In the Depths of the Fairest Cape
Posted By Sara-Lise Haith on 5 January 2007
Ask anybody who has been to Cape Town, and their opinion of it. Awesome, fantastic, I drank loads of wine, seem to be common comments. It’s difficult to describe the beauty of the majestic mountains which loom over the city, and put into a few words the magic of the oceans which roll about her beaches and rocks.
I say oceans in plural, as Cape Town has two ocean currents which run past it. The warm Agulhas runs south and west from the Indian Ocean pushing against the near-freezing waters of Antarctica, before meeting the cold Benguela current off the Cape of Good Hope. The second swiftest current in all the world's oceans, the Agulhas is deadlier than the swiftest current (the Gulf Stream) for two reasons. First one of its branches surges through a narrow passageway between Madagascar and Mozambique on the east coast of South Africa. Furthermore its waters rush from north to south--the opposite direction from which Portuguese ships needed to travel in order to round the tip of Africa. The Atlantic side is very cold water, reaching nearly 6degC in winter. False Bay is a little warmer, with temperatures up to 22 deg C making it an ideal playground for the famous Great White Sharks that roam the waters of the Cape coast. At L’Agulhas, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean meet together and the Cape coast is fiercely rough, jagged, shallow and is, and has been, be a sailor’s nightmare. The Cape Coast is dotted with 1000s of wrecks, some inaccessible to the regular diver.
I decided to go to Cape Town to see if I could see the white sharks and other sharks on a friend’s blue water hunting expeditions, but unfortunately as I hit the Cape the rough weather joined me and I was limited to diving in False Bay, which proved to have other attractions. I signed up with Scuba Shack who are based close to Kommetjie, and embarked on my first ever dive in South African waters.
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