Sunday: Boat dives from OPBC or Hout Bay if conditions permit
Midweek launch: From OPBC to see the Volvo Ocean Race yachts arriving in Table Bay
Dive conditions
The wind is forecast to do some real south easterly blowing over the next few days, so False Bay is messy but the Atlantic is a bit cleaner. There is too much wind on Saturday for any kind of pleasant diving or boating, but Sunday has less wind (according to some of the wildly contradictory weather forecasts) and I think the odds are good that Table Bay will be a better option than Hout Bay, if the water cleans up enough to make dives worthwhile. It is difficult to say for certain where would be best but we will make that call on Saturday afternoon. The plan will be to dive North and South Paw if conditions permit. Let me know if you’d like to be on the watchlist!
Last weekend we dived out of Hout Bay, visiting the BOS 400, Star Walls and then Tafelberg Reef. The water was less clean than expected: 8-10 metre viz and a very cold 9 degrees. Thanks to Georgina for this picture of an itsy bitsy basket star! On Monday I was out along the Atlantic seaboard for a film charter and despite the fog we found dolphins, a sunfish, a whale, hundreds of seals, and incredible bird life once we were far offshore. There’s an album of photos on facebook.
Volvo Ocean Race
The Volvo Ocean Race first leg comes to an end next week and the yachts are expected to arrive at the V&A Waterfront from Tuesday onwards. There is currently less than 9 nautical miles between the top four after several thousand miles of open ocean racing. The finish will be really exciting and we plan to launch as many days as possible next week to hopefully catch a glimpse as they race by… And perhaps a photo or two. Let me know if you think you’ll be able to take a midweek day of leave to go out on the boat.
Diversnight
Diversnight is an international night diving event that we try to participate in each year, just because. This coming Thursday, 6 November we will meet at Long Beach in Simon’s Town at 7.30 pm with the aim of starting the dive at 8.00 pm. We must be in the water at 14 minutes past eight to “count” and the aim is to set a new world record. There are currently 16 countries participating in this event. You can RSVP to the event on facebook, and read more about Diversnight here. There is no charge apart from any gear you may need.
If you need to rent gear, please let me know by Wednesday morning. You don’t necessarily need to be an Advanced diver to do a night dive, so give me a call or send me a mail to talk about it if you’re unsure. If you’ve been thinking about an Advanced course, though, this is a good time to get started.
With weekend temperatures reaching 26 degrees I am going to pretend it’s summer, and to compound that we will dive the Atlantic. The south easter has blown most of the week and is set to blow really hard tomorrow so the Atlantic will be clean… And cold. There is some wind for the weekend but nothing too hectic. The swell is small.
We will launch from Hout Bay on Saturday and Sunday and dive some of the sites we haven’t been to in a while.
9.30 am Die Josie – shallow reef spectacularly located under Chapmans Peak
12.00 pm Tafelberg Reef – a vast reef complex with pinnacles, a yacht wreck, and basket stars
Please reply to this email or text me if you want to dive.
Join us at the Boat Show
Next weekend (Friday 10 October to Sunday 12 October) is the Cape Town International Boat Show at Cape Town Convention Centre. We have some complimentary tickets to give away, so if you’d like one please let me know – first come, first served! Also, there will be a pool where your non-diving friends and family can experience breathing underwater for the first time. If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, arrange it with participating dive operators, of which we are one…
I had high hopes for The Death and Life of Monterey Bay, for reasons that will be revealed (I hope) in the course of the next few years. Monterey Bay is in California, and opens onto the Pacific Ocean. It has approximately the same surface area as False Bay but is shallower and less square. Filled with diverse marine life, it was formerly bounded by a row of sardine canneries (setting for John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row) which were responsible for massive pollution in the area. Tons of stinking sardine guts fouled up the bay, which had been stripped of much of its marine life by aggressive fishing practices and cascading effects in the ecosystem.
In 1892 the Hopkins Marine Station was founded, a research laboratory of Stanford University. In 1931, the area of ocean in front of the lab was designated the Hopkins Marine Life Refuge (now Reserve). The bay’s populations of abalone, sea otters, killer whales, kelp forests, whales, and other life gradually recovered, and the sea urchin barrens were overgrown and once again supported a variety of life.
