The Coastal Guide of South Africa – Lynne Matthews
The Coastal Guide of South Africa
This is a slim guidebook that will be useful to anyone living at the coast or enjoying a holiday there. Covering all of South Africa’s almost 3,000 kilometres of coastline, this book has sections on all the flora and fauna found between the dunes and the ocean. It is by no means exhaustive, and a local guide will always have more information on a particular locale, but for scratching the surface or beginning to learn about coastal life forms, this is an excellent start.
When I was younger we had giant Reader’s Digest guidebooks to help with road trips and visits to the shore, and this is a super scaled-down little cousin of those faithful hardback volumes. The introductory section deals with tides, currents, and the different zones along our coastline. There are sections on plants, birds, fish, invertebrates, reptiles and mammals. The species identification information is good, with distribution, size and the main identifying features provided, at a minimum.
There is also a section on fishing regulations. I’m not a fisherman so I can’t comment on whether it’s even worth putting these in a book – are they static, or subject to frequent change at the whim of DAFF? There is also a section on SASSI – how to eat seafood sustainably. If I had to add a section, I’d ask for something on ocean safety – rip currents, drinking and swimming, not wearing sunscreen, boating foolishly, scuba diving in boat traffic without a buoy – all the things that keep the NSRI and lifesavers busy over the festive season. One can’t be reminded often enough.
The book is mainly illustrated with line drawings and paintings, as well as several maps. If you have space in your bag for a larger format book, I’d recommend Southern African Sea Life: A Guide for Young Explorers over The Coastal Guide of South Africabecause it’s more practical and detailed, but if you don’t have children you might feel shy whipping that one out while on the beach!
A DVD – either a movie, a series box set, or a documentary – is not a bad gift idea!
Dive gear
Smaller items of gear such as cutting tools, masks, clips and other accessories won’t break the bank. Contact Tony for some ideas and suggestions as to what to get and where to find it.
Keeping it local
Support some local entrepreneurs!
Rochelle at Oceanscape sells gorgeous ocean-themed clothing at her online shop.
Kerri now stocks a range of ocean-themed jewellery at various markets. Check out Accessories for Aquaholics.
Thinking outside the box
What about a day trip to Cape Point, a donation to a worthy cause on behalf of your loved one (the NSRI is always first on our list), an underwater photo shoot, or (if you take photographs or can find a photographer whose work you like and isn’t too expensive) a framed or mounted picture of some of our local marine life?
You can also refer to Christmas gift guides from previous years (2011, 2012 and 2013) for more ideas. Be safe this festive season!
The NSRI recently assisted the occupants of a 5.5 metre rubber duck (for scale, almost a metre shorter than Seahorse, which is rated for seven passengers and a skipper) when their single engine failed off Gansbaai. There were eleven divers on the boat, and it was 11.30 pm when they were rescued. The NSRI report of the incident specifically states that the divers were “recreational”, but it is highly likely that they were poachers, illegally harvesting abalone or possibly rock lobster.
The NSRI report was shared on a number of facebook pages maintained by members of the local scuba diving community (including ours). One comment thread in particular, in one of the groups where the report was shared, made me very sad. Multiple commenters suggested that the NSRI should have left the poachers out at sea to be eaten by sharks, and there was even distasteful speculation about the race of the men who were rescued. It’s very easy, on the Internet, to write that you think someone should be abandoned to die, or that they deserve it – but that doesn’t make it a right sentiment. The speed at which we get updates on social media make it easy for us to fail to engage with the nuances of events and situations, and rather to pass swift judgments and wish death on some mother’s child.
Sea Rescue is the charity that saves lives on South African waters. Our crews put their lives at risk in order to save the life of a stranger. They will voluntarily go to sea in the worst conditions, to help anyone in need.
Nothing there suggests that they will first pass judgment on the activity you’re engaged in, or on how wise you were to go out in such bad sea conditions, and then decide whether to assist or not!
This abalone is several years old
Fisheries management in South Africa has been performed with aggressive incompetence for the past five or more years, with a focus – by the authorities – on personal enrichment and the fruits of corruption. (If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you read the whole of the Feike Management blog, and then start making serious plans to get off the grid, given that the former minister of fisheries is now brokering nuclear deals with that global pariah, Russia.) Management of our abalone stocks has been done on the basis of wishful thinking and illegality.
