Dive Sites – Page 13 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Dive sites: North Paw (Northern Pinnacle)

Tony has dived North Paw before (while I sat, sick with jealousy, in front of an Excel spreadsheet at work). This time I went with him and some students, and we were to explore an unmapped pinnacle to the north of the site, which seems to be quite extensive. It rises to within 10-12 metres of the surface, and doesn’t actually have a name yet…

Grant’s best suggestion (which some on the boat were keen to override) is “Bokkie’s Rump” – the idea being that the lion (Lion’s head) has its two paws (North Lion’s Paw and South Lion’s Paw) resting on a little springbok that he’s caught. The bokkie’s rump (ahem) sticks out beyond the northern paw.

DC relaxing with North Paw rocks in the background and Grant's boat approaching

Grant put the shot on top of the pinnacle, which according to Peter Southwood, is about 8 by 10 metres. We descended next to it – a lovely sheer wall – down to the sand at about 20 metres. There are rock lobsters galore, and rich invertebrate life.

Georgina pointed out a large cuttlefish, well camouflaged on the reef. When he moved, he changed colour to match his new background. Tony also found four tiny cuttlefish – fingernail-sized – lined up as if for a race. When he turned to call me with the camera, they scattered, invisibly, on the sand.

I found a few different nudibranchs – black, gas flame and crowned – and Tony also found one for me, much to his delight. He claims to have been having a “nudibranch drought” lately!

The site is rocky with lots of crevices for rock lobster to hide in. We saw some large ones, but, Gerard assured me, no HUGE ones. He should know! We were highly amused to see one big guy eating a sea jelly – the ocean floor was littered with a few dead (or incapacitated) ones, and apparently rock lobsters enjoy that kind of treat. I also saw a large rock lobster carefully carrying a cluster of mussels!

Hungry rock lobster eating a night light sea jelly

At the safety stop I saw no fewer than four different kinds of sea jelly – the largest being a night light sea jelly that was almost as long as Tony, with a huge purple bell. He obligingly swam behind it to give some perspective to the photo but I carried on photographing the jelly as it swam off into the distance.

Gerard had gotten low on air earlier, and returned to the boat… While he was waiting for a pick-up, something bumped his leg hard, and he was convinced it was a shark. Instead, it was one of the friendly seals that had visited us during our dive. His comments on the subject are unprintable – suffice it to say he got a bit of a fright!

When the rest of us surfaced we got to chill for a while, looking at the magnificent scenery, because we’d come quite far from the original pinnacle. We had drifted with the current, roughly towards the Atlantic seaboard. It must be – as I announced when the boat arrived – the most beautiful place in the world to surface. The diving’s pretty good too!

Dive date: 20 February 2011

Air temperature: 27 degrees

Water temperature: 8 degrees

Maximum depth: 23.6 metres

Visibility: 10 metres

Dive duration: 36 minutes

Dive sites: SS Clan Stuart

Here’s the SS Clan Stuart, courtesy of Google maps…

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Cape+Town,+Western+Cape,+South+Africa&layer=c&cbll=-34.171068,18.429159&panoid=pMgwf2qD2JFXxmT-C_8KFg&cbp=12,132.18,,0,5&ll=-34.200448,18.455383&spn=0.001105,0.001749&t=h&z=19&source=embed&output=svembed&w=425&h=350]

Then

The entry used to be across the beach – you parked outside the cemetery, kitted up and walked across the road. One climbed over the low brick wall, walked carefully across the railway line and onto the sand. It’s necessary to take care going through the breakers – while they may look small, they’re often strong enough to knock you off your feet.

Now

I’m not sure how to get in at this dive site any more. The repairs to the Simon’s Town railway line have entailed the dumping of hundreds of very large rocks into the ocean, from just below the railway line all the way across the beach. At high tide, the water comes all the way up to the edge of the rocks. Tony and I checked out the site last weekend, and getting over the boulders is almost impossible, let alone fully kitted out.

I’m not sure who to complain about this to… The Clan Stuart was one of the only shore-entry wreck dives in Cape Town, and suddenly it’s a shore entry no more. I can’t see dive charters bringing their boats here – it almost seems like a waste, since the site is so familiar. I’d like it if some of our MPA permit money was spent to make a pathway for divers down to the sand. Maybe Underwater Africa can get on the case!

Update: You can read about how to get in at the Clan Stuart dive site here. Rest assured, when the railway repairs were completed a way was made to access the beach in front of the wreck!