In this book Palumbi and Sotka trace the decline and recovery of the bay, lingering on colourful local characters such as Monterey mayor Julia Platt, whose no-nonsense attitude ensured access to the ocean for all the residents of the area. I expected the book to be more about marine biology, with information about how the various species recovered in the ecosystem once the polluting and overfishing forces were removed, but it is definitely more of a human history, with a strong focus on Platt, John Steinbeck, and his friend Ed Ricketts, with whom he travelled to the Sea of Cortez.
The establishment of the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row effectively redeemed an area that was the source of seemingly limitless pollution. The aquarium was opened in 1984 after years of planning. It is a sister aquarium to Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium, and also has the distinction of being the first aquarium to attempt to exhibit a (juvenile) great white shark, an enterprise that (fortunately) seems doomed to failure.
There’s an excellent article on Palumbi and the book here.
Here’s Stephen Palumbi giving a TEDx talk on how Monterey Bay came back to life:
Conservation biologist Callum Roberts has spent years researching the history of the last 1,000 years’ exploitation of the sea by human beings. The result, The Unnatural History of the Sea, is a stunning and detailed illumination of the scale of destruction we have wrought on our oceans. I had been under the impression that the development of industrial-scale fishing capabilities (factory ships, flash freezing, gill nets and the like) in the mid 20th century was what prompted the most egregious overfishing practices. This, however, is an example of baseline creep, in which successive generations look back at the conditions of nature experienced by the previous generation, and mistake them for pristine.
Humans have been harvesting marine life for over 1,000 years, moving from the freshwater ecosystems of Europe’s rivers and lakes after denuding them of all significant fish life through astonishingly aggressive (and familiar-sounding) fishing practices such as stringing nets across the entire width of rivers when fish returned to spawn. Siltation of the rivers caused by deforestation on their banks, and the development of better fishing equipment, also contributed to the move to marine fishing.
Millions of sea turtles and whales used to roam the oceans. To put that in perspective, there are under 15,000 southern right whales alive today (we think they’re recovering well – haha), and approximately 200,000 breeding green sea turtles. Numerous sea turtle rookeries, where the animals return year after year to lay eggs, are now lost to memory, after their breeding populations were completely wiped out during the 16th and 17th century by explorers and settlers in the New World. Entire seal and otter populations were hunted to extinction for their pelts. Hunters and fishermen often took far more than they needed, killing for amusement, squandering the abundance and leaving carcasses to rot or tossing excess fish – already dead – back overboard. After perusing logbooks, letters, diaries and other documents, Roberts remarks that rarely did the explorers, settlers and merchants remark on any aspect of the natural beauty of the creatures they saw on their travels, and if they did it is immediately followed by instructions on how to kill and prepare the animal, and what it tastes like.
Natural marine spectacles such as the sardine run off the Eastern Cape coast of South Africa were once far less remarkable and unusual than we find them today. The migration of herring from the Arctic down to the latitudes of the United Kingdom between May and October each year drew thousands of basking sharks (now we get a news article when four are seen in one day) and other predators, and their spawning left eggs lying on the sea floor in layers up to two metres thick. Roberts says that great white sharks also feasted on this bounty of fish, and mentions that there are too many detailed reports of white sharks up to nine metres long from the 18th and 19th century to discount all of them as false. (The maximum recorded length of a white shark in modern times is approximately six metres.) Today white sharks are seen so rarely in European waters as to create a great fanfare when one of them is spotted.
The point is that the oceans used to support far, far more life and abundance than we are able to conceive of today. Herring used to be so abundant in the seas around Scandinavia that they held up shipping. Pods of dolphins didn’t number in the thousands; they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Whales were seen in similar numbers, surrounding boats, rubbing against them, and drenching them with spray from their blowholes. Ships navigated towards land by following the sound of countless sea turtles swimming towards the beaches they laid their eggs on.
This is a crushing, shocking book. While reading it I frequently felt myself assailed with despair and regret at how long the over-exploitation of marine resources has been underway, and how much we have lost. Bottom trawling dates back to the 14th century, and already then there were complaints (to Edward III of England, in 1376) about its indiscriminate destructiveness. Scientists visiting newly-discovered (they think) sea mounts have found their once thriving slopes reduced to fields of rubble, littered with discarded trawl nets and other fishing gear debris.
