Roman Rock

Roman Rock holds a special place in the False Bay diving landscape — not because of the dive site alone, but because the name is associated with one of the bay's most distinctive features: the Roman Rock Lighthouse, a small iron lighthouse sitting on an exposed rock in the middle of False Bay, marking the hazard to navigation with the automated flash that seafarers entering the bay from the south have used as a reference point for over a century. The diving at Roman Rock takes place in the shadow of this maritime landmark, adding the lighthouse's historical presence to an already interesting reef environment. Roman Rock Lighthouse was built in 1861, one of the Cape's series of navigational lights constructed to assist the growing maritime traffic rounding southern Africa. The rock itself is a reef hazard rising from the surrounding bay floor, its submerged base constituting the dive site that the lighthouse marks above. The irony of diving the rock that ships need to avoid is one of those pleasing inversions that wreck and navigational hazard diving provides — the dangerous rock from a sailor's perspective becomes the destination rock from a diver's. A beginner-accessible site near Simonstown, Roman Rock offers the reef diving experience of the False Bay inner zone with the added distinction of diving in the shadow of a working lighthouse. The lighthouse's position on the rock means that the submerged portion of the formation — the same structure that the lighthouse was built to warn ships away from — extends below the surface as a reef of some extent, its surfaces colonized by the marine community that Cape temperate reefs consistently support. The reef surface at Roman Rock supports the encrusting community typical of inner False Bay rocky reefs — sponge communities in the Cape's characteristic color palette, coralline algae on exposed surfaces, and the associated fauna of nudibranchs and small mobile invertebrates. The Roman fish — Chrysoblephus laticeps, the reddish reef fish that gives this part of the Cape coast its characteristic species — inhabits the reef with territorial familiarity, its presence at a reef called Roman Rock creating a pleasing coincidence of naming. The Seven-gill cow sharks that make False Bay famous among shark diving enthusiasts range through the inner bay and may be encountered around the Rock. For Cape Town divers, Roman Rock is one of those sites with extra meaning beyond its diving merits — a connection between the above-water maritime history of False Bay and its underwater present, where the lighthouse that has guided ships for over a century stands above a reef that now guides divers through one of the Cape's most distinctive and productive marine environments.