Shuhood stayed in his mother's home town of Port Elizabeth for three weeks, diving another three times. His earnings came to more than R16,000. He was pleased that he had mastered the waters that had almost drowned him, but still felt like a small player in the poaching scene.
The top divers were all working at Bird Island, a marine reserve 70km offshore, earning up to R40,000 each on a single night, it was said. Though Shuhood was earning more than he had dreamed possible just a few months earlier, it was hard to be satisfied when bigger payoffs felt within reach.
But to dive Bird Island he needed to get a spot on one of the poaching boats. Most of the boat owners were divers who had invested their profits, charging other divers fees to reach the offshore beds. They only worked with people they trusted, giving word of their operations less than two hours before they launched.
Shuhood wanted to join them - not only for the money but from his desire, engrained since childhood, to match or exceed whatever his peers did. Each time he heard that another boat had gone to the island it aroused in him a bitter envy.
The boats were large, sleek rubber ducks with powerful engines for outgunning marine patrols. They were called "superducks".
The biggest could carry 10 people or more. The Port Elizabeth divers were revolutionising the poaching game and within a few years superducks would be launching across the Cape. To chase them, the authorities got better vessels of their own, often using boats impounded from other poachers. The abalone trade was entering an explosive new phase.
In 2003, according to Serge Raemaekers's research, there had been just four poaching boats operating in Port Elizabeth. By 2006, there were at least 34. Nearly a third were longer than 8m, with combined engine capacity of 150hp or greater. The value of some of the bigger boats, including their motors, trailers and towing vehicles, exceeded R1m.
The vessels were launched without divers or equipment, collecting them en route to avoid interception. Lookouts placed at strategic locations - harbours, police stations - alerted the skippers to any danger. Sometimes poachers staged decoy dives to draw patrols away from target reefs. When they finished, they dropped their catch for runners to collect, racing back to the slipway.
Before landing, they rinsed their decks with petrol to destroy DNA evidence of carrying abalone.
Shuhood returned to Cape Town determined to ascend the poaching hierarchy. Through his network of divers he had heard about a crew he could join on a trip to Robben Island. But before he could go he had to appear in court for the Cape Point bust.
The attorney representing the Hangberg divers struck a plea bargain - only one of them was found guilty, receiving a fine of R5,000 - and Shuhood walked out of court to resume his diving career.
DOZENS UPON DOZENS OF SHARKS
The boat launched in darkness from a quiet stretch of beach between Melkbos and Blouberg on the west coast. Eight men stood neck-deep in the tossing surf, holding the nose of the vessel steady. Beyond the breakers they jumped aboard, sitting four to a side on the pontoons. The skipper lowered the twin 85hp engines into the water and whipped them out to sea.
Shuhood clung to the ropes, spray stinging his cheeks. The wind was picking up, rocking them as they advanced into Table Bay. "There was an air of camaraderie on board because Robben Island lay in our sights and I was told we were going to make some very serious money," Shuhood wrote.
As they drew nearer the divers began suiting up. The skipper cut the engines and told the men to extinguish their cigarettes. In silence they drifted past the jetty towards the deserted eastern shores. The lighthouse spun on the island's far shore. There were lights on in some of the small houses where the rangers lived.
Shuhood saw the glowing tail-lights of a car move through the night. Further on, where the lights receded, the divers pulled on their masks, strapped on waterproof headlamps, and one by one flipped backwards into the black water.
"Having never attempted this," Shuhood wrote, "and not to be outdone, I also tried." He inflated his BC [buoyancy compensator] and tumbled over, misjudging the rotation and slamming his head on the hull.
Underwater it was frigid and impossible to see anything; then he switched on his lamp and the reef was bleached by pale light.
The first thing he noticed was the abalone, crammed in every direction he pointed his torch.
Cutting through the kelp around him, he then saw dozens upon dozens of sharks.
They were reef sharks, some close to 2m long. Shuhood hit the inflate button and rose back to the surface, spinning in search of the boat. "Turn-off-your-f**king-torch," someone hissed from a few feet away. Shuhood swam across, hauling himself onto the deck with his rig and weight belt - a performance he has never managed to repeat.
"And now?" the skipper asked, waiting for him catch his breath.
"There's f**king sharks down there!" Shuhood said. "Sharks everywhere!"
The skipper laid into him, keeping his voice low: What about the other divers? Were the sharks scaring them? F**king maybe Shuhood should get a nine-to-five and leave space for men who wanted to work.
