In Malta we had the privilege of diving with several Russian divers, and Sergey our Divemaster was also Russian. They were extremely impressive in the water – precise, no wasted movements, and demonstrating exemplary buoyancy skills. Unfortunately their English was only slightly better than our Russian, so we had to rely on hand signals (and Sergey’s interpretations) to communicate.
A diver's version of grande battements
A couple of them also demonstrated some exemplary ballet/yoga skills, which were whipped out like clockwork between dives, despite still being clad in 5 millimetres of inflexible neoprene. I wonder whether maintaining a good in-wetsuit stretching regimen during the surface intervals wasn’t part of their secret diving mojo!
Streeeeetch...
These pictures were taken at Cirkewwa before and between dives on the Rozi and P29.
We have had a run of good diving of late, between the ocean and the pool I have been fortunate to be underwater almost every day for the last week and a half and it seems set to continue for the next few days. For this time of year the weather has been relatively mild and we have had half decent visibility and not too cold water. Today the visibility at Long Beach was 5-6 metres and the water 16 degrees. The ocean treated us to a display of the smallest short tailed stingray I have ever seen.
Linda and James meeting some klipfish
I consider myself very honoured right now having been requested to teach a young man who doesn’t have full use of his legs to dive. It is surprisingly easy to take what most of us have – full use of all our limbs – totally for granted. Be warned that the next diver to complain about the weight of their dive gear will be the lucky winner of a lecture from me!!
Two curious klipfish at Long Beach
Most of you know Cecil, and well we wish him well as he starts his cave diving training today in a sinkhole somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Cecil started diving late last year and has to date done Open Water, Advanced, Deep, Nitrox and twin tank diving courses in preparation for his next step. His goal for the end of the year is a cave dive in Borneo!
Hottentot on the Admiral’s Reef at Long Beach
This weekend
Saturday we are on the boat for an early launch… well, early for some… and we will visit a new site called Atlantis. This is a newly discovered site and I dived there last week Monday for the first time. It comprises two stunning pinnacles that start at around 6 metres and drop of to almost 30 metres. I have never seen such big schools of fish or such a diversity of life on any other site in Cape Town as yet.
A box jelly (after a good meal)
After the boat dive we plan to dive at A Frame and then move to Long Beach for a third dive.
Sunday is a little uncertain at this point as a southeaster is forecast but hopefully it will arrive later in the day so an early start will again be required… I hear Clare groaning…
Other stuff
The Dive Site magazine has just changed from being free to being on a paid subscription basis. If you subscribe within the next week you can get it at R120 for four issues, a special discounted price. Even if you have to give up one of your other magazines, diving or otherwise, do it! It’s the best diving magazine in South Africa.
I often take pictures by accident. This is no mystery – the construction of my camera housing and the fact that I sometimes forget to turn it off on exiting the ocean conspire here to produce curious results. What is a mystery, however, is what some of the photos depict. As a fun (haha) activity for our loyal reader(s), here’s a game of Guess the Dive Gear. Answers at the end of the post…
1. Very easy
We start with something easy
2. Easy
Also quite straightforward
3. Also easy
What's this?
But can you guess what brand it is?
Can you guess the brand?
4. Slightly less easy
Looks very tropical
5. This should be a piece of cake
What's this?
Just identifying the piece of gear isn’t enough – do you know the make and model?
Can you guess the brand?Still no idea?
6. A bit tricky
Similar to (4) above, but with an additional item to complicate matters…
Think I might have been lowering my gear to the ground. There’s a compass visible at the top of the picture, and the black mass at the bottom might be an inflated BCD. Any better ideas?
Valve handles in dodgy visibility on the SAS Fleur
Last weekend we dived the SAS Fleur. This rates as the best wreck dive in Cape Town, in my book. It is closely followed by the MV Aster which we plan to dive and penetrate this weekend. Back to the Fleur: we did not have exceptional visibility (about 6 metres – Clare apologises for the dodgy pictures), and the current was quite strong at depth. But as we were doing a Deep Specialty, on Nitrox, this was a perfect site. We had lots of seals during the dive and many stayed with us during our deep stop and the extended 5 metre safety stop.
