bother with redundancy?). The air integration with the computer wouldn’t work, but they only discovered this on the boat when they were parked over the dive site, and – after toying with the idea of cancelling the dive, and then swapping kit so the instructor, who should have an excellent feel for his air consumption, had the set up with no pressure gauge – did a very short dive. As a mathematician I can see that having snapshots of your remaining air at 20 second intervals to look at in the dive manager software might be appealing though…
Decompression algorithm
The D6 uses the Suunto Deep Stop RGBM (Reduced Gradient Bubble Model), and allows for continuous decompression as you ascend (instead of forcing you to do stops at particular depths). It also allows you to complete your safety stopsat depth – something I haven’t experimented with much, but will be using next time we dive the Lusitania. The computer recommends a safety stop once you exceed 10 metres on a dive, and if you violate the recommended ascent rate it will advise a mandatory safety stop between 3 and 6 metres. I tried to photograph the D6 during a dive where I’d switched on deep stops, but there was a 20 metre layer of green plankton blocking out the light from above, and my flash kept reflecting off the screen protector. Hence the dubious results you see here. I have 28 minutes of no-decompression time remaining, dive time is 11 minutes, depth is 20.9 metres, and my first deep stop will be at 13 metres. Maximum depth (bottom left) so far has been 23.8 metres.
Suunto D6 during a dive – first deep stop is due at 13 metres
You’re most likely aware of this, but a dive computer does not measure anything that is going on in your body with respect to dissolved gases. Dive computers use mathematical models – based on the original dive tables, only more sophisticated – that approximate, for the average person, how much nitrogen has gone into solution in the body’s tissues, and how fast it is being released, based on your dive profile. They measure depth temperature, and time, that’s all. For this reason many dive computers, including the D6, have an option for you to set a more conservative calculation algorithm if you’re at higher risk of DCS – for reasons of increased age, high body fat percentage, or any of the other DCS-predisposing risk factors. You can also adjust the partial pressure settings up and down if you so desire, but anything higher than 1.4 bar (ata) strikes me as reckless.
Nitrox and no-fly time
It goes without saying that the D6 is Nitrox capable, and it’s very straightforward to set the Nitrox mix. After one dive on Nitrox, the option to do a repetitive air dive disappears, and you have to manually set the oxygen percentage of your mix back down to 21%. I think this is to force you to think about what gas is in your cylinder. The D6 also handles switching to a richer mix for decompression, and this optional second mix may be set through the same menu system as the primary nitrox mix.
The D6, again like most dive computers, gives a no-fly time after you’re done with diving for the day. This time is usually well under 18 hours, but you’d do well to follow DANguidelines forflying after diving (usually 18 hours after your last dive) and not bank on the reading given by your computer. Do not be like Gerard, who shall remain nameless, and mistake the time display on your computer for the no-fly time. After a dive on the Aster that ended at about 3.30pm, he announced that his no-fly time was “fifteen hours and twenty nine minutes.” A few minutes later, to his puzzlement, it was “fifteen hours and thirty four minutes!”
Dive Manager software
The Suunto dive manager software, that allows you to examine the details of your dives on your computer screen at home, is not compatible with Apple Macs, so I had to find another solution. I’ll review the software I do use, MacDive, in a separate post. Apparently from “fall 2011”, whenever that rolls (rolled) around, the Suunto software – DM4 – will also be compatible with Apple computers. I’ll test it when I get a chance, and let you know what it’s like… As is apparently wildly popular these days, one can also share one’s sporting activities on the Suunto Movescount site via an automatic link-up from within the software interface. And, no doubt, publish them to facebook.
Electronic compass
Suunto D6 with elastomer strap (right) and titanium strap (left)
One of the major appeals for me of the D6 – and I think the feature that bumps its price up so much higher than the D4 – was the integrated electronic compass, which can be accessed at (almost) any time by holding down the top left (Select) button. In the picture at right, the D6 with the elastomer strap is on the compass display (the one on the right is in the memory log display mode which can’t be accessed during a dive). If you’re not on a dive when you use the compass, obviously the depth and dive time won’t show.
