This would be my first taste of diving in South Africa. Launches through big surf were always exciting, and always risky. The water was slightly colder than what I was used to, around 20 degrees C, and the first task was to get this water up your wetsuit as you helped pull the boat into the water until it could get its engines on. Because engine power was so critical for getting through the surf, all dive boats had two engines, usually 85 hp. All equipment was tied down or stowed, and the tanks in the middle were rigged with regs and lashed tight. The divers sitting on the rubber edge had ropes to hold on to and footstraps on the deck. All aboard, the boat raced into the surf and looped back toward shore as the skipper awaited a break in the waves. At just the right moment, he turned out to sea and gunned it. We popped up one wave before it crested, landing with a splash on the other side, and avoided the next by racing to its edge ahead of the curl. In a few moments emulating a sort of reverse-white water rafting, we were past the surf zone and heading out to "2 mile reef" (2 miles out), where other dive boats were already scattered over the various sites. It was a big reef, and there seemed to be plenty of room for all.

At the site, everyone kitted up together. The boatman maneuvered us to the exact drop point and everyone went in at once. Once in there was little messing around on the surface. I heard later that a diver who had delayed too long at this point had appeared to a great white to be a seal and had not survived the experience. With more wetsuit than what I was used to, I was a little underweight, but I finned down and let the depth compress me to where I could stay down at depth. From there, it was a matter of enjoying the dive.

However, I wasn't that impressed. True to what they'd told me at the dive shops, there was little more there than reef fishes. The water was a little unpleasantly cold, and there was nothing of interest that couldn't be seen in more tropical waters elsewhere. Vis was better than it usually is in Musandam, but there was nowhere near the number of fish. Overall I was disappointed in this particular corner of the great Sodwana reef system. Of some consolation though, the rufty tufty CMAS instructors were all up after 35 to 45 minutes, as were their students, leaving me and Peter, the PADI divemaster, all to ourselves at the end of our 50 minutes of dive time.

Back on the boat there was some discussion in Afrikaans to which I paid little heed, and when people made motions as if to swim for shore through the surf rather than ride the boat in, I just assumed this was their habit. It looked like it might be fun to body surf in, and it would all be in keeping with the Afrikaans esprit de vivre. However, it turned out that these actions had been made necessary by one of the engines on the boat conking out, which I understood only when another boat turned up to offload us, making the swim for shore unnecessary. With us all aboard the second boat, we raced into the surf, keeping the engines going just enough to ride the backside of a wave in. Once the wave depleted itself inside the high surf zone, we raced for the shore. The skipper lifted the engines at the last minute as we crashed onto the sand, the boat heeling over on one of its pontoons, all but dumping one set of divers onto the other. Everyone clamored off the boat in good spirits and started to warm up in the hot sunshine.

Surface interval duration actual: 3 hours, had a breakfast where I couldn't get scrambled eggs, because "the person who usually did the eggs wasn't there"

I was awakened at 5 and I went downstairs to get suited up in the pre-dawn chill. Down on the beach, the sun poking over the surf didn't do much to take the edge off the winter, though Durban doesn't get that cold. The boat was made ready, the usual rubber inflatable dingy with a pair of 85 hp Yamahas at the stern, for the usual charge into the waves. A miscalculation would flip the boat and send a dozen dive tanks to the bottom, but the skipper was skilled, white this time, with a sense of humor, and managed to gun us over the edges of the 5 foot waves. The sea was fairly calm at dawn and the Regge sharks were waiting in their cave, our destination, where they consistently congregated in the winter. We saw a couple dozen of them, lazily swimming about in the water, grey-green with steely eyes. Swimming to and fro our paths crossed often. Their presence would draw about 500 divers on this one day, some, like me, making the trip out twice. Other than sharks, there was a large turtle, a stonefish, a mass of fish attacking a squid, devouring it like vultures, and some unusual crayfish. When I'd had enough diving, charges for the room at the lodge, two dives, and all equipment were about $50, which was incredibly cheap for this kind of activity.