The communities whose young men choose poaching as a career are poverty-stricken and in many cases beneficiaries of laughably small quotas to catch stocks of fish that no longer exist. It is an economic choice for them, borne of desperation, and often the men who harvest the resource only get a fraction of the ultimate monetary value of the product. An article in the Mail & Guardian by Kimon de Greef, who studied abalone poaching for a Masters degree in conservation biology, explains the economics of the process:
He explained his poaching work as we sat amid the plants and the Rasta, whose name was John, continued preparing his spliff. David told me he skippered a boat for a white diver who had relocated to Hout Bay to target reefs on the Cape Peninsula. Another local diver – whom by chance I’d already interviewed – worked with them, as well as a bootsman, or deck assistant.
The divers paid David R20 a kilogram of perlemoen they harvested; the bootsman earned half as much. The divers also hired carriers to run their catch to middlemen in the community, who paid prices of between R200 and R250 a kilogram. These middlemen sold the product on to buyers from larger criminal syndicates, who ultimately controlled the illicit trade to the Far East.
On a good night, after expenses, the two divers could earn R10 000 each, with David taking home R4 000.
As scuba divers, we tend to see this issue quite simply: someone is illegally taking beautiful, unique creatures out of the ocean! We forget that the communities engaged in these activities are far less privileged than we are, and that this is a complicated, historically fraught issue that won’t be solved by leaving a boatload of poachers to be swept out to sea in the dark of night.
I suggest you read de Greef’s article. It humanises the poachers – puts faces on them – and helps to tease out some of the more complex issues at play regarding this valuable marine resource. Johnny Steinberg did a comprehensive and more detailed review of the illicit abalone trade some years ago, which is a longer read if you’ve got time.
Tony and I had lunch in Hout Bay recently, and while we were sitting at The Lookout Deck waiting for our food, we had lots (and lots and lots) of time to contemplate the beautiful view of Hout Bay, the yachts, and the mountains beyond. The NSRI was out and about doing training, and the highlight of our afternoon was watching this nifty bit of parking, with the RIB pushing the hard boat along from a side by side position. If those aren’t the right technical terms for what was going on, the complaints department is behind the third door to the left.
We’ve been getting visits to our blog from people wanting to find out about an incident involving a capsized whale watching boat and a monster shark called Submarine, that supposedly took place at Shark Alley off Gansbaai in South Africa. The reason for these queries is a misleading pack of lies broadcast under the title Shark of Darkness as part of Shark Week 2014.
To clear up any confusion you may have as to what is true and what is not about Shark of Darkness, I urge you to read Michelle Wcisel’s post on the subject at Southern Fried Science, and this post by Andrew Ingram of the National Sea Rescue Institute, distancing the organisation from the documentary. Michelle’s post points out how utterly distasteful and inappropriate it is for Discovery to exploit a real event, in which two people died, for ratings, while spinning a web of lies around the real circumstances of the incident.
But since you’re here, and may have arrived here searching on a query like “whale watching boat capsizes in shark alley with passengers” looking for sensational news capitalising on the death of two people, let me clear up some things.
There are a few locations called Shark Alley in South Africa. The most famous one is at Dyer Island near Gansbaai (a two hour drive from Cape Town) where a seal colony attracts great white sharks to aggregate. White shark cage diving trips are held there, and whale watching trips.
No whale watching boat capsized at Shark Alley next to Dyer Island.
No great white shark – least of all a fictional monster called Submarine – harrassed passengers of the capsized Miroshga in Hout Bay.
Dyer Island is not in Hout Bay.
Two passengers on Miroshga died, but not because of marine life. A few passengers spent a couple of hours underwater inside the air pocket of the ship’s hull, but were rescued by the heroes of the NSRI (South Africa’s version of the Coastguard, funded by the public) in appalling conditions.
I even made you a helpful map (click to embiggen):
Helpful map for Shark Week: Shark of Darkness fake documentary
In short, Dyer Island, and white sharks, are not in Hout Bay, where the whale watching boat capsized. See how far apart the red stars are on the map? There is also no white shark called Submarine.
