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.
Peet’s Vulcan Rock video
Category: Brittle stars
Dive sites: Vulcan Rock
Vulcan Rock is a dive site just outside Hout Bay. We dived it on a day when the south easter had been blowing for a while, so the visibility was quite good. The dive site is essentially a huge stack of granite boulders, with Vulcan Rock as the highest point. The rocks are covered with sea urchins, rock lobster, corals, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, and a bit of red seaweed.
Esther and I stayed within the range of Open Water divers, not going deeper than 18 metres, but it is possible to go as deep as 30 metres at this site if you go for a bit of a swim. This is definitely a site to visit when the surface conditions are good and the swell is low (not that Hout Bay diving is ever great – or particularly safe – in a big swell).
I had the little Sony camera with me and took some happy snaps. Underneath all the granite is an enormous cave, with several entrances. Peet, who joined us on this dive, made a video of the cave that I will share with you later this week.
Dive date: 19 April 2015
Air temperature: 23 degrees
Water temperature: 10 degrees
Maximum depth: 15.6 metres
Visibility: 12 metres
Dive duration: 39 minutes
Dive sites: Roman Rock
I’m not sure why I haven’t written about Roman Rock before. I’ve actually done four dives on the main reef, the first in 2010. The pictures in this post are from more than one of the dives – I’ll group them together, and you’ll be able to see by the water colour which dive is which.
Roman Rock reef is a very large collection of boulders separated by sand patches, centred on the Roman Rock lighthouse. Nearby reefs include Castor Rock, Livingstone Reef, Roman’s Rest, Wonder Reef, and Tivoli Pinnacles. The reef is comprised of granite boulders, heavily encrusted with typical Cape Town reef life – feather stars, brittle stars, nudibranchs, sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers and ascidians – varying with the depth. If the current is strong you will find a lot of fish here, mostly roman and hottentot, enjoying the tasty bounty brought by the tide.
Part of the dive is along high walls that are reminiscent of Atlantis Reef, further south. There are deep dead-end passages in between the rocks, wide enough to swim through (or drive a car through), and the rippled sand looks like a white carpet or a runway. In the middle of nowhere you will come across a ladder; it’s been there since the first time I dived Roman Rock in 2010. Your guess is as good as mine.
The site is suitable for Open Water divers, as the maximum depth one can attain while staying adjacent to the reef is about 18 metres. There are several pinnacles and shallower plateaus that are suitable for deeper safety stops. It goes without saying that each diver must have a surface marker buoy – the site is a relatively short boat ride from False Bay Yacht Club, but offshore nonetheless and there may be boat traffic, depending on where the current takes you.
Dive date: 3 August 2013
Air temperature: 22 degrees
Water temperature: 14 degrees
Maximum depth: 16.5 metres
Visibility: 10 metres
Dive duration: 38 minutes
Dive sites: MV Katsu Maru
The MV Katsu Maru is a 40 metre long Japanese trawler, now lying approximately 30 metres south west of the MV Aster in Hout Bay. On days with good visibility, which has been the case both times I’ve dived her, you can sometimes see both wrecks at the same time.
Unfortunately both dives I’ve done on the Katsu Maru featured misted up camera housings. This was connected to the excellent visibility; the sea was icy cold thanks to the upwelling that follows a south easterly wind, and the air was hot. My camera didn’t like it and I am used to the easy conditions in False Bay that allow me to be fairly cavalier about keeping my housing cool between dives. These photos therefore don’t show the ship in quite the same way as I saw it. But hopefully you get the idea.
The wreck lies on her side, with her superstructure half buried and the bottom of her hull angled slightly upwards. There is a distinct keel strip running the length of the ship. To me she looks like nothing so much as a submarine when viewed from behind. When one swims around the wreck, the remaining superstructure can be seen and her funnel is revealed.
