Molluscs – Page 12 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Newsletter: Diving and travelling

Hello everyone

I am sure you have all enjoyed a vacation and are dying to get back to work… Hehehehe!

Permits

Every diver must have a diving permit. For those that don’t, please rush off to the post office armed with you ID book and get one for the princely sum of R94. Keep it handy, it is meant to be ”on the boat” with you. At some point you will be asked to produce it and failure to do so could result in anything from a fine to the donating of your scuba gear to the government… Jokes aside, its law, so get one. Almost every dive site in south Africa falls in a Marine Protected Area and these are the people who are meant to protect these areas from harm… They need your money.

Recent dives

December has come and gone, the sun has been warming the ocean and we have 18 -19 deg at the moment. Sadly warm water often means less visibility, but the dives we have done have still been fun.

We saw two tiny devil rays at Long Beach just off the concrete wreck near the harbour buoy, a massive short tailed sting ray and a few small playful seals.

On Sunday, in 3 – 4 m visibility Clare took these pictures of a klipfish and an octopus having a disagreement, two students with good buoyancy on their first sea dive and…

Stand-off between a klipfish and an octopus

Open Water students on their first sea dive

… these two orange clubbed nudibranchs were on the kelp near the wooden dinghy wreck at Long Beach.

Orange clubbed nudibranchs at Long Beach

Sodwana

I have attached the details and costs of the planned trip to Sodwana. This picture shows a few divers from the last trip doing a navigation swim in 25 m visibility. Did I mention the water temperature was 24 degrees celcius? and will be 25 degrees in April. If you are keen let me know, we do not have to pay anything until middle of February, so stop, think, and book…

Low Season Prices 2011

Boat dives

I am hoping to get us all out on the boat this weekend. I have a few Advanced students needing to do their deep dive as well as Nitrox students. Just remember, if you book a boat dive and cancel less than 24 hours before the launch, I get billed (and hence, so do you).

See you in the water soon!

regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!

<strong><a href=”https://www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/small-colour-e1284626229322.jpg”><img class=”alignleft size-full wp-image-486″ title=”Learn to Dive Today logo” src=”https://www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/small-colour-e1284626229322.jpg” alt=”Learn to Dive Today logo” width=”73″ height=”67″ /></a>Tony Lindeque</strong>
076 817 1099
<a href=”http://www.learntodivetoday.co.za” target=”_blank”>www.learntodivetoday.co.za</a>
<a href=”https://www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog” target=”_self”>www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog</a>
<em>Diving is addictive!</em>

Underwater Alphabet Part 2

Part the second of the underwater alphabet I am making for my nephew. Here’s part one.

H is for helmet shell

I is for isopod

J is for jellyfish

K is for klipfish

L is for lionfish

M is for manefish

N is for nudibranch

Gas Flame nudibranch on the SAS Pietermaritzburg

Dive sites: MV Romelia

Long before I knew there was such a thing as scuba diving, I knew about shipwrecks. I grew up in Cape Town, and spent a lot of time in various rock pools, on the local beaches, on the Sea Point promenade, and sitting in the back seat of my parents’ Volkswagen Beetle as we whizzed around the peninsula. Cape Town is shipwreck paradise, and the most visible ones to me were the Antipolis, which sticks a tiny bit out of the water at Oudekraal, and the MV Romelia, which used to be an extremely prominent feature on the Llandudno rocks. I liked the Romelia because it was pink.

A photo of the Romelia, aground on the rocks, taken in 1989

(The picture above is from this website – worth a browse!)

Following Tony and Cecil through a crack

My parents told me the story of the Romelia and the Antipolis often (I liked saying the names, because they sounded romantic and mysterious) – in July 1977 my folks had been married for two years and were living in Cape Town when the tow rope connecting the two vessels to a Japanese tug snapped, and they ran aground independently on the western seaboard of the Cape Peninsula during a winter storm. The Romelia broke in half, and the bow sank, leaving the pretty pink (rusty) stern on the rocks. Later the stern also sank – a great disappointment to me, but no doubt a relief to the owners of the palaces in Llandudno!