If you’d like to learn something proper about sharks and be a force for good in the world, go read Demon Fish or Sharks and People.
We don’t have a television, and I’m not even sure if Shark Week gets broadcast in South Africa, so I haven’t seen this show. But from the discussions I’ve had the misfortune to witness on facebook and other social media, it seems that Shark Week is becoming an annual opportunity to swill ignorance and sensationalism around the trough for a public that is ill equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. Sadly, attempts by scientists and science communicators to provide corrections and factual information to counter Discovery Channel’s deliberate misinformation only serve to generate more publicity for the spectacle, and ultimately, it seems, to benefit Discovery and their bottom line most of all.
Conditions that make for great surfing generally mean poor diving, and vice versa.
The second point above is exactly why reading a book on what makes waves turned out to be an extremely enlightening experience.
Dr Tony Butt lives in Spain on the exposed north Atlantic coast (good waves), but apparently spends the southern winter in Cape Town, surfing Dungeons where possible I imagine! He is a physical oceanographer. In Surf Science he explains where waves come from, and what leads to different kinds of surfing conditions.
His explanation of the origin of the waves that reach the coast starts at the very beginning, with an explanation of the drivers of weather systems. This section caused me to jump up and down with excitement, and to speak many long sentences to long suffering husband Tony. His expository method is easy to follow at each step, and for the first time I feel that I have a grip on . First we build up a mental model of the earth as a stationary globe with no land, and then gradually add rotation about its own axis, rotation around the sun (seasons), and the presence of continents to the model. At each step further understanding of the average world weather patterns (north Atlantic high, roaring forties, and so on) is improved.
The book goes on to cover the propagation of swell, and what happens when waves arrive in shallow water, break, and possibly allow surfing. Butt also deals with water temperature, tides, and rip currents, and concludes with a few chapters on surf forecasting models and how to read them. Throughout the concepts are illustrated with straightforward diagrams, and end-of-chapter boxes contain formulae for the mathematically inclined.
This is a shorter and more richly illustrated book than The Wavewatcher’s Companion, serving a different audience. Both surfers and divers can benefit from Surf Science, as well as the yachting fraternity, NSRI crew members, and anyone else who has an interest in the mechanics of the ocean. This volume has more the flavour of a textbook, with no unnecessary information, anecdote or humourous asides. There is a place for both books!
You can get a copy here or here, or here (if you’re in South Africa).
The conditions forecast for this weekend is not very different from the weather we had last weekend and as the weather experts say,we are in a seven day cycle. This has been very evident as we have had some really stunning midweek diving days with great conditions and good visibility. My guess is that Saturday will be lousy and although the weather clears on Sunday, it does so in the late afternoon only. Not to mention there are a few drastic swell direction changes starting tomorrow… So I reckon its a stay home weekend.
Sunrise over Sun Valley
Things to do
There are a lot of things to keep you out of trouble if you aren’t diving:
Panorama of False Bay (left) and the Atlantic (right)
Conditions
When a surf school reckon this weekend’s surfing is likely to be the best surf this year I take it as a sign the diving most likely won’t be that great. A 6 metre swell rolls ashore this weekend and if you look here you can see it has already begun to arrive. I know the debate as to whether it will affect False Bay or not can go on forever I think I will give launching a miss.
So our weekend plans are training in the pool on Saturday, and on Sunday big wave surfing at Long Beach, or diving if conditions permit. We will hope the swell is not to hectic and that the rain doesn’t wreck the viz and do two shore dives!
Coelacanth talk
Dr Kerry Sink of SANBI and the SeaKeys Project will talk about the history of the coelacanth, right up to the present day, at Kirstenbosch on Friday 1 August. The evening aims to raise funds for the NSRI. More information here.
Secret dune field near our house
Sevengill cowsharks
A total of twenty five sevengills have been tagged to date, and in time we will have a better understanding of where they go inside and outside False Bay. Did you know that thirteen of them were caught (and tagged and released) in a fishing competition held at the Strand recently (more information on the South African Shark Conservancy facebook page)? They definitely wander further afield than just Shark Alley! Remember to log your sightings of sevengill cowsharks on the Spot the Sevengill facebook page. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on our protocol for diving with cowsharks, which we took the time to write down recently!
