Sunday: two launches either from False Bay Yacht Club or Hout Bay depending on what the Atlantic looks like on Saturday afternoon – but Hout Bay looks more likely.
If we go to Hout Bay we will dive the BOS 400 and the SS Maori, and if it’s False Bay I want to dive with the cowsharks and at Alpha Reef.
False Bay is alive right now and a huge pod of dolphins has been seen almost every day somewhere in the Bay. I was out on the Bay on Tuesday and could see them off in the distance slightly north east of Roman Rock. The viz reports have varied wildly this week from 20 metre viz down to 3 metre viz. We have some south easterly wind the next few days and the kind of conditions that make Hout Bay an appealing option for Sunday.
As usual, text or email me if you want to dive. Sodwana people, remember to make your final payments soon please!
A lot of bumpf about dolphins can be found in a variety of forms and forums, not limited to claims of their apparent ability to heal people. Gregg manfully attempts to cut through the noise and make a final pronouncement on whether dolphins really are as friendly and well disposed to the human race as their smiley faces suggest.
Dolphin House is part of a larger, horse shoe shaped reef called Sha’ab El Erg. We did our check dive (the first dive of our liveaboard trip in October 2013) at a site on this reef called Poseidon’s Garden. Because of the shape of Sha’ab El Erg, it is possible to find a sheltered area almost regardless of the conditions. We retreated here towards the end of our trip, on quite a windy day. I should have listened more closely to the briefing, and paid more attention to the name of the reef. A pod of dolphins is reliably sighted here, and indeed, my companions (and everyone else on our liveaboard) did see them, and Tony took this National Geographic quality photo as they swam past:
Dolphins at Dolphin House, Sha’ab El Erg
I surfaced from the dive completely ignorant of any cetacean presence, and, upon going through my photographs afterwards and matching timestamps, I figured out that while the dolphins were swimming by, I was considering a tiny goby, well camouflaged on the sand. Veronica kindly mounted my cylinder, shook me bodily, and gestured enthusiastically, but I interpreted her signals to mean that I had a small leak on my first stage, and thought nothing more of it. Ah well.
Mucous cocoons from parrotfish
In addition to gobys and dolphins, we saw several of the mucous cocoons pictured above. Some species of parrotfish, and other reef fish, extrude mucous from their mouths at night, forming a protective layer around them while they sleep. These cocoons may hide the scent of the fish from predators, or provide an early warning system when the cocoon is breached or disturbed. In the morning the fish simply breaks out of the cocoon and swims away.
Heart made by dive guides from broken coral pieces
Christo, Kate and Tony
That guy from Dumb and Dumber
Kate and Veronica pose for a mother-daughter shot
Flounder
Departing dolphins, and Christo
Chubby cheeks and her camera
The dive site comprised two pieces of reef separated by a wide sand patch with a coral garden on it. We found the current on the sand and the furthest piece of reef to be quite strong, so we stayed mostly quite close to the boat, exploring the section of reef to which we had tied up. Even without the dolphins, this was a lovely dive. Kate spent most of it in a meditative pose…
We launched from OPBC last weekend and took the boat to Justin’s Caves. There is also a small seal colony there that begs to be dived. I know Justin’s can be dived as a shore dive but I am not a fan of big climbs and long swims, and the boat ride there is very beautiful! We had patches of really clean water with a very green surface layer. We enjoyed watching a small, lazy pod of dusky dolphins on the surface, and before the dive we saw a sunfish leap right out of the water, and then disappear into the depths next to our boat. Thanks to Gary Carstens for this week’s newsletter photos!
Distant dusky dolphin
The south easter has blown a lot this week but has suddenly dropped off and once False Bay calms down the diving will be good. The bay does not have that terrible green colour it can sometimes have with a south easter. The Atlantic needs more wind for longer to clean it, so I reckon False Bay will be better for the weekend.