The trawler sank after sustaining a hole on her port side, which is visible as she is resting on her starboard side in the sand. The wreck has been there since 1978; about sixteen years later the Aster was stripped and scuttled nearby to join her. The relative positions of these wrecks makes them ideal for a rebreather dive (in drysuits) or a navigation dive from one to the other. I’ve been on the boat with divers who have attempted to cross the 30 metre gap from the Aster to the Katsu Maru in poor visibility, and have spent a delightful dive on the sand. The proximity of a sewerage outlet pipe adds a delightful element of risk to this strategy.
If you swim into the scour at her stern, you’ll get about 28 metres. I spent most of the dive on top of her hull, at about 16 metres. Limited penetration of the wreck may be possible, but it is probably a stupid idea (and if you’re not trained to do it, it’s definitely a stupid idea).
There isn’t an enormous amount of striking sea life on this wreck, but I think it’s my favourite one in Cape Town simply for the way she’s lying. Nothing makes me feel as though I am really taking full advantage of the three dimensional movement that diving offers as much as swimming along what is actually the bottom of a ship.
Dive date: 9 February 2013
Air temperature: 23 degrees
Water temperature: 9 degrees
Maximum depth: 25.4 metres
Visibility: 15 metres
Dive duration: 24 minutes
Dive sites: North Paw (Monty’s Pinnacles)
It seems that it’s only on magnificent days that we end up launching from Oceana Power Boat Club. While my colleagues were having an end of year function just above Clifton Beach, I was floating on the surface a few hundred metres off the same beach, waiting to be picked up by the boat after a dive. You’ll recall that we had a week or more of incredibly strong southeasterly winds at the end of November. The wind dropped during the night of 30 November, and hours later we were on the boat. The aim was to complete Christo’s deep dive for his Advanced course, and our hope was for excellent visibility.
The Atlantic is so capricious, however, that the surface layer was already turning green with a layer of happily multiplying phytoplankton when we arrived to dive it. I am unreasonably pleased with this picture of Christo and Tony at the safety stop, right at the boundary of the blue and green water.
Beneath the layer of pale green we discovered crystal clear, freezing cold water. I can well understand how falling into the water in the Southern Ocean or Bering Sea can be fatal after this dive. Towards the end I doubted my ability to swim for the surface, and just wanted to lie down on the bottom and go to sleep!
Monty’s Pinnacles refers to part of the North Paw complex, a large area of granite reef that has several distinct dive sites within it. We have also dived the northern pinnacle. Monty’s Pinnacles lie a short distance to the north of the exposed rocks that mark the main North Paw reef. There’s a map here. The two pinnacles were discovered by local diving legend Monty Guest while scootering around the area in 2010. They rise to within 10 metres of the surface. The topography is spectacular, with great ridges in the granite that are so straight as to appear to be machine-hewed. Small stands of kelp grow all the way down to 25 metres, testifying to the clarity of the water here at certain times of the year.
I didn’t see much unusual macro life (perhaps in my near-hypothermic state I had reduced powers of observation), but the rocks are heavily encrusted with mussels, brittle stars, and urchins. There are very large west coast rock lobsters everywhere you look. I saw the odd sea cucumber and a couple of anemones, but the chief beauty of this site for me is the passages and tumbled boulders that one swims among. There are swim throughs here, but we didn’t find them.
The view upon surfacing is spectacular, with the Twelve Apostles and the Atlantic seaboard to feast your eyes on.
Dive date: 1 December 2012
Air temperature: 28 degrees
Water temperature: 9 degrees
Maximum depth: 25.9 metres
Visibility: 15 metres
Dive duration: 30 minutes
Dive sites: Roman’s Rest
Roman Rock lighthouse stands near the entrance to the navy harbour in Simon’s Town. In its general (I use the term very loosely) vicinity one finds – amongst other sites – Tivoli Pinnacles, Castor Rock, Wonder Reef, Rambler Rock, and, of course, the Roman Rock reef system, which is right under and around the lighthouse. Grant didn’t drop the shot line right at the lighthouse as one would to dive Roman Rock itself, but at a set of pinnacles called Roman’s Rest which are at the eastern end of the Castor Rock reef complex. Wonder Reef is at the western end.
