The people of Malta are predominantly Catholic, and the islands are full of visual reminders of their faith. One we particularly liked was a magnificent statue of Jesus Christ, purposely placed in the ocean as an attraction for scuba divers.
The statue stands in a natural amphitheatre of rock
The three metre tall, 13 ton statue by Maltese sculptor Alfred Camilleri Cauchi, made of concrete-covered fiberglass, was commissioned to commemorate the 1990 visit of Pope John Paul II to Malta. After being blessed by His Holiness, the statue was placed on the seabed near St Paul’s Islands as an attraction for divers.
Christ's face is upturned towards the surface (or heaven, if you prefer)
Ten years later the statue was moved to its current location about two kilometres offshore (off Qawra Point) near the (deliberately scuttled) wreck of the Imperial Eagle. The Imperial Eagle is a ferry that used to travel between Malta and Gozo, and was scuttled in July 1999. The statue was moved because the water clarity in its original location had deteriorated to the extent that it was no longer being dived. Explanations for this include increased boat traffic in the area (and possible dumping of waste from the vessels), and the nearby fish farms.
The statue is to scale, and three metres tall
It’s a tranquil and serene environment, and we found the statue, which is somewhat encrusted with sea plants and algae (but not nearly as much as it would be if it were in the waters of Cape Town!) quite beautiful and compelling.
Tony hovers behind the statue for scale
The statue stands on white sand in a natural circular amphitheatre, at a depth of about 28 metres. It is a short swim from the statue to the nearby Imperial Eagle. Dive details shown below are for a boat dive we did on both sites.
The large plinth rests on white sand
Dive date: 3 August 2011
Air temperature: 31 degrees
Water temperature: 18 degrees
Maximum depth: 37.0 metres
Visibility: 30 metres
Dive duration: 35 minutes
Tony swims off towards the Imperial Eagle shipwreck
Clare and I have just returned from an epic trip where we visited Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Malta. In total we took close to 10 000 photos above and below the surface, and close to 10 hours of underwater video. We were fortunate with the weather and only had a few hours of rain whilst driving from Germany to Denmark.
Entrance to one of the many cavesWreck penetration
Whilst in Malta, we had 30+ degrees celcius sunny weather with slight breeze every day and of the 10 dives we did, 9 were to between 30 and 40 metres with water temperatures around 23-25 degrees celcius, apart from a deeper dive where the temperature dropped to 18 degrees inside one of the wrecks. The visibility was on average 30 metres. We tried some cave diving and I now understand the allure of cave diving far better than before I had tried it. We saw amongst other things free swimming bluefin tuna, possibly escaped from the many tuna farms in the ocean just off the islands, and on the wrecks we saw barracuda.
Clear water at 32 metres
Back to Cape Town diving… The weather for the weekend does not look at all good. There is a cold front coming tomorrow bringing with it a 7 metre swell that will ruin the weekend’s diving prospects. This drops off on Sunday and every day next week looks good at this point. I am busy with a few courses so I will dive most of the days next week.
Bluefin tuna
The summer season is fast approaching and things get a lot busier so August is possibly the last chance this year for some ”special offers”.
To have the right qualifications to dive on most of the best wrecks in Cape Town a Nitrox and Deep Specialty are good qualifications to have. A wreck specialty is required to penetrate wrecks and the best wreck in Cape town for this is theMV Asterin Hout Bay. If wreck penetration is on your bucket list mail me and we can get started. Don’t get me wrong here, Cape Town has many many stunning dives for the Open Water diver and a list can be found here, but if deep or wreck diving are your thing then make sure you have the right qualifications, they do improve your diving skills, make you a safe diver a safer buddy and give you a rush.
I’ve been on a bit of a Richard Ellis binge of late – he’s the man who wrote a super book on great white sharks that started me and Tony off on our learning curve about those creatures.
In this book Ellis tackles the tuna – focusing on the bluefin, but also covering yellowfin, skipjack and albacore. These fish are magnificent – breathtakingly so – and grow (when left in peace) to the size of compact cars. They can swim at incredible speeds for sustained periods of time, and are considered the pinnacle of piscine beauty, economy of form, and utility.