Text message list
In addition to the newsletter I have an sms list that I use to notify divers of planned dives. If you’d like to receive text messages as well when we plan to go out, please email or text me your number (if you text me, send your name too so I know who you are). There are contact details at the bottom of this newsletter, otherwise hit reply.
Memorial
For those interested, on Sunday there will be a procession of boats attempting to encircle Robben Island in memory of Nelson Mandela. This starts at 12pm from OPBC.
Rocksucker at Justin’s Caves
Training
During the months of December and January we will run a Drift Diver specialty course. This is a lot of fun as you can often end up drifting over things on the ocean floor that you had no idea were down there. If you’d like to extend your training with this or one of the other Specialty courses I can teach (there’s a list here), give me a shout.
John Steinbeck was the author responsible for some of the best known works of American 20th century fiction – you may have read The Grapes of Wrath (or The Wrath of Grapes, as my sister is occasionally wont to call it) at high school, for example. The Log from the Sea of Cortez is a non-fiction work, recounting a marine specimen collecting trip that Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts made in the Gulf of California, in 1940. This extremely biodiverse piece of ocean has been the site of studies of Humboldt squid, Shark Men expeditions, and studies of whales.
Ricketts was a biologist, and inspired some of Steinbeck’s fictional characters. The two of them chartered a fishing boat, and sailed from Monterey Bay and spent six weeks making various stops in the Gulf, anchoring the fishing boat and using their unreliable tender to travel to shore and back. They concentrated chiefly on the intertidal zone, and collected samples of as many species as they could find.
To most modern readers, accounts of them trying to spear manta rays and eating dolphin will be upsetting, but in general the curious delight that Steinbeck and his companions took in their discoveries is infectious. More than this, however, I enjoyed the way Steinbeck evoked life on board the fishing boat, the warm evenings, the companionship of the crew, and the sun-baked, sleepy towns they encountered en route. Steinbeck was distressed by Japanese shrimp trawlers wreaking havoc on the ocean floor, and horrified by the tons of bycatch (specimens, to him!) that was thrown back into the ocean, dead and dying.
In between accounts of their life on board the ship, and their forays to shore searching for specimens, Steinbeck ruminates beautifully and gently on man’s connection to the ocean and to everything else, materialism, contemplation, politics, love, freedom, and any number of other lofty themes.
We have thought often of this mass of sea-memory, or sea-thought, which lives deep in the mind. If one asks for a description of the unconscious, even the answer-symbol will be in terms of a dark water into which the light descends only a short distance.
A group of scientists reproduced Steinbeck and Ricketts’s journey in 2004; while the website that recorded their voyage has disappeared from the internet, a description of their expedition has not.
This is a book to be read during a summer holiday, or when one wishes to invoke the feeling of summer, and with ample time to hand for slow-paced philosophical musing. It’s a travelogue that says much about the interconnectedness of things, and more.
You can get a copy of the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.
Tim Ecott, author of much beloved (by me, Tony, and the many friends we’ve lent it to) diving book Neutral Buoyancy, writes for Aeon Magazine about sailfish. Or, he seems to. What he has really written is a beautiful description of encounters with marine life, and how these meetings often seem imbued with great significance – something more than “human meets fish”. For me, Ecott’s writing best captures what it feels like to dive, and if you have someone close to you who longs to understand your attachment to the underwater world, I’d let them read something like this.
Ecott experiences being underwater – the place where by his own admission he is happiest – as catharsis, and it has helped him to deal with the deaths of both his parents, for example.
For me, it is a release from anxiety. It is also an opportunity (arrogantly, I sometimes think) to be truly seen – once every few tens of dives – by a stranger, another living creature that has no obligation to pay any attention to me, and whose natural instinct in many cases would be to flee. These experiences keep me thinking for months afterwards. The first time I felt as though I’d been “seen” by a fish was at Long Beach in Simon’s Town, while Tony did some Open Water skills with a student. It must have been my thirtieth or fortieth dive since I’d qualified. I hovered on the sand, and met a green klipfish (pictured – he was awesome) who was fascinated by my fingers wiggling in my gloves.
