The Skipper… and a little history
Grant Whitford
I have always been an ocean loving seadog with interests in sailing, shipping, navigation, hydrography and oceanography. When I finished school I joined the navy to travel the world driving ships and surveying the seabed to make nautical charts. I learned to dive in 1993 and my fascination with wrecks and treasure hunting began. The navy was great but after 15 years, having traveled the world, studied abroad and become a Lieutenant Commander, I left to work as an underwater surveyor in the Namibian offshore diamond fields. That only lasted 2 years but circumstances then allowed me to start my own business.
I bought my first dive boat, Blue Flame, and started Enviro Divers Charters with Robert Erasmus. Our 1st dive charter was on May 6th 2001. I married Jo-Anne and our son James was born the following year. We soon found that we needed a bigger boat and an affiliation to a dive shop so I joined up with Mike Nortje who was setting up Pisces Divers in Kloof Nek. Pisces grew quickly and we needed a bigger boat so it was off to Durban to get a new boat named Big Blue. I then qualified as a CMAS Dive Instructor and ran the nitrox and compressor operators courses at Pisces. In those days petrol was cheap and we seemed to have a lot of time for wreck hunting and salvage. We found numerous wrecks and came home with plenty of shinny stuff. When Pisces moved to Glencairn in 2005, I decided to go solo. My boat was blue and my only staff member was Flash, our Golden Retriever, so it made perfect sense to name the business BlueFlash! I opened South Africa’s first drysuit repair workshop and spent time in the UK learning repair techniques and sourcing the required components. In 2008 I splashed out and bought a brand new boat and named her Ruby Runner. Then in December 2016 we launched our own range of drysuits under our Cape Gear brand.
To date (updated 1st November 2023) we have taken 25 438 people diving, done 3 190 individual boat dives, run 968 other charters and repaired 3 780 drysuits.
The Illustrious Crew
Derrick Duvill
Derrick joined us in February 2012 as a part time drysuit tech and has become a master at repairing drysuits.
Dale LagumaDale joined us in May 2019 as a full time drysuit tech, commercial diver and boat crew.
Our Way
We understand that what we do at work is a direct reflection of who we are at heart.
We are not here by accident – BlueFlash was created to fill a niche in Cape Town’s diving and charter industries. We will adapt to the changing requirements of our clients so that we can still be here a hundred years from now. (Not us, I suppose, but certainly BlueFlash!)
We welcome and engage our clients with positivity.
We are professional, industry leading craftsmen and seamen.
We accept responsibility for our mistakes.
We may be a tiny business, but we are growing every year and making a substantial contribution to our industry.
We strive to be at the forefront of technologies that advance our products and services.
We love interacting with like-minded customers who respect our experience and the service we provide.
We offer our services with unexpectedly fast turn-around times, but never at the expense of quality.
We want our clients to feel that no-one else can do what we do, and wonder why nobody does it the way we do.
We are more than just environmentally conscious – we re-fuse, re-duce, re-use and re-cycle to the absolute maximum.
We actively support the Cape Town recreational diving industry and engage with our competitors to find ways of growing and improving our industry together.
