Barra Beach and Tofo – April 2005
by Jason

After flying into South Africa I spent a few days diving the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, I then made the journey north of Durban, driving to Mozambique via Swaziland. The infrastructure in Mozambique has never been very good, the Portuguese concentrated on developing the coastal towns that serviced their East African trade routes and the roads linking these were never more than basic. The situation was then compounded by fifteen years of civil war which only ended in the early nineties. The Mozambican tourist industry is still therefore relatively undersubscribed and offers deserted beaches, unspoilt diving and a real sense of getting away from it all.

We were staying near Inhambane, a beautiful town on a 23 kilometre-wide saltwater lagoon. This port was first established by Arab traders as the southernmost destination in their trade routes and their influence is apparent in the town architecture and the traditional fishing dhows which are still used on the lagoon.

Our chalets were in beautiful coconut groves on Barra Beach at the mouth of the lagoon. The dive sites off Barra are coral reefs in about ten metres of water which, despite not looking impressive, have a lot to offer a dedicated fish-nerd (like myself). It is their proximity to the sheltered breeding grounds of the lagoon that make these reefs special and I repeatedly spotted the juveniles of a number of different species including emperor angelfish, checkerboard wrasse, rippled triggerfish, bluespotted tamarin, black snapper and rockmover wrasse. I also found tiny juvenile morays of every stripe, clearfin lionfish, many nudibranchs, and crocodile, stone and scorpion fish by the dozen.

Tempted by the promise of yet more juveniles I did a muck dive in the lagoon itself. The three metres of water were hardly teeming with fish but the floor of the lagoon was the focus of our attention and here, amongst the urchins, rotting mangrove leaves, sea grass and rubbish, we found hundreds of tiny juveniles including porkys, cowfish, scorpionfish and lionfish. One member of our group spotted a seahorse and I had an encounter with a very curious cuttlefish.

The majority of the dives that I did in Mozambique were not off Barra but round the point in the open ocean off Tofo and about 20 minutes away by RIB. These sites ranged from 15 to 30 metres.

The shallower sites provided all the usual reef suspects and most had busy cleaning stations of some sort or another. At Salon the numerous overhangs and gullies contained hundreds of cleaner, banded, dancer and zebra shrimp which happily cleaned anything put in front of them (finger and toenails included) and at Mike’s Cupboard I watched thousands of fusiliers streaming over the reef like silver darts to converge on an overhang containing a single harassed looking cleaner wrasse who was darting into the mouth of each in turn. On these reefs I also found huge cowries and cushion starfish, lots of octopus and my first paperfish.

The deeper reefs in this area were the most interesting topographically, their rock amphitheatres and escarpments dotted with sponges and green coral trees. These reefs are also the site of numerous manta cleaning stations which never failed to live up to their hype. I did 5 dives on these deeper reefs and saw mantas on every one. Reaching up to 4 metres from tip to tip and sporting impressive-looking shark bites the mantas seemed completely unconcerned by our presence. They swam over, around and between us trailing their attendant remoras. One station was manned by butterflyfish which fluttered behind the mantas like a bright yellow train. I don’t have an underwater camera but luckily one of the divers on my RIB did, all the underwater pictures and video footage in the report are his (thank you, David Park).

On our last dive we saw two bull rays and about a half dozen mantas as we made our way along the rocky ridge of Giant’s Castle. A crack in the reef held a huge crayfish and a nest of geometric morays, one adult and four juveniles, their bodies twined like rope. Juvenile redfang triggerfish no bigger than anthias swarmed around holes in the reef, while adults flapped clumsily through the water above them. As we ascended to our five metre stop the water around us was full of barrel-shaped tunicates as big as rugby balls and chain salps over a metre long. Below us a group of six mantas converged once again on the ridge. Coming in close, they turned in an almost perfect circle, each just feet from the next, as though they were reclaiming the reef.