Dive sites: Partridge Point

The first boat dive I ever did, and my first dive after my Open Water course, was to Partridge Point, where we cruised around Seal Rock and enjoyed the antics of the local inhabitants. It was on that dive that I met Fritz (“Borrels”) and Justin the Silver Fox, who was Divemastering. Here’s a picture Fritz took of me that time, with a chubby seal above my head. Look ma, no gloves! And did I mention how irritating snorkels can be?

My fifth dive, at Seal Rock near Partridge Point

I’ve dived the site twice since, the most recent time being on 6 February. We’ve had a couple of months of totally awful visibility in False Bay, but a little bit of north westerly wind and some big swells cleaned out the bay in record time and we were able to have a beautiful weekend’s diving. This time, when Tony told Cecil we’d be going to Partridge Point and that we’d probably see seals, Cecil said matter of factly, “Sharks eat seals.” Fortunately the great whites prefer to hang about near Seal Island in the middle of False Bay!

The Partridge Point reef system is extensive, and new areas are constantly being mapped. The most recent addition to the site (it was always there, but has only recently been discovered!) is Peter’s Pinnacles, named after Peter Southwood of wikitravel fame.

Grant dropped us on a pinnacle that rises to within 12 metres of the surface, and we descended on the shot line. The site is made up of an extensive scattering of granite boulders and rocky outcrops, separated with sandy strips that look very much like staircases or runways. Dropping down close to the sand at one point to photograph a four-legged starfish, I was delighted to discover that the area I was hovering above was covered with tiny striped brittle stars.

Stripy brittle stars on the sand at Partridge Point

The site is incredibly diverse and teeming with brilliantly coloured life, including large numbers of sea cucumbers (surprise!) and sea urchins. Giant gorgonian sea fans inhabited by sponge crabs (resembling nothing so much as coconut-dipped vetkoek) wave gently in the surge, in orange, red and every shade in between.

And it is nudibranch paradise. I took a personal census of every single nudibranch on the part of the site we traversed – mainly gas flames and black nudibranchs – and felt it my duty to photograph every single specimen. I never, ever get tired of these creatures. They are so extravagantly beautiful!

There are also sea anemones in bright, bright red and orange, gregarious white ones with curly tentacles, and elegant feather stars in abundance.

We saw a number of very frisky dark and puffadder shysharks, zipping around with a sense of purpose we never see in their relatives at Long Beach. We usually see them on the sand at Long Beach, and I was surprised, seeing one lying on a rock, at how well camouflaged he was.

We weren’t particulary close to Seal Rock, but we were visited by three or four friendly seals who probably heard us from a mile away and came to investigate. They swam around us, checked us out thoroughly – I must say looking a seal in the eye at 20 metres as he circles me like a puppy is enough to put me in a good mood for a week – and returned once or twice for a further look. They are so graceful in the water, and have such large, soulful eyes and cute little ears sticking out at 90 degrees from their heads, that I just want to cuddle them. But I’ve seen their teeth, and know that this is a bad idea!

Towards the top of some of the pinnacles is the red bait zone, with sea squirts of prodigious size surrounded by feeding hottentot. While we were doing our slow ascent we looked up into the sunlit, shallow water above the rock closest to us, to see a cloud of fish swimming slowly around the top of the pinnacle.

Dive date: 6 February 2011

Air temperature: 26 degrees

Water temperature: 8 degrees

Maximum depth: 21.9 metres

Visibility: 10 metres

Dive duration: 38 minutes

The Partridge Point site is inside the Castle Rocks restricted zone in the Table Mountain National Park Marine Protected Area (MPA), and for many years no fishing has been allowed there. I like to think that the sheer profusion of life we observed is a result of this – MPAs can work, if they’re administered properly and the permit money we pay as scuba divers is put to good use enforcing conservation policies, instead of buying BMWs for government stooges.

Dive sites: SS Cape Matapan

Desirous of doing a deep dive for three students busy with their Advanced course, Tony, the students, Tami, Goot and I set off on Saturday 22 January, bright and early from Oceana Powerboat Club near the Waterfront. The southeaster was strong, and the boat ride was a hoot – sitting on the plushy bench at the back of the boat, I was soundly drenched by the freezing waves as we hurtled down the coast. I had forgotten to eat any ginger snaps for seasickness, but the wind on my face and the splashing waves made the boat ride a pleasure, and even when we stopped, rocking, I think the wind helped a lot with nausea.

