Under the sea {Darrell}


Advertisement
Published: March 15th 2007
Edit Blog Post

Pool trainingPool trainingPool training

The new divers learning to hold our breath... I mean NOT hold our breath... whatever
The final destination of our great road trip was the Sodwana Bay Nature Reserve. Apart from being a stunningly beautiful dense forest, just off the coast lies a series of coral reefs which make the bay one of the world's top 5 dive sites.

We had booked our dives with Coral Divers, a beautiful dive lodge in the National Park. Since the 3 of us were doing our dive course, we had an included tent accommodation . These were pretty decent army-style tents under a tin roof with proper mattresses inside. The cost of the same accommodation for the other 3 was R50 per day, but then you also have to pay R40 per day for park fees. Instead, the other 3 paid R45 p/d to camp in the park and then just pitched our well-used tent at one of the camp sites next to the Coral Divers lodge. Strictly speaking, we were on the self-catering option at Coral Divers, but that included the use of a fantastic big kitchen with gas cookers, microwaves, fridges, china plates and everything else we needed. When we wanted to make a braai in the big open braai area, they told us that all
The odd coupleThe odd coupleThe odd couple

Aww.. aren't we beautiful
we need to do is tell reception what time we would be braaing and they would have a fire ready for us. They even collected our plates from the table and washed them for us when we were finished eating! Thats way better than the self-service I've had anywhere else.

The lodge isn't right ont the beach, but there's a tracktor with a wagon that goes down to the beach 45min before each dive with all your gear. At the beach you can sit in the shade and do your dive briefing while they pack your stuff on the boat. In the afternoon we could catch the shuttle down to the beach and use their surfboards and kayaks or go snorkeling just of the shore where there's plenty of tropical fish and rays. Back at the lodge there's a big wooden deck around a swimming pool with a bunch of deck chairs outside the lodge, which was fantastic for lounging around in the evening.

Basically, we highly recommend Coral Divers as a fantastic place to stay. You really get a lot for the little you pay.

Cathy is already a great diver, but I (Darrell) have been
Dive briefingDive briefingDive briefing

We're all in such good shape, we'd better make our dive master get warmed up
waiting for an opportunity like this to do my open water course. George and Jeanne-Mari were also doing the course with me, from the Monday to Thursday. In the meantime Cathy, Willie and Andries started diving together, bringing back stories of rays and eels and swimming with dolphins, just to get us even more excited. By the Wed we started diving, which was far better than I'd even began to expect. It was beautifully clear and incredibly colourful underwater. We swam in the middle of huge schools of tropical fish and saw eels, lionfish, giant clams, HUGE sea turtles and the biggest rays I have ever seen.

On our last day we had finished all of the dives we had pre-booked, but found that there was one last one we couldn't miss out on. A whole group of female ragged tooth sharks had come to breed at on of the reefs just off the coast and they were going to go dive at the site. Apparently raggies do not eat at all during their breeding time, and are very placid. They breed only at this specific site, and are only there a few days every year. We dropped into
Off we goOff we goOff we go

Pushing the boat out
the water with our buoyancy jackets fully deflated, and crawled along the bottom, right through the breeding ground.

It was a really eerie experience. The water was a bit murky, visibility maybe 8-10m, so you would see a dark shape arriving out of the corner or your eye, and as it slowly gets closer, you can see that it's a 2.5m shark, complete with rows-upon-rows of teeth! Sometimes you don't notice them coming, so that when you turn around, they are right next to you, close enough to reach out and touch (not that you would!). It was definitely the most exhilarating thing I've done. You have a very clear feeling of being a foreigner in THEIR world. They really are beautiful...

Well, we all had crazy fun, then packed our dirty selves and all our stuff back into Sandy, and left for the long trip home. Andries' parents gave us a welcome pit stop to eat and clean in Uitenhage and then we were back home, 5100km and 12 days later, feeling like we'd been away for years.


Additional photos below
Photos: 7, Displayed: 7


Advertisement

Guess what we saw!Guess what we saw!
Guess what we saw!

Post-dive ridiculousnesses
The twoThe two
The two

'Nuff said
In the eveningIn the evening
In the evening

Good food, good friends


Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 29; dbt: 0.0441s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.1mb