Red bait zone and hottentot on the Romelia

I actually had no idea that you could dive on the Romelia, or where it had disappeared to, until the Sunday before Christmas. Our planned boat dive to Die Josie or Tafelberg Reef wasn’t looking like a good idea – reports were that the visibility was pretty poor, and the water was very dark. Grant suggested we go north, around the corner past Maori Bay to the MV Romelia.

It’s a gorgeous 12 kilometre boat ride from Hout Bay slipway, past the BOS 400 in Maori Bay, past the nudist beach at Sandy Bay (strangely, everyone we could see was fully clothed!), and to Sunset Rocks on the southern end of Llandudno beach. Grant dropped the shot line quite close to the rocks, where an artificial cave is formed by the bow and some large rocks, with the anchors hanging from the ceiling.

The visibility was mixed – there were clouds of fry (not sure which species of fish, but they were definitely babies) in the water at points, and the westerly wind of the day before had made things a bit soupy, but as we moved around the site there were patches of very decent visibility. I must confess that we’d been on the wreck for nearly ten minutes when I asked Tony where it was… He pointed at the (in retrospect) suspiciously smooth orange wall we had been hanging in front of since the start of the dive, and I realised that the ship has been so colonised by coraline algae and other sea life that most of it is virtually indistinguishable from the rocks around it.

There are amazing walls – each a different colour. One is mostly orange, another purple, and when you start ascending there are massive sea squirts above about six metres. These are all a rusty reddish brown colour. The rocks and the wreckage – some quite mangled, other sections totally hidden by sea creatures – are heavily encrusted with urchins, sea cucumbers, anemones, nudibranchs, and other invertebrate life. We saw large schools of hottentot in the red bait zone and against some of the walls.

There are ample opportunities to swim through cracks in the rocks and between the wreck and the rocks, and this demanded good buoyancy control and some smart finning because there was a fair amount of surge. A particularly alluring gap was just too narrow for me, but every time I went close to try and take a photo through it the surge pushed me up perilously close to the wall, and I had to give up.

Most of the photos I took are of a macro nature because the visiblity didn’t warrant wide angle shots… You can see in the shots of the divers above that the water was very murky. But there’s also no opportunity really to get a panoramic view of anything because the site is more a series of passages and swim throughs than a giant ship lying on the ocean floor like the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks.

More information on the wrecks of the Romelia and the Antipolis can be found here, along with some super photos.

Dive date: 19 December 2010

Air temperature: 27 degrees

Water temperature: 7 degrees

Maximum depth: 18.5 metres

Visibility: 5-8 metres

Dive duration: 45 minutes

Newsletter: Dive report and southeaster

Hi everyone

I hope you have had a great Christmas and hopefully a break from the office. Fortunately my ”office” has been busy and I don’t relish a break from it. I know there are many of you chomping at the bit to dive and finish your courses but the southeaster has been howling non-stop since Saturday and the sea looks a little like pea soup. I hope it dies down soon so we can all get back in the water. Sunday’s early boat dives were also cancelled due to an unforseen breakage on the boat.

Strawberry sea anemones and a pink urchin on the Romelia

I spent Friday in the Newlands swimming pool with a family of five, the youngest being 9 years old. Abby was doing a program called Seal Team. It is unbelievably rewarding teach such young kids to dive and her older sister and brother, mom and dad took longer to get comfortable than she did. I had hoops in the water and by the second session in the water her buoyancy was perfect and she swam through the hoops with a big smile on her face.

I am going to plan a day in the diving pool at Newlands, it’s five meters deep and a perfect place to hone bouyancy skills, trim your gear and cull some of the weight from your heavy weight belts. Its also a wonderful place to test and get acquainted with all the amazing dive gear you got for Christmas…

Early January I will be starting a Wreck specialty and plan to include penetration into the Aster, lying in Hout Bay on the sand at 25 metres. I am also going to run a Nitrox and Deep specialty so if going to 40 metres is on your to do list don’t miss this (I hope you got a torch for Christmas)!

We recently dived the wreck of the Romelia (pictures courtesy of Clare). The visibility was not great but the colours and sea life were stunning.