Unfortunately their meat is prized to a manic extent by the inhabitants of Japan, and to an increasing degree by the rest of the world’s sushi-loving inhabitants. This has led to disastrous overfishing, and, in the case of Japan and France, blatant disregard for the quotas set by ICCAT, the laughable regulatory body that has so far demonstrated astonishing incompetence and corruption in the management of the stocks of this glorious fish.
Ellis covers tuna biology, ranching (like farming except that instead of spawning, juvenile tuna are captured and fattened before slaughter for market – as seen in Tuna Wranglers), sport fishing (repugnant), commercial fishing, and everything in between. This is a fascinating and extremely comprehensive book. The photographs of anglers with their tuna are both incredible – a 2 metre long tuna is a thing of beauty – and tragic. Hunting a wild creature for sport – whether with a rod and reel, a rifle or any other weapon – to me represents the nadir of human nature and I cannot respect or condone it.
In the concluding chapters Ellis deals with the issue of mercury in tuna meat. Expelled into the atmosphere by human industrial activity (particularly by coal fired power stations which can release of the order of 100 tons per year), mercury is ingested by bacteria in the ocean, transformed into the toxic methylmercury, and makes its way up the food chain. Large, long-lived top predators end up with the most mercury in their bodies. Ellis cites several examples of individuals who took up diets high in tinned or fresh tuna and sustained mercury poisoning, the damage from which can be irreversible.
The book is available here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here. If you want to read it on your Kindle, go here. It’s a cracking good read and will put you off eating tuna – whether for your own health or for the fish populations’ – for life.
Also called perlemoen, abalone were among the creatures I was most excited to see when I started diving. As a child, I’d collect their shells on the beach at Betty’s Bay, and admire the mother of pearl interiors. I enjoyed ranking them in order of size, and specially loved the tiny, tiny shells the size of a thumbnail.
Empty abalone shell in Simon's Town harbour
The holes running along the edge of abalone shells are for respiration, used to eject water from the gills. Baby abalone are called spats, and abalone only reach reproductive maturity at the age of about seven years. It takes an abalone about 30 years to reach a size of 18 centimetres, and they become more and more prolific breeders as they increase in size. I am always awed to see a large specimen on a dive… Sometimes they’re almost as old as I am.
Walking abalone (with passengers) at Long Beach
When we’ve dived in relatively undisturbed place, such as the North Battery Pipeline and Simon’s Town Harbour, we’ve found huge abalone clustered together. Fisherman’s Beach is also a favoured hide-out. They usually hold fast onto rocky outcrops, but I’ve seen them on the sand at Long Beach, motoring along leaving a wide trail in the sand behind them. They are preyed on by octopus, occasionally, but not much else.
Abalone in Simon's Town harbour
They are herbivores, and eat kelp leaves – trapping them under their shells as they float by. Sometimes it’s a feast for the whole family if a single abalone manages to capture a large frond.
Abalone in the harbour at Simon's Town
Abalone meat is considered an expensive delicacy in many other parts of the world, and particularly in Asia. The snails have large, fleshy feet which need to be pounded vigorously to tenderise them. I found this guy tipped over on a dive at Long Beach – I thought his foot was beautiful. I took this photo, and then turned him over. I hope he wasn’t sun tanning or something!
Upside down abalone (I turned him back over)
This page on the Department of Environmental Affairs website makes for sobering reading. For the last few years, no permits have been issued for perlemoen harvesting. They used to be managed on the same basis as West coast rock lobsters, but stocks are too low at the moment.
There are over 15 abalone farms in South Africa of which (at least) three abalone farms are in the Hermanus area: Abagold, TerraSan, and HK Abalone Farm. There are also several up the West Coast between Saldanha and St Helena Bay. such as Abulon Holdings. I’m itching to visit one of them, and you can be sure that I’ll update the blog when I do. As you can imagine, it’s a lucrative business, and several companies have sprung up to support the burgeoning mariculture (sea farming – compare the word agriculture, bearing in mind that mares means sea in Latin) business. One of them is Marifeed, which supplies abalone feed to the abalone farming industry.
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.
