When your sport takes you under the water, a must- have on your equipment list is a watch specifically designed for free diving.

Most South African spearos started out diving for crayfish. The diving technique that is adopted here is ‘bounce diving’: short surface times with a lot of dives that range from 40 seconds to 1 min 20. This is all fine and well when you are diving in shallower water and your dive times are not too long. However, when you start to spear or hunt crayfish in deeper water this style of diving can lead to unnecessary fatigue and will not help improve your deeper and longer dives.

One of the great attractions of spearfishing around  Inhaca Island is the variety and number of spots to dive. From deep blue water spots and big ledges coming out of deep water, to great spots for reef fish and wrecks scattered around the area… Inhaca has everything. The only problem is when and how to dive the spots properly in order to be effective.

The whole Inhaca area is governed by tidal moments in and out of the Bay of Maputo. This means that you could get to a spot the one day and it’s cooking… only to find it as dead as a desert the next. So every spot needs to be worked according to the tides. Once you have the tides and currrents worked out, you will be able to plan what species and reef you are going to hunt at different times of the day and week.

Much of the time, spearfishing is all about location. Sometimes, the difference between a productive dive and and an unproductive one is not a question of “how?”, but rather, “where?”. Growing up, I would often see experienced divers coming out of the water with far better fish than I did, even though we were diving in the same area. I thought these guys must just be amazingly skilled divers. I have learnt, however, that all the skill in the world will not help if you are not diving on the right spots that hold fish. Not knowing your location can put you at a huge disadvantage.

This is why guys with local knowledge will often out-dive spearos who are visiting an area. It’s often that specific small crack, or knowing to find certain indicator fish on a section of reef, that will make all the difference. If you dive an area a lot, you will eventually have the reef mapped out, and you learn where the fish hold up. Over time, you learn where certain fish are more likely to come through.

It’s no wonder our forefathers named it the ‘Transkei’… loosely translated as ‘that place over that river’. It was a place so formidable and difficult to transverse yet alluring beautiful. Not much has changed since those days. Sure, now there’s a spiderweb of mud roads criss-crossing the landscape, which makes getting from A to B at least possible. The mystery of the Transkei still grips you. It’s almost surreal.

Deep green valleys carve their way through to cliffs that plummet into the sea, as if the hand of God came and tore away the shoreline. The Transkei is like something out of a Tolkien novel, a ‘Middle Earth’ of sorts complete with rolling mists that cloak its secrets. Even the trees grow strangely, twisted and battered by the wild winds and elements.

The Transkei ocean, not unlike the land, also has its own thing going on. It’s not at all like the Cape or Natal. The Transkei cliffs seem to give the sea an odd ‘bump’ even on calm days. The colour of the water is different, a ‘clean green’ gloom with an airy feeling to it that only adds to the adventure and craziness of this phenomenal place.

Sodwana is one of South Africa’s premium spearfishing destinations. As an experience, it’s about as close to diving Mozambique as you can find, but with a fraction of the hassle and cost. As you can imagine, we get quite a few requests for information on where and how to spearfish up at Sodwana. And it’s not just absolute beginners who are asking – seasoned spearo’s doing their home work, trying to hone their dive strategies for the area, are also eager for knowledge.

The reality is, Sodwana is a maze of reefs that stretch over a dive area of more than 60km and even trying to make sense of the smallest of reefs can lead to frustration. Due to the vast expanse of reefs and diveable areas, changing conditions (like currents, tides and different seasons) are variables that make a spot a boiling mass of fish one day and an absolute desert the next.

I have been diving Sodwana for almost 20 years and it is only in the past few years that I have started to dive the area effectively. I’ve picked the brains of various people on the where and how to dive the area, and have gleaned a lot of knowledge in this way.