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Newsletter: Diving

Hi everyone

SAS Transvaal in Smitswinkel Bay — The SAS Transvaal is a huge naval frigate

The weekend was a real humdinger and we started off with a early boat dive out of Miller’s Point, seven of us all together and we visited the wreck of the SAS Transvaal in Smitswinkel Bay. The wreck, 94 metres long, lies in 34 metres of water and the top of the deck is at about 29 metres. Once we were down we dispensed with the deep skills for the guys doing their Advanced course and then cruised down the length of the wreck to the stern before starting back up to the dive boat.

Besides the good viz of about 8–10 metres we were honored with three Southern Right whales waiting for us when we surfaced. There are more photos on the blog and Facebook of these huge whales and tiny divers less than 50 metres apart. The whales don’t know the 300 metres regulations and we were forced to back away from them as they were totally oblivious of us. Coming face to face with such a majestic creature, in its own environment, relaxed and content to have us gawking is one of the many reasons diving is so rewarding. We were treated to them fluking, blowing broad V-shaped water fountains and diving around us. I would guess they were around 12 – 16 metres long. That is a lot bigger than the 9 metre rubber duck we were on. The skipperwas quick to get everyone on board and back slowly away from them.

Southern Right whales and divers in Smitswinkel Bay

Fisherman’s Beach

The day got even better and after lunch we dived and explored the site called Fisherman’s Beach or sometimes called Froggy Pond. Clean white sand, an easy entry and several clusters of rocky reef make this an amazing site. We found a crevice in a small swim through that is home to a huge octopus and and he was very wary of us as I was on the one side of the opening trying to get a picture and Justin was on the other side peeking in. We were also treated to a very amusing feeding frenzy by a school of Fransmadam. I picked up a piece of kelp root and broke it into little pieces and they went wild snatching pieces from each other.

Coraline algae and other life encrusting a kelp stem

Long Beach

Today we dived at Long Beach and were able to confirm the hiding place of the pyjama catsharks with a photo. They are primarily nocturnal but are sometimes seen in the day. Over the last few weeks I have seen them in a small hideout a few times, never really sure of what I was seeing as it is a small opening. Today I put my video light in the opening and and held my camera in the entrance and took a few photos. They were sleeping stacked on top of one another.

We saw quite a few sea jellies, of different varieties, and lots of fish. It seems to be breeding season, as I also spotted a teeming mass of about 30 warty pleurobranchs the size of my fingernail – perhaps they had just hatched.

We were joined by Alexandra who has recently moved to Cape Town and has done lots of warm water diving. So the chilly Cape waters came as a bit of a shock!

Diving this week

Tuesday: Peak Performance buoyancy,

Thursday: Seven gill cow sharks.

Friday: I want to explore the Kalk Bay Harbour wall.

I have students on Saturday and Sunday starting their Open Water course, but we will start after lunch so I am planning another wreck dive to one of the other wrecks in Smitswinkel Bay on Saturday morning. With boat dives I need confirmation by Wednesday night.

For the group joining me in Sodwana don’t forget the dinner on Tuesday for final planning.

Have a good week and try and get wet, it beats sitting behind a desk, tell your boss you need a day of aquatic therapy, then come and dive, you will feel better the next day!!!

Permits: All divers need a permit, so please get yours at a post office near you.

Regards,

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!

Newsletter: Diving this week

Hi everyone

The weekend’s diving was really good. We had a real early start on Saturday, leaving home at 6.00 am for the V&A Waterfront where we boarded a ferry for Robben Island. It was an OMSAC underwater clean up event and I believe the first ever recreational dive with such numbers in the harbour. We dived both sides of the centre jetty, 25 buddy pairs, each armed with a knife, scissors and mesh garbage bag, and there were some really interesting very old glass bottles found.

