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This is a question many divers ask: "Should I spend money on buying my own scuba equipment or, should I continue to rent gear each time I go for a dive?" If you’re on the fence about buying new gear, you can start by doing a cost estimate of renting gear for the amount of diving you plan to do in the next year and compare that to buying your own. Here are a few other things to keep in mind when deciding.
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Never been to Egypt and dived the Red Sea? You are missing out, this trip will keep you coming back for more.
The Red Sea has some of the warmest and clearest water in the world, with pristine reefs and historic shipwrecks. Here are 10 reasons why this is a dive experience that should not be missed.
Info about our next trip HERE
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Cape Town boasts many magnificent features for divers to explore. There are beautiful dive sites that can be reached by boat, but unlike many other places around the world, that’s not the only way to dive in Cape Town. Our shore dives are something spectacular in their own right.
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and why they are Important
This is definitely a proven way to help protect our wonderful ocean and marine life for the benefit of people and nature.
What is a Marine Protected Area?
Like a nature reserve but in the ocean, it is an area of coastline or ocean that is specially protected with limits put into place in these specific areas.
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Featuring Women in Diving
Nicolene Olckers tells us about her interesting career as a photographer and dive professional with some great advice for people considering a career in diving.
How I got started in scuba diving
I must admit, I am a bit of an adrenaline junky. Over the years I have taken on the usual suspects, skydiving, bungee jumping, adventure motorcycling scuba diving, and open water swimming.
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Featuring Women in Diving
I was super excited to do my scuba course. After hearing and seeing all the amazing experiences that others had underwater, I couldn't wait to start my journey.
The Open Water Diver Course requires a medical check-up. I didn't think much of it, it's just standard procedure. The doctor heard a noise in my heart and declared me unfit to dive. He told me that just a week before, there was a case where he heard the same noise in another patient, and she ended up being diagnosed with PFO (Patent Foramen Ovale). This means that there is a small opening between the two upper chambers of the heart. The opening normally closes soon after birth, but in some people, it doesn't. This opening makes it dangerous to dive as it cannot handle the pressure, and can cause an air embolism.
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Sea urchins are echinoderms in the class Echinoidea. The name Echinoderm came from Greek. “Echinos” means ‘’Spiny” and “Derma” means “skin”. Some marine animals that are classified as echinoderms are sea cucumbers, sea stars or starfish, sand dollars, and sea urchins. Sea Urchins are like the porcupines of the sea and get their name from an Old English word for the spiny hedgehog.
Sea urchins inhabit all oceans and can be found from the shallows to 5000 meters deep, there are around 950 species.
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When a red tide enters our waters, you will see a strange natural occurrence. If you’ve never seen this happening, you need to go to the beach after sunset at the next red tide. When the water is disturbed with your hand or you can watch the waves, the water lights up with a blue color. This is called bioluminescence, and there is an excellent reason why this is happening.
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Diving in False Bay offers a variety of dives, making it a sought-after destination.
Location:
False Bay is an Atlantic Ocean body of water between the Cape Peninsula and Hottentots Holland Mountains in southwest South Africa. The bay’s mouth faces south, demarcated by Cape Point to the west and Cape Hangklip to the east.
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Read more: Exploring False Bay’s Aquatic Wonders: A Diverse Diving Destination
Dive Travel — South Africa
One of the world’s largest kelp forests is in South Africa. Kelp is a marine alga and not a true plant, with species ranging from shorter “bottom kelp” to taller ones. This ecosystem serves as food and shelter for many marine species and is one of the richest habitats on earth.
From the shore on the water’s surface, the forest canopy is visible and looks like a shiny green mass. But below the surface, an enchanting new world opens up.
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The neglected diversity:
Who would have thought that marine research, and specifically research on elasmobranchs (Elasmobranchii is a subclass of Chondrichthyes or cartilaginous fish, including the sharks and the rays, skates, and sawfish), would be one of the major areas of expertise in an inland university? Over the past three years, researchers at the NWU Potchefstroom campus, along with our collaborators at the South African Shark Conservancy (SASC) in Hermanus, have been doing research on elasmobranchs to determine ecotoxicity and their parasite diversity.
