scubish.com: Scuba diving Umkomaas - South Africa

Umkomaas, a small coastal town on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa was formed when a harbour was built in 1861, to export sugar, on the mouth of the navigable Mkhomazi River. When the successful dredging of Durban harbour's sandbar and the arrival of the railway, the town suffered and like Port Shepstone the harbour fell into disuse. Large number of whales once used the estuary as a nursery, giving birth in the shallows. The Zulus named the river after this spectacle (uMkhomazi means the place of cow whales). The settlement was originally known as South Barrow, with its suburb known today as Ilfracombe then called North Barrow.

In the late 1950s an Italian consortium developed the enormous Saiccor industrial cellulose plant beside the river a short distance inland from the town. A substantial number of Italian immigrants, predominantly from the vicinity of Udine, followed suit, and the result is that today Umkomaas probably has the largest Italian community relative to its total population of any town in Sub-Saharan Africa. Saiccor has long proven to be a controversial plant. It was purchased by international Pulp giant Sappi in the 1990s, and while it continues to provide jobs for thousands of workers, and a livelihood for their dependents, concerns were raised in the 1990s over the widespread asthma and other health conditions afflicting children at the nearby Umkomaas Drift School. Additionally, a large amount of effluent is pumped out to sea, and major extensions of this effluent pipe were carried out in the late 1990s, though Saiccor maintained for many years that the effluent was largely harmless. Perhaps the most famous act of protest against Saiccor occurred in the 1990s when local man Simon Weekes gatecrashed a Saiccor function and challenged company executives to drink a glass of effluent. Saiccor is today the world's largest producer of chemical cellulose, and employs slightly over 1000 people, its pulp being used largely for products such as acetate and cellophane.

A notable event in the town's history was the fatal air crash involving a Kitty Hawk Air Force plane during the Second World War. The aeroplane is believed to have sunk into quicksand on the south bank of the river between the village and the present-day location of Saiccor. A local group made numerous attempts to recover the wreckage of the craft in the 1980s, but as the precise location of the plane is still not decisively known, it has never been recovered.

Umkomaas is most renowned for the superb diving opportunities created by the Aliwal Shoal, a coral reef about 5 kilometres offshore. Ragged-tooth sharks, Rock Cod, and a multitude of other species can be found in the shoal. Growth in diving-related tourism has grown dramatically in the past decade, although the Shoal features two particularly fine shipwrecks, the Nemo and the Produce, that long predate the current surge in popularity. Additional tourist attractions include the Umkomaas Golf Course, home of Tim Clark and universally regarded as being one of the best in KwaZulu-Natal,...