On a trip to snorkel with seals at Duiker Island in March, Kate got hold of my camera. She took most of these photos, which is why I am in some of them.
Snorkeling with the seals
You can see that it was a calm, beautiful day. The snorkellers were visiting South Africa from the United Kingdom, and had a wonderful time checking out the seal colony.
The Sentinel
Snorkelers ready to go
Chilling on the boat
It was warm enough for them to take a break on the boat when they got cold, warm up, and get back in the water. I don’t like to rush things – unexpected and interesting things always happen when you’re not expecting them to, and being in a hurry leads to missed opportunities.
Seal Rock is an attraction for both divers and snorkelers because when visiting it one is guaranteed to see at least one seal, and probably many more than that. Upon arrival, several seals generally leap into the water to check out the divers. I’ve seen boat skippers clapping their hands vigorously to encourage this behaviour – not sure what trigger they’re exploiting, but it seems to work.
Seals in the water
The seals are not aggressive, but are very active and move incredibly fast. They are very graceful in the water, and will sometimes make displays of teeth and barking in order to assert or challenge dominance. The best approach is to remain calm and not to reach your hand out – those teeth are big. They will not attack you!
Whizzing by
The water teems with seals
A handy school of fish near the rock
If you’re not keen on seals, I encourage you to turn your eyes to the reef surrounding the rock. It’s colourful and diverse, and on a sunny day with good visibility it’s an absolute delight to the eyes. The shallow water enables maximum light penetration, to the extent that on my most recent dive there my camera became quite confused.
Before you have a heart attack (or a good laugh) at my dive time below, please bear in mind that when I started the dive I only had 50 bar in my cylinder, because of a mix up with the number of divers, number of dives each one planned to do, and number of full cylinders. So, hush.
I was a huge Arthur C. Clarke fan for many years (still am, I suppose), beginning at the age of about ten and reaching my peak during my university years. He’s a science fiction writer, the kind whose work – when read years later – actually foreshadows developments that are currently just beyond the reach of our technological capabilites, but quite feasible.
He also had a great love for the ocean, and this book is an account of a few months he and his buddy Mike Wilson spent diving the Great Barrier Reef in Australia during the early 1950s. The Aqualung had just been invented and their diving locations were remote, so they did a lot of skin and free diving to conserve their air supply.
The book is partly a travelogue, and partly a description of memorable encounters he had with sea life. It’s clear that the diving adventures Clarke describes heavily inspired Dolphin Island. Wilson took photographs, some of which are reproduced in grainy black and white in the book. There’s a hilarious one of a diver with his cylinder mounted upside down (by current standards) and the hose from his second stage snaking down the side of his body to his bottom.
In his foreword, Clarke mentions that he now reads the sections of the book in which he describes (and advocates) walking out on the exposed reef at low tide with some embarrassment. Coral is sensitive, and shouldn’t be touched. The book is also laced with accounts of spear fishing, a sport I think is ridiculous and distasteful. Disturbingly, they capture a turtle, harrass her extensively (sit on her back for photos) and then try to drag her (alive) out to their boat so they can eat turtle steak for dinner. Fortunately the difficulties they encounter in trying to get her offshore cause them to think better of their plan and release her. But a lot of the thinking is very dated and somewhat repugnant to modern sensibilities.
I was surprised by how funny Clarke’s writing style is – his sense of humour is not something that comes through in his science fiction writings. He speaks of having to “de-louse” one’s vocabulary after having spent any length of time in Australia, and dubs the word “bloody” as The Great Australian Adjective. His argument for turning down an exotic meal cooked by the inhabitants of one of the islands they visit is that he would be very distressed and disappointed were he to develop a taste for the rare meats on offer, and then be unable to obtain them when he returns to London or New York. I informed Tony of this excuse, and expect to hear it next time I cook broccoli.
In all, the book paints a fascinating picture of the Great Barrier Reef prior to it becoming the tourist attraction it is today. The reef’s vast extent is very apparent, and Clarke’s enjoyment of the underwater world is palpable and inspiring. I look forward to diving there one day.
Many of Tony’s students come to him with extensive skin diving experience. Living in Cape Town, it’s almost obligatory to enjoy at least one lobster braai during the season (and often many more). Sometimes the veteran lobster-divers struggle at first with breathing through a regulator – their instinct while under water is to hold their breath (it’s illegal to take lobster when you’re on scuba). But their comfort in the water (and being used to the cold) stands them in good stead, once Tony’s tapped them on the regulator a few times to remind them to inhale!