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Read more: Blood Parasites of Catsharks off the Western Cape
A world-renowned shark-diving reef in Southern KwaZulu Natal
If you want to dive with sharks, this is the place. We saw 8 different species of sharks, scalloped and great hammerheads, ragged-tooth (also called the gray nurse shark, sand tiger shark or blue-nurse sand tiger) sharks, tiger sharks, lots of Zambezi (bull) sharks, oceanic black tip, dusky and giant guitar sharks in the short time we spent here.
Protea Banks is situated approximately 7.5km out to sea from Shelly Beach on the East Coast of South Africa. The reef lies at a depth of between 27 and 40 meters. It is about 6km long and 800m wide. Essentially a fossilized sandbank that comes up from 60m.
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Shark behavior and tips on how to behave when you find yourself in the water with a shark
A while back we did a dive trip to Tofo, Mozambique. On our 4th dive of the trip, we were just about to end our dive on a dive site named Sherwood Forest when a Great White shark came to greet us. We were absolutely awe-struck coming face to face with this magnificent animal. She was very inquisitive and not skittish at all and circled us as we slowly started making our way to our safety stop. She kept moving just out of sight and then coming closer again while circling us. The visibility was not great that day. We did not feel threatened at all as the shark seemed calm and not overly inquisitive.
We fear what we do not understand.
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We have made a handy list of tips for you to improve your underwater photography skills.
1. Keep Still
Try to keep your camera as still as possible in order to prevent camera shake. The underwater environment can sometimes make this a big challenge and even impossible in surge or strong currents. Using a faster shutter speed will also help, but you are not always able to set the shutter speed too high without getting a photo that is too dark. To compensate for this, you can bump up your ISO to lighten up your image.
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Read more: 8 Handy Tips for Improving your Underwater Photography
Marine animals are probably the most interesting but the least known. So we made a list of some of our favourite sea creatures with interesting facts about them. All of these can be found around the South African coast.
1. Ragged-tooth Shark
The Ragged-tooth shark or as it is fondly called 'Raggie', has unmistakable 'ragged' teeth giving these docile sharks a fearsome appearance. They are however a slow-moving shark with no confirmed human fatalities.
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Octopus are one of the ocean’s most intelligent animals, and while it’s hard to pick favorites, here are the five species we most want to see on a dive.
Known as one of the most intelligent animals in the ocean, many factors make octopus so intriguing, including their camouflage skills, their multiple hearts, their locomotion technique, and their use of tools (in the case of the coconut octopus). We don’t like to pick favorites, but here are the five octopus species we’d most like to see on a dive.
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Shark illustration by Caitlin Judge
So, I’m sure most of us have seen ‘that shark video’ by now which has gone viral. Drone footage showing an encounter with a respectably sized white shark here in Plettenberg Bay.
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which was discovered in KZN
- The tiny and beautiful Sodwana pygmy seahorse is one of its kind to be found in Africa and for that matter the Indian Ocean.
- It now has a scientific name.
- Smaller than a R1 coin, the rare seahorse was only discovered in 2017.
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Going to Mafia Island was a spur-of-the-moment decision and one of the best we’ve made. We were going to Malawi but decided to go to Tanzania as an add-on to our Malawi trip since it was just a little bit extra to get there from Malawi. Mafia Island and its reefs are renowned as an excellent, world-class diving destination.
Mafia Island ("Chole Shamba") is an island in Tanzania. The name "Mafia" derives from the Arabic morfiyeh, meaning "group" or "archipelago", or from the Swahili mahali pa afya, meaning "a healthy dwelling-place".
See our next trip to Mafia Island
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Imagine a creature that looks like it was designed by a committee of artists on psychedelics: a sea slug that comes in every color of the rainbow, wearing its lungs on the outside of its body, and packing chemical weapons. Meet the nudibranch. The word "nudibranch" comes from the Latin nudus "naked" and the Ancient Greek (bránkhia) "gills" - a fitting name for these shell-less wonders that proudly display their gills like decorative feathers on their backs.
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