Super klipfish in the sea lettuce likes to be tickled
Ecott writes:
In my experience, the connection that I make with marine life is something other, with just a thin thread of recognition. It certainly, on occasion, goes beyond the normal confines of a wildlife encounter. The very term ‘encounter’ smacks of pseudoscience, or the affected dispassion of the wildlife filmmaker. There are times when I feel strongly that these meetings underwater carry all the implied wariness, negotiation and unfulfilled, unknowable expectations that we have when we meet human strangers.
In this description there’s no hint of the pretentious foisting of human upon shark, dolphin, manta or turtle that goes on in many of the more highly publicised encounters between humans and marine animals. It doesn’t matter if no one was around with a camera to document the event – it still happened, and is probably all the more significant for it.
Read the full article here. And look at that magnificent sailfish in the accompanying photograph…
Here’s a short video that we made introducing our youtube channel, which is mostly about diving in Cape Town but also has clips from some of the diving we’ve done in Malta, Sodwana and elsewhere. It shows some of the highlights of diving in Cape Town: seals, cowsharks, and shipwrecks.
Every second day someone has a new inspiration as to how the ancient wisdom and psychic powers of dolphins can make the world a better place. The latest popular idea is that dolphins can heal people with developmental disorders and psychological wounds via “dolphin assisted therapy” (DAT). I found this article about it by neuroscientists Lori Marino, via a write up by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, which probably does it more justice than I’m about to.
Marino explains the reasons for the mystique attached to dolphins thusly:
Much of our attraction to these creatures derives from their appealing combination of intelligence and communicativeness, and the mystery associated with the fact that they inhabit a hidden underwater environment. Dolphins are the Other we’ve always wanted to commune with. And their ‘smile’, which is not a smile at all, but an anatomical illusion arising from the physical configuration of their jaws, has led to the illusion that dolphins are always jovial and contented, compounding mythological beliefs that they hold the key to the secret of happiness.
The idea of dolphins as healers, or having magical powers and somehow being more than they are (sea dwelling mammals with sharp teeth and apparently smiley faces) is not new – it is thousands of years old. Many cultures have ascribed special powers and significance to dolphins (and to cats, but I don’t see anyone charging for Cat Assisted Therapy or CAT). Most recently, the work of neuroscientist slash psychoanalyst John C. Lilly served to cement dolphins’ status as what Marino calls the “ultimate New Age icon[s]”. Initially his research remained rooted in the scientific method, but his dolphin studies (including feeding them LSD and some other unsavoury details that Marino alludes to) increasingly incorporated more and more quasi-spirituality and mumbo jumbo.
Dolphin assisted therapy is big business in a number of countries worldwide. Practitioners are not accredited in any way, and charge huge amounts of money to desperate families hoping to witness a miraculous improvement in the health of their sometimes severely disabled children. Marino is blunt about the exploitative nature of these programs, and the lack of evidence supporting their effectiveness (long quote, sorry, but excellent – emphasis mine):
Meanwhile, many of the parents featured in the enthusiastic testimonials return home to renewed disappointment. Their children fall back into their regular routine, and fall silent again. At first, cognitive dissonance will not allow these parents to consider the possibility that they’ve wasted their money. But later they recognise that nothing has changed, and that the initial improvement was due to the excitement of the trip, and all the personal attention their child received. Many families visit DAT facilities and end up gaining little more than they would have done from interacting with a puppy.
Equally sad are the lives of the dolphins. Hidden behind their smile, and therefore largely invisible to patients and vacationers, captive dolphins spend their lives under tremendous stress as they struggle to adapt to an environment that, physically, socially and psychologically, is drastically different from the wild. The results are devastating. Stress leads to immune system dysfunction. Often they die from gastric ulcers, infections and other stress and immune-related diseases, not helped by their sometimes being given laxatives and antidepressants that are delivered in their food.