The D6i has updated the compass to allow accurate readings when your wrist is tilted; the old D6 (the one I have) is not as tolerant and you’ll need to keep your arm level as with a standard dive compass. Unfortunately the D6 doesn’t record the compass heading along with the temperature, depth and other dive statistics during the dive – or, if it does, the download software I use doesn’t access it. I suspect the former is true, since I installed Suunto’s own dive manager software on Tony’s PC to check, and there was no sign of compass headings. Boo.
What’s in the box
In the box was the computer, a strap extender, the instruction manual, a disc with the Windows-compatible dive manager software on it, and two or three scratch guards which are trimmed to fit the D6’s screen. I’ve done close to 70 dives with my D6 so far, and the scratch guard is scratched and still doing its job well. Tony’s computer, the Mares Nemo Wide, is protected with some cheap cellphone screen protectors we got from Look ‘n Listen. You can buy a generic size, and then trim it down to fit your phone (or dive computer, as the case may be). We didn’t expect this makeshift scratch guard – which is NOT designed for regular immersion in salt water – to last beyond five or ten dives, but over 100 dives and it’s going strong. I think I paid R60 for the pack of screen protector stickers, and we’ll get nine Nemo Wide-sized ones out of the package.
Buying it
Continuing with the subject of good value, one more tip for the bargain hunters. I actually bought my D6 from Cape Union Mart. They stock Suunto sports watches, and were able to order me a D6 from Suunto in Finland. I had to wait six weeks for it to arrive, and it cost R8,700. What made the deal very sweet was that by buying it on my Discovery Card which gives me a 20% discount at Cape Union Mart (thanks to my years in the Vitality program and points status), the computer ended up costing just under R7,000. I paid a further R1,200 for the download cable (I got that at a dive centre). If you have a few weeks before you need the computer, or are prepared to wait in exchange for some savings, it’s worth getting a quote from Cape Union Mart as to what they’ll charge you. If you’ve got a Discovery Card it’s a no-brainer. Email them via the website for a quotation, and they’ll tell you to print that and take it to your nearest Cape Union Mart to place the order. I had to pay a 50% deposit.
Update (late 2012): Based on feedback from other divers who have shopped for Suunto computers lately, it seems that Cape Union Mart isn’t doing this any more, unfortunately – but it’s worth asking anyway!
Maintaining it
Finally – if you have a dive computer and live in Cape Town, take it to Orca in Claremont to get the battery changed when necessary, and ask for Chris the “worship manager” (that’s autocorrect gone wild on “workshop manager”) to do it for you. Tony’s students have had baaaaad experiences (a hair across the seal, anyone?!) at other locations. There’s usually not much you can do if the service centre doesn’t seal the computer properly and it floods – your only recourse will possibly be to your insurance company.
Weather, hmm, this time of year it is a tussle between the Atlantic and False Bay with the Atlantic winning more often than not. We decided not to dive last Saturday as I felt the conditions unsuitable for newish divers. Those that braved these conditions (see the picture below) were rewarded with 8 degree water and mind blowing viz.
Fun times on the boat out of Hout Bay harbour
As I write this newsletter I can see outside that the southeaster is hammering the bay and despite the wind dropping off tomorrow I don’t think False Bay will be very clean for the next few days. This weekend’s conditions are once again sending the boats and divers to the Atlantic. Saturday does not look good but Sunday seems at this point to be much better. Grant will launch on Sunday from Hout Bay. Please contact him directly to book… I will be spending most of the weekend in the pool with new students!
Feather star finds a home
We did dive False Bay this last week before the southeaster became problematic. On Sunday we were at Long Beach, and later in the week I dived with tourists primarily and had 6 metre visibility with 17 degree water. We also dived at A Frame and saw gully sharks in the swim-through. I only saw two, but there have been up to 8 seen at once so it appears they have made it their home.