The sections on fishing in the deep sea and on trawling are devastating. Roberts contends that there is no such thing as a sustainable deep sea fishery, as the target species are so long-lived and slow growing (and unknown to science), with unknown population sizes, that there is no sustainable number of fish that can be removed without risking the species’s ability to survive.
Finally, Roberts offers some solutions to arrest the awful, seemingly inevitable slide towards ocean barrens populated only with sea jellies and urchins. The steps Roberts outlines in order to save and recover the world’s fisheries are simple to state, but will be challenging to implement:
reduce present fishing capacity (i.e. number of boats, level of sophistication – this is not referring to reducing quotas)
eliminate risk-prone decision making (i.e. use science, and act only when you have the facts – don’t use hope or gut feel as a decision making tool)
eliminate catch quotas and instead implement controls on the amount of fishing (i.e. how much effort can be expended)
require people to keep what they catch
require fishers to use gear modified to reduce bycatch
ban or restrict the most damaging catching methods (e.g. trawl fishing)
implement extensive networks of marine reserves that are off limits to fishing
He advocates the use of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) – scientists estimate that it is necessary to protect 20-40% of the world’s oceans in order to save fisheries for the future. Strangely, to someone who lives here and doesn’t think much of our collective will and ability to police MPAs, especially when fishing is allowed in many of them, South Africa is actually a world leader and has protected a larger proportion of her territorial ocean than many other countries (the world total is about 1.2% of the oceans, with only 0.01% of the world’s oceans designated “no take” zones, according to Wikipedia). The benefits however, even of poorly policed marine parks, are significant.
I am not sure I share Roberts’s optimism that the situation can be reversed or arrested – passages from this book come to me at odd moments, leaving me nauseated at the greed, waste and ignorance that we have displayed as a species, against the life of the sea.
The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice – Trevor Corson
I didn’t really know what to expect from this book – I admit that I tried it out because it had a fish on the cover, and because I’d previously enjoyed Trevor Corson’s The Secret Life of Lobsters. I was pleasantly surprised. Showing the same narrative flair as he exhibits in his lobster book, Corson interweaves science and history with a present-day story with novel-like characteristics.
Formerly titled The Zen of Fish, The Story of Sushitakes place at the California Sushi Academy, tracing a (real and) diverse group of students as they spend several months learning to be sushi chefs. The principal character, the weakest student in the class, is squeamish about handling raw fish, and scared of her sushi knives – one wonders if she had done any research about what being a sushi chef entails. Despite this drag on the overall mood of the classroom scenes (one can only read about someone being berated for their incompetence, or deliberately shirking tasks that they find unappealing, so many times) Corson manages to invest the reader in the lives of the chefs and students that he profiles. As the students learn about sushi, so do we.
The history parts of the book deal with the development of sushi as a cultural and culinary phenomenon, first in Japan and then spreading to the rest of the world. Corson also delves into food science, explaining why things taste the way they do, and the microbial processes that give us vinegar and other fermented foods (essential in the development and preparation of sushi), and marine biology. Make no mistake – bluefin tuna, abalone, urchins, eels and octopus play only bit parts in this book, and appear more frequently as sushi toppings than as vibrant life forms populating the world’s oceans. Corson talks about the biology of the animals only insofar as it enables development of his main – food related – themes.
I found this a surprisingly good read, and a helpful informer on the subject of an aspect of Japanese culture other than their well known penchant for whale hunting and general disingenuousness around ethical fishing practices. It has made me a more informed sushi consumer but not as regards what fish are best to eat (use SASSI for that). There is hardly a mention of whether one can ethically consume all sushi toppings with gay abandon, or whether the environmentally conscious consumer should think twice about eating certain seafoods. I do feel that I have more understanding of the construction and serving of sushi, and am able to watch the chefs at my local sushi bar with a bit more awareness.
Some of the sites we visited on Two Mile Reef were noticeably more barren – with less coral and more sand and rock – than others. I wonder whether this is a seasonal (or annual, or multi-year) variation, or whether it’s a slow process of the reef becoming silted up. Sites towards the middle of Two Mile, such as Garden Route, were covered with coral and looked exceptionally healthy.