The worst of it, perhaps, is that there is absolutely no evidence for DAT’s therapeutic effectiveness. At best, there might be short-term gains attributable to the feel-good effects of being in a novel environment and the placebo boost of having positive expectations. Nothing more. Any apparent improvement in children with autism, people with depression, and others is as much an illusion as the ‘smile’ of the dolphin.
Studies purporting to prove that DAT is beneficial fail to account for the fact that interacting with an animal makes most people feel good, and for the fact that treatments often work because people believe that they will (the placebo effect). I can testify to how lovely it is to be near dolphins – in my case, wild ones. Dolphins are large predators with sharp teeth, and some DAT encounters have resulted in injuries and near drownings. Dolphins can be sexually aggressive, even towards humans (eek!), which I ‘d imagine would turn a DAT session sour in moments. They are also wild animals that don’t belong in captivity, and are stressed and traumatised by the experience. Marino concludes
I understand that desperate people will continue to visit DAT facilities for help with their own illnesses. Sadly, they may never realise that the dolphins they seek help from are likely to be as psychologically and physically traumatised as they are.
Read the full article here. I urge you to check it out – it’s fascinating. Leave your crystals at home.
I follow science writer Ed Yong on twitter, and much enjoy his Phenomena columns hosted at National Geographic. The one we’ll look at today is about dolphins (in keeping with yesterday’s theme).
Yong’s article (published in March 2012) was followed by one written by Tim Zimmermann for Outside Magazine. I only recently discovered Yong’s work on the subject, and I’d recommend it. He seeks to answer the question “Will we ever talk to dolphins?” Yong stresses that
A true language involves small elements that combine into larger chains, to convey complex, and sometimes abstract, information. And there is no good evidence that dolphins have that, despite their rich repertoire of whistles and clicks.
In Florida, the Wild Dolphin Project is endeavouring to communicate with wild dolphins using wearable computers to facilitate interspecies communication. The founder of the project, Denise Herzing, has been swimming with a particular pod of dolphins for nearly 30 years, and it is on this foundation of familiarity that the communication endeavour is built. As I said when I wrote about Zimmermann’s article, there is no suggestion of the kind of hairy legged hand waving that suggests that dolphins hold the secrets of the universe, or can perform miraculous healings. They are simply interesting animals to study.
One Saturday in late October last year we went out to Maori Bay in the hope of a dive on either the SS Maori or BOS 400 wreck. Unfortunately the swell was huge and moving directly into Maori Bay, and the water was green from a developing algal bloom (but still freezing cold). We decided not to dive – the conditions just weren’t good enough.
Dolphins in Maori Bay
While we were still in Maori Bay, discussing our options and checking out the conditions, a pod of dusky dolphins arrived from somewhere north of us, and surrounded the boat. The engines were off and all we could hear was the dolphins’ breath sounds, and the swell slapping on the sides of the boat and breaking slightly on the rocks at the edge of the bay. We sat watching the dolphins for some time. They were playful and very curious, coming close to the boat and filling the bay. There were at least 30 dolphins, perhaps as many as 50. They weren’t on their way anywhere, just milling around.
After quite a while, because the dolphins were so calm and curious, we slipped over the side of the boat to see if they’d like to take a look at us in the water. They did want to. The four of us (Tony was in his drysuit, which isn’t really suitable for snorkeling, so he stayed on the boat with skipper Mark) floated around the boat on snorkel, and the dolphins approached us repeatedly, often swimming in pairs or threes. The water wasn’t too clear so they approached as ghostly shapes in the gloom and then materialised a few metres from us. They’d look at us, and then swim by. We could hear them clicking under the water.
The conditions were far from ideal – you can see how large the swell was and how green the water in the video – but we loved spending time with these animals. They came very close, sometimes closer than arm’s length, but they didn’t touch us (and we didn’t touch them). This was a very unusual encounter. When the boys got out of the water, Odette and I stayed in for a bit, and the dolphins came even closer.
