Odds are that Hout Bay as well as False Bay will offer some decent diving on Saturday. I was out on the boat on Tuesday and Wednesday in False Bay and it was decent.
Hout Bay today was very green. A forecast of howling south easter for tomorrow may clean things up, but I think its best I decide where to go on Saturday after a look tomorrow afternoon. Let me know if you’re keen to dive.
Gull in Lamberts Bay
Diversnight
Diversnight is on 3 November. It’s a night dive with a difference – learn all about it here. We’ll probably be at Long Beach this year to avoid the tricky conditions at the jetty at low tide (squelch!)x – here’s a facebook event to remind you of the date, and where you can post any questions you might have.
Shark Spotters / Little Optimist fundraiser
Monwabisi Sikweyiya, the original Shark Spotter and real-life hero, is participating in a race with a difference, having just learned to sail. He’ll be racing an tiny sailing dinghy against a host of other luminaries at the V&A Waterfront on 20 October. Sponsorships of Monwa will be split between Shark Spotters, who keep False Bay’s sharks and people safe, and The Little Optimist Trust, which assists ill and needy children to survive and thrive. Both very worthy causes! Donate here if you’re keen to lend a hand.
Sunday: Boat dives… which side of the peninsula to be confirmed!
Both Saturday and Sunday have fairly decent weather forecasts. The question will be whether the visibility is better in False Bay or Hout Bay. I will go with diving on Sunday, doing two launches. The first will be for Advanced students, second for Open Water divers. I will decide tomorrow late afternoon where to go. Shout if you’re keen to dive.
Ark Rock
Water
The WWF’s Wednesday Water File this week is about carrying on our water saving ways, even though the situation for the rest of the year has apparently improved (or, an election looms large). There are some great “dry hygiene” tips to help you to keep under the 50 litres per person per day limit. Read all of them here.
Citizen scientists unite!
Are you interested in how you can contribute to science as an ordinary citizen? We’ve shared some local ideas here and here… And now there’s a Citizen Science Fair taking place at Kirstenbosch on 14-15 April. Here’s a link to the event on facebook. Learn about how you can get involved in adding to scientific knowledge, which enables better conservation management decisions and protection of the biodiversity around us. I’ll remind you again of this event closer to the time.
The wind, strong as it has been, has not been from the right direction to create favourable diving conditions. The Atlantic needs good solid south easterly winds and there has not been enough of that yet. Tomorrow and Saturday are forecast to offer up wind from the right direction, but a 3.5 metre southerly swell will make for bumpy conditions even if the water cleans up.
This leaves us with False Bay. The swell direction is not one that is kind to False Bay so I think I will skip boat launches and plan shore dives at sheltered Long Beach on Sunday.
I will also be shore diving with students on Monday and Tuesday. Fun divers are welcome to join us as long as you’re happy to let me focus on my students. If you’re keen to get wet, let me know.
Hobie cat at Fish Hoek beach
Water
I trust that all of you are doing your very very best to save water and that you are thinking about and making plans for Day Zero, which seems more likely than not by this point. The WWF has started a helpful weekly publication to assist everyone through this period – read the first one here (pdf).
Life’s a Beach: Your Round-The-Coast Guide To South African Beaches – Ann Gadd
Compliments of the season. If you’re contemplating which beach to head to for tomorrow’s traditional Boxing Day beach outing, a venerable South African institution, I have just the book for you. The product of a mammoth investment of time (which couldn’t have been all bad) and distance travelled, Life’s a Beach is a handy guide to (possibly, probably, almost) every single beach along South Africa’s coastline.
Life’s a Beach
Each pair of facing pages covers a stretch of coast, and beaches are rated for surfing, alongside information about swimming, kiteboarding, wake boarding, kayaking and canoeing, diving, fishing and hiking. The scuba diving information for the sites around the Cape Peninsula, with which I am familiar, is reasonable, but of necessity very abbreviated owing to the book’s format and primary focus. It goes without saying that you should seek out some local knowledge before diving in an area you haven’t visited before.
Unique experiences and best kept secrets (no longer – haha!) are highlighted, as well as the presence of braai and picnic facilities. Tips on where to go for sundowners are also included. Child friendly activities are mentioned where applicable, too.
Access tips, as well as warnings about rips, pollution, sharks (thank you Shark Spotters!) and whether a beach has Blue Flag status round off the comprehensive information that is provided in a handily concise manner. This book will be extremely useful when you’re visiting an unfamiliar stretch of South Africa’s coastline, and particularly invaluable when it’s a little known and less popular beach.
Get a copy of the book here, or here if you’re outside South Africa.
False Bay is rather pleasant at the moment and Saturday looks to be an ideal day for student dives at Long Beach. We will start at 9.30 am. Sunday has some south easterly wind but I doubt it will be enough to spoil the conditions, so we will launch at 9.30 am from the jetty in Simons Town. Let me know if you want to dive.
