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 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 each day, driving fifteen minutes or so in the Mediterranean sun to a craggy coastline, then stepping off into a glistening 30C sea. In Sodwana, 350km north east 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, over 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…
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