Tami and I agreed that this was one of the most beautiful dive sites we’ve visited in False Bay – it’s comprised mostly of large granite boulders and huge flat, sloping rocks that are rich with invertebrate life. The whole area is populated by various types of sea fan, giving the effect of an underwater forest.
I was a bit cold (it was the second dive I did that day, and I had not put on enough layers of wetsuit to compensate for the freezing boat rides to and from the sites!) so I didn’t manage any half-decent photos of fish. But we saw Roman (of course!), and a large school of hottentot or other nondescript silver fish hanging in midwater over the reef. There were many nudibranchs – contrary to our usual experience of seeing one at a time, we saw several that were often so close together that I could include them all in one photo.
The part of Roman Rock that we dived is a newish area, I think, that Peter Southwood is busy mapping for the Diving the Cape Peninsula and False Bay wikivoyage site. It’s a very, very special site – highly recommended. With the right equipment and good visibility, lovely wide-angle photographs can be possible.
There are a couple more pictures from this dive in the newsletter Tony put out in the week after we dived the site. The surface conditions were horrible but you can see that the visibility was very good indeed (by False Bay standards!).
Dive date: 27 August 2011
Air temperature: 19 degrees
Water temperature: 14 degrees
Maximum depth: 21.4 metres
Visibility: 10 metres
Dive duration: 42 minutes
Dive sites: Outer Photographer’s Reef
Outer Photographer’s Reef is a massive slab of granite in False Bay, about 170 metres long and 35 metres wide. The top, which slopes gently to the south east, is flat and about 15 metres deep. The edges drop off almost vertically, to a depth of about 30 metres. The topography is absolutely spectacular – this was the first proper wall dive I’ve done and I loved it. The sensation of dropping off the top of the reef was fantastic! We found a couple of deep vertical cracks in the rock, where redfingers, roman and doublesash butterflyfish were hiding, and a small cave-like feature half way up the wall. There were more fish out in the open on top of the reef – the wall and sandy bottom are mostly covered with invertebrates.
We found some ammunition scattered at the bottom of the wall, as well as what I think was a small unopened ammunition box (about the size of a small cake box). We were very careful not to touch any of it – I admit that the temptation to slip one of the brass shells into my pocket was strong, but the prospect of blowing my hand off (underwater or on the surface) deterred me!
The rock is covered – and I mean covered – with brittlestars. I didn’t know that there were so many brittlestars in the world! The sand around the rock is also ankle deep in brittlestars waving the tips of their legs in the water column. We also spotted pipefish (one of the pictures is here), a fat warty pleurobranch, and a few brave anemones and urchins. But it’s definitely brittlestar country.
I actually went into deco (briefly!) on this dive – it was the third dive of the day for me, and the second one to close on 30 metres. To end the dive we swam up the gently sloping top of the granite ridge, and were joined by seals who stayed with us for some time. At the safety stop, we were accompanied by several seals playing around us, and when we surfaced they were playing in the bow wave of Grant’s boat.
Dive date: 18 May 2011
Air temperature: 19 degrees
Water temperature: 12 degrees
Maximum depth: 29.8 metres
Visibility: 10 metres
Dive duration: 33 minutes
Newsletter: Winter diving is here!
Hi divers
Finally the conditions that bring exceptional diving have arrived. The lack of any strong south easterly winds and the occasional days of northerly winds have started to clean up False Bay and we have had reasonably good conditions. It only gets better from here on.
Saturday and Sunday were spent doing Open Water dive course training and we dived 5 DSD students. The conditions were great with good visibility and everyone had a good time. Wednesday we spent on the boat doing three dives one after the other. There were 15 of our divers for Grant to deal with during the day (and at least 15 mini chocolates eaten) and we covered the Deep Specialty, Open Water qualifying dives and fun dives. Clearly it was a heavy day because when I saw Grant this afternoon he was leaning on a walking stick!
Clare has also achieved Master Scuba Diver status (Advanced plus Rescue Diver plus five Specialties plus 50 logged dives) not to mention she is our master photographer. We have a pile of CDs of photos at home for many of the people that dive with us full of your pictures and I will give them to you next time I see you.