The weather was fantastic and the water was surprisingly 15 degrees. I was expecting 5 degree water. The bottom is very silty and at some points the visibility was reduced to zero, so bad you could barely make out your hand, but an interesting experience nonetheless. A similar size group dived in the Waterfront near the Table Bay Hotel and found a shopping trolley, bundles of rope and many other strange things.

Today we spent all day in the water in the Simon’s Town Yacht basin, doing Discover Scuba and Open Water dive courses. This is also an interesting dive as you swim along underneath some beautiful boats, boats that look like a million bucks on the surface, yet below the water line they are covered in algae, barnacles and all sorts of little fish scurrying around feeding. We were also joined by Charlie, an SSI Master Diver and job shadow participant, I think he worked harder than he imagined today (thanks Charlie)!

Kitting up — Charlie helping Sediqa put on her weight belt

This coming weekend has a public holiday, something we all love, and I am going to arrange a boat trip for Friday or Saturday, to dive either a wreck in Smitswinkel Bay, or a wreck in Hout Bay depending on the weather. To ensure we get the boat and have the right to choose the dive site requires that we are a minimum of six people. As an Open Water diver you can do a Deep Adventure dive with an Instructor, and anyone joining will receive a signed off deep dive in their log books. This can be used as a credit on the Advanced Course should you wish at some point in the future. So anyone keen to join, please let me know by Tuesday evening.

Full moon is getting close and either Friday or Saturday we plan to do a night dive at Fisherman’s Beach, the white sandy bottom, scattered reef and kelp forests are amazing in the dark, they are pretty awesome by day too!! The white sand reflects the light so it is an amazing place to be at night.

I am starting a new Open Water course this coming weekend and will most likely run this in the afternoons so we will do fun diving in the mornings. It has been a while since we have had conditions suitable for the seven gill cow sharks so this is high on my wish list.

Don’t forget to buy your dive permit at a post office, for the guys going to Sodwana this is very important as they are checked daily.

Yours in diving

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!

Newsletter: Diving

Hi everyone

The Sodwana trip is done and dusted, 10 people, all booked confirmed and raring to go. For those still keen mail me and there is a chance we can accommodate you.

The weekend is going to be busy as we are doing a clean up dive on Robben Island on Saturday morning and I hope the swell has dropped off enough to do a dive with the cowsharks in the afternoon. There will also be a night dive on Saturday night again. We did a night dive on Monday night and had a shoal of hundreds of maasbankers swarming around us for most of the dive, clearly attracted to the many torches, strobes and camera flashes.

Next weekend we have a public holiday on the Friday. I would like to arrange a boat dive for the group, possibly to one of the wrecks in Smitswinkel Bay or a wreck in Hout Bay depending on the wind direction. I will need to book this early in the week to ensure the boat goes where we want it to so please let me know early if you want to dive. Boat dives are normally R250, but if we are a group of six or more I can squeeze them down to R180.

I am starting an Open Water course tomorrow in Danish… Its been a while since I have had a Danish student. Sunday morning I have Discover Scuba Divers in the morning and will start a new Open Water course on Sunday afternoon.

I will also start another Open Water course on Thursday evening with diving on the long weekend for anyone wanting to complete the course in one weekend. It involves theory on the Thursday night, confined water training on Friday after the boat dives and more theory in the afternoon, and then two dives Saturday and two dives Sunday. There are still spots left for this.

Remember, all divers need a permit, get yours at the post office for R85 valid for a year and keep it in your dive bag with your dive gear.

The blog has been updated again, there are lots of random diving information posts about gear, travel, etc. and Clare has done a few book reviews of some of the books we have and what makes them good or bad to own… So feel free to read them, and comment…

I will add a list of diving and ocean related DVDs that we have and how you can get to watch them…

If you dive soon remember the two most important rules, never hold your breath, and never go deeper than the bottom!

best regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog

Diving is addictive!

