Everything ocean related, with a special focus on scuba diving the rich coastal waters of Cape Town, South Africa.
Scuba diving in Cape Town
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Here’s a variation on last week’s photo, showing more of the Fish Hoek Valley and less of the bay. Lovely place we live in!
Tony and I drove up to the top of Fish Hoek, to see what the Shark Spotter can see from his hut at the end of Contour Way. This photo was taken from further down the road, lower down than the hut. Wherever you stand, you can see a lot! It was windy and swelly when I took this picture, but you can still see the kelp and rock patches close to the catwalk without the aid of binoculars.
Here’s Tony at the safety stop in a notable plankton bloom, at the end of a dive at Justin’s Caves. Fortunately the water was clean at the bottom, and even cleaner inshore on the landward side of the rocks!
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A strong south easterly wind that brings clear, nutrient rich water from deep offshore, followed by even a few windless hours of sunshine, will turn the surface waters of the sea on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula to pea soup. Here’s a salutary example from a dive we did where the top 20 metres or so were thick, green sludge.
Here’s Roman Rock lighthouse taking a pounding from a large swell, just after a large storm that activated the Admiral’s Waterfall in Simon’s Town and left us all feeling quite bedraggled.
Sea Dog is a surfski time trial at Fish Hoek beach that takes place every Friday evening, starting at six in the evening. It runs for the last ten weeks of the year, and the first ten weeks (so twenty weeks, during the summer months). There is a gap in between for Christmas and New Year. It has been running for a few years, and a meet is never cancelled for any reason. We can attest to this, having gone down to the beach during a black south easter with bucketing rain, only to see a hardy group of paddlers battling it out behind the breakers in almost zero visibility.
The event is organised by the Mockes of the paddling shop in Fish Hoek, and there’s usually a photographer (apart from me) to document the event. There are usually a couple of marker buoys out in the bay, and the paddlers do a number of laps around them. I’m not sure of the details of the race format, but it starts and ends on the beach. There are participants of all skill levels, from world champions to weekend warriors.
If you’re around, it’s a lovely thing to watch (or participate in, if you’re a paddler) on a Friday evening after work. We sometimes get dinner and take it down to the beach to watch the proceedings.
I’m not sure why I haven’t written about Roman Rock before. I’ve actually done four dives on the main reef, the first in 2010. The pictures in this post are from more than one of the dives – I’ll group them together, and you’ll be able to see by the water colour which dive is which.
Roman Rock reef is a very large collection of boulders separated by sand patches, centred on the Roman Rock lighthouse. Nearby reefs include Castor Rock, Livingstone Reef, Roman’s Rest, Wonder Reef, and Tivoli Pinnacles. The reef is comprised of granite boulders, heavily encrusted with typical Cape Town reef life – feather stars, brittle stars, nudibranchs, sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers and ascidians – varying with the depth. If the current is strong you will find a lot of fish here, mostly roman and hottentot, enjoying the tasty bounty brought by the tide.
Part of the dive is along high walls that are reminiscent of Atlantis Reef, further south. There are deep dead-end passages in between the rocks, wide enough to swim through (or drive a car through), and the rippled sand looks like a white carpet or a runway. In the middle of nowhere you will come across a ladder; it’s been there since the first time I dived Roman Rock in 2010. Your guess is as good as mine.
The site is suitable for Open Water divers, as the maximum depth one can attain while staying adjacent to the reef is about 18 metres. There are several pinnacles and shallower plateaus that are suitable for deeper safety stops. It goes without saying that each diver must have a surface marker buoy – the site is a relatively short boat ride from False Bay Yacht Club, but offshore nonetheless and there may be boat traffic, depending on where the current takes you.
Dive date: 3 August 2013
Air temperature: 22 degrees
Water temperature: 14 degrees
Maximum depth: 16.5 metres
Visibility: 10 metres
Dive duration: 38 minutes
I took this photo with Tony’s long lens, from the parking area of False Bay Yacht Club, which is a good place to see the waterfall when it’s in flood. It was one day after we’d had 120 millimetres of rain in under 18 hours, so there was a lot of water coming off the mountain. If you want to see the waterfall up close, drive your car to the end of Barnard Street in Simon’s Town, and walk from there. It’s a flat walk of about twenty minutes.