Being photo-bombed by seals at the safety stop on the Fleur
After the Fleur we did two dives at Long Beach, being dive 1 & 2 for Open Water students. We visited the new Lady Long Beach reef project being built by Pisces Dive Centre.
Slightly beaten up cuttlefish at Long Beach
Many have heard of the sardine run, well Steve Benjamin from Animal Ocean will be doing a squid run, in Cape St Francis. Diving 25th Oct – 29th Oct (5 days), this is just as the Commercial squid season closes. Visit his website for more info and look at some of the sardine run photos.
Tami approaching a swarm of box jellies at Long Beach
This weekend
This weekend we are diving in Hout Bay harbour on Saturday morning as part of the clean up dive organised by OMSAC. Diving starts at 9.00 am and even if you are not diving come along and join the fun. The harbour will be alive with divers, boats and humans. This is also a very photogenic part of Cape Town so bring your camera.
If you plan to participate in the cleanup dive, you must register beforehand – visit the OMSAC website for more details.
You must ensure you have your dive card AND your MPA permit with you on Saturday.
Compass sea jelly at the deep stop on the Fleur
We have booked two dives for the afternoon with Underwater Explorers (you may remember Alistair from this post). At 2.00 pm we will do a dive to the Aster wreck, lay lines and do some penetration. Entering the wreck is not for everyone and some of the divers will stay outside while a few of us are inside. We will also attach a few cyalumes as we are doing the second dive there at 6.30 pm.
There is still space on the afternoon dive but the night dive is almost full… Speak up quickly if you want to join. We will be making a day of it so bring chairs, braai stuff and chocolate. We have also ordered sun so bring sunscreen.
There are a lot of people doing these dives on Saturday so it’s important you mail me to book any gear you want to rent. I have bought a few more wetsuits, BCDs, cylinders and regulators so I am sure we will manage but don’t wait until Saturday to let me know what you need – I’ll pack on Friday evening and leave home very early on Saturday. I also only have 6 torches to rent. You can of course go and buy these things from Andre‘s shop in Simon’s Town – email him here!
Sunday we are doing dive 3 & 4 for Open Water and if conditions are good we will dive the Clan Stuart or Windmill. Meeting time will be 10.30 as all my cylinders will be empty from the night dive and I only have one bicycle pump.
Bits and pieces of the Fleur
Travel plans
The planning of a Mozambique trip is taking shape and within a few weeks we will have a solid plan. We will most likely go to Ponta Do Ouro and will do the same thing we did for the Sodwana trips: fly to Durban, rent cars and have cheap tents or upmarket chalet options for accommodation. Car sharing, tent sharing and sleeping bag sharing… are all options. If you missed the last two trips then you won’t know how much fun we had but you can read all about it here.
Salps at Long Beach
(For more information on exactly what a salp is, check out Wikipedia. They’re alive!)
Talks
There is a talk by Barry, the owner of Dive Action, at the Dive Action shop next Tuesday evening on diving in Norway with stunning pictures. Free, starts at 6.30pm.
On Wednesday night there is a talk at 7.00pm by George Branch, author of the classic The Living Shores of South Africa and expert on all things marine biology-related, at the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Centre in Kalk Bay. The topic is evolution, and the cost is R50. (It’s for a good cause and you also get soup and rolls.) Save Our Seas foundation does many things but the Kalk Bay centre focuses on shark conservation. They also have a marine tank that is amazing… You get to see that too. The talks here are always very good and worth the money.
Text me if you are coming to either talk (booking is essential for the Save Our Seas talk) and I will book for you and send you directions. (Well actually Clare will!)
I’ve been wearing a fantastic new wetsuit for the last few months: the MaresTrilastic 8-6-5. Like Tony’s Mares Flexa 8-6-5, the Trilastic (which is just from the new range) is 8 millimetres thick on the torso, 6mm on the upper arms and thighs, and 5mm on the forearms and calves. The one I have is from the She Dives line by Mares, which makes allowances for women’s body shapes.