Why it’s a good idea to carry an SMB

When I met Tony he was living in Mozambique, and when his visa ended he moved to Durban. Around that time we had decided we quite enjoyed each other’s company, so I flew up every second weekend to visit him. He was working at Calypso Dive and Adventure Centre at uShaka Marine World as an Instructor and Divemaster, so I tagged along on dives on the Saturday mornings I was in town. I was a fairly new diver at the time (it was September 2009).

It was the first time I’d come up to Durban to see him, and he had a student who had to do a deep dive on the Saturday morning. The boat was heading out to the Coopers Lighthouse wreck, a mysterious ship lying in 24-32 metres of water whose identity is not certain. Some people think it’s an old whaler, but there are several theories as to its origin. The wreck is thought to be about 100 years old and situated in line with the Cooper Lighthouse on the Bluff.

The rubber duck left the beach at 0700. The sea was looking quite bumpy, and the boat ride wasn’t great. I am not the best sailor, but as long as the boat is moving I’m fine. It’s about a 25 minute ride through shipping lanes, south of Durban harbour.

There was a howling current when we arrived at the site, and while we kitted up on the boat we drifted some way from the shot line hooked to the wreck. The sea was horrible – I alternated vomiting over the side (so embarrassing) with doing up clips on my BCD! Once we were ready, the skipper circled round and dropped us close to the shot line, but on the wrong side – so the current was taking us away from the line rather than towards it. I was with Tony, and his student – who was on the other side of the boat – had managed to get to the shot line and was holding on for dear life. In the current, his body was horizontal, like a flag in a strong wind.

Tony and I swam and swam, for what felt like an hour. We were swimming into the current at about 10 metres depth, but I think we were either standing still or moving backwards (it must have looked quite funny, if you were in that sort of mood). We could see Tony’s student, and we could see the shot line ahead of us, and then it just seemed to vanish. By that time the student had joined us, and the current had taken us out of sight of the line.

I wasn’t quite sure what we would do at that point, but Tony had a plan, which he explained to me later, on dry land. We descended to about 20 metres, and stayed there for about 20 minutes. The three of us were hanging in the blue ocean – no sign of the bottom – surrounded by shoals of fish. We could have surfaced immediately when we lost the shot line, but then we’d have had to spend the duration of the dive sitting on the boat, which was being tossed about like a cork. (I’d already demonstrated low tolerance for this kind of activity by chumming the local fish life while kitting up.) That’s if the boat had even found us – the skipper wouldn’t be expecting divers to surface after only ten minutes, and the conditions were not conducive to him spotting us as soon as we surfaced.

After about 20 minutes we began our ascent, doing a safety stop at 5 metres with an SMB deployed. When we reached the surface, the sea was mountainous. There was no sign of the boat, and even if it had been five metres away from us we’d have struggled to see it because of the size of the waves. Tony clipped our BCDs together so that we would drift more slowly (larger surface area to offer resistance to the current), and told me to keep my regulator in my mouth becuase the waves were so big. (It was on this dive that I discovered that you can vomit through a regulator… useful fact to keep in mind…)

Then we waited. The bright orange SMB stuck up between us, and in between gags I scanned the horizon (which was not very large, thanks to the waves) for the boat. The three of us floated there for 55 minutes before the boat found us. After being hauled aboard like a drowned rat I heaved over the side for good measure and then concentrated on my lollipop.

The skipper told Tony he’d been driving around looking for us, cursing Tony for not having an SMB deployed. We did – but the waves were so big that the boat was practically on top of us before it could be seen. If we hadn’t had an SMB, I very much doubt they would have found us without the aid of the NSRI.

Reels and surface marker buoy (SMB) — Different sized reels and surface marker buoys (SMB)

For the uninitiated, SMB stands for Surface Marker Buoy. They’re generally tubes of orange, red or yellow plastic, that you inflate by inserting your octo or regulator at the bottom, and purging it. It’s generally considered good practice to deploy an SMB at the safety stop when you’re on a boat dive – it warns other boats of your presence, signals that you’re ok, and gives your skipper an indication of where to come and fetch you.

