Everything ocean related, with a special focus on scuba diving the rich coastal waters of Cape Town, South Africa.
On one of the relatively few days this past winter (early in August) when we had really good visibility, the western side of False Bay was full of compass sea jellies. I filmed some of them from the boat while Jerrel and Nick completed their dive. Watch out for the “shark” at the end!
[youtube=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHH2aYqO6zU&w=540″]
Peet made this amazing video while diving Vulcan Rock with us. There is a huge cave with several entrances at the bottom of the reef, and he went inside to check it out.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPLmfoJnhqU&w=540″]
The dive site Checkers, that I visited for the first time on our most recent trip to Ponta do Ouro in southern Mozambique, is notable for the amount of plate coral that can be seen there. Unlike many of the other sites in the area, Checkers has quite dramatic topography, changing depth over relatively short areas. Here’s a short panorama video I shot at one point during the dive. There weren’t many fish around at this point, but you can see the plate coral and the slope of the reef.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQe0vUQE8pc&w=540″]
You can also see, right at the end, one way of diving with your main squeeze!
We had amazing experiences with potato bass last time we dived in Ponta do Ouro, encountering them most notably at reefs called Texas and Doodles. This time, Doodles did not disappoint us. There is a one-eyed potato bass (his eye was caught on a fishing hook) who is very comfortable around divers, and when we met him this time he calmly swam through the group. Check how large he is compared to Laurine!
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gr-bkBPNx0&w=540″]
He was accompanied by a school of juvenile kingfish – the yellow and black ones – that will grow into amazing silver swimming machines similar to these queenfish. He also had a remora in his entourage (visible in the picture above), which could not seem to get a grip on him but was sticking around anyway and doing a lot of swimming in the process.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4y2xX8xGFc&w=540″]
After the other divers moved on, I stuck around and watched him for a bit. He swam towards me slowly, like a cowshark, and I regretfully and respectfully made tracks.
I hope you don’t get tired of snappers, because I haven’t yet. Here’s a wonderful school of them at Steps, a dive site in southern Mozambique that we visited during our July trip to Ponta do Ouro.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H4hPsW33s4&w=540″]
Above the coral reef at Creche, a dive site in southern Mozambique, hang huge and colourful schools of fish. A quiet, calm diver may approach them quite closely. Here’s Tony filming some yellow snapper:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMhGvv1yp8M&w=540″]
I love this close up of snappers:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6w_EGQ4lRY&w=540″]
And here’s another school of snappers making shapes in the water:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlxlZR6yEI&w=540″]
I find them quite hypnotic!
The reef called Creche, which we dived twice during our June-July trip to Ponta do Ouro in southern Mozambique, is full of fish life. The water above and around the reef is usually so dense with fish that divers drift among schools of snapper, fusiliers, goatfish and other fry of species I can’t recognise because they’re still too small.
Here are some fusiliers with us at Creche:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhpvuor-iM&w=540″]
And here’s a mixed school of mostly yellow snappers:
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA60FGSd1DU&w=540″]
Being this close to wildlife (which is how you should think about fish) is an almost miraculous experience.
Unlike the large, distinctive schools of mostly yellow-coloured snappers that we saw on several of the reefs that we dived while in Ponta do Ouro, twinstripe fusiliers tended not to hang around as long, or as densely grouped. These beautiful blue fish with yellow stripes tended to stream past us in huge, spread out schools, passing for minutes at a time like passenger pigeons, and then disappearing.
I found the experience captured in this video, filmed at the reef called Creche, to be almost transcendental – I felt as though I was in a blue cathedral, with the fish streaming past me towards the light of a distant stained-glass window. Or something – it was quite moving, anyway.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46WXWrNYkIo&w=540″]
Doodles is one of our favourite reefs to dive when we visit Ponta do Ouro. It is different every time, and there is often so much happening in midwater that you don’t know where to look. On one of our dives there during our recent dive trip to southern Mozambique, a school of talang queenfish swam past us at the edge of the reef.
This video starts out pretty dodgy – they were on the edge of what the visibility allowed us to see – but improves slightly towards the end. (The BBC wildlife unit isn’t going to be calling me any time soon.)
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkgmV5n5R1o&w=540″]
Queenfish have venomous dorsal and anal fins, according to The Reef Guide, which was an enormous help during our trip. They are large, fast gamefish and look as “in charge” as yellowtail and tuna do as they swim quickly by.
One morning while we were in Ponta do Ouro, skipper Mike asked us what we wanted to see that day. Laurine had an answer ready: “A turtle!” So we went to Drop Zone.
We had not finished descending when Christo, spotter extraodinaire, noticed a turtle near the surface. We were going in opposite directions, though, so it remained in the distance. When we arrived on the reef, we almost immediately came upon another turtle being cleaned by a group of what I think are lined bristletooths, as well as a bright blue wrasse at the turtle’s right back flipper. The fish are nibbling algae off the turtle’s shell; this went on, peacefully, for some time, while we watched.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B8w7ipWhW4&w=540″]
We continued the dive, and met a second turtle, who was obligingly friendly and swam alongside us (Laurine in particular – I could see her self-actualising right there) for a while.
Later I returned to the same part of the reef where we’d met the first turtle. The spa session was pretty much over, so I took a little more video. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome or make the turtle feel uncomfortable, so I started trying to withdraw from the area. The turtle, however, had other ideas, and approached me head-on while I back-pedalled slowly. It wasn’t at all hostile (hostile turtle, anyone?) but maybe a little curious or maybe just trying to get somewhere and I was in the way.
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ZGTnUvyy8&w=540″]
Being able to observe these creatures in the water is the most amazing privilege. They can live to 80 years of age. I don’t know how old this one was, but based on its carapace length of about 50 centimetres, work done in California suggests that it is perhaps 5-10 years old.