Tony (back to camera) doing deep skills with students

Our planned destination was North Paw, to explore a part of the site that hasn’t been mapped yet. Unfortunately when we got there the surface conditions were atrocious and it was decided to move further towards the shore to see if the sea was calmer there. An investigation of the rocks at the north end of Camps Bay beach revealed flatter seas, but visibility of not more than two metres. Personally, I will accept cold water, or poor visibility, but not both.

We were heading back to OPBC for breakfast, but as we passed the section of coast opposite Cape Town Stadium it was decided to dive the SS Cape Matapan, located thereabouts. The surface conditions were still pretty rubbish, but when Mauro got in to check the props of the boat after a small barney with a rock, he came back reporting that the props were fine and the visibility was stunning.

The Cape Matapan was a steam-powered fishing trawler that sank after a collision with another ship in dense fog in 1960. The location of the wreck was not known (apart from the information that it is about 30 minutes from Table Bay harbour under slow speed) until last year, when some False Bay Underwater Club veterans searched for it and located it off the Atlantic seaboard.

The wreck is very broken up on a flat bottom. I loved being within view of the Sea Point promenade, and then sinking beneath the waves to see what’s there. Goot compared it to the moon, and he was right – the visibility was good (15 metres or so) and we could see for ages around us. Nothing except the ship’s boiler stands up from the ocean floor.

There was a very strong current down there, the sort that you don’t want to even try to fight against, so we drifted with it. We didn’t get to the boiler (events intervened while most of us still had lots of air – boo!) but we saw bits of metal plating and twisted wreckage here and there as we motored along. Tami and I were delighted with an entire field of golden sea cucumbers sticking up from the sand (of which there isn’t much). We didn’t see any fish, but the ocean floor was echinoderm paradise. It was a beautiful dive.

Golden sea cucumbers near the Cape Matapan

The dive site is on the edge of the shipping lane serving the harbour in Cape Town, so we all had SMBs (didn’t get time to deploy those!) and Grant was on high alert when we surfaced. Seeing giant container ships in the distance reminded me that if we were to get in the path of one of them, with a draught of 10 metres or more, we’d be toast. We didn’t want to get separated as a group, either, because of the current.

Brittle stars and sea cucumbers next to a block of cheese (coraline algae on a rock!)

Tony was doing his first Cape Town drysuit dive, trying it out. His initial report is good, and you’ll hear more from him on the subject. Here’s a dodgy photo of him in his snug getup. I was particularly jealous of the body-shaped sleeping bag/drysuit pyjamas (neither of those being the correct technical term) that one wears underneath. His had fetching purple stripes down the sides.

Dive date: 22 January 2011

Air temperature: 25 degrees

Water temperature: 7 degrees

Maximum depth: 24.4 metres

Visibility: 15 metres

Dive duration: 20 minutes

Dive sites: Shark Alley

Here’s Shark Alley, home of False Bay’s resident sevengill cowsharks, and site of some eventful dives. Courtesy of Google maps.

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Cape+Town,+Western+Cape,+South+Africa&layer=c&cbll=-34.236909,18.475009&panoid=-T_DGVgiGhOBkHIQXlrzJA&cbp=12,44.94,,0,18.23&ll=-34.236776,18.474964&spn=0.001104,0.001749&t=h&z=19&source=embed&output=svembed&w=425&h=350]

You park here, and climb down the slope to the rocky shore. The entry point you choose will vary depending on tidal and swell conditions.

Tony’s van, the divemobile, was broken into here, as was Tami’s car. The suspects (whom we spotted from the surface just before we started the dive) were a very tall man, and a shorter woman with dark hair. They were driving a small white or silver car.

Break ins are a fairly common occurrence for this dive site and it’s essential to take your own car guard when you go there.

Dive sites: North Lion’s Paw

On Thursday seven of us decided to do a fun dive from the boat. We dived at a site called North Paw. It’s a short boat ride from the Oceana Powerboat Club launch site close to Camps Bay and Clifton, and despite the howling south easter the site is sheltered. The sea was calm, very little current or surge and the visibility was amazing, 15 – 20 metres. The outstanding visibility always has a catch: the water was cold. At 25 metres the temperature was 4 degrees celsius.

The skipper had mentioned this dive site was anchor paradise and so it seemed, I saw 3 anchors lost at sea. Cecil decided to take one home so he followed the trailing rope, lifted the anchor and discovered just how heavy it was. We attached Bernita’s SMB to the anchor and sent it to the surface.

