Cape Town 2003

Rory McNeary

In 2003 I was lucky enough to find myself in Capetown, South Africa for an unbelievable 3 months. I was there to complete a 10 week commercial diving course. My diving instructor and host had been head of diving operations for the South African Navy and had more than thirty years experience. He had seen action during South Africa’s ‘dirty’ border wars and was one of the last South African Navy divers to be officially trained by the British Navy in 1972.

The diving was admittedly not the most exciting and the novelty of diving in Agas, Exos and Kirby Morgans soon wore off. We dived day-in-day-out for about eight weeks. For the most part it was about getting bottom time to qualify interspersed with mind numbing tasks, such as, chain breaking, broco cutting, and valve assembly and disassembly.

We dived in three principal locations: in and around Kalk harbour on the False Bay side of the Cape, Hout Bay on the Atlantic side and a murky quarry inland in a suburb of the city. Kalk harbour was a small working fishing harbour and market. The atmosphere was brilliant – feral fishermen basking on their boats, cape salmon and yellow tail being hawked on the quay and the fish cakes in Kalky’s fish and chip shop were heaven sent. If you find yourself in Kalk harbour go to Kalky’s, don’t bother going diving, it stinks and if you stand on the pier and look east you will make out the hazy landmass that is ‘Seal Island’. In 2000 an amazed crowd watched as a white shark seized a seal off the outside of the harbour wall in the middle of the day. I was informed of this shortly before I slid into the water to do a night dive at the harbour.

The Hout Bay side offered much better diving and we had some good visibility on occasions. The back-drop of Chapman’s Peak is stunning. A number of dives stand out: a 30m dive in near perfect viz onto the wreck of the Aster in the middle of the bay on scuba. The Aster was originally a lobster catcher that had been scuttled in April 1977 to form an artificial reef after being thoroughly cleaned out and swim-throughs cut into her. I did that dive in the gear provided: 8mm suit (water temp. 10°C, not warm), twin 7ltr Navy Draeger, single regulator and a contents gauge – no computer, no BCD, no octopus reg – we’re talking retro. Four of us took it in turn to stand on the prow of the ship and make-like-Leonardo in Titanic before dropping gloriously deeper to the bottom. I could make out our dive boat - the twin hulled Argo Cadet - on the surface. That day was made all the better for seeing a Southern Right Whale breach about a hundred metres from the boat and it was February.

I saw only one white shark and that was in Hout Bay. We had divers down when a large dorsal fin appeared and kept coming straight at the boat. I saw it first and shouted out. We watched as it circled the boat, bumped the small dinghy tied off the back and hovered around the divers’ exhaust bubbles. We knew the divers were sitting on bottom at about 22m. The viz was like pea soup that day. They had no idea and no word was sent to the divers over the comms. The mysterious fin disappeared periodically and then would appear again. Was it actually a shark? We asked the instructor for confirmation, he replied, ‘It’s just a bloody sun fish’ – the assistant instructor looked at us all knowingly and gave us a wry smile. That was no sun fish. When the divers surfaced we changed out gear and I went down with the next wave. We all knew. In the pea green viz we stood back-to-back sentinel-like at the bottom of the shot not moving and counted the minutes. Needless to say I survived.

At the end of the course I was given the opportunity (free-of-charge) to dive in standard dress in the predator exhibit at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Capetown. This exhibit is the largest in the Aquarium containing two million litres of water. I was kitted out in a Japanese Imperial Navy Diving suit which consisted of a copper helmet (18kg), lead boots (9kg each), a canvas suit, and other lead weights. The total weight of the equipment was 60kg. Air was supplied from the surface through an umbilical cable. I was lowered into the tank and shuffled around the gravely bottom in this incredibly heavy outfit as five extremely fat, well-fed, ragged tooth sharks swam around me along with a variety of rays, including a giant short tail ray, a turtle, shoals of yellowtail, mussel crackers and garrick. The sharks were as disinterested in this array of fish as they were of a skinny Irishman like me but I still got to eye-ball them up close. I assure you the adrenaline was pumping.

One of the ragged tooth sharks I swam with, Maxine, who weighed in at 190 kilograms and measured over 2.5m was returned to the ocean in March last year after being displayed in the aquarium for over eight years. Maxine has become the icon for the Save our Seas Foundation M-Sea Programme (Maxine Science, Education and Awareness Programme) which is supported by the Save our Seas (S.O.S.) Foundation, AfriOceans Conservation Alliance (AOCA) and the Two Oceans Aquarium. Maxine has been tagged with an ultrasonic coded tag and two pop-up archival satellite tags – to monitor her movements. The ultrasonic tag will transmit signals for up to two years. It is hoped that she will migrate with other ragged-tooth sharks to their breeding grounds further up the east coast of South Africa. It is possible to monitor Maxine’s journey on the website www.aoca.org.za.

The time I spent in South Africa was made all the easier due to the fact that I had met a South African called Peter Bernico on the River Dodder in Dublin fly-fishing the previous summer and we had become good friends. He had subsequently returned to work in Durban but had provided me with contacts in his old university town of Capetown. His friends and family that lived on the Western Cape were extremely generous and keen to show me the country that they were so proud of. I went with them to the wine farms of Franschoek, fly-fishing on the Elandspad River beyond the Du Toit’s Kloof Pass, longboarding at Muizenberg and Fish Hoek beach and shared countless braais. Mike Jenkins deserves a special mention as he introduced me to the simple art of fishing for rock lobster or crayfish, which are like our own lobster but without the large front pinchers. Mike was a dab hand and had two good sized crayfish in an hour. These along with others caught were cooked that night – par-boiled, barbequed and drizzled with garlic butter. The memory of eating those lovelies with buttery fingers and washed down with cold Namibian lager has brought me close to emigrating ever since.

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