Sea life on the side of the Romelia (encrusted with orange coraline algae)

There is an amazing contrast between the life, colour and water temperature between the Atlantic sites and the False Bay sites. I tend to favor the False Bay coast as the water is warmer but every time I dive the Atlantic I am astounded by the clarity of the water. On our last wreck dives, the Maori and the BOS 400 we had 20 plus metres visibility.

Hottentot in the red bait zone above the Romelia

regards

Tony Lindeque
076 817 1099
www.learntodivetoday.co.za
www.learntodivetoday.co.za/blog
Diving is addictive!

Dive sites: SS Maori

I have done one prior dive on the SS Maori, about a year ago. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, one I am not keen to repeat. The boat ride was harrowing – we took the narrow channel between Duiker Island and the mainland, and I had my eyes closed for most of it. I am not a good sailor, but Tony is, and even he was seeing his life flash before his eyes. Huge waves were coming from all directions and we later learned that the skipper had been so terrified negotiating the channel that he’d called the owner of the dive shop as soon as he’d dropped the divers into the water, and practically sobbed.

We were actually intending to visit the BOS 400, but when we got there the surge through the wreck was incredibly strong and the entire superstructure was creaking ominously. A call was made to go to the SS Maori instead – it’s a couple of hundred metres from the crane and the wreck is scattered on the seabed rather than being still mostly intact. The dive itself was extremely stressful – maybe 3 metres visibility, temperatures so cold that I sucked my tank dry in about 20 minutes (ended up on Tony’s octo), strong surge on the bottom that made it impossible to control where one was going, and I honestly didn’t see anything that I could describe as a wreck.

The experience we had diving the Maori on Reconcilation Day could not have been more different. Tami and I were finishing our Wreck Specialty course, Cecil was finishing his Open Water course, and Tony had a group of casual divers with him. The boat ride was a pleasure, apart from the smell (or rather, taste!) of the seals on Duiker Island as we sped past. The water was so blue that Grant could see the wreck below us while he dropped the shot line.

The SS Maori ran aground in Maori Bay (named after it) in 1909 in thick fog. The ship lies perpendicular to the mainland, depth ranging from about 6 metres down to about 22 metres towards the centre of the bay. The ship was carrying a cargo of railway lines, cast iron pipes (visible in great stacks that are very tempting to try and swim through – common sense won out), explosives, and crockery. A fair amount of beautiful porcelain is still visible on the site, but apparently it’s been well worked and looted over the years.

The visiblity on this dive was sufficient (20 metres or so) for us to be able to see far down the ship as we explored. Parts of the wreckage are very broken up, but there are large parts of the wreck that are relatively intact. We descended on the engine block, at the shallow end of the wreck, and into beautiful kelp forests that glistened green in the clear water. It was cold, very cold, but having something amazing to look at tends to distract one from the inconvenience of chilly fingers.

As far as sea life goes, there’s a fair amount of kelp and other sea plants. Oscar found me a huge cuttlefish to photograph, just posing nicely on a rock, and there were some molluscs, the odd nudibranch, lots and lots of rock lobsters and crabs. We also saw a nice school of hottentot. Like the BOS 400, though, you visit this site first to look at the wreckage. Anything else you see is a bonus.

I can see why the Maori is such a popular dive site – we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and Tami and I were heartbroken when we had to ascend, as our air reached 70 bar. It’s a very large site and several dives are required to appreciate its full scope. I plan to do those several dives, and then some!

Dive date: 16 December 2010

Air temperature: 23 degrees

Water temperature: 4 degrees (that’s what my computer said!)

Maximum depth: 19.9 metres

Visibility: 20 metres

Dive duration: 32 minutes

Touch Pool ruminations

I spend one Sunday afternoon a month (the third Sunday – come and say hi – you can catch the shark feeding at 1500 while you’re there, and it might even coincide with my tea break!) at the Two Oceans Aquarium, volunteering at the Touch Pool or the microscope. It’s my job to interpret the exhibits to visitors, introducing them to the joys of marine life. My entire afternoon is documented on beenthere.tv because the camera is located just opposite the Touch Pool.

Working at the Touch Pool - sore back at the end of the day!