Wearing a loose hoodie and an anorak over my wetsuit
With it I wear a loose hoodie, and my booties and gloves go over the bottom of the wetsuit ankles and wrists, not underneath. There are two reasons for this:
The Trilastic doesn’t have zips on the legs and arms
The wrist, neck and leg seals are kind of special and seal very tightly against my skin (except for the neck seal)
The wrist and ankle seals don’t have zips and are quite delicate. Wearing the booties over the leg seals involves a bit of gymnastic stretching to get the zips closed, but it results in warm water trapped very effectively inside the wetsuit and boots. Unfortunately it makes me look extremely bulgy after a dive because the water can’t escape, but it keeps me warm!
I like the small zip at the front – it makes a big difference to my experience of seasickness, since my old ScubaPro presses very uncomfortably on that little dip at the bottom of one’s neck. This contributes greatly to the urge to hurl! There’s still fabric touching on my neck, but not nearly as firmly or tightly as a wetsuit with just a back zipper. I actually wanted a wetsuit with a front zip, but in the thickness I wanted (i.e. VERY) there wasn’t anything available for ladies.
Accidental photo of the Mares Trilastic neck detail
With it I have a 0.5 millimetre thick Mares Rash Guard. It’s very warm but I do find the stitching a bit coarse and I have to be careful how I line the seams up on my arms and torso. The wetsuit seals so tightly that after some dives, however, my arms even have dry patches on them. I slather vaseline on the skin in the front of my neck before repetitive dives, because I get an uncomfortable chafe going on there if I spend a day in my wetsuit and rash vest.
The sleeves of both the wetsuit and rash vest are a bit long (or perhaps my complaint should be that I have short arms). I suppose I can have them adjusted (might be cheaper to do the sleeves rather than the arms). In the mean time I make use of Gerard’s patented plastic bag donning technique for wetsuits.
I can still wear a shortie on top of the 8-6-5. It remains to be seen whether Atlantic diving will require this.
Perhaps you’ve wondered how you’re going to make it along the coastal road from Simon’s Town after a dive, with a bag full of dive gear. You’re worried that a strong gust of wind might catch your enormous dive bag and overbalance your bike. What’s more, maybe you have a passenger who also has a large bag of gear. What to do? Stay at home?
Final mechanical check
Fear not! Help is at hand, courtesy of Andrew and Oliver. Their solution is as follows:
wear your wetsuit, booties, weight belt and BCD
stow your regulators and masks under the seat of your bike
get the passenger to hold both pairs of fins
don’t forget the helmets!
Ready to go!
I’m afraid if you have cylinders too, we can’t help you. A bigger bike might be required…
We are back from Sodwana. When we arrived the folks that had dived the day before said the conditions were not that great… “The water is only 26 degrees and the visibility was only about 15-20 metres.” Well… being tough and from Cape Town we just had to endure the hardship and had 8 amazing dives. It was partly cloudy most days so nobody came back toasted like we did on the last trip. To the 12 people that joined me, BIG THANK YOU. It was good!!! Clare has put together a disc of photos for everyone and we will make a plan to get them to you.
Below are a few photos from some of the dives.
Green turtle on southern Pinnacles
I have a fair amount of diving to do in the coming weeks as we were able to sign up 28 people for a Discover Scuba experience. Kate is also back from the UK and needs to do forty dives before June when she will attend an Instructor course.
Descending at Pinnacles with Adam, Ollie and Goot
We also have an Advanced course running and this coming weekend I will start a Nitrox/Deep speciality combo, six deeper dives to some of Cape Town’s stunning wrecks, on Nitrox (enriched air) After the deep dives we will continue the Open Water student training.
Sea star at Hotspot
The winter months bring cold but very clean water into False Bay, with northerly winds we have exceptional visibility and this winter we will focus on running the Deep, Wreck and Night specialties every month. The wrecks in Smitswinkel Bay are almost all in 35 metres of water and these wrecks are a sight for sore eyes when the water is clean. Night diving has so much to offer as the ambient light, moonlight and bright torches turn the ocean into a pool of light filled with some amazing creatures.