If you get lost on the surface, a SMB is essential. You’re not very visible dressed from head to toe in black, and that orange tube might be the only difference between a very long time drifting on the surface, and a quick rescue. They fold up really small, and with a little practice are very straightforward to deploy. If you’re diving off a boat, or in an unfamiliar location, make sure you pack your SMB.

Newsletter: Treasure Hunting, Whales, Sodwana

Hi everyone

The weekend is closing fast, today we saw 14 whales in the bay, of which four were close to Long Beach and three at the Clan Stuart. They have been hanging around for about two weeks now and don’t look set to leave soon. It is very likely we will dive with them on Saturday as the weather is looking amazing, sunny, 27 degrees and hardly a breath of wind.

I have a posse of Discover Scuba Diving candidates on Saturday, so I will dive long beach in the morning. Afternoon dives will be dependent on where the whales are and we will hopefully be able to get them on camera…on a dive.

Night dive on Saturday as usual, meet at long beach at 6.00 pm. Remember I have torches and cyalumes.

I have good news and bad news:

The good news is that the Sodwana dive trip is filling up fast, the water temperature there today was 22 degrees, flat seas and sunny skies…. Hmm, it’s not too late to decide to come along, a cheaper warm tropical dive trip will be hard to find. We are all arriving in Durban at about the same time so we will share hire cars to keep costs down. There is also an option of diving Aliwal shoal on the Monday… shout soon if you are interested.

More good news, I have been asked if we would be interested in diving the Rietvlei Nature Reserve and water sport facility. Matt works for a company that runs a boat there and they have lost a very valuable stainless steel propeller. It would require some search and recovery techniques and we would be very popular and possibly famous if we find it (the reward may be as much as a case of beer). We would need to be three teams and anyone doing the dive will receive a search and recovery adventure dive log in their log books, free, one less dive on the way to Advanced diver…

Besides, there must be so much treasure down there as it is a seldom dived area… no crocs I assure you. Sunday would be good for this dive.

The bad news is that from tomorrow anyone diving with me will need to ensure their hair is proper, make-up done, dive kit polished and shiny, and they behave underwater, and on the beach… I have a new video camera and will be hunting for footage of you all behaving badly underwater, something I can put on YouTube, or use to embarrass you. If you think you are behaving foolishly and no-one saw, beware, so Tami, no shark wrestling, Clare, no groping of unsuspecting puffer fish, Maurice, no more crayfish in your pockets, and then to all of those that molest poor innocent pipe fish… be warned… luckily the biggest offender will be holding the camera…

Don’t forget all divers need a dive permit, get yours before they get you! Available at the Post Office – take your ID book.

Dive Like a Fish - Learn to Dive Today!

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!

Diving at the Two Oceans Aquarium

For Tony’s birthday in June we spent a Sunday morning at the Two Oceans Aquarium at the Waterfront, diving in the I&J Predator Exhibit and in the Kelp Forest Exhibit. These were two of the best dives I’ve ever done. You need an Open Water or equivalent qualification for the predator tank, though I think you can do a (expensive?) DSD there too. For the kelp forest you need an Advanced qualification, as even though it’s only 6 metres deep, it’s very surgy.

On both these dives, you are on view to the public. It’s fun to wave at the kids through the windows of the displays. They are very excited to see real live SCUBA DIVERS in the water with all the fish. Needless to say, the scuba divers were very excited to be there!

Youtube videos for both dives can be found here.

Kelp Forest Exhibit

We started in the kelp forest – you wind your way up to the roof of the aquarium and drop into the water off a small wooden platform. This exhibit completely is open to the air, since it’s comprised of vegetation and sea creatures found in Cape waters, and because kelp loves sunlight. Kelp also likes water movement, so there are a variety of devices to keep the water moving – dump buckets, a plunger, and some pumps. This makes it quite choppy on the surface and quite surgy below. (Fascinating fact: since kelp cleans the waste products – such as ammonia – out of the seawater by filtering it, a lot of the aquarium’s water is passed through the kelp tank on its way to other exhibits.)

