Blue Flash
Leak in Cape Town

To date we have taken 18 588 people diving, done 2 364 individual boat dives, run 523 other charters and fixed 1 685 drysuits.

He accompanies us on Ruby Runner if space allows, and serves as security guard and rescue swimmer. As a committed eco-friendly operation we are pro-marine conservation and vehemently anti-poaching. We keep stock of a vast array of drysuit components so repairs can normally be done in just a few days. If you don’t live in Cape Town the best way of getting your suit to us is with PostNet. Dive shops can also make use of our services to repair their client’s drysuits at trade rates. That’s because most of the time I’m skippering the dive boat and controlling the search from the surface. It’s not easy and quite often there is a lot of swimming and not much finding! The barge had been found and dived many years before but before nothing was recorded. Ken’s recollection of the position was fairly useless, hence all the swimming, but he did give me some interesting info on other wrecks in the area. Fortunately it is very beautiful reef to swim over so there were always divers willing to dive the area. It’s a great dive and an interesting piece of Cape Town history. They can only be dived in very good conditions and can be quite challenging as dives. It’s just more non-sensical, over-regulatory, beurocratic twaddle! Divers often find intact soda water bottles with inscriptions at the wreck site. Whittle Rock is a large area of rocky reef in False Bay with a pinnacle that is just 3m to 4m below the surface. Old Cape Town divers talk about copper hull sheeting being found around the anchors but that is all. There is no record of any other ships coming to grief at Whittle Rock. Perhaps another wreck lost there without a trace and still waiting to be discovered. We noted the approximate position of where we dived but conditions were not good and decided to return with our own boat to have a better look. We spent some time at the national achieves where we found newspaper articles which had better info on the ship itself and described the sinking in detail. Many interesting discussions on wrecks were held around that display case and the meagre beginnings of Pisces of a centre for local wreck divers interested in exploring and documenting our wrecks. Can something be considered national heritage if nobody knows about it? At that stage Mike at Pisces decided he would rather not be be involved with artefact collection and the display case was dismantled. Cape Town has a pathetic maritime museum (not really worth visiting), the multi-million rand wrecks database is just a dead file and there is precious little wreck preservation and documentation work happening.