Burrowing anemone at Long Beach
Many people are on leave, have odd days off and want to get some diving done. This time of the year also sees an influx of tourists so planning and pre-booking is essential. The dive schools are also all busy so getting on a boat can be difficult as Cape Town has far fewer dive boats than number of dive schools. If you have a few days off in the next couple of weeks try and plan ahead, and if I text or email you about a boat dive, let me know chop-chop if you’re in.
The Learn to Dive Today website has had a bit of a revamp – we are currently busy switching over from the old to the new one, which can take up to 48 hours as the new hosting information propagates across the internet, so service may be unpredictable. If you do go check it out, please let me know if you find any broken links or typos!
P.S. For gift ideas for the scuba diver in your life, or as a list of hints to give to your mother, girlfriend, granny or second cousin to assist them in buying you a present, you can check out our Christmas gift guide. Also works for Hanukkah!
Many of the divers who regularly dive with me will know Kate, who came out to South Africa for two months in late 2010 to qualify as a Divemaster. She had never dived before when she arrived, and I took her through a full Zero to Hero course, including 60 dives to meet the requirements for Divemaster, before she went back to the UK.
Some peaceful no mask breathing
Headstand
Kate rests easy in the pool
She returned to South Africa in April (her family joined her here for a short holiday) to prepare to do an Instructor Development Course, for which she had to get her dive numbers up to 100 dives. She did her IDC with Danny Martin, who trained me and who I rate as one of the best Instructor trainers in South Africa. We asked her to write about what the IDC involves so that those of you who are curious can get an idea of how one works.
The PADIIDC is an instructor development course that consists of two halves, the first (three days) is Assistant Instructor and the second is Open Water Scuba Instructor (four days). The final two days are when the Instructor Examination (IE) takes place. An examiner is brought in from somewhere else (usually outside the country) to test the candidates. We also spent an extra day doing the EFR Instructor course.
An exam (made up of 5 parts: physics, physiology, environment, equipment, and standards and procedures)
Prescriptive teaching presentations (taking a knowledge review question and expanding on it so as to help students understand the answer in more depth)
Confined water presentations (giving a pre-dive briefing, demonstrating the skill, having the student demonstrate the skill and then giving a debriefing)
Open water demonstrations (same procedure as in confined water, except that the Instructor does not demonstrate the skill this time)
Watching risk management and marketing presentations
Testing our own skills in the pool, for ease of understanding and ability to demonstrate
Rescue workshops
The main aspect of the IDC is preparation. After completing my Divemaster course with Tony, he then made sure I fully prepared for the IDC. There’s not a lot of new information to learn as most of it is covered in the Divemaster program but having someone to test me on everything was rather handy. Tony also took the time to do one to one pool sessions in which he would make sure my skills were above the standard needed. He also ran me over what to expect from the IDC and how to prepare myself.
Sodwana was a great place to complete my IDC. The environment is really friendly and the diving is exceptional (it was a minimum of 26 degrees at all times!). The accommodation is tents or wooden cabins, and they have a bar and a restaurant. There is a tractor service to take you to the beach every 45 minutes.
I definitely would recommend doing the IDC, for me it has opened up a new love for diving. It takes you further then being just a Divemaster and gives you more responsibility within the diving community. You also find that the experience increases your diving ability and performance.
I started diving in October 2010 with my Open Water and completed my IDC in June 2011. I also completed a load of specialties and am now preparing myself for a trip to the Arctic circle.
Kate is now a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor. When she has done 25 certifications, she will be certified as a Master Scuba Diver Trainer – this means she can teach courses from Discover Scuba Diving and Open Water up to Divemaster, along with a list of Specialties. I am very proud of Kate and really enjoyed teaching her. She impressed (andoftenwildlyamused) everyone who met her while she was in South Africa and she will be a great ambassador for diving. I am looking forward to following her adventures!
