and restaurants such as Jack’s Barefoot Bar, Paulo’s Bar, Sunset Shack, Come to See, 360` and Campismo; we knew the drinks would be plenty and the seafood delicious! The day we arrived in Malongane, we made it just in time for dive planning! Not only were we welcomed by some familiar faces but by some friendly new ones too. Every day at 17:00 at the dive camp, Derek calls out the boats and dives for the following day which people respond to with their names, which time they would like to dive and what dive qualification they have. Due to weather and sea conditions the dives were cancelled, however the following day the conditions were great; an hour before the dive time, you should kit up your gear and put on that skin-tight wetsuit. We had donned our gear and were impatiently waiting for the other divers; at long last we all gathered around a table with our Dive Master and Instructor to have a briefing and to find out which reef we would be diving. This would be Goblins; an amazing reef close-by with a depth of 17m, and WOW what a brilliant dive it was! We saw the luminous colours of the sea life and coral; we saw a majestic leatherback turtle, a massive honeycomb moray eel and not to mention the ever so friendly potato bass. When diving; you become more aware of your wonderful surroundings and the bright colours, the little clown fish hanging around the anemone, the moray eel hiding in his hole protecting the cleaner shrimp hard at work, the stingray burying himself in the sand and the schools of fish just swimming on by.
are so beautiful in their own way that makes them so extraordinary. On our next dive I was pleasantly surprised by John with an underwater proposal to marry him, how utterly spectacular in a setting that most don’t even get to see! With only hand signals under the water it was a BIG YES! We dived every morning for roughly two weeks; they were absolutely breath taking and so much fun, however we saved the best dive for last… Pinnacles, the 10th best dive destination in the world! As we got the boat off shore and into the sea, we were set on our way to see some serious shark life. As we backward rolled off the boat and started descending the first shark we saw was a Zambezi, not long after that we saw Hammerhead circling on the reefs bottom; as we got to 35m we were greeted by a massive potato bass which stuck by us for majority of the dive, the second potato bass seemed a bit more shy but still swam past all the divers. As we slowly started to profile upwards, we saw a small Lemon shark, White Tip Shark and then, the biggest beauty we had seen, Elvis… A colossal Zambezi shark with her dorsal fin slightly folded to the one side, she came within a mere 20m of us! An experience of a lifetime; such majestic creatures that are given such terrible reputations which at no point did I feel scared or unsafe, what a way to end off the perfect holiday!Thanks to Splash H2O, scuba diving has really opened up new horizons and is definitely an experience worth sharing! You have one life, dive it!
The ocean opens up a whole other magical world that we don’t get to appreciate as much as we should, there are so many creatures that
Profusion Magazine
FEB | MAR 2015
63