CAPE TOWN
IN DECLINE Blue sharks were once the
most abundant shark species in our oceans, but due to overfishing (it’s estimated that between 10 and
“Makos are pretty shy,” Brocq
explains. “But if they come up to you, stay still and make eye contact. Same for the blues. They’re curious and use their mouths to investigate. They’ll come up and might try to have a nibble. Engage with them: move towards them, look them in the eye and gently push them away. They’ll swim away and maybe come back for another look. Don’t back off or splash around. And if any skin is exposed, they’ll be even more curious. They’re attracted to light colours.” I look down at my old wetsuit. It has
two pale pink panels running down the sides. Fantastic. Two hours earlier, we’d been
skimming along the water a few hundred metres off the ragged coast of the Cape Peninsula. Mountains gave way to sea, cleſts of dark green foliage twisting up ravines into the rust-red folds of cliff faces. “Look, there’s Water’s Edge,” Keri said, pointing at the small bay in which we’d dived countless times. “And there’s Windmill.” From out here,
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where the water is deep and blue, our regular dive sites looked miniature, the boulders and floating kelp blades like ornaments in a pond. Keri and I met about a year ago on a
freediving course, where we learned to hold our breath and rescue each other. The kelp forests soon became our daily shrines, where we discovered the alchemy of sunlight in water and the magic of entering a world populated by creatures and plants so strange and surprising that sometimes all we could do was shake our heads. We took photographs with our
compact cameras: of shaſts of light streaming through golden ribbons of kelp, black-and-white striped pyjama sharks sashaying past, neon anemones blooming, octopuses eyeballing us. Lisa introduced us to nudibranchs, tiny sea slugs whose patterns and shapes are an audacious carnival of colour. I fell in love with the harmless, chunky houndsharks endemic to Southern Africa and silently patrol the reefs and
20 million are killed each year), they’re now listed as ‘near threatened’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list. Makos are considered vulnerable on the IUCN list.
ABOVE: Blue shark
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