Lions, sharks, and lager - part 1

The idea came, as most good ideas do, over a beer. I was sitting in a rather lovely hotel with my good friend Reon Coetzee enjoying a pint – very much an ‘Ice Cold In Alex’ moment as I had just spent the last week charging around telling all manner of tall stories at conferences in Cape Town. I’d been looking forward to seeing Reon, particularly as I was anticipating giving him some serious stick about the upcoming British Lions rugby tour to South Africa.

It was still many months away, but already the whisper on the sporting wind was that it could be a potential classic. Having absorbed my initial salvos wordlessly, Reon finally placed his glass on the table, the clink a neat full stop to my stream of abuse. He wiped the froth from his top lip, regarded me quizzically for a moment, then spoke. “Right my boy, if you are so damn sure the Boks are in for a whipping, how about you bring some divers out and we watch it together.” Fast forward a couple of hours, and there are now several empty glasses on the table (occasionally being used to show the more complex back row moves that the Lions would perform on the Boks), and a soggy piece of paper with a broad itinerary on it. The greatest dive tour of my life had been born.

In fact, it had passed through adolescence and was nearing maturity. Wonderful stuff, beer. Recruiting the team proved a doddle. I remember one scarred hulk of a chap staring at the board over my stand at the Dive Show, looking at the banner that announced the Sharks and Lions Tour, and turning to his mate to whisper reverentially in a gentle Welsh lilt: “The British Lions, shark diving, beer, singing, South Africa, and the Springboks. It’s like finding heaven before you die.”

The eventual team consisted of a mad dentist and his lovely wife, a ludicrously talented (and rather short) Welshman, a boisterous leadership coach, an ex-professional footballer, an IT specialist, a property magnate, a Colonel, a jocular engineer, and my old chum Simon Enderby from Scubazoo. Simon was the official cameraman for the trip, but had the unofficial task of making me do things I didn’t want to do because I was scared. He’s been doing this for years while we made Great Ocean Adventures together, and is the main reason I get in the water with big scary things. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” is his mantra. Messy death is the obvious answer, but he always ignores me and chucks me in anyway. And if you happen to be reading this Si, no I’m not getting in with a hippo, it’s a ridiculous idea. Stop sending me emails about it.

Recruiting and selecting the perfect team was intense. To get on the expedition, the team members had to undergo a rigorous process requiring them to place several grand in my bank account. Happily, with such a random means of putting a team together, we ended up with the nicest bunch of people I think I’ve ever travelled with. It was a joy from start to finish, and I was very sad indeed at the end of the trip when we all had to go home. There’s always the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, chaps… We arrived in Durban having flown in from London resplendent in our replica British Lions jerseys. I’d decided to buy one that was very tight indeed, as that’s what the players do. It turns out that they spend a lot of time in the gym though, and that breathable, wick-away-moisture stretched over the beginning of a middle-aged paunch doesn’t have quite the same effect of striking fear into the opposition. Skinny arms, akin to pencils, hanging out of baggy sleeves didn’t exactly help either.

Nonetheless, we all trooped off to the first game, trooping back a couple of hours later having watched the Springboks spank the Lions, making the decision en masse that this was no longer a rugby tour, but a diving one. Right, off to do some diving then. We obviously needed to start with a nice gentle opener. How about a two-knot drift, four miles offshore, surrounded by feeding bronze whaler sharks and black tips? Sounds perfect. Happily we were in the massively capable hands of Mark and Gail Addison of Blue Wilderness dive safaris. Mark and Gail have been introducing people to the truly wondrous encounters that can be enjoyed off the Natal coast for many years, and know their onions. The briefings were concise, the staff gloriously competent, and the passion evident for all to see.

All you need to do is dive once off the wild coast of Natal with Blue Wilderness, and you end up picking up a very nasty shark habit, which means you have to go back again and again. Which is great, of course. The start of the dive involves a hair-raising surf launch off the beach at Rocky Bay. Ours was particularly exciting, as our skipper – who’s name is withheld to protect his ego – slightly miscalculated the angle and speed of an approaching wave. We were perfectly safe, but nonetheless the sight of many tons of crackling wave front bearing down on, then looming over, our little boat created a strangely contemplative silence on board. Showing remarkable British phlegm, knuckles were whitened on the ropes along the tubes, eyes narrowed, upper lips stiffened, and everyone assumed a general air of bovine acceptance of imminent death. The wave duly arrived, a great big, green, angry, roaring lump of Indian Ocean. When it had passed over, under, through and around the boat, it left behind a scene of some chaos.

Simon was wedged between the outboards, grinning and still filming (the loon), and the rest of us were all wearing each other’s bobble hats as well as various pieces of loose equipment that had been on the deck only seconds before. The skipper wordlessly looked round, smiled, checked we were all still present (if not entirely correct), gunned the engine, and we were off. Twenty minutes, two dolphin pods and a humpback later, we were over the site. A festering drum of fish was lowered overboard, a glance over the side revealed the thrilling arrival of the sleek shapes of our first sharks, and the dive could begin. It takes big cahoonas to roll backwards into a mass of feeding sharks, regardless of how safe you know it is. There is a substantial part of you that rails against the madness of it all, that tells you to stay in the boat and be safe, that beneath you lies injury and death. You have to will yourself over the side, a conscious, muscular effort to propel your mammalian form into the mass of predators beneath, as your ancient self attempts to hang on to the boat through buttock-pressure alone.

continued in part 2....