Cecil's anchor on the way up — Cecil’s anchor on the way up

I was really happy to find a juvenile manefish (Caristius groenlandicus), not much bigger than a five rand coin. Initially I was really excited believing it was a batfish, but the books proved me wrong and a manefish it is.

On the way back to the slipway, we saw a seal beating a large octopus to death on the surface of the water. After it had finished eating its tasty snack (one tentacle at a time), it delicately wiped its mouth with its flippers.

Dive sites: Fisherman’s Beach

Here’s Fisherman’s Beach – lovely for training and photography on a calm day. We’ve done some gorgeous dives there. From Google maps:

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Cape+Town,+Western+Cape,+South+Africa&layer=c&cbll=-34.2061,18.457939&panoid=yDtzRervO4LJDvL90G_hbw&cbp=12,20.51,,0,5&ll=-34.206195,18.458018&spn=0.008837,0.01399&t=h&z=16&source=embed&output=svembed&w=425&h=350]

There’s a wide flight of steps down to the beach on the left end of the sand. You can park across the road outside Whale View Manor. Unfortunately a car guard is advisable here, too.

Dive sites: MV Romelia

Long before I knew there was such a thing as scuba diving, I knew about shipwrecks. I grew up in Cape Town, and spent a lot of time in various rock pools, on the local beaches, on the Sea Point promenade, and sitting in the back seat of my parents’ Volkswagen Beetle as we whizzed around the peninsula. Cape Town is shipwreck paradise, and the most visible ones to me were the Antipolis, which sticks a tiny bit out of the water at Oudekraal, and the MV Romelia, which used to be an extremely prominent feature on the Llandudno rocks. I liked the Romelia because it was pink.

A photo of the Romelia, aground on the rocks, taken in 1989

(The picture above is from this website – worth a browse!)

Following Tony and Cecil through a crack

My parents told me the story of the Romelia and the Antipolis often (I liked saying the names, because they sounded romantic and mysterious) – in July 1977 my folks had been married for two years and were living in Cape Town when the tow rope connecting the two vessels to a Japanese tug snapped, and they ran aground independently on the western seaboard of the Cape Peninsula during a winter storm. The Romelia broke in half, and the bow sank, leaving the pretty pink (rusty) stern on the rocks. Later the stern also sank – a great disappointment to me, but no doubt a relief to the owners of the palaces in Llandudno!

Red bait zone and hottentot on the Romelia

I actually had no idea that you could dive on the Romelia, or where it had disappeared to, until the Sunday before Christmas. Our planned boat dive to Die Josie or Tafelberg Reef wasn’t looking like a good idea – reports were that the visibility was pretty poor, and the water was very dark. Grant suggested we go north, around the corner past Maori Bay to the MV Romelia.

It’s a gorgeous 12 kilometre boat ride from Hout Bay slipway, past the BOS 400 in Maori Bay, past the nudist beach at Sandy Bay (strangely, everyone we could see was fully clothed!), and to Sunset Rocks on the southern end of Llandudno beach. Grant dropped the shot line quite close to the rocks, where an artificial cave is formed by the bow and some large rocks, with the anchors hanging from the ceiling.

The visibility was mixed – there were clouds of fry (not sure which species of fish, but they were definitely babies) in the water at points, and the westerly wind of the day before had made things a bit soupy, but as we moved around the site there were patches of very decent visibility. I must confess that we’d been on the wreck for nearly ten minutes when I asked Tony where it was… He pointed at the (in retrospect) suspiciously smooth orange wall we had been hanging in front of since the start of the dive, and I realised that the ship has been so colonised by coraline algae and other sea life that most of it is virtually indistinguishable from the rocks around it.

There are amazing walls – each a different colour. One is mostly orange, another purple, and when you start ascending there are massive sea squirts above about six metres. These are all a rusty reddish brown colour. The rocks and the wreckage – some quite mangled, other sections totally hidden by sea creatures – are heavily encrusted with urchins, sea cucumbers, anemones, nudibranchs, and other invertebrate life. We saw large schools of hottentot in the red bait zone and against some of the walls.

There are ample opportunities to swim through cracks in the rocks and between the wreck and the rocks, and this demanded good buoyancy control and some smart finning because there was a fair amount of surge. A particularly alluring gap was just too narrow for me, but every time I went close to try and take a photo through it the surge pushed me up perilously close to the wall, and I had to give up.