Lobster on a wreck at Long Beach
We see West Coast rock lobster (not crayfish – those are freshwater creatures) in both False Bay and on the Atlantic side. They are gregarious, and can often be found sheltering in cracks and under overhangs, in quite large groups.
West coast rock lobster on the BOS 400 wreck
It’s a pleasure to do a deep wreck dive such as on the Maori and on the BOS 400, and see hordes of good-sized rock lobster teeming all over the wreck. Some of the shallower sites are definitely over-fished, and we only see really big specimens when we dive beyond the range of your average skin diving lobster hunter. On Gerard’s first deep wreck dive in Smitswinkel Bay, we hadn’t been on the wreck for three minutes when I turned around to see him excitedly waving a MASSIVE lobster at me, the biggest either of us had ever seen. Some finger waggling and head shaking convinced him to replace Mr Lobster in his home, but I think Gerard was heartbroken.
Small rock lobster at Long Beach
Rock lobster are almost impossible to farm. At the Two Oceans Aquarium on our crash course in marine biology we learned that there are 13 larval stages, during which time the creature drifts hundreds of kilometres offshore through a huge variety of water conditions that it would be impossible to replicate in a mariculture setting. The larval phases can last up to two years. Lobsters grow very, very slowly and can live to the age of 50. There’s some nice detail on the Two Oceans Aquarium website.
Rock lobsters on the Maori
They eat crabs, abalone, starfish, snails and sea urchins – this latter fact makes them quite important in the ecosystem as a whole. I’ve mentioned before that juvenile abalone shelter among sea urchins. If there are too many lobsters, they eat too many urchins (and too many abalone) and this leads to a decline in the population of abalone. It’s a fine balance.
Rock lobster at Long Beach
Lobsters are incredibly sensitive to the level of oxygen in the water, which sometimes leads to what look like mass walkouts onto the beach when there’s a red tide or similar event leading to (near-)anoxic conditions on our coastline. What actually happens is that they move away from the de-oxygenated water where the red tide has died, and get stranded on the beach by a retreating tide. Once when Tony was landing a dive boat at Miller’s Point, he was waiting for a chance to use the slipway next to a fishing boat that was packed to the gills with lobster. The captain said they’d found a spot where thousands of lobster were strolling together in orderly formation across the ocean floor, and he’d just scooped them up. (He would not share where this magical location was, but the lobster were probably moving to more highly oxygenated waters.) Having substantially exceeded his quota, the fisherman was somewhat twitchy about being pulled over by the authorities!
Rock lobster on the move on the Maori
Poaching of rock lobster is a big problem in South Africa. They’re a very valuable commodity – you just need to go and have a seafood platter at a Camps Bay restaurant to see what damage it can do to your wallet – and easily accessible to anyone who can hold their breath and is prepared to do a bit of rock scrambling. The government Department of Environmental Affairs tries to manage stocks by implementing a closed season, catch and size limits.
Currently, you may only take lobster that measure greater than 8 centimetres from the front of their head to the end of their carapace (NOT to the tip of their tails, as I used to think – fortunately I’m not a lobster fisherman!);
You must have a MPA permit to take lobster (same form at the post office as the scuba diving one);
The season runs from November to April (the dates vary by year);
You may only take lobster during the day – between sunrise and sunset;
You’re not allowed to sell them;
You are not allowed to take females in berry (with eggs), or lobsters with soft shells that have just moulted;
There are also regulations about the number of rock lobster you may transport at once, or have in your possession.
Many people seem to think that they’ll experience claustrophobia when they put their faces in the water, with their breathing restricted to their regulator, wearing a wetsuit, and having all that water around them.
Here are some facts…
Breathing from a regulator
A regulator or demand valve is a brilliantly designed piece of equipment that attaches to a hose linked to a cylinder of compressed air. It’s constructed so that it’s easy to breathe from – no more effort is required than breathing without one, it gives you as much air as you need, and you can even cough or (I know this from sad experience) vomit with it in your mouth and you won’t have ANY trouble at all with the consequences… If you get my drift. In the unlikely event that it fails, it won’t fail in the “off” position and stop your air supply; it will free flow (deliver a continuous stream of air). One of the skills you do in your Open Water course is breathing off a free-flowing regulator, so you are fully equipped to handle this situation.
