Just peeking out behind the wave you can see the top of the Clan Stuartwreck. This photo was taken just after a large storm, at spring high tide. Here’s another photo of Mackerel Bay, the not very obvious bay where the Clan Stuart lies in only 12 metres of water. With a wave like this, a shore entry would be out of the question. It is possible to dive the Clan Stuart from a boat, though it’s not commonly done.
My Sony DSC-TX5 has served me remarkably well, but after three years I was starting to itch for something with a bit more scope for manual control. The TX5 has an underwater mode: you switch it on, turn on the flash, and you’re good to go. It also has a rugged Sony-built housing that is almost neutrally buoyant with the camera inside, can be held and operated with one hand, and supports the addition of an external strobe (which I did). All these things make it incredibly user friendly and eminently suitable for a busy diver who might be doing other things (like grabbing onto other divers who are being wayward, or being a good buddy) and need both hands now and then.
I did a lot of reading and asking, and ended up settling on another Sony camera (my third, and the fourth for our family), the Sony DSC-RX100. It’s a tiny, pocket-sized camera that has many manual control options (aperture and shutter priority modes, manual and program mode, and some built in automatic modes) but isn’t a DSLR. It has received the most effusive reviews that I’ve ever read for an electronic device. Here’s Wired, and here’s the New York Times. Digital Photography Review also said nice things. It has a giant 20.2 megapixel sensor and a fast Carl Zeiss lens capable of a magnificent 3.6x zoom. You can read up about those things elsewhere. It takes HD video, and you can shoot stills at the same time. What sold me on the camera was its reported excellent performance in low light environments (a feature of several of the Sony models I’ve owned), which I figured would make it excellent for Cape Town diving.
The Ikelite housing for the Sony RX100
There are a couple of options for an underwater housing for the DSC-RX100, but unfortunately nothing made by Sony. I settled on the Ikelite housing because there’s a local Ikelite presence, and because it wasn’t insanely expensive. The housing unfortunately has the hydrodynamics of a house brick and mine needed its clips replaced after less than thirty dives, but the camera is nice enough that I was willing to put up with having a perspex sea-anchor attached to myself in order to get it into the water. Toting the housing around has also thrown my buoyancy for a loop, so I’m having to consciously adjust some things to get my air consumption back where it was in the good old days. (I’ve decided that my next camera will probably have a manufacturer-built housing, or I won’t buy it.)
Anyway. After much debate I also splurged on the Ikelite W-30 wide angle lens, which cost more than the housing and which has been my only recent Ikelite purchase that has worked flawlessly and hasn’t needed replacement or repair, probably because it has no electronic or mechanical parts. It’s magnificent. It screws onto the outside of the housing, and is a wet lens, which means that upon getting into the water you have to make sure that all the air gets out and water fills the space between the lens and the housing, otherwise you get a line across the middle of your photos. Same goes for when you get out of the water – the lens has to drain before you can use it on land.
My most sustained use of the camera so far has been on our Red Sea trip last October – you can see all the underwater photos on flickr in my wreck dives set, reef dives set, and night dives set. I am still using it mostly on the automatic and very simple manual settings, but I expect that playing with the camera on land (which I haven’t had time to do much of) will make me more confident with it underwater. The buttons on the housing are very hard to use with gloves on or cold fingers, and they are extremely close together, which means you have to learn what each one does (or carry a cheat sheet on dives) in order to change settings underwater. Despite these complaints, you can access all the camera’s controls via the housing, which is more than can be said for other housings.
Your photographer
The camera flash is immensely powerful. The housing comes with a diffuser (for photography without an external strobe) and a shield to completely block the flash from the front when the strobe is on. I use the latter when I attach my AF-35 Autoflash, which works like a charm. I have tried using the flash on the camera while underwater, but you have to be quite far away from your subject to avoid blowing out the image.
Apart from the clip issue on the housing, I’ve been very happy with the camera so far and am looking forward to doing some more underwater macro photography, since the DSC-RX100 focuses much closer than the DSC-TX5 (and indeed any other camera we own). I’m also enjoying its very easy to use video function, as you may have noticed from the proliferation of videos on the blog since April 2013! I’ve added a video light that has come in handy for photography on night dives, but that’s another story…
Breaking wave in Mackerel Bay near the Clan Stuart
The wreck of the SS Clan Stuart is in an area marked on the charts as “Mackerel Bay”. It doesn’t look like a bay to me; even on a map, the arc of the coastline in that area is almost imperceptible. I wonder whether it was more pronounced 100 years ago. Here’s the beach at Mackerel Bay after a storm, with a big swell. That wave can make getting in and out at the Clan Stuart dive site very tricky.
Early in December last year, Tony escorted some members of the media on a dive/snorkel in the shark exclusion net at Fish Hoek beach. To remind you, this net is a highly visible barrier in the ocean, designed to keep sharks and humans apart, and both species alive. It was specifically designed not to catch anything, unlike the gill nets that are deployed by the Sharks Board off the KwaZulu Natal coast. This is what the net looks like from underwater:
This is what it looks like on the surface. The day was quite grey and dreary when we dived it, but the yellow buoys along the top of the net are highly visible. At the end of the day the net is retrieved, and if the weather and sea conditions permit, it is deployed again in the morning.
