As I watch a line of crimson blood trickle down my foot, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. The injury – even if it is minor – secures my place alongside the other passengers of this jostling dinghy, a vessel currently being tossed around the Indian Ocean like a marionette under the influence. The boat’s 10 passengers, all being kept from going overboard by a foot jammed beneath a strip of webbing, bear similar scrapes and scratches. Such cosmetic wounds are the unofficial badges of a scuba diving “Divemaster”, as identifiable as the labels on their rash vests.
I’m at the tail end of a month in Sodwana Bay National Park in South Africa, where I’ve been training to become a PADI Divemaster. It’s been a challenge. My body has been put through its paces (I’m not what you’d call an F45 kind of girl) and my underwater skills are seriously tested.
It’s been a change of pace compared to the scuba diving education I received four years ago in Gozo. That experience consisted largely of hopping in a truck daily, driving 15 minutes or so in the Mediterranean sun to a craggy coastline, then stepping off into a glistening 30C sea. In Sodwana, 350km northeast of Durban and one small part of the vast iSimangaliso Wetland Park, diving is a very different affair.
Sodwana isn’t as synonymous with scuba diving in the way the Maldives or the Red Sea are, nor does it crop up on many best diving destinations lists. Yet, this pocket of protected land less than two hours from Hluhluwe–iMfolozi Park (South Africa’s oldest game reserve) boasts as much marine life as its more famous neighbours yet in a much smaller area.
At last count, the ocean life along this stretch of coastline consisted of 22 marine mammals, more than 1,200 species of fish, 20 sponges and all manner of megafauna including thresher, bull (locally known as zambezi) and great white sharks. Loggerhead and leatherback turtles nest on the beaches here and paperfish, frogfish and anemones thrive along its coral-encrusted seabed. It’s even home to a fish species once thought to be extinct and now fondly referred to as “living fossils”: coelacanths. At least 30 of these ancient creatures have been documented in the waters around Sodwana Bay since 2000.
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The region’s rich marine life owes its abundance to its position on the African continent’s edge, the waters of which are fed by the rich Agulhas Current. Sodwana’s reefs are some of the southernmost on the planet, yet it remains a mystery why they’re not better known. However, sitting around a braai at Coral Divers resort one evening, I began to understand. “You don’t want to go to the Maldives?” I asked one long-serving staff member. He shrugged, “We have sharks, whales, mantas, eels – it’s all here, all year. Why would I go anywhere else?” “What about Indonesia?” I pushed; a headshake, “The marine life here is better”. I had little riposte; after all, he’s not wrong.
I’ve been lucky enough to have explored both Indonesian and Maldivian depths, and although the water might be warmer that side of the Indian Ocean (Sodwana’s sea temperature ranges from 17 to 28C) and the marine life comparable, to see the best of it, divers usually need to travel significant distances – hence the popularity of liveaboards. In Sodwana, the 10-mile stretch north of Jesser Point holds much of what the Maldives boasts across thousands of square miles of atolls, while on land divers enjoy the added bonus of sleeping in cosy lodges rather than cramped ships’ cabins. The message from locals is clear: “Why would you go anywhere else?”
Gaining access to this miasma of ocean life, however, isn’t quite as relaxed as my Mediterranean or Maldivian forays. Boats are “launched” from the shoreline via tractors using three-metre-long logs to thrust them through the stubborn surf. Divers walk into the water alongside the boat, helping to drag it into the depths before hauling themselves over the side (harder than it sounds when you have the upper body strength of a newborn turtle). Then it’s all about staying on board as swells pushing four-metres-high smash the boat from all sides. Luckily, you don’t have to hold on for long; the roughly 50 dive sites are close by, spread across nine unimaginatively-titled reefs (their names denote their distance from Jesser Point ie Two Mile, Five Mile, Seven Mile).
One of the most bountiful reefs is also one of the closest. Two Mile (which itself stretches for nearly 1.8km) features the most diving locations (around 30) and the shallowest depths, effectively debunking the myth that when it comes to diving, deeper is better. Marine life thrives in the sunlit shallows; I spotted ghost pipefish, marbled electric rays and large shoals of striped eel catfish, not to mention honeycomb moray eels, turtles and a plethora of nudibranchs – some 400 species are believed to thrive here.
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Like in many of the ocean’s most verdant regions, diving in Sodwana is restricted, and visitors are required to pay for park fees and diving permits. It’s also remote: the dive centres are at least 30 minutes from the nearest town, Mbazwana, along a broken road that is often filled with more cows than cars. That’s partly why pairing a diving trip here with PADI’s most extensive certification made sense. I’m going to be here a while, so let’s go all in.
Once qualified, a Divemaster can work as a dive guide and assist instructors with certain training programmes anywhere in the world. It’s a comprehensive course, meaning that over 30 days and 35 dives, I was able to visit some sites multiple times, mapping seabed topography, perfecting my navigation skills and honing emergency procedures while trying not to be distracted by the destination’s alluring offerings. On my very first dive, we took some time out en route to swim with a pod of curious bottlenose dolphins; on day two I found myself staring eye-to-eye with a couple of pregnant, three-metre-long, ragged-tooth sharks and yet another instance saw a human-sized sea bass got so friendly I thought it might follow me out of the sea.
It seems my experiences were just the tip of the Sodwana iceberg. My instructor Nick – a quick-to-laugh, fortysomething who joined Coral Divers nearly two years ago – fondly recalls encountering a 300kg Brindle Bass on “Antons”, vast shoals of hammerheads and manta rays at ‘Hotspot’ and drive-bys with two bull sharks at “Gotham”. He’s in love with Sodwana, and talk of diving elsewhere – even the temptations of wreck and cave diving (not feasible here) – might spark a look of intrigue, but nothing more.
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Personally, it’s hard to imagine only ever diving in one place. Travelling to new corners of the world, seeking out increasingly bizarre-looking creatures and challenging myself in different diving conditions is, for me, a key part of the scuba experience. Yet, arguably, Sodwana ticks those boxes too. No one dive here was ever the same. Currents and visibility varied wildly day to day – one morning the surface would be “Sodwana Lake”, the next metre-high waves would crash into the shore – and neither necessarily reflected conditions beneath the surface. Much of the pelagic marine life is transitory, so diving at different times of the year yields different results, with the possibility of huge mammal sightings such as humpback and southern right whales.
As for Sodwana’s location, former South African president Nelson Mandela perhaps put it best when he said: “iSimangaliso must be the only place on the globe where the world’s oldest land mammal (the rhinoceros) and the world’s biggest terrestrial mammal (the elephant) share an ecosystem with the world’s oldest fish (the coelacanth) and the world’s biggest marine mammal (the whale).”
When compared to the eye-watering prices of the Maldives and the Galapagos, and the sprawling remoteness of Indonesian islands, it’s easy to see why Sodwana Bay remains a hidden gem – it’s a secret fiercely guarded by those lucky enough to have discovered it.
Ally Wybrew travelled as a guest of PADI
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