I went freediving in a kelp forest with the narrator from My Octopus Teacher – here's what I learned
We met on a perfect Cape spring morning, the sun sparkling off an uncharacteristically calm Atlantic. Craig Foster, tall and lithe, limbering up on one of the granite boulders that bookend the Cape Peninsula beaches. Me, unfit and flabby, attempting to touch my toes. Wondering what the hell I was doing, wasting the time of the kelp forest guru.
A few months back I had encountered Foster’s book Sea Change at Lekkerwater Beach Lodge, in South Africa’s De Hoop Nature Reserve, where owner Colin Bell had exhorted the pioneering work of its author. I paged through it, entranced, as much by images of the creatures – bizarre as aliens in an ethereal undersea forest – as by the man who chose to document this little-known world unencumbered by a scuba tank or wetsuit.
I have always hated the constraints of wetsuits, but Cape Town waters – dropping as low as 9C, an icy manacle on each ankle – meant immersion without one was by necessity brief. Besides, the oft-roiling Atlantic – pounding what the 15th-century explorer Bartolomeu Dias called the “Cape of Storms” – offered little temptation; just a graveyard for ships, I thought, when anyone suggested diving here.
Ocean swimming was reserved for tropical waters; preferably floating in wonder above the coral reefs that proliferate north of the tropic of Capricorn. And yet here was a man, wearing nothing but a bathing suit and snorkelling gear, sustained by a single breath, documenting a world that made the Indo-Pacific look rather limited: creatures that could hunt with electricity, build a shiny mirror to navigate by moonlight, power themselves with sunlight, grow food within their bodies, change their sex. Page after page, revealing an extraordinary wilderness hidden below a surface I had spent a lifetime gazing over, accompanied by lyrical accounts of the transformation the African Seaforest had wrought on Foster and his co-author Ross Frylinck – a psychic and physical healing in “this forgotten wild reservoir of ancient rain”.
When Foster returned to the city of his birth in 2010, he had garnered more than 60 international awards for documentaries, many of them – like his record of swimming through a murky underwater river channel into the lair of a giant Nile crocodile – filmed at great personal risk. A professional success then, but emotionally burnt out; in pain, depressed, overweight, unable to sleep. Recalling the carefree joy that the ocean had given him as a child, he started swimming again. The therapeutic value of the bracing waters was immediate, and he made a non-negotiable commitment to swim once daily, twice if he was forced to miss a day.
As Foster habituated to the cold, he felt his mind clear, his body and immune system strengthen – and equally so the sense of reconnection to some inner sanctum. “It felt like I had been jolted back to life. I felt authentic, like I had stepped through a door into an ancient wilderness, a place of awe and wonder, back where I belonged.”
I was surprised when he agreed to my request to take me “swimming” (I had not yet fully comprehended the concept of freediving). With his encouragement, I embarked on my own regimen of daily immersion in the ocean, using the Camps Bay tidal pool to learn to “release heat with my mind” while imagining my body rebuilding “brown fat adipose tissue” (though doubtless my relatively fast habituation was due to the common garden kind). On the morning he invited me to join him, the water was a mild 15C (59F), so it wasn’t the cold I feared as much as the embarrassment of a total novice intruding on the daily ritual of a man for whom the golden kelp forest is akin to a cathedral.
I watched Foster slip in, elegant as an otter. Once in the water, my anxiety dissipated; I felt the by-now familiar euphoria that follows a few minutes after the cold kicks in. We glided past tall individual stipes crusted with lichen and shells; fish flitting below, spiny urchins and starfish scattered across the sandy bed. At an outcrop of boulders about 50 yards offshore, Foster showed me how to pull myself down the kelp to view the rock wall. What looked fairly innocuous above the water line – an array of limpets, whelks, mussels and barnacles – was underwater a kaleidoscope of colours: multicoloured lichens; neon anemones; purple urchins; the pink-tipped open mouths of sea squirts.
We explored a cave, teeming with life, then headed back inshore to giant limpet “gardens”, each limpet tending to its own rock, creating delicate circular patterns in the algae individual as a fingerprint. “I’d rather dive in these forests than go on safari to the Serengeti,” Foster said when we emerged from witnessing a short-tail stingray undulate into deeper waters. “On land, there are physical limitations. In the ocean wilderness, you are gravity-free; able to engage with other species at an intimate level.”
He remained solicitous about the cold; by the time I heaved myself ashore, more than an hour later, I was glowing from an experience as profound as any of the best I’d had in 30 years of travel writing. And all in my own “blue backyard”, as South African freediver Hanli Prinsloo puts it.
Founder of I Am Water, Prinsloo offers freediving courses all over the world but has spent lockdown teaching in Cape Town. During her excellent one-day introductory course (currently off limits for UK visitors because of South Africa’s “red list” status), I learnt that humans share the same dive reflex found in whales and seals: a series of physiological responses triggered by breath holding and immersing the face in water. These include a slowing of the heart rate to consume less oxygen, peripheral vasoconstriction (shifting blood from the extremities to the vital organs), the contraction of the spleen to release more oxygen-carrying red blood cells – all of which means you can hold your breath for a lot longer than your panicky mind tells you.
But I improved on a two-day course with Cape Town Freediving, the highly professional outfit run by Daniela Daines. This erased the last of my old residual fears (Jaws has a lot to answer for) and I was able to spend more than a minute underwater, holding on to the kelp and marvelling at the curious innocence of creatures that allow so much intimacy with a super-predator.
A filmmaker to the core, Foster documented his daily encounters. One in particular had a profound impact on him: a young female octopus he claimed as teacher. Together with friend and filmmaker Roger Horrocks, he captured behaviour never before seen: watching it walk along the sea bed on two tentacles as though bipedal, playing with fish, armouring itself from predators in a dense cluster of shells… First spliced into episode five of the BBC’s Blue Planet II series, the footage was finally made into My Octopus Teacher, a remarkable documentary released on Netflix in September last year. A huge success (winning a Bafta and Oscar this month), it has catapulted quiet, self-effacing Foster into the spotlight.
Ten days ago, he was feeling the pressure of the media build-up to tonight’s Academy Awards – a far cry from our leisurely swim back in the spring.
“It’s ironic that the path I chose – this deep work in the water – has led me full circle back to the world I wanted to leave behind,” he said. “But this is a conservation plea. If we don’t have a change of heart soon, we will be facing an intolerable habitat. It’s very simple – if you care about the near future, if you have a child, then educate yourself, vote with your wallet. And spend some time, every day, connecting with nature.”
And with that, my octopus student turned teacher was gone.
Tintswalo at Boulders is offering a two-night/three-day package for R7,995pp (￡400) with accommodation, most meals and two marine activities.
To freedive in the Cape kelp forests featured in My Octopus Teacher, visit capetownfreediving.com or iamwateroceantravel.com. If you want to learn to freedive in the UK while waiting for Cape Town/South Africa to be removed from the travel red list, visit gofreediving.co.uk for course dates.