The exhibit has live kelp that is actually growing, which is quite an achievement, but you’re not supposed to hang onto it the way I sometimes do in the open ocean! The tank is packed to the brim with white steenbras (my absolute favourite), red stumpnose, galjoen, zebra, roman, shysharks, fransmadam, and even a gully shark if you can spot him. The fish are huge, many of them much larger than any I’ve seen in the ocean. I was extremely fortunate to be allowed to feed them – I was given a small bag of squid pieces and sardines, and the fish gathered around me as I knelt on the bottom. It was wonderful, so busy and colourful. They weren’t shy, bumping into my legs and BCD once they’d realised I had lunch with me. There’s a hilarious finger-biting episode at around 2:45 minutes in this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kePTwljhsyo&w=540]

The water is cold, and the tank isn’t actually very big. There are nice swim throughs between the rocks (made of fibreglass) and the kelp. The visibility isn’t perfect as the water is so highly aerated, and there are little bubbles of air everywhere. But it’s a thrilling dive and a very rare opportunity to get so close to so many beautiful fish.

Dive date: 6 June 2010

Air temperature: 18 degrees

Water temperature: 14 degrees

Maximum depth: 5.7 metres

Visibility: 10 metres

Dive duration: 27 minutes

I&J Predator Exhibit

The second dive we did was in the predator tank, which is a lot warmer than the kelp forest. On this dive, the Divemaster was armed with a piece of broomstick to “guide” the sharks away if they were to bother us. There are five ragged toothed sharks in the exhibit, none more than two and a half metres long. I think they’re all female. They cruise round and round in circles, looking completely awesome. I spent a long time just sitting on the floor of the tank watching them.

The other magnificent inhabitants of this tank are the sting rays. There’s Olive, a giant (and I mean GIANT) short-tailed sting ray like we see at Long Beach and Miller’s Point in summer, and a whole host of small (the sort of size that makes you want to take them home as pets) devil rays. Tony spent a significant part of the dive (while I was sitting watching sharks) chasing tiny rays around with his camera set on video.

In the corner of the tank we met the loggerhead turtle. She was lying next to a water vent, with her head in the corner. I was allowed to touch her on her neck (it felt really soft, and I felt lucky). I wasn’t convinced that she was a happy girl – she looked kind of depressed. Our DM said she gets more active when the water temperature increases, and sure enough I saw her swimming happily past the glass in the predator tank two weeks ago, when I went for my Saturday morning training at the aquarium.

The tank also contains musselcrackers, garrick, yellowtail, and (at the moment, but not when we dived in it) the remains of a sardine baitball.

The only moment when I got a bit of a fright was when we were surfacing against the rocks in the middle of the tank, and I omitted to look where I was going: straight into the path of a raggie. And sharks don’t generally get out of the way! Fortunately our DM had seen me behaving like a space cadet and “guided” the shark off to the side (since I wasn’t able to interrupt my ascent quickly enough).

Dive date: 6 June 2010

Air temperature: 16 degrees

Water temperature: 18 degrees

Maximum depth: 5 metres

Visibility: 25 metres

Dive duration: 35 minutes

Wreck penetration

Once you embark on the Wreck Specialty Diver course you can choose to include wreck penetration if you wish.

There is more to this aspect than just having a big torch! Passages deigned for walking along become very tight spaces if the ship is lying on its side and a once narrow walk way will have you crawling along the bottom of it while your tank scrapes the top, dislodging rust from above and silt from below – reducing visibility to zero despite your huge light.

