KwaZulu-Natal South Coast – April 2005
by Jason

In April of this year I had the opportunity to visit Mozambique. As I had to travel via South Africa I decided to fit in a few days diving in Kwazulu-Natal.

My first day in the water was at Aliwal Shoal, an hour south of Durban. This rock reef system is the place where I first learnt to dive and I know that on a good day it can really deliver, unfortunately I had arrived on a bad day. A strong current and surge and three metres of murky, brown vis produced a rather testing dive. Shore-launched RIB dives are the norm in this area and are exciting at the best of times. Compounded by rain and a nasty shore break they become quite hair-raising and I was relieved to finally get in the water. We managed a respectable dive time despite the conditions and our divemaster spotted a juvenile rockmover wrasse which caused much excitement in our group. It wasn’t enough to tempt us back into the water for a second dive however and we headed back to brave the landing rather than sit out a decent surface interval in increasingly unpleasant weather.

The following day I went further south to Shelly Beach, the launch site for the Protea Banks. This mile long reef lies 8 kilometres from the shore and is closer to the edge of the continental shelf than it is to land. It is 27 metres at its shallowest and drops away quickly to 60 metres on either side. The currents sweeping the length of east Africa snag on this ridge and are curled toward the surface providing one of the richest feeding grounds in this area of ocean. I had two great dives in clear, dark-blue water full of shimmering thermoclines and big schools of barracuda. Above one raised slab of reef hundreds of trevally rode the current in the company of a half dozen large potato bass. We also had two marbled ribbontail rays over a metre across come in to investigate us. On our ascent we were lucky enough to see some of the sharks that make this dive site famous. First two bull sharks passed us, they were a little wary but their silhouettes, just at the limits of the vis, were unmistakeable. The rest of the group also saw a large tiger shark as it cruised above us; I was too busy watching the barracuda though and had to wait till we were back in the RIB to find out what had caused their excitement.