Logbook / SFB Club

Our first Logbook / SFB (Stupid Friggin' Bugger ) award goes to Doc & Noreen Delport of Benoni for their experience while diving at Sodwana Bay. The first prize for this one is the smiles and pats on the back from the local diving community....... Don't worry Doc, we have all been there.....SMILE.....

Read the story from Noreen, his dive buddy below......

Encounter with a free swimming Honeycomb Moray Eel - By Noreen Delport

After days of having the pleasure of diving by ourselves in Sodwana, my husband and I found ourselves the the displeased owners of two extra divers. We decided to take them to 7-Mile reef as they had apparently dived themselves out on 2-Mile for the entire duration of their stay.

I had an underwater camera with me and my husband knew that I was looking for a nice shot of a moray eel, the skipper had slipped two frozen sardines into my husband's BC pocket without me seeing them. We were about 10 minutes into the dive, my husband leading, our two divers in the middle and me bringing up the rear, I was about 2 meters behind the two divers when I saw that my husband had stopped and was motioning for everyone to come closer. When I joined them I saw that he had found a moray eel for me! What I missed was that he had decided that the eel looked a mite hungry and had offered it one of his sardines. Of course the eel did not want the frozen thing and ignored the offering, somehow my husband lost his grip on the sardine and it fell into the eel’s hole! My husband wisely backed off, turned around and finned away taking the two divers with him. Keeping in my 2m distance policy from anything with teeth, I managed to get 1 photo before I too turned around and finned after my little group. All of a sudden my heart started pounding and I had the weirdest feeling that I was being followed – I looked back and lo and behold – there was our moray, swimming after me with a passion!

I put a little muscle in (what little I have) and finned like crazy all the while looking back to see this rather agitated eel closing in on me. I decided that since I was not going to out-swim it I may as well stand up and take my medicine like a baby, drawing myself up to my full height in the water, the eel came to within 1 meter and turned away. Once my pulse rate steadied I finned off again – to find that the eel was now alongside of me and the two other divers, going after my husband. I have this little purple shaker which I shook like crazy trying to warn the others – my husband looked back, saw an eel the length of three divers chasing him and turned on the turbo! After a few more seconds of chase my eel gave up and went back home.

These poor guys managed to finish the dive with us and get back to shore, the next day an instructor friend told us that they had apparently asked if they could dive somewhere where there were no moray eels as they had had a bad experience with one just yesterday!

Moral of the story:-

1. You can talk to strangers, just don’t dive with them!

2. Moray Eels do not like frozen sardines – at least thaw them a bit!