Anemone fish at Four Buoy
I have also bought more gear and have a few warmer wetsuits for the cooler months coming to a ocean near you.
Moray eel at Chain
I would like to make either a Saturday or a Sunday morning boat dive every weekend, weather permitting, so give me some idea of what days are best for whom so we can try and schedule something.
Yellow banded snapper at Stringer
We have also added a few videos to youtube, quite a few new posts to the blog and the website has had a facelift. The blog is an amazing source of information for anything ocean and diving related with many book reviews and a host of other information on sea life. There are hundreds of photos and many of you appear in them! Take a look sometime.
I also have many of your dive cards and will try and drop them off but if you are in the southern suburbs at some point call me and we can meet somewhere. Sending them by post is often a problem as they are mistaken for credit cards and they often just vanish.
Dive gear is expensive but looked after correctly it will give you many years of service. You are reliant on this equipment at depth and ensuring it is always in excellent condition means you never need to fear an equipment failure will spoil your dive.
BCD
When you buy a BCD make sure it is the right size. Too often a salesperson will tell you if it is a bit loose over your T-shirt it’s okay as a wetsuit is thicker… Don’t fall for that, your 7 millimetre wetsuit is not much thicker than 2 millimetres at 40 metres and an ill-fitting BCD at depth is not pleasant. The other important factor is that you may end up diving in the tropics, half naked, and a snug BCD is important.
Make sure you have tried a rental rear inflation as well as a side inflation before you buy. If you don’t know the difference, try it before you buy it. Side inflation BCDs with pockets are popular with training schools (instructors can pop weights in students’ pockets if they are too buoyant). It is a rugged style of BCD and it’s cheaper than most integrated weight BCDs.
Weighing a BCD in the garden
Another important factor is the weight. If you will travel often with your gear consider a lightweight travel BCD as some BCD’s can weigh as much as 3-4 kilograms.
Cleaning
Rinse your BCD in the bath in warm water. Very often you will find there is water inside the bladder of your BCD. This happens when you hold the deflate button long after it is empty on your descent. Fill the bladder with a few liters of warm water by holding the BCD down in the bath and holding the deflate button. Then give it a good shake to swirl the water around and dissolve salt crystals (warm water dissolves salt quicker than cold water).
Flushing water from inside the BCD
Invert the BCD and allow at least half of the water to run out by depressing the inflate button. This ensures the small valve and tiny opening on the inflation side is flushed. (Do this often and you will never have a sticky inflator.)
Drain the last water by depressing the deflate button, then orally inflate the BCD, drain it again, inflate it again and hang it up to dry, in the shade. Clip all the clips – a closed clip is less likely to break. Extend the straps so they are not folded over in the same spot constantly.
Tracy, Goot, Sophie, me, Tami, Bernita, Clare and Cecil outside the chamber
We have just come home from a 50 metre chamber dive. We were two groups of four on each dive and the profile went like this: surface to a brief stop at 9 metres to check that everyone was okay and then a plunge down to 50 metres in two minutes, ten minutes at this depth and then around 25 minutes for the ascent with a few stops to decompress.
50 metres down...
We took a small sample of a wetsuit with us, this compressed to paper thin material. Two balloons, inflated before the descent, shrank to the size of a fist at 50 metres. We took several dive computers and a wrist mount depth gauge. The computers agreed more or less on the depth we reached, 50.2, 50.4 and 50.1 metres. The analogue depth gauge showed almost 60 metres. Great fun and a safe way to experience chronic nitrogen narcosis.
Clare examining the controls of the chamber
Last week
Evil-eye pufferfish at Long Beach
We had three good days of diving last week and saw a huge ray, several cuttlefish, puffer fish, and of course the regular octopus. There have also been huge schools of yellowtail, the fishermen were netting a few hundred an hour on the northern end of Long Beach. All the dives last week were interesting as a big school of tiny anchovies followed us around.