Your regulator delivers more than enough air, NOT less than you get breathing on land. If you do at some point feel as though you’re not getting enough, it’s because you’re breathing too shallowly. When you dive, your breathing must be deep and slow. Extracting the full goodness out of each breath maximises your enjoyment: your air will last longer, and you’ll feel more relaxed.
Bubbles rising in the Atlantic
Having to breathe out of your regulator – as opposed to being able to go take one breath in each corner of the room, or open your mouth as wide as it can go – is not restrictive at all. If you think about it, when you breathe on land, you’re drawing in the air that is in front of your face. There’s no hardship in not being able to take in the air from down the passageway – that’s not where you are.
What’s more, having the regulator in your mouth only feels funny for the first few minutes. It’s made with soft rubbery flanges that fit in your mouth (mouthpieces come in different sizes, too) and once it’s seated properly you won’t even know it’s there. If you’ve snorkeled, you know what it feels like to have a mouthpiece between your teeth. Breathing from a regulator is easier than breathing from a snorkel, and what’s more you don’t have to worry about rogue waves splashing water into your breathing apparatus! So if you can snorkel, you can definitely scuba dive.
All that equipment
Some people worry about wearing a mask, and think they might feel closed in with one covering their eyes and nose. Firstly, it’s important to note that it’s essential for the mask to cover your nose so that you can equalise your ears . If you wore swimmers’ goggles, they would get compressed onto your face at depth (which would hurt, and might look funny). This way, you can exhale through your nose into the mask to equalise (one of many techniques).
To be honest, a mask is no more claustrophobic to wear than a pair of wrap around sunglasses, and it’s probably going to be a lot more comfortable once you’ve found the one that suits your face shape.
Oscar enjoying all that space
Others worry about wearing a wetsuit, that they won’t feel free to move. They’re right about that: wearing a wetsuit on land is one of the least comfortable things you can do. They’re hot, restrictive, and tight. In the water, however, you won’t even notice it’s there. Wetsuits keep you warm (important in the Cape) and protect you from marine creatures that might sting or scratch you as you pass through their domain. Deciding you won’t like or try diving because wetsuits make you feel cramped is like deciding you aren’t going to eat Haagen-Dazs ice cream because you don’t like the font they write their product labels in.
All that water
Finally, some people worry that they’ll feel trapped under the weight of all the water above them, and that it’s impossibly far to get to the surface. There are a few answers to this:
Firstly, you’ll learn a skill called a CESA, or Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent, on your Open Water course. This enables you to swim for the surface in a controlled, non-panicky manner if you need to. This is not something you’ll just do if you’re feeling uncomfortable one day – it’s for when you run out of air and have no buddy nearby to borrow an octo from.
Second, when you learn to dive you’re not suddenly going to start spending all your time at 30 metres. The PADIOpen Water course qualifies you to dive to 18 metres, and you have to do an Advanced course to get to 30 metres, and a Deep specialty to get to 40 metres. So these things come with time. Some divers have no interest in deep diving, and there’s nothing wrong with that – Tony and I spend most of our time in less than 10 metres of water because the best and easiest photographic opportunities are there, and we can stay down a looooong time because our air lasts forever! Your first diving experiences will be in relatively shallow water, and only as you get used to being underwater will your instructor gradually increase the depth you go to.
Looking up in the clear Atlantic
I will admit that when visibility is poor, one loses the feeling of having three beautiful dimensions around one to play in. But this is infrequent, and if you’re diving for fun, then you hopefully won’t have to get in the water when conditions aren’t great (unless you’re desperate to get wet, in which case you won’t care!). But the feeling of space when one drops into the gin-clear water of the Atlantic on a summer’s day is so extreme as to make one almost dizzy. Being underwater is the closest I get to flying, and I love it.
In conclusion, diving involves a fair amount of unfamiliar equipment, and is quite different to our day-to-day experiences as human beings on planet earth. You may not like it; but you probably will. If you’re not sure, sign up for a Discover Scuba Diving experience (DSD). Tony even sometimes does these in people’s swimming pools – just to give you a taste of the freedom that comes with breathing underwater. You can make an educated decision about diving after that.