It’s that time of year again. I trust you are all feeling suitably festive. Here’s our annual (well, second so far) Christmas gift guide. Use it/don’t use it…
Books
For the reader, you could check out our book reviews, arranged by topic:
Summer weather has arrived as can be felt by the days of strong southeasterly winds. Sadly this negatively impacts weekend diving on a regular basis so taking the day off occasionally in the week can be very rewarding. I had very good diving on Tuesday and Wednesday this week in False Bay.
Wynberg pool
I have quite a few new students so I have spent a fair amount of time in the pool. The pool structure has now been completed and the water heaters are back on so it is a very pleasant environment for training, particularly on days where the weather is lousy. The current temperature is 24 degrees and last Saturday I spent close to 6 hours in the water.
The Wynberg pool has been refurbished
Sunday’s boat diving was cancelled due to a very strong wind (southeaster) which is supposed to clean the Atlantic up nicely but when it blows over 30 kph it churns the surface up and the boat ride is horrible and the surface conditions at the start and the end of a dive very unpleasant.
Double rainbow
Wind and diving
This weekend looks much the same as last weekend for Saturday, strong winds so I am going to give the Atlantic a miss. Sunday looks way better so I will dive a bunch of students in False Bay.
Clare and I took a drive around the peninsula on Sunday and looked at all the dive sites, and none would have made it onto my “safe to dive” list yet there were charter boats launching and people doing shore entries. I had a bunch of Russian tourist divers with me on Wednesday and was saddened by their story of a local dive centre ripping them off, taking them on the boat in shocking conditions and letting them dive in 2 metre visibility before hauling them out of the kelp and onto the boat with a rope and almost drowning one of them in the process. This kind of behaviour is a blatant disregard for diver safety, and it is bad for the tourist trade and the dive industry.
Monday to Wednesday next week promises very good diving conditions so that elusive day off for a dive is beckoning. I have tourists next week doing some diving and we are hoping to do a pelagic trip on Wednesday. This involves a trip out to the Ttna fishing grounds approximately 20-30 nautical miles off Cape Point. The idea is to look for the warmer cleaner water of the Agulhas current, hang a chum drum in the water and wait for the sharks. There are usually blue sharks and mako sharks plus many seabirds join the picnic. It is an incredible trip and will blow your mind. There is space for two more people but you will need to contact me asap. We leave from Simon’s Town at around 7.30am and get back around 3.30pm. It’s a cabin boat, has a loo and lunch is served on the way back. Not to be missed!
It is important to establish the credentials of your diving instructor and it is equally important to establish whether he/she is an independent or freelance instructor.
An independent is just that, an instructor who can take you right through the course without being dependent on a dive centre for equipment, training material or training aids.
A freelance instructor will need to rely on the availability of gear and training aids from a dive centre. A freelance Instructor will not be able to guarantee the same gear, wetsuit, mask etc. that you have used in the pool when you do your sea dives as they are rented and may therefore be out with another diver when you need them.
The divemobile taking in the sights in Gansbaai
To be an independent instructor you need to be able to operate independently of any dive centre. This means you will need:
to have your own rental gear: regulators, BCDs , wetsuits, cylinders, fins, masks, and possibly even a compressor; and
to be able to find students, discuss and plan their course schedule entirely independent of a dive centre schedule and without relying on someone else’s training aids. For example if you are going to sign up for an Enriched Air/Nitrox course will there be a Nitrox analyser? If you plan to do night diving you will there be torches available, glow sticks, and strobes? Search and Recovery dives will require slates, reels and a lift bag. Being an independent instructor requires a certain degree of self-sufficiency.
(Often, independent instructors or freelance instructors open dive centres themselves. This transition usually comes with having a retail outlet and often the main focus is then diverted from teaching diving to paying the rent. Sales become more of a focus and they then arm themselves with freelance instructor contact details so anyone wanting to do a course can be accommodated.)
When you’re signing up for a dive course, this is a useful distinction to be aware of, and you should ask your instructor about whose kit he uses, and whether he’s dependent on a dive centre in any way.