Most of the photos I took are of a macro nature because the visiblity didn’t warrant wide angle shots… You can see in the shots of the divers above that the water was very murky. But there’s also no opportunity really to get a panoramic view of anything because the site is more a series of passages and swim throughs than a giant ship lying on the ocean floor like the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks.

More information on the wrecks of the Romelia and the Antipolis can be found here, along with some super photos.

Dive date: 19 December 2010

Air temperature: 27 degrees

Water temperature: 7 degrees

Maximum depth: 18.5 metres

Visibility: 5-8 metres

Dive duration: 45 minutes

Dive sites: BOS 400

This wreck is so spectacular from above the surface that I did a separate post with photos I took prior to this dive. It’s situated in Maori Bay, just outside Hout Bay. You can’t miss it!

The helipad at the stern of the vessel collapsed in September 2010 (in the Google maps image here, the helipad is still intact – it’s the circular feature on the left), and this seems to have stabilised the wreck quite significantly. Last time I was in Maori Bay the crane was creaking ominously in a strong swell, but she was silent on the most recent visits I’ve done.

Tony has not been an enthusiastic Atlantic diver since his arrival in Cape Town in late September 2009. He’s used to the warm seas of Jordan, Sodwana and Mozambique, and while False Bay is chilly but tolerable, he found the Atlantic unbearable. Dives like this one, however, have been changing his mind. Combine 25 metre visibility with an industrial wreck of monumental proportions (both above and below the surface) and he’s in heaven. He says it’s one of the best dives he has ever done.

The wreckage is identifiable in many cases – as staircases, the helipad, causeways and the components of the crane – but much of it is completely mangled. Large sheets of metal are curled at the edges like paper held to a flame. Wreck penetration is a definite possiblity here – with great care, but there are certainly opportunities.

The size of the crane is such that one could spend a lifetime exploring the site and not get bored. We didn’t even get to the SS Oakburn, which lies under the stern of the BOS 400 and is a much older wooden steamer, very broken up.

As far as sea life goes, there’s a fair amount of lush red and green seaweed. I found some friendly klipfish and lots of West Coast rock lobster, but the main attraction is the wreckage so I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at small areas or really close to things.

The contrast of the sandy-bottomed bay peppered with round boulders behind you, and the massive metal hulk in front of you, is stunning. We’ll be back!

Dive date: 16 December 2010

Air temperature: 23 degrees

Water temperature: 7 degrees

Maximum depth: 23.9 metres

Visibility: 25 metres

Dive duration: 37 minutes

If you’re interested in visible shipwrecks, check out my ebook Cape Town’s Visible Shipwrecks: A Guide for Explorers!

Dive sites: BOS 400… from the surface

The BOS 400 was a giant floating crane of the Derrick/Lay barge type, used for pipe laying. She was under tow by the Russian tug Tigr when the tow rope snapped in a north easterly gale in June 1994. The 12,000 ton crane, which had now engines of her own (she was a barge) ran aground on the rocks at the southern corner of Maori Bay just outside Hout Bay, home of two other wrecks: the SS Maori and the SS Oakburn. (More on a recent dive we did on the SS Maori can be found here and here.)

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=hout+bay+harbor&sll=-34.03768,18.308673&sspn=0.005085,0.008336&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Hout+Bay+Harbour,+Hout+Bay,+Cape+Town,+Western+Cape,+South+Africa&t=h&ll=-34.037289,18.308952&spn=0.003112,0.00456&z=17&iwloc=A&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

The BOS 400’s back was so badly broken and the seas so rough that salvage was impossible. All 14 crew were airlifted to safety. The crane was outfitted at great expense (worth $70-80 million US dollars) and as many of the fittings as possible were stripped before the vessel was condemned. If you like legalese, here’s a link to the findings in one of the several court cases that pertained to this vessel.

We survey the wreck from Grant's boat — We survey the wreck from Grant’s boat

BOS in fact (as far as I can determine) stands for Bouyges Offshore Services (either that or Board OffShore, a type of crane), but over the years the name of the crane seems to have been transmuted into Boss 400.

The part of the superstructure that protrudes above the water is incredibly impressive, but can only be seen from the sea or by hikers on the Karbonkelberg above Hout Bay – there are no roads in the vicinity. When we dived this wreck, our skipper Grant carefully drove us all the way around the back of the wreck into the channel against the mountainside. These photos were taken from that vantage point.

If you’re interested in visible shipwrecks, check out my ebook Cape Town’s Visible Shipwrecks: A Guide for Explorers!