MABIBI BEACH

Last weekend we caravanned to Mabibi beach on the south eastern shore of South Africa. Turns out that when they say, “you need a four wheel drive”, they weren’t kidding. We had two RAV 4s and one Toyota Corolla. The Corolla got stuck in deep sand approximately 15 times before finally getting stuck so badly that we couldn’t drive forward and had to get help to get pulled out. We then had to back track, park in secure parking and get a ride to the campground from a 4 WD. It turned a 5-hour drive into a 9-½ hour drive.

Luckily, it was worth it. The remoteness and beauty of the beach was spectacular, the weather perfect and water temperature refreshing without being cold. We wanted to make it to this particular beach not only for those attributes but also b/c of the fact that it is sea turtle nesting season. The two main sea turtles that are abundant in that area are the loggerhead and the leatherback turtle. The loggerhead is quite large but small in comparison to the massive leatherback. The carapace (shell) of each is quite different, making identification relatively easy. The carapace of the loggerhead is the typical mosaic pattern found in many turtles. We saw a few of these turtles the last time we went scuba diving in Sodwana Bay. I was able to get close enough to gently touch it’s back in the water. It is amazing to watch them swim. The leatherback’s carapace has longitudinal ridges running along its back and its texture is more like hard leather. They can get incredibly large and don’t like to move too far on the beach to lay their eggs because it is too much of a work out.

For a few months out of the year, these turtles come back to the same beach where they were hatched via an internal “GPS” system and waddle up the beach before making a large sand “nest”. Once they settle into position for laying eggs, they enter a hormone-induced trance and can lay over 100 eggs. They then gently bury these eggs and in a couple of months they hatch. Upon hatching, these little buggers scoot like mad for the water, while registering the location in their internal “GPS” system for later use. 12% of the eggs are eaten by ghost crabs in the nest. Only about 2 in 1,000 eggs make it to a full adult turtle. Birds, larger fish, and other predators have a feast as these baby turtles try to make it out to deeper sea and safety. We saw many turtle tracks on the beach and their nests but did not actually see any turtles on the beach. The tracks of the loggerhead are about the width of a 4 wheeler and the leatherback more like the width of a small car. The picture of tracks here are that of a loggerhead.

The dive instructor said that these sea turtles have been around since the fall of the dinosaurs. My nephew Ben apparently tells grandma this fact all the time. The instructor also said that they are predicted to go extinct in our lifetime. So, it has been a great experience to get so close to such amazing creatures.

We did get a chance to go scuba diving over the weekend as well. The visibility wasn’t great but the biodiversity was. Highlights were a blue-spotted ribbon tail stingray about the size of the hood of a car and directly behind it some sort of electric ray. The honeycomb eels were abundant, along with lionfish, angelfish, snapper, nudibranch and others. Definitely, a highlight of the last two trips was dolphins playing along side our boat within feet of us for a long time. Last time we also saw a whale surface. After our dive, our dive master mentioned that at that very reef they saw an 18-foot great white shark on their last dive. They are common along the southern shores around Durban and Cape Town but more unusual around this area. Not sure I would have been too enthused to dive had I known that. I am sure that is why he waited until after the dive to tell us. In Cape Town and Durban you can do cage diving – where they take you diving inside a steel cage in Great White Shark infested waters. Your chance of seeing one is quite high but I am not sure what kind of environmental impact this has. You definitely don’t want these animals associating humans with food! On the other hand, it would be awesome to view one underwater……