SODWANA BAY
Eat, dive, sleep, repeat is the pattern for David Rogers and family on their annual holiday
We’d heard high-pitched squeaks throughout our 50-minute dive on Five Mile Reef. But the large cetacean shape looming above us during our regulation decompression stop took us completely by surprise. Almost choking on my regulator, I grabbed the fin of every diver I could reach and gesticulated wildly upwards. A 30-ton humpback whale on its annual migration was crossing our path. Fortunately my son Liam, who had the GoPro, created two seconds of footage to immortalise our once-in-a-lifetime encounter, before the whale moved effortlessly into the gloomy blue ocean. For the Rogers family ‘the whale at the safety stop’ is now the crowning glory in a set of legendary tales acquired during more than 30 dives, and told with glee around fires and dinner tables. Our humpback features alongside other epic encounters with sharks, dolphins, turtles, reefs and innumerable other species.
Sodwana, which means ‘little one on its own’ in isiZulu, has a big reputation. Proclaimed a nature reserve in 1950, it forms part of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park World Heritage Site, which also includes uMkhuze Game Reserve, the Eastern Shores, Lake Sibaya and several other conservation jewels.
Sodwana’s Jesser Point protects a sandy bay fringed by coastal dune forest. Running north from the point, and named – not very creatively – by their distance from the Jesser Point launch site, are a series of coral reefs, which are on fossilised dunes formed when the coastline was 20 metres lower than present. At 4 000 years old, these reefs are considered quite young and are still growing, polyp by tiny coral polyp (a sea-