Permits
Most of the False Bay dive sites we visit lie within a Marine Protected Area (MPA). This means that limited consumptive activities (such as fishing) are allowed, and also that as scuba divers, we need a permit to dive there. The permit costs in the region of R100, is valid for a year, and can be obtained at the Post Office on presentation of your ID book and the fee in cash. Please make sure yours is up to date!
Shark Alley is a special and unusual dive site just south of Millers Point. It is an aggregation site for broadnose sevengill cowsharks, predators who feed on seals and a variety of other animals. They can grow to three metres in length. These sharks seem to use this site as a resting area (though we aren’t sure – research is ongoing) and their behaviour is typically docile and relaxed. For this reason it is a great place to dive, as the sharks come close enough to get a good look at them but do not behave in a threatening manner.
There has never been a serious incident involving a diver and a shark at this site, but there have been a few incidents. Clare has had her pillar valve gnawed on by a feisty young male shark while on a dive here a few years back, and early in May a diver was bitten on the arm by one of the sharks. That latter bite made the newspaper (the shark drew blood and the NSRI was summoned), but I am sure that there have been other more minor incidents here that didn’t get reported.
Young cowshark
This got me thinking about a protocol for diving with these animals. Shark dives all over the world are governed by safety protocols and guidelines, usually put in place by dive operators themselves (examples here and here). We do have a set of standards that we adhere to when visiting this site and mention in dive briefings, but I’ve never written them down all together before. I am a firm believer in self regulation, whereby the industry regulates itself so that we don’t end up with a bureaucrat in an office telling us we can’t dive with cowsharks without (for example) a special permit, or (heaven forbid) ever again!
Cowshark passing a diver
So here’s our protocol – how we choose to regulate ourselves when diving this site. It’s not a set of hard and fast rules that everyone has to follow, but it’s how we choose to approach dives at Shark Alley, a little bit like Underwater Africa’s diver code of conduct, but for cowshark diving. You are welcome to use these principles yourself, and I’d like to hear any suggestions you have to improve them or for points I may not have thought of.
Do a positive entry (i.e. with your BCD fully inflated) if you are diving off the boat, so you do not risk landing on a shark in mid water. If there is a thermocline, the sharks typically swim above it, and may be shallower than you expect.
Descend slowly in a controlled manner, looking below you at all times. Ensure that you are carrying sufficient weight (you should be able to kneel on the sand if necessary).
Do not feed the sharks. Don’t carry anything edible (sardines, for example) in your BCD, and do not chum from the boat. This includes washing the deck off at the dive site if you’ve just been fishing or on a baited shark dive. Chumming is both illegal (you need a permit) and unsafe, especially if there are divers in the water.
If you have students in the water, perform skills away from the sharks (if possible, avoid conducting skills at this site).
Some sharks will show a keen interest in your camera and flash or strobes. Do not antagonise them by putting a camera directly in their face. If a shark is showing undue interest in your photographic equipment, hold off taking pictures for a moment while it swims away.
Move out of the sharks’ way if they swim towards you. (Here’s a video of Tami doing just that.) Cowsharks are confident and curious, and often won’t give way to divers. Respect their space and move far enough away that they won’t rub against you or bump you as they swim by.
Be alert for any strange behaviour by an individual shark or the sharks around you. Be aware of your surroundings and don’t become absorbed with fiddling with your camera or gear. If a shark does become overly familiar (bumping or biting), gather the divers together in a close group and abort the dive in a controlled manner.
Do not dive at this site at night or in low light. This is probably when cowsharks feed (though we aren’t sure), and as ambush predators their behaviour is likely to be quite different in dark water when they’re in hunting mode.
Do not dive at this site alone. When diving in a group, stay with the group and close to your buddy.
I am not writing this protocol down to make people afraid of diving with cowsharks in Cape Town. But I do think it’s important to remember that this is a dive that needs to be taken seriously, with safety as a priority. Because we can visit this site whenever we want to, it’s tempting to become blasé about what an amazing experience it is, and also about the fact that these are sharks that need to be respected.