The Touch Pool is nothing special to look at. It’s a low concrete pool with a rim wide enough for little people to sit on. On any given day it contains icy cold water that is being constantly replaced by the aquarium’s filtration system, several sea anemones, a couple of hermit crabs, some whelks, lots of different kinds of seaweed and sea sponges, some starfish, several abalone shells, and a sea urchin or two.

As a volunteer at the Touch Pool, I explain simple facts about the sea life to visitors. I also guide them regarding how to interact with the exhibit – no squeezing or pulling, do not take the anemones, crabs, urchins and starfish out of the water, and the like. We also tell the visitors where on their bodies to touch the creatures – most importantly, not to stick their fingers into the sea anemones’ mouths!

The point of the Touch Pool is to touch. For really small children, it’s just about the different textures – toddlers love the slimy, knobbly and smooth seaweed and the rough sea sponges. Older children also love the seaweed too, but their chief interest is in the starfish and sea anemones. The experience of touching a starfish – gently, just under the surface of the water – is transformative.

The things that fascinate me about the Touch Pool are these:

Children will run towards the Touch Pool, past exhibits showing large, colourful, exotic fish, shouting “I want to touch the starfish”. This experience means more to many of them than the chance to see marine life that they’d NEVER see ordinarily, even large impressive creatures like sharks and rays.
Many adults have never interacted with marine life at all. It’s very special to help a grown up in their twenties or thirties feel the side of a sea anemone for the first time, or run their finger over the rough skin of a starfish. The adults are often more reluctant and fearful than the children.

Aquariums around the world have Touch Pool facilities. The animals are rotated in and out so that they have time to recover – it is unquestionably stressful for a starfish to be groped repeatedly by chubby little hands. But the curators have determined that the virtues of this kind of exhibit are outweighed by the risks to the animals.

As a diver, I am well aware of the debate surrounding touching of the sea creatures we encounter. I am of the view that interacting by touch with marine life is not totally taboo, and when I see the effect of giving this opportunity to small children and others – most if not all of them not scuba divers – I am convinced that there is a place for this kind of interaction in our experience of the sea.

Wreck specialty course… Part 2

Tami, Kate and I are busy with the PADI Wreck Specialty course, and did our third of four dives on Sunday 21 November. It was miserable weather, pouring with rain, but Kate demonstrated the virtues of organising a rental car with ample boot space.

Dive 3: SAS Good Hope

The SAS Good Hope is one of the five ships scuttled in Smitswinkel Bay. This was the second dive I’ve done on it. (The first one involved an unfortunate case of nitrogen narcosis – I had to briefly stop my descent because I felt it again this time, but nowhere near as badly.)

Strawberry sea anemones on the SAS Good Hope

The water was a chilly 13 degrees at the bottom, and while the visibility was excellent – perhaps 10 metres – it was very dark. The wreck is spectacular, of massive dimensions (94 metres long) and with large sections caved in. There are numerous bits of metal to swim under (we did try one or two under Tony’s instruction) and overall it is incredibly dramatic. The darkness, however, meant that even though my eyes could see the entire structure in front of me, my camera couldn’t see more than a foot or two. So the only pictures that came out were of a macro nature.

Our skills on this dive involved use of a reel and line. We tied off the reel on the wreck, and then swam into the current, keeping it tight as if we were going to using it in penetration. We turned two corners and tied it off each time. I really do not like the way I feel at depth – I feel noticeably stupid – but I was quite proud of our performance.

We did a good safety stop in very green murk, and deployed an SMB from seven metres or so. There was a fairly large swell so surface conditions were not ideal, but I managed to keep my breakfast down which pleased me no end.

Sea life: Molluscs

Helmet shell on the move at night at Long Beach

I know octopus are molluscs, but by the title of this post I mean things with external shells – abalone, limpets, whelks, mussels and chitons. Couldn’t find a word that covers all of them!

When I was a child, apart from interfering with innocent sea anemones, I enjoyed everything else that the rocky shore had to offer. I collected shells, tried to pull limpets off the rocks, and admired the tracks left in the sand by plough shells on Fish Hoek Beach. As a scuba divers, the temptation is to dismiss all these creatures as not being that interesting – after all, we dive in order to see BIG things, like rays, sharks, fancy fish, and octopus.

