BREAKING #317 | TRAVEL DIARY

Why does the ‘seabed’ look azure?

Nicole Ex

Column

May 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

May 2026

An underwater kelp forest lies in a remote part of False Bay, near Simon’s Town on the Cape Peninsula: a forty-five-minute drive south of Cape Town and an hour north of the Cape of Good Hope. It is exposed to the cold Benguela Current of the Atlantic Ocean, rich in plankton, which is why so many lives and grows here.

This is a very particular place, beloved around the world thanks to My Octopus Teacher (2020), the almost meditative nature documentary about a man who dives in this bay and forms a friendship with an octopus. We head out with Pisces Divers in a rubber boat, joined on board by diver and founder Mike Nortje and oceanologist Ethan Smith.

We have come from a landscape that was once an inland sea, with succulent plants such as the ‘soutvygies’, whose fleshy leaves still taste of salt. Now it is time to surrender to the swell and shimmer of the ocean itself, to upwellings and wind-driven waves, with lenticular clouds floating above us like flying UFO’s.

It truly does not get more beautiful than this. But first I have to move past my fear of the unknown: lower myself into the water in a wetsuit, fins and snorkelling gear. It feels like having your first tennis lesson at Wimbledon, and I know it. But they talk me through it, and then my whole perspective tilts.

Water above and below, clear to a depth of eight metres, sunlight falling in shafts onto the giant seaweed. Heavy, smooth stems rise up, with strips and ribbons of kelp swaying between them, schools of fish moving through a shifting architecture of starfish, sea anemones and sea urchins, in blue, purple and pink.

Why does the ‘seabed’ look azure? Because blue light penetrates deepest into the water, explains Ethan. After a morning out there, we return to the dive school in the back of a pick-up truck. Anke, who has even seen pyjama sharks, says: ‘I have no words for it. I feel like a smile.’

My Octopus Teacher is available to watch on Netflix. Watch the trailer here.