In conclusion! Unlike great white sharks, cowsharks (and blue sharks, and mako sharks, and and and…) are not protected in South Africa, so it’s not illegal to fish for them in permitted fishing areas (i.e. outside no take zones, etc). One of the cage diving operators in Gansbaai even used to use cowshark livers in his chum… If you want to make a difference in the lives of cowsharks and ensure they’re still here for us to dive with in future decades, consider writing a letter to the relevant government minister (make sure it’s the current one, in the new cabinet) and also to the shadow minister from the opposition party, requesting protection for more shark species in South African waters.
When I was a university student (in the late 1990’s), my friends and I misspent much time fooling around on the internet. I distinctly remember watching (repeatedly) a video of an exploding whale: a piece of 1970 news footage showing a dead eight ton sperm whale being blown up with 500 kilograms of dynamite in order to remove its remains from a beach in Oregon. The effort was not entirely a success. Chunks of blubber were showered over a considerable radius, damaging vehicles and causing onlookers to run for cover. (I feel like part of internet history for having enjoyed this video; check out Andrew David Thaler’s piece on the relationship of exploding whales to the history of the web.)
Whales do not only explode because they’ve been seeded with half a ton of dynamite. When a whale dies of natural causes (or – more likely – from ingesting plastic, or being struck by a ship), its thick layer of blubber keeps its internal body temperature high for far longer than would normally happen when an animal (or human) expires. This allows for a decomposition process called autolysis, in which the whale’s tissues are broken down by the enzymes and chemicals inside its body, releasing gases such as ammonia and methane into the whale’s body cavity. The whale can become massively distended by these gases, and may eventually explode (as a side note, this was one of the dangers faced by flensers and the other men who dismembered whales caught during pre-industrial whaling times). Here’s a recent news report about a Canadian town facing this risk, which seems to be generally overstated.
Exploding whales have re-entered the public consciousness several times over the last few months. The engineer responsible for the 1970 exploding whale passed away in October last year prompting a wave of reminiscence, and a new generation of internet users have been able to marvel over the piece of beauty that is the KATU news broadcast showing the carcass exploding in the background. Several dead whales are washed ashore each week – a couple of blue whales in Canada caused the most excitement recently (and spawned hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com), but a check of google news alerts shows that this is far from an unusual event.
What does all this mean for you?
No one likes to see a beached marine mammal. It’s upsetting to see a creature that is so easy and graceful in the water, out of its element on the beach. Familiarise yourself with the protocol for dealing with stranded marine mammals if you live near the coast. There are some (American) examples of what to do here and here. In South Africa, the NSRI and local law enforcement will typically handle strandings, possibly with assistance from the public. You should follow their instructions, and stay back if they ask you to. You should also remember that only very rarely is their a happy ending for a stranded marine mammal – typically animals that end up on the beach are sick, weak, or otherwise compromised, and – horrible though it may seem – euthanasia is the kindest thing that can be done for them. It is also likely that the whale will be sampled for scientific research purposes; it is rare for marine mammal researchers to be able to have such ready access to their research subjects! Whales on the beach are a boon for science.
If a stranded marine mammal dies, you will be relieved to know that the state of the art technique for dealing with dead whales on the beach no longer involves explosives. It entails loading them on a truck and driving them to a landfill. In areas where there aren’t too many sharks inshore, they can even be buried on the beach or towed back out to sea. The risk of a whale exploding on the beach is really low, and there are actually not too many reports of this happening.
If you actually want to know more about exploding cetaceans, the Atlantic has a lovely round-up of the phenomenon of exploding whales, but be warned – it’s not for the squeamish. Simon Lewster explores the changing symbolic import of whales, as they evolve from symbols of the global conservation movement to harbingers of doom, their bodies loaded with toxic chemicals absorbed from the oceans around them. For a more general overview, here’s a good place to start: hasthewhaleexplodedyet.com. You could also visit this site, which looks as though it arrived in a time machine, and is dedicated to exploding whales.
Finally, for a reminder that marine mammals have been ending up on the shore since they started to live in the sea (and that people have never quite known what to make of the phenomenon), here’s a news report about an old Dutch painting that was recently restored to reveal a whale lying on a beach. Previous viewers of the painting had been puzzled by the small crowd gathered around an empty piece of sand; a whale had been painted over, perhaps because the subject matter was deemed too macabre.