Once in a wreck you need to move very slowly as the diver behind you will not have a good time swimming in the silt cloud you create. Your bubbles are also enough to create a cascade of flaked rust in some instances. It is extremely important to use a reel and line, tied off at the entrance. You belay the line at various points to prevent the line following a route you can’t navigate on your return. If you don’t do this, the line will find the shortest route through the wreck behind you – not necessarily person-sized! Cyalumes attached to the line are useful just as a back up torch or three is also an essential requirement.

Always ensure you have studied a drawing of the layout of the sections you plan to penetrate. The MV Aster wreck just outside Hout Bay Harbour was purposely scuttled by divers, for divers. As a result detailed drawings of the interior of the wreck exist, and it is an ideal site for training in wreck penetration.

Bookshelf: Marine outposts and shipping

There’s a romance and fascination to the structures that we build to try to tame the ocean, and a sense of awe demanded by the scale and industry that modern harbours project. Learn about the development of modern shipping, about lighthouses, and more with this list of book recommendations for the shipping buff.

Lighthouses

Harbours and shipping

Sailing

The Complete Yachtmaster

Bookshelf: Two Oceans

Two Oceans: A Guide to the Marine Life of Southern Africa – George & Margo Branch et al

Two Oceans (original edition) — The original edition of G & M Branch's Two Oceans

Two Oceans is one of the better known guides to South African marine life, and rightly so. Tony is on his second copy – the first is so dog-eared that the covers have fallen off and the spine has split in multiple places. That’s the sign of a much-loved and well-used book!

It is extremely comprehensive and illustrated with photographs of the creatures and plants in their natural habitats, which is how you’d see them as a diver.

I’ve used the book after dives, but also as part of the volunteer training course I’m doing at the Two Oceans Aquarium, to identify sea plants and animals in rock pools and in the aquarium exhibits. It’s useful for the whole family, even if you’re not all divers, because it covers shore creatures as well as those found only at depth.

The book has been through several editions. The latest one (see the cover below) is greatly expanded, with more user-friendly contents pages (it’s arranged a lot like bird books, with colour-coded pages).

I use this book a lot; I would recommend it as a first or second purchase for a local diver. It covers the entire coast of southern Africa, so you may not find as much regional detail as you need, but that’s where the SURG publications step in and fill the gap! (More on those later.)

You can buy the book here if you’re in South Africa. Otherwise go here.

Wreck diving

There is just something so intriguing about diving a wreck and this need not be limited to ships alone. This tank wreck in the Red Sea is an amazing dive.

Sunken tank in Jordan — This tank was placed as an artificial reef by order of the King of Jordan, who is a diving fanatic!

Wrecks all have a story to tell. Some are there from navigational errors (like the Kakapo on Long Beach, Noordhoek), some from mechanical faults, some from war battles (like the HNMS Bato off Long Beach, Simon’s Town), many of them as a result of bad weather (like the Clan Stuart) and some wrecks are the result of a planned scuttling to form an artificial reef (for example, the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks).

No matter how it got there, exploring a wreck is fascinating and within months of its arrival marine life forms move in and make the nooks and crannies home. Corals, sponges, sea anemones – to name a few – all appear and grow within months of the wreck’s arrival. Wrecks can sometimes become home to more species than you see on a nearby reef purely due to the wreck’s size, giving juveniles far more protection from rough weather than a reef can.

Despite the allure of the many opening and overhangs, wreck diving has its own set of hazards and without proper training it is important to stay out of any overhead environments. It is also critical to avoid becoming entangled in the myriad of cables, ropes, chains and often fishing tackle that can sometimes be draped over a wreck. When you start wreck diving you will most likely be content to swim around the outside and be awed by the size of some wrecks, once majestically sailing the seas, brightly painted and full of noise and life. Now they lie silent, rusty and overgrown, but still teeming with life.

A powerful dive light is a must if you want to peer inside holes and hatches, but be wary as your light can often disturb some huge creature who will buzz by you startled and dazed by your light, as you are blocking the exit.