Chasing The Sun

Underwater photographer and writer Helen Walne was once scared of the ocean but now spends all her free time in Cape Town’s kelp forests.

I used to despise the ocean – and for good reason. When I was six, a rogue wave at Durban’s Addington Beach knocked me off my feet and sucked me back and forth, grating my skin against the mussel-clad pier I cried when the nurse at the nearby hospital daubed mercurochrome all over my body.

As a teenager, slightly drunk on Spiced Gold, I got felled by a breaker that relentlessly tumbled me, rubbed my face in the sand, and stole all my breath. A man walking his ridgeback had to pluck me out.

Then, two decades later, on a hot summer’s morning, my brother, Richard, swallowed a fistful of pills, waded out into Cape Town’s frigid Atlantic waters, and ended his life I couldn’t look at the ocean for two years I thought it had it in for me.

Life is a strange, slippery thing After losing my other brother, Andrew, to muscular dystrophy seven years after Richard died, I began swimming. First, it was in swimming pools: up and down; up and down – 65; 66; 67. It was meditative and soothing and loosened my tears. After many months, I became fit and strong. The cold had sparked me into being again I began to laugh at jokes.

I was then ready to take my swimming further, and I approached an open-water group and asked a lot of questions: Would someone keep an eye on me? Were there waves? Would I get left behind? That first Sunday I joined the group, I was terrified and shy. An icy shore break pummelled the shallows, and I clung to a large amiable man called Ali, who coached me through the waves and out into the silky blue It was the first time I had worn goggles in the sea. And as I swam amid a windmill of arms and legs, I couldn’t believe what was below me: ribbons of golden kelp catching the light; flotillas of fish flitting among the reddest of algae; sun-rippled sand; sparks of silver I was entranced I needed to be here more!

After the next few months lagging the group as I ducked down with a terrible action camera, searching for light and kelp, I decided to swap swimming for snorkelling. That way, I could move at my own pace, taking in this crystalline world, learning about its creatures, and photographing little scenes of beauty I graduated to a better, compact camera; became obsessed with jellyfish; and eventually took a freediving course to help me delve deeper into this strange and inexplicable voyage. How had I arrived here? Here, of all places? The very nub of all my fears and hurts! It is something I still can’t explain.

Seven years later, here I am I freedive, suitless and sockless, every day Sometimes I even dive in the very place where Richard ended his life It is a beautiful spot, fringed by a towering kelp forest rooted in a bed of ruby seaweed. Curious seals make silver spirals as they twirl and twist around you, while clumps of soft coral and jewel-like anemones stud the reefs and rocks.

I now have a grown-up camera set-up I will be paying off for eternity. And nothing brings me more joy than diving down into the kelp, wriggling into the undergrowth, and waiting for the light to be just right. My knees, elbows and hands are constellations of urchin scars, and I wear them like aquatic tattoos.

Much like the fynbos-clad mountains that rise from the city’s shores, Cape Town’s sea forests are home to a rich diversity of life. Each dive is different: one day, you might be surprised by a short-tail stingray lifting off from the sandy seabed like an ancient pterodactyl; another day, you might be floating in a purple froth of jellies. Curious common octopuses reach out their tentacles to “taste” your camera and arms while balls of silver sardines move like a single organism through the water. Then there are the tiny creatures: nudibranchs as flamboyant as Rio Carnival dancers; teeny arthropods with googly eyes; specks of bryozoans meshed together in perfect fabric-like fractals.

However, it is the interplay between kelp, sea and light that keeps me returning again and again I am addicted to how the sun shards through matted stands of bladder kelp and lands like a spotlight on anemones and sea fans I can’t get enough of the late-afternoon light that drenches the water, illuminating the sand and turning everything golden. Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed with grief when I dive – not for my brothers or for me, but for these pristine environments and the uncertain future they face.

Surfacing these worlds via photography hopefully showcases the magic that exists – magic that requires us to become a better species.

I’m unsure what my life would have been like had I not experienced such profound loss. I don’t think I would have found the kelp, the creatures, the light. And I wouldn’t have learnt that the ocean doesn’t have it in for me In fact, it has always been within me – I just needed to find my way back.