CV24 (team Greenings), one of the yachts participating in the Clipper Race, aground at Olifantsbos
Diversnight
Diversnight is this Saturday evening. It’s a night dive, free of charge (unless you need gear), and we are diving at the jetty in Simons Town. We’ll meet at 7.30 pm and get into the water at about 8.00 pm, as the aim is for divers around the world to be underwater at 20:17 (get it?). This year, so far, there are 135 dive sites registered, in 22 countries. Clare might even bake something for when we get out of the water. Join us!
I am having a tough time trying to understand the current weather. Despite days of westerly and north westerly wind the visibility has been very very slow to respond. At Long Beach the visibility today was only 3 metres. It should have have been better.
There is more wind, coming from the right direction, forecast for tomorrow so I am hoping for better viz by Saturday. I have student and Refresher dives to do so I will be at Long Beach from 9.00 am.
Yacht at Long Beach
Clipper Yacht Race news
The Clipper Yacht Race vessels are arriving in Cape Town at the moment, and you can visit them at the V&A Waterfront. There are several excellent events planned while the yachts are here.
There’s also a talk about this round the world race at Hout Bay Yacht Club next Wednesday, 25 October, at 7.30 pm. Details here (on facebook).
Into a Raging Sea: Great South African Rescues – Tony Weaver & Andrew Ingram
I insensitively packed this book for Tony to read while we were aboard MSC Sinfonia for the BirdLife cruise we took in April. It’s a rip-roaring read about various rescues that the NSRI has been involved with over the years, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – Tony wasn’t keen to read about maritime disasters (even ones that ended well) while we were at sea.
One of the things I loved about this book was that it reveals the men and women behind the daring, often dangerous rescues. The rescuers are allowed to recount the events they experienced, using their own words, and this is revealing. These rescuers are not usually lionised by the general public or, as a rule, afforded prolonged media attention, and neither does this book glamorise them or romanticise their achievements. The challenge of the rescues – and occasional raw fear felt by the rescuers – are vividly portrayed. The writing is beautifully matter of fact, without downplaying the seamanship, strength of character and perseverance required to do this (unpaid) work.
It reminded me fondly of the “drama in real life” stories that I used to devour from the pages of the Readers Digest magazines my grandmother used to bring whenever she came to visit. There are many, short chapters, each one offering its own little catharsis. The rescues span South Africa’s coastline, as well as a few other locations, and not all of them are maritime disasters.
Proceeds of this book support the NSRI. Get a copy for yourself, and all your friends. It will entertain anyone who loves a good story of heroism and adventure, and it will encourage anyone who’s feeling jaded about humanity’s capacity for good. It’s an excellent read.
You can find a copy on Loot if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.
North to the Night: A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic – Alvah Simon
North to the Night
Having for some time immersed myself in literature and film about the Antarctic (Endurance, Empire Antarctica, Ice Patrol), I have lately turned my attention to the Arctic. Unlike Antarctica, the Arctic is inhabited by humans, but if you go too far north, you run out of land. This is not a problem experienced by Antarctic explorers.
Alvah Simon and his wife Diana set out to explore the Arctic in their sailboat, and decided (against all advice) to overwinter in a cove in Baffin Bay (which is more like a sea than a bay, and is situated between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic). North to the Night tells the story of their journey to the Arctic, and the dark, freezing winter that Alvah Simon spent there, alone save for his cat Halifax, with his boat trapped in the ice.
The subtitle of the book is apt: the intensity of Simon’s winter experience was such that he underwent a sort of spiritual transformation – perhaps an argument could be made that he started to lose touch with his sanity, or reality. The book thus serves to contrast the intensely practical preparations that the Simons had to make for the voyage, with the epiphanies they experienced as they explored and survived in one of the most challenging environments on earth.
I was frequently frustrated with Simon’s over confidence and willingness to disregard the advice of people with far more sailing and survival experience than he had, but to his credit he seems to be able to see his own stubbornness, and does not attempt to justify or defend it. He is also able to see, in retrospect and to his credit, to what extent he tested his marriage with this journey.
Probably a requirement to embark on this kind of trip is a certain steeliness of will and ironclad self confidence that manifests itself as arrogance, or even foolhardiness. It is also my suspicion that many with similar aspirations don’t return from their adventures, or don’t even set out in the first place. For this reason Alvah Simon’s beautifully written account is particularly precious and rare.
You can get the book here (South Africa), otherwise here or here.
The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage – Anthony Brandt
The Man Who Ate His Boots
The Northwest Passage is a sea route (routes, actually) running between Canada and Greenland, across the top of the North American continent through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and through the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. At its end is the Far East, for hundreds of years the destination of the thousands of sea voyages that made their way around the Cape of Good Hope, and later through the Suez Canal. Its existence was an enormously appealing idea to Europeans, because if the east could be reached by sailing along the top of the world, great savings of sailing time and expense would result.