The truth is, however, that during my dives I’ve seen a lot of the shells I used to pick up as a child. With a couple of notable differences. One is that these shells are generally inhabited – and their inhabitants are far more brightly coloured and interesting than I ever imagined they would be. The other difference is that, in general, the specimens I see strolling around on the sea bed are bigger than the empty shells I found in rockpools and on the beach. Much bigger (and it’s not just the magnifying effect of the water).

Ribbed turrid on the move at Long Beach - look at that gorgeous foot!

Take abalone (perlemoen) for example. Prized by sexually insecure foreigners, these gastropods are poached almost into oblivion all along the South African coastline. Most of my diving is done in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) for which I pay for a permit, but this doesn’t make them immune to poaching. It takes years – up to 30 years – for an abalone to grow to its maximum size of about 18 centimetres in diameter. These are incredibly slow-growing creatures. So when I see a massive specimen clinging to a rock at Fisherman’s Beach, or strolling across the sand with the edges of its mantle waving festively at Long Beach, I feel hugely privileged. He’s almost as old as I am!

A week ago I found an abalone at Long Beach that had gotten flipped over, and his (very beautiful) foot was in the air. I took a picture, righted him, and took another picture. Even though he was not very big (about 13 centimetres) his shell was so encrusted that he was clearly quite old.

We also see many whelks of various kinds. These are voracious predators – they will drill holes in other shells using acid, and then inject digestive juices in order to digest their prey while they are still inside their shell. If you find shells with small holes drilled in them, it’s probably one that met an unlucky end at the hands (foot?) of a whelk.

Deadly (or passionate?) embrace at Long Beach

Chitons are protected by a row of eight overlapping plates – if you find a piece of shell that looks like a little boomerang, that’s a piece of chiton. They come in various sizes from the very small (1 centimetre) to the rather impressive. They can’t see a thing – their heads are completely hidden under their plates. They have a very sharp tongue called a radula that they use to scrape algae and other tasty goods off the rocks for food.

Another regular sighting is the allegedly tasty alikreukel – the biggest snail you’ll ever see. As a child I would pick up the little trapdoors they use to seal their shells – one side is usually gorgeous mother of pearl, and the other has little knobbles. These snails are quite active and we often see them moving about.

There’s a lot to see if you slow down and take your time over small areas of the sand, rocks or reef. You’ll often find a handsome mollusc hiding in amongst the seaweed, or making his way across a sandy patch. They’re little miracles in and of themselves – take a look!

Sea life: Urchins

I used to love collecting sea urchin shells as a child – we’d go on holiday to Betty’s Bay, and I would collect handfuls of shells from tiny to huge. When we went home, I’d make strings of shells, arranged in size from largest to smallest.

Sea urchins and brittlestar at Fisherman's Beach

The bare, empty shells look green, but at the aquarium we have looked at them under the microscope and they are actually far more detailed than just plain old army green. The live urchin has spines, tube feet, and little pincers, all of which protrude from different holes in its shell. The outer surface of the shell is ribbed, with lots of lumps and bumps and gradations of colour all the way from green to purple. And looking at a live urchin under a microscope is amazing indeed.

Sea urchins tend to like to live on rocks – we don’t see many of them at Long Beach (possibly also because they’ve been eaten by the rock lobsters) but they’re prolific at Fisherman’s Beach, Shark Alley and Sunny Cove. They can be found clustered on the rocky reefs, many of them with a piece of seaweed as a hat.

Juvenile abalone shelter among sea urchins, and disturbing the balance of the sea urchin population can have devastating consequences for abalone. One of the primary predators of sea urchins is the West Coast rock lobster (commonly, and incorrectly, referred to as crayfish). When the population of rock lobster gets out of control, they eat too many urchins, and the juvenile abalone have nowhere to hide. The abalone population can consequently collapse. This has been documented and studied at several sites in the Western Cape. This has implications for fisheries management.