Sodwana sees a lot of divers doing a lot of dives, year-round. There are at least eight dive charters operating from the beach, and Two Mile in particular sees some heavy traffic – including Open Water divers (many from Johannesburg) doing their first sea dives. During a recent conversation, Gerard blamed the heavy boat traffic for what he perceives as a slow decline in the health and biomass of the reef life in Sodwana; I wonder if the fishing activity that somehow co-exists with the dive charters has anything to do with it. Or perhaps we are imagining things, and just happened to dive on a few parts of the reef that were having a quiet day.
Sodwana is a Marine Protected Area, but perhaps it is not getting the monitoring and policing it requires to be fully effective. This is a widespread problem in all of South Africa’s MPAs, as well as a concerning lack of scientific thinking in the government ministries that are supposed to be keeping an eye on these things.
Whether we are imagining the changes in the reefs in Sodwana or not, it’s still a very beautiful place to dive, and worthy (as are all wild places on this earth) of our protection. You should go there and see for yourself!
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.
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.
There is a barge wreck at Bluff Point on Big Gubal Island in the Red sea, where we did an amazing, fast drift dive along the side of the lagoon. During that dive we did stop in briefly at the barge wreck (its origin and identity is unknown), but it was on a night dive the previous evening that we actually spent a significant amount of time exploring the barge.
It’s supposed to be one of the best night dive sites in the Red Sea, and we were amazed by the amount of life on and around the wreckage. We saw multiple large moray eels, huge basket stars, enormous urchins, and a crazy variety of other life. We jumped off the back of our liveaboard, swam under a neighbouring liveaboard, and found the barge wreck just off its starboard side. It was teeming with divers from our boat and the other liveaboard, but there was so much to see over such a spread out area that it didn’t matter too much.
My favourite thing was the basket stars, of which there were many. We saw some huge ones, with diameter nearly as big as my arm span, and some small, palm-sized ones. They are not the lovely blue-grey colour of the ones we see in Cape Town, but the intricate design of their many arms is the same.
We also saw a number of moray eels. Our dive guide told us that two big ones live on the barge wreck, named George and Georgina. The ones I saw and photographed were extremely large. As with the night dive we did at the Alternatives, the water was very still and very clear, so torch light actually shone an appreciable distance. This kind of night diving is so easy and wonderful that I think it might have spoiled me for night diving in Cape Town!
The Brunswick is a historical wooden shipwreck that lies a few hundred metres off the northern end of Long Beach in Simon’s Town, directly opposite the northern end of the white apartment buildings overlooking the Main Road. Like HNMS Bato, she is infrequently dived. Having lain underwater since 1805, she is heavily overgrown and much of her decking and hull is covered by sand. She used to be a shore entry (with a precipitous climb over the railway line), but in recent years a large number of boulders have been added as a breakwater between the ocean and the railway line, and climbing over in dive gear is no longer possible. For this reason we do the dive from the boat. Close to shore and in shallow water, the Brunswick is an ideal site to get used to boat diving.
The Brunswick was a British East Indiaman, which means she carried men and goods between Britain and the East Indies – (south)east Asia and India. She was carrying a cargo of cotton and sandalwood from China back to Britain when she was captured by some French vessels off Sri Lanka, and brought to Simon’s Bay. In September 1805 her anchor rope parted, and she ran aground during a south easterly gale. Most of her cargo was salvaged, as she lies in shallow (less than six metres deep) water.
We found the dive site to be similar to HNMS Bato, which was also a sturdily built wooden ship of similar vintage. The Brunswick was 1,200 tons, and her wreckage is spread out quite extensively. There are many thick, wooden planks, laid out as they would have been to form her decks, as well as much evidence of the bronze bolts that secured parts of the ship together. There are also many copper bolts, rivets and what could be small amounts of rolled up copper sheathing in evidence on the site.
The highests parts of the wreck are covered with feather stars, anemones, sea cucumbers, and kelp. There are many octopus, and peering under the wreckage with a torch yielded a couple of very large pyjama catsharks. We were lucky to dive the site most recently on a day with lovely visibility, and the shallowness of the water means that there’s a lot of light penetration which improves things enormously.
Before diving this site, you should call the SA Navy Ops Room on 021 787 3818, to ask for permission and to tell them how long you’ll be. Same procedure as at Long Beach.
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.