We did the first dive on the wreck of the SAS Good Hope and spent a brief time on the MFV Princess Elizabeth. Grant dropped the shot right between to two wrecks and the visibility was great so we could see both wrecks at the same time. We found a horsefish and then a bunch of pyjama sharks all curled up together.
The second dive was to Pie Rock where Lindsay and Tinus qualified as Open Water divers (congratulations!), and the third dive was to Outer Photographer’s Reef where we saw a few boxes of ammunition as well as a few scattered shells, walls of brittle stars, doublesash butterflyfish and had seals follow us around for the last half of the dive. Kate was continuing with her Deep Specialty course on this dive.
The sea was flat, the visibility was great and all three dives were great fun. The conditions look set to repeat themselves this weekend so the boat is calling.
We are planning a full weekend of diving to suit everyone, to some of the less dived sites, and there are a few people that we haven’t seen in a while: Bernita, Gerard, Maurice, Danelene and André, Richard and Belinda, Dirk, Marinus, Dean, Alina, Hilton, Sarah F and Sarah H, to name but a few… No excuses!!! This weekend is going to be a weekend of fun dives with good conditions and Saturday we will do a day of boat dives:
- First launch: DEEP to the SAS Fleur at 40 metres (for the Deep Specialty course and those already qualified)
- Second Launch: a mysterious wreck for Advanced divers (20 metres)
- Third launch: a dive for Open Water divers to the wreck of the Glencairn Ammunition Barges (12 metres)
Grant picks us up and drops us off at Long Beach with the boat so it is really easy. Any of the courses such as Advanced, Deep, Wreck and Photography can be started on these dives.
On Sunday we will dive the sevengill cowsharks (max depth 12 metres) and or the Clan Stuart wreck (max depth 10 metres). The boat fills quickly on a weekend with such great conditions so text me as soon as possible if you are joining!
Best regards
Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!
Excuse me very much
I may have mentioned my great fondness for warty pleurobranchs before. I probably have. They’re not overtly attractive creatures, but have – to my mind – quite a lot of character. They are frequently a source of great amusement on dives because they have little regard for what they walk over and are voracious predators. Here are some recent warty pleurobranch moments that caused me to partially flood my mask laughing…
Because whelks and other molluscs can’t feel things on their hard shells, they seem to be a favourite stepping stone or even a food source. The warty pleurobranch is quite a fierce predator and possibly enjoys feeding on the algae that often encrusts whelk shells. They are also very mobile, and able to barrel over almost any surface. The next photo provides proof!
We observed the next little interaction while exploring one of the Ark Rock boiler wrecks. I think the warty pleurobranch was after the ornate amphipods that you can see on the brittle star – little black, yellow and white critters. At one point he was actually half on top of the brittle star’s body, only to be rebuffed by a whip-like arm pushing him out of the way.
Exploring: Ark Rock Boiler Wreck #3
We did two short exploration dives around Ark Rock on 21 March. The first was to a small wreck roughly east of the rock itself, and the second one was to check out a pair of boilers lying on the sand s short distance apart. There’s nothing else around except for some rocky reef, which Tony and I explored for a while after we were done with the boiler.
The boiler looks quite imposing – for the technicalities on fire boxes and things visit the Wikivoyage page for Ark Rock, but it’s solitary and impressive. There are no other bits of wreckage lying around. Most of the boiler is very overgrown, and we found a huge roman hiding in one of the holes in the boiler.
The rocky reef close to the boiler is covered with sea cucumbers, Stephens codium, brittle stars and feather stars.
Tony and I were fascinated with the sea pens sticking out of the sand, and I spent quite a while watching a warty pleurobranch trying to walk over a brittle star (who fought back).
We took a slow swim around the reef and back to the boiler and the shot line, which was on the sand nearby. The water was very green, but the visibility was fairly respectable!
Dive date: 21 March 2011
Air temperature: 25 degrees
Water temperature: degrees
Maximum depth: 16.4 metres
Visibility: 6 metres
Dive duration: 21 minutes
