Scuba at Sodwana

Sodwana Bay is actually located within a marine nature reserve, and so the accommodation options are quite limited. But it turned out that the best and nicest place to stay was with the main scuba diving operation - Coral Divers. They are a pretty major operation and have superb facilities and equipment, and seeing as how we arrived mid-week in low season I got a great deal on a diving package.

In total I did five dives there - all of which were in poor visibility (8-10 meters), but all of which also had some kind of highlight. The launch site for the boats actually had quite big breakers, so actually just getting beyond them was a great laugh (we had to wear life jackets, and the boat captain had to do a practice run first to make sure the engines were working properly). On our first ride out to the dive site the dive master spots a whale shark and jumps into the water to try and get a proper bearing on it. I'm hurriedly getting my snorkel and flippers on, but the dive master can't find the whale shark again and we miss it. On my last dive I was bumped off my original dive boat to make room for a group of students, and of course on their way back from their dive they found a whale shark and got to dive with it and get really close - naturally I was raging, but that's just the luck of the draw really.

But it also whale season at Sodwana and coming back from my first dive a humpback whale's tail came right out of the water, no more than 30 meters from the boat. I thought this was amazing at the time, but the next day on the beach I saw flippers flapping about and just caught a glimpse of a full breach (where the whale jumps straight up vertically from the water, and splashes back down again in a huge explosion of water). But over the following few weeks (and especially at Hermanus) we got see lots of lots of whales, sometimes extremely close.

The dives themselves weren't really spectacular (mainly due to the poor visibility), but I still got to see lots of coral , lion and scorpion fish, nudibranchs, moray eels, rays, an octopus, puffer fish, pipefish, etc. It was great to get back diving again - it was hard to believe it had been over seven years since my last one.

I saw four turtles over the five dives, which is always nice. Sarah got to see one too when she did a Discover Scuba dive. Discover Scuba is for people who want to just give scuba a go without doing a full course, so after about an hours instruction Sarah got to come on one of my dives. She was pretty nervous but once she relaxed she got to enjoy the dive. Her instructor was good too, and let her free swim for a bit (i.e. not holding her hand for the entire dive) and she managed very well (some people will just bolt straight for the surface). Her air managed to last a good 40 minutes too, which was very good for a first-timer. She didn't get to see any sharks though!

From Sodwana it was South again and time for a tad more safari.