A large ship and a yacht seen from Glencairn Beach in False Bay
False Bay doesn’t usually see very large ships, but when there’s a storm brewing we’ll sometimes see big vessels coming to hide in the bay. I took this photo at the beginning of November last year. This huge ship spent a day or two in the bay, as well as another one you can see just behind the yacht. This picture was taken from the bottom of the Whale Lookout at Glencairn.
You can see how pronounced the shape of False Bay is, specially compared to Table Bay, which is hardly visible as a tiny arc at the head of the Cape Peninsula.
Here’s the view on Scarborough beach looking north, towards Misty Cliffs (the mist is visible in the distance). There’s a little river flowing over the beach into the sea, just visible to the left of the boardwalk.
One Tuesday in early December, Tony escorted some members of the media – Murray Williams of the Cape Argus, and Bruce Hong of Cape Talk radio, on a dive along the inside of the shark exclusion net at Fish Hoek beach. It was just before the start of the school holidays, and since the net has been trialledmultiple times by now and is working well, it’s a good time to raise awareness of the additional beach safety and – importantly – peace of mind that the net offers. I tagged along as photographer.
Over-under view of the exclusion net at Fish Hoek
The net at Fish Hoek beach is a world first. It has a fine mesh that is highly visible underwater, and is designed not to catch anything – unlike the shark gill nets in KwaZulu Natal. The net is put out in the morning and retrieved at the end of the day, but only when sea conditions allow it. The south easterly wind can bring huge quantities of kelp into Fish Hoek bay which would foul the net, so when there is a strong south easter the net cannot be deployed.
If you’re a water person, please educate yourself on how the net works, and its intention, and share it with your friends. Even now, nine months after the trial started, I hear uninformed comments from people who have not bothered to do any reading about the net, and assume it’s the same kind of net as the ones in Durban. It’s not. The whole idea is that nothing – no sharks, no humans, no klipfish – gets hurt. Shark Spotters and the City of Cape Town have been very clear on this from the start. I had a bit of a rant about this late last year.
Murray dives down to check out the exclusion net
I digress. We went to the beach, got suited up, and went to check out the net. It was spring low tide, so at its southernmost end we were in about 2 metres of water. The net is high enough that when the tide comes in and the yellow floats rise with the water level, it simply unfurls further downwards, making an unbroken curtain. The lower portion of the net rests on the sand, with two parallel weighted lines to ensure that it lies flat. You can see that in the photo above Murray is gripping one of these leaded lines, and that there is a fairly large amount of net waiting on the sand for higher tides.
The divemobile ready for action
Entering the water watched by some schoolboys on an outing
Monwa, superhero
Your photographer
Batman on the surface
The net hangs down like a curtain and rests on the sand
Murray and Monwa discuss the net
We stuck close to the net, and didn’t see much marine life on the sandy bottom. I spotted a large sand shark (when I say I “spotted” him, I mean that I almost landed on top of him). We were mutually surprised, and he zipped away into the bay, sliding neatly under the bottom of the net. I also saw a box jelly cruising along the net. Given my recent history with box jellies, I kept clear! The sea floor in the area where the net is deployed is level, sandy and free from rocks. There’s more life on the catwalk side, where beautiful rock pools wait to be snorkelled.
We were accompanied by Monwabisi Sikweyiya, who is the Field Manager of Shark Spotters. He is a hero and I always feel a bit star-struck when I see him (although he has no idea why – he probably just thinks there’s something wrong with me). He swims along the net regularly – someone does each time it is deployed, actually – to make sure that it’s released properly and hanging straight down.
After the dive
Swimming inside the net is completely voluntary. When a shark is seen in Fish Hoek bay the Shark Spotter still sounds the siren and the flag is raised to clear the water. The Shark Spotters team are still waiting to see how a shark will respond to the net when it swims close enough to be aware of it. So far none of the local sharks have come close to the net, as the summer season when sharks move inshore has only just started. Tony was half hoping that we’d be swimming along inside the net, look out through the mesh – and blammo! – see a great white shark. But we had no such luck, if that is the right word.
You can read the article that Murray Williams from the Argus wrote after the dive, here.
It’s not Jellyfish Lake in Palau by any stretch of the imagination, but we had some impressive jellyfish action in False Bay during September and October this year. I filmed these two videos at Outer Photographer’s Reef, at the safety stop.
These purple beauties are compass sea jellies, but we also saw impressive blooms of box jellyfish that lasted for several weeks, right into November. It’s possible that this congregation of sea jellies was caused by a quirk of a current somewhere, that herded them all into False Bay and then prevented their departure. There’s also the possibility that they found something nice to eat in False Bay, perhaps because of the large volume of sewerage that gets pumped out into the ocean all around this special piece of coastline.
Scientists aren’t actually sure what causes jellyfish blooms, but ultimate causes seem to be warmer oceans and increased nutrient loadings in coastal waters as a result of human activities.
Box jellies can deliver a nasty sting – it’s the luck of the draw whether it’s bad or not, but if it is, you can suffer for days. It’s also distinctly possible that with repeated stings you will become more sensitised to their venom. So take care!
