Algoa Bay

A diving day here is a boat day, and it starts with a look at the wind. Charters run inflatables out of Gqeberha, normally two dives to a trip with the deeper reef first and something shallower after, and once the boat has committed to the offshore marks there is no ducking back for a quick shore dive instead. Wind, rather than water clarity, is what costs people days, so book more diving than you actually need.

The bay reads as two areas. Inshore, low reef ridges and gullies sit in greener, surgier water within sight of the city, unreliable on visibility but the thing that saves a day when the offshore trip is scrubbed. Further out, isolated reef tops rise off deeper ground into the run of the current, and that is where the water clears first and where the sharks gather. Wreck diving adds a third profile again, fixed structure standing up off otherwise open seabed.

The shark diving is static rather than a chase. Ragged-tooths are seasonal travellers along this coast, and the Eastern Cape summer gathering is generally read as pregnant females that have moved south after mating further up the coast. They are also the one shark known to gulp air at the surface and hold it in the stomach as a buoyancy float, which is how an animal that size hovers over a reef without swimming. The method is to settle, stop finning and let them drift back over you.

Numbers build from November, hold through the high-summer months the calendar rates prime, then thin as the water cools, so a midwinter trip is a different holiday altogether. The crossing often earns its own entry in the log, with bottlenose pods working the surface and whales through in the colder months. It suits divers content in water that is cold and often green and who can hold a position without silting the reef out; anyone whose reference point is warm tropical reef should expect a temperate bay that happens to have sharks in it.