The post appeared first on: Visit Adventure Mania
Bianca Oosthuyzen
There is a profound history as to why black bodies react the way they do in the proximity of large bodies of water. I can’t quite explain the feeling all I know is that there is a deep ache in my bones followed by all coherent thoughts leaving me , and fear imprisoning me.Â
It could be all the tales I heard as a child about the spirts of the waters being violent and unrelenting to those that dared near it without asking for permission. Others suggest the crashing waves mimic the cries of our ancestors who were taken on ships as slaves and died at sea. Â
A myriad of these thoughts assaulted me on my first open water dive, everything in my life leading up to this day had conditioned me to believe that I was an outsider to these waters. By ancestral rite, I understood to some degree the power the great ocean was. She was always a priestess, who’s alter I worshipped at when praying for the healing of her people.Â
I had never dared dream this goddess would one day, hold space for me to become an extension of her, that’s how diving in the deep blue feels. As if you are seized in the heart of a pulse, intoxicated by both the silence and the thudding ,nothing else matters in that moment besides breathing. Â
As we made our slow descent down to our dive site, a bundle of nerves and frightened eyes I was, but those were merely bodily receptors of being cocooned in the deep blue. In my mind existed not a single thought, everything I was processing felt strangely familiar? I’d never dived before, so how could this feel like home I’d known all my life. Very much accustomed to being worried 24/7, this was the newest addition to my worry-list. How was I so at comfortable 12 meters deep, it felt like being in trance. It was on my second dive I realized it didn’t just feel like being trance, it definitely was the euphoric state I only frequented when passing between the different dimensions on behalf of the patients I healed.Â
That first dive it felt so different being in trance thinking of nobody else but myself, enamoured by the feeling, this gave me an opportunity to look around. I was welcomed by the brightest most vivid colours of coral and rock formations. Having never seen a clown triggerfish, a blue-spotted ribonntail ray or even a sea turtle I expected had myself to be frantically searching for these animals.Â
Instead my eyes and attention were captured by the plant like globes, patches and structures I later heard being referred to as coral. Mid – dive, I could have sworn some of the coral was singing and lulling about as the oceans current swayed them around. Driven by curiosity I reached out to touch one and it felt as delicate as I had imagined. Â
Sceptical I had been riding on a high of dopamine during my first dive, on my second dive I tentatively approached the coral with just as much intrigue but was mindful to not touch this time. It still had the same effect, it alternated between audio and visual seduction. The colours unlike anything I had seen on land they were almost hypnotic; the sound some of them made against the rocks as they moved was an extraordinary chime. Â
Everything about coral reefs was enchanting! I continued to think this as my learned fellow , Dr. Furaha Karisa a specialist in coral reef resilience, shared the basis of her studies with me. See corals weren’t only an alluring marine tourist attraction; it also provided an important ecosystem for life underwater. It is the home for over thousands of species that can be found living on it, apart from shelter corals are food for some marine life. Oftentimes hunting species also rely on coral to blend in and remain unseen to their prey, this multifaceted system also acts as a maternity ward as the smaller creatures use it’s crevices for laying their eggs. Forming a barrier on the ocean floor, it acts as a fence between the harshest waves and the shoreline, keeping us both protected and sustained through the fish we are able to catch.Â
Corals underwater are what the Garden of Eden is to us on land, the beginning of life. As ferociously as we protect the greatest historical structures on land, I am of the thought that the same should be done for reef structures. However, Dr. Karisa’s research comforted me because the more I heard, the more I realized corals were far more resilient than I had imagined. This does not mean we are to continue causing damage to the ocean in the all ways we do. It does however mean that without human interference from, these systems can renew themselves.Â
Coral seduced me with her sway, her melodic voice and most obvious her visual appearance but what entrapped me the most about her was how much I needed and relied on her, here on land, without even knowing it. -Thandeka Hlongwa – Dive Master, Freediver and Story Teller
The post Becoming an African Storyteller: Coral reef Resilience. appeared first on Adventure Mania.