Two tiny cuttlefish at Long Beach
We dived at Long Beach on the weekend, Corne doing Divemaster training, Marinus and Dean doing dive three and compass work for their Open Water course, and Sarah finishing her Open Water course.
Dean practising compass work under a towel while Marinus and Corne look on
The water was 15 degrees and the visibility was low, perhaps 3-4 metres. We were able to capture a small feeding frenzy on camera below the bow of the wreck where a few species were after the same food, the winner being the shyshark who took it all in one bite. I’ll send a link to the video in the next newsletter.
Sarah impersonating a manta ray
Sunday’s planned boat dives were cancelled due to a red tide hitting the coastline and turning the water into coffee. Clare, Lukas and I did a photography dive to check it out and had less than 2 metres visibility.
This weekend
This weekend will be a little tricky. The Argus Cycle Tour is on and its around the peninsula so there are going to be road closures on Saturday evening and Sunday. Saturday they are closing the road late so we may be able to dive from Hout Bay but will only know on Thursday if this is going to happen.
Sunday is definitely out so we are planning to head off to Gordon’s Bay, weather permitting. The plan is for Grant to take the boat out really early, check out the conditions and then give us a call. You will need to either escape the race, participate, or stay home so why not come to Gordon’s Bay and we go wreck hunting. The diving there is lovely and conditions are good there when our side of False Bay is a mess because of the southeaster. We’re going to make a day of it and have lunch and an ice cream afterwards.
If you want to come diving on Sunday please let me know before midday on Friday because the boat will fill up very quickly with NON-cyclists!
Sodwana
Sodwana divers please send me a list of gear you will require so we can get it planned and arranged. We will have a dinner at our house for the group about 10 days before we leave to get all the final arrangements sorted out. I will let you know amounts owing in a separate mail.
I am going to run two special programs over the next month, one being a package of Open Water, Advanced and a Specialty – e.g. Wreck, Deep or Nitrox – at a half price. Secondly do Discover Scuba Diving any weekday for R350 and if it is for a friend of yours you can tag along for free.
The idea for this experiment was born after a few dives Tony did last year, wearing his dodgy old wetsuit, in very cold water. He’d emerge from the water almost paralysed, unable to speak, shivering uncontrollably. His muscles would cramp, and he’d struggle to breathe for a time. It’d take him quite a long while afterwards to regain his comfort level.
We wondered just how much a lengthy submersion in cold water affects one’s body temperature when wearing a wetsuit (two 5 millimetre layers, plus a hoodie and gloves). I’ve been trying to remember to take a thermometer with me to dives for months, and finally – on the day of two planned dives in False Bay in early February – managed to remember to pack it into my bag.
Since Tony is now diving in a drysuit on deeper dives, the person whose temperature was to be measured was yours truly. I don’t get as cold as he does – I have more body fat, for one thing, and for another I learned to dive in the Cape and haven’t dived much anywhere else… So cold water is the norm for me. I’m also a hot sleeper, if that counts for anything – my body is quite good at warming itself!
Anyway, I took my temperature before and after both dives. My thermometer isn’t terribly reliable so I took a couple of readings each time and averaged them. Temperatures are in degrees celcius. It was a beautiful, sunny day with a warm breeze. The air temperature was about 26 degrees. Here are the results:
Five minutes after surfacing, dive time 38 minutes, depth 21.9 metres, water temperature 8 degrees celcius
34.8
For those of you (like me) who enjoy graphs, here’s one showing the same data.
Graph of body temperature before and after repeated dives
We repeated this experiment on two dives of similar duration and similar temperature in the Atlantic ocean, and the results were also a 1.5 degree drop in body temperature which had almost fully reversed itself by an hour after the dive. We’re also going to repeat this experiment on my husband, in his drysuit, to see whether the temperature changes are as extreme. I know they’re not – this time on the boat ride back to the slipway it was me whose teeth were chattering so much I couldn’t eat my Bar One, while Tony displayed a complete lack of sympathy, all snug in his drysuit pyjamas!