Sea urchin and cushion star at Fisherman's Beach

Sea urchin spines are a pain (literally) if you get them in your foot or other body part. For this reason your buoyancy needs to be good if you plan to swim over urchin country. There are several kinds of urchin found in the Cape, but I’ve only seen the one depicted in these photos so far. Urchin beds are more active than they seem at first glance, and worth a look when you’re diving in a rocky area.

Wreck specialty course… Part 1

Tami, Kate and I are busy with the PADI Wreck Specialty course. It involves four wreck dives, and a theory component. You don’t need to be an Advanced diver to do the course – though all three of us are – but an Adventure Diver qualification is sufficient.

(The Adventure Diver qualification is like Advanced-lite: instead of five adventure dives, you only do three. Also, you can credit each adventure dive towards the first dive of the corresponding specialty course.)

The theory component is simple: there’s a short (50 page) manual that covers safety aspects of wreck diving as well as some of the historical and (marine) biological considerations that should be borne in mind when exploring wrecks. I was particularly struck by the section pointing out that some wrecks are war graves or the final resting place (like Titanic) of many civilian souls, and should thus be treated with the same respect as you would a grave in a cemetery.

The manual is also very clear and forceful on the subject of wreck penetration, an activity that seems terrifying to me. You need the correct equipment, and (as Peter Southwood says repeatedly on his Wikivoyage pages) if you don’t know what that is, you’re not qualified to enter a wreck! Also, there are particular techniques required to handle that equipment: you need to know how to manage a reel, belaying it correctly, as well as how to handle yourself in case of entrapment, entanglement, or disorientation. Added to all this, many wrecks are unstable and all of them are in a state of decay… Locally, the SAS Transvaal, SAS Pietermaritzburg and BOS 400 come to mind (the latter collapsed during a storm this past winter, and is now in a radically different orientation).

Four wreck dives are required to complete the course. This past weekend we did two: a deep dive on the MV Rockeater, a fantastic former diamond driller in Smitswinkel Bay, and a dive on the SAS Pietermaritzburg.

Dive 1: MV Rockeater

The MV Rockeater is the oldest of the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks – it’s been down there since 1972. The ship has a lot of interesting bits and pieces sticking up off it, as well as a collapsed helicopter pad and a drilling derrick that is lying on the sand next to it. It’s 65 metres long and very, very lively. We saw a sleeping pyjama catshark in the wreck, as well as nudibranchs, lots of fish, and the most beautiful sea fans. Space cadet here didn’t lower her camera’s lens cover before putting it in the housing, and didn’t check that everything was in order with the camera while still on the boat… So at 20 metres when I switched it on, it told me to “lower the lens cover in order to shoot”… Opening the housing to do so was not an option! So I just had to look, no pictures.

Our project on this dive was to determine which way the current was flowing, and then swim from the shot line down the wreck into the current. We’d do this to 1/4 of our air, and then turn around and swim back with the current.

Dive 2: SAS Pietermaritzburg

The SAS Pietermaritzburg is a more recent scuttling (1994) but lies in a very exposed spot just off the Miller’s Point slipway. It has a fascinating history – before being purchased and renamed by the South African government, it took place as the lead minesweeper in the D Day invasion of Normandy. And now it’s lying 1 kilometre from Miller’s Point!

The visibility wasn’t great (apparently fairly standard for this site), but it’s a fantastic wreck. Maximum depth (on the sand) is about 22 metres, so you can have a nice long dive in relative comfort. The wreck has all sorts of cool places to look inside, a ladder up to the deck, and for the brave (or foolhardy), some swimthroughs under the hull.

It was nudibranch paradise… Instead of giving my full attention to the mapping project we’d been set (drawing the wreck including estimates of width and length, the compass direction in which it’s lying, and depths on the deck and sand), I was taking National Geographic quality photos of those gorgeous sea slugs.Fortunately Kate’s map was good enough for both of us!

Tony was doing dive 4 with Cindy, an Open Water student, so Gerard, Kate, Tami (once she found us!) and I cruised the wreck investigating all the awesome features. We will definitely be diving this wreck a lot more in the future.

Weather permitting, we’ll do the second and third dives for the Wreck specialty next weekend or the weekend after that.