For a long time the existence of the Northwest Passage was merely a hypothesis, and in the 1800s the British expended vast quantities of energy exploring the Canadian Arctic in search of a sea route. The passage was first traversed in 1850-54 by Robert McClure, by ship and sledge. Roald Amundsen traversed it entirely by ship in 1903-1906. Until this century, the route was not navigable for most of the year owing to the presence of sea ice. Now, thanks (?) to climate change, there is far less ice to contend with.
Sir John Franklin was one of Britain’s most eminent Arctic explorers. He made several trips to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. His final expedition, starting in 1845, ended in the disappearance of his two ships (HMS Erebus and HMS Terror), Franklin himself, and all 128 of the men with him.
The story of his expedition, and the searches for evidence of its fate (upwards of 30 expeditions were mounted to look for him), and the subsequent discovery of what had happened (no spoilers here – it was awful) is related in gripping detail in The Man Who Ate His Boots. Brandt also provides ample historical context, describing prior expeditions which serve to illuminate the British motivations behind their exploration of the Canadian Arctic.
There was a curious mixture of stoic heroism and wild arrogance at work during this period of British history. The rigors endured by early Arctic explorers cannot be overstated – the environment is almost entirely hostile to human survival. The British did not believe that there was anything to be learned from the Inuit, indigenous people who live widely spread across the area, and suffered as a result. As one of the Inuit pointed out when the awful lengths Franklin’s men had gone to in order to try to survive were revealed, his people “know how to starve.”
There is a strong thread throughout this book relating to the colonial attitude towards colonised peoples. A belief prevailed in Britain that, equipped with a shotgun and a good pair of shoes, an Englishman could survive anywhere, and that his Christian piety would serve to protect him and speed his endeavours. (On one of Franklin’s earlier expeditions, which was a complete fiasco largely owing to poor planning, the British officers survived whereas the mixed-race local fur traders – who were doing all the manual work and carrying the supplies – perished. This was attributed to the protective influence of the Christian beliefs of the British men.) It was further reckoned that there was nothing to be gained from studying the techinques of the Inuit. Eyewitness accounts from Inuit turned out to hold the key to the fate of Franklin’s party, although their account was not believed initially (they were dismissed as habitually lying “savages”).
You can read reviews of The Man Who Ate His Boots at the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian. If you enjoyed Endurance, then I recommend you investigate this book. In light of the developing findings of the excavation of HMS Erebus, the material has refreshed relevance today.
At the beginning of this year, the NSRI launched the SafeTrx smartphone app. It is available in other countries, and the NSRI brought it to South Africa. I have been using it since February. It has taken a bit of getting used to with a few missteps on my part, but it now provides great peace of mind whenever I go out to sea. The app is a journey planner for boaters, with the capability of activating emergency contacts should you not return to port on time.
The app is available for iOS and Android systems. Skippers using the app can register a vessel (or more than one vessel) with the app (mine is Seahorse). You can provide a photo of the boat, its registration number, its radio call sign, and whether it has an emergency beacon (EPIRB or similar). When you depart for a trip, you select which vessel you are travelling in, how many passengers, what type of trip you’re doing (diving, cruising, safety, etc.), and an estimated time of arrival. You can also specify the route you’re taking by including waypoints on the trip map.
Once you’ve set up your journey, you can text it to your emergency contact(s). On your return to port, you re-open the app, close your journey, and have the option to text your emergency contacts again to let them know you’re home safely. These are screen shots from Clare’s phone showing the start and end of a trip with six people (including me) on board:
Text messages generated by SafeTrx app
The SafeTrx app comes with a login to the SafeTrx website, which allows you to review your journeys online. You can actually see updates in real time; Clare took this screen shot from the website when I was out at Duiker Island in Hout Bay. When I started to return to Hout Bay harbour, the boat icon could be seen moving (jerkily) towards the harbour entrance.
The website information also allows you to evaluate the directness of the sea routes you follow, which is important when supporting open water swimmers, and gives useful statistics about how far you’ve travelled on the boat and for how long.
Viewing journeys on the SafeTrx website
The first time I used the app, I didn’t set my ETA (estimated time of arrival) correctly, and left it on the default value, which is fifteen minutes after the current time. Not long after that time had elapsed, Clare (my emergency contact when she’s not on board) received a phonecall from Maritime Rescue stating that I was overdue and had she been in contact with me? She assured them that she had and that I was a first time user of the app, hence the mistake! We were extremely impressed by the speedy response, and glad to know that the system works so efficiently. Needless to say I have not made the same mistake again.
I encourage you to visit the NSRI website for more information about the use of the app, including download links. If you see me on the jetty and want to take a look at the app set up on my phone, please feel free to ask!