"If you got such a big bek why aren't you getting in the water?" said Shuhood to the skipper, a middle-aged coloured man. ("One of those old-school gangsters, I think a 28," he told me.) Secretly, though, he began doubting himself. "I sat there like an idiot," he wrote later. "Did I really want to do this?"
He expected further embarrassment when the divers surfaced, but the first to arrive was Malcolm, one of the divers he knew from Hangberg. He emptied his pouch and swapped his cylinder for a spare, preparing to go under again.
"How'd it go?" he asked Shuhood. Before he could answer, the skipper cut in: "Man's afraid of a few sharks."
Malcolm looked at Shuhood, shivering in his wetsuit. "No," he said. "You're getting back in with me."
Usually the divers shucked their fish underwater, Malcolm told Shuhood as he rigged up again, but they would not do that tonight - the sharks were in hunting mode, moving in quick bursts with their fins lowered. They weren't man-eaters but could get mean, he warned. Stab one and the other sharks would devour it, before turning on the divers "as the main course".
Shuhood did not know if this was true, but trusted Malcolm, who was the more experienced hand. The skipper was watching.
Other divers were coming up with their bags. Pushing back his fear, he followed Malcolm over the side.
"I just tried to keep my mind on the perlies that were bigger than soccer balls, and I took some massive crayfish," Shuhood wrote. "Now and then one of the sharks would come straight towards us and in an instant turn away with just the tail brushing my face."
Malcolm was beside him, popping loose abalone and loading his pouch. Back beside the rubber duck, they handed their bags to the bootsman.
GOUGE, LEVER, TWIST
Shuhood would dive with sharks many more times in his life, getting used to their presence, but never saw them again at Robben Island. In his memory their appearance on his first night dive has acquired the significance of a rite of passage.
"You feel a sense of accomplishment: it's not everybody who can do this," he told me. "Everybody is a bit scared of sharks, but are you gonna let your fear overpower you?"
When all the men were on board, the skipper raised anchor and raced towards Hout Bay, stopping in deep water beyond the island to allow the divers to shuck their catch. The bootsman had marked their bags with colourful strips of cloth to tell them apart.
They opened the bags and began working. Gouge, lever, twist.
Shuhood's wrists began to ache. Gouge, lever, twist. Abalone slime dribbled across the deck and fish rose to tear at the discarded guts.
Cape Town was a string of lights above the water, the Mouille Point lighthouse flashing. The other divers were shucking much more quickly, their forearms stronger from years of practice.
Gouge, lever, twist. Eventually Shuhood asked the bootsman, for a small fee, to help finish the job.
He went home with R8,000 in cash that night, less than the other men but by far the most he had earned in a single dive. More than anything else, he was proud that he had returned to the water. He paid the boat owner his fee - ten kilos of fish, worth another R3,500 - and apologised to the skipper, ensuring that he would be able to work with them again.
In Hangberg, the divers were not allowed into the room where their abalone was weighed. Instead they had to trust that their payout was accurate. They were dealing with a new network of buyers, ruthless men connected to gangsters from the Cape Flats.
It was better, Shuhood knew, not to ask too many questions.
The buyers subtracted 10% from the weight to compensate for slime that would still ooze for several hours. It was important to act fast, and everybody was tense. The fish had to be stored and driven out of Hout Bay before the cops arrived or the flesh, still tender, began to spoil.
'THEY KNOW IT'S RUNNING OUT'
It takes seven years for an abalone to reach reproductive maturity and more than 20 years to reach maximum size. Since the year 2000, researchers estimate, poachers have harvested nearly 100-million individual abalone from SA. A video montage of each shell being shucked, at one second per cut, would run longer than three years.
The cold fact of depletion properly hit Shuhood for the first time, he says, on a dive off St James in False Bay. It was 2015.
"This place used to be gifted - packed with perlemoen," he told me. We were parked within sight of the tidal pool, opposite a queue of people filling canisters at the roadside spring. In summer he used to work off the rocks in broad daylight, enlisting his entire family to help cover for him.
"When the beach is full, it's kwaai," he said. "Then you can do your thing. I'd go snorkelling like I was on holiday: just a pair of flippers, mask, my three-quarter shorts. When I'm finished, my little daughter brings me a towel. I'm in the water with my bag and I wrap the towel around it and pick her up. Nobody sees us."
Years later, late at night, he returned on what would be his final boat dive. The four divers first got in at Kalk Bay, but a team of road workers heard them and shone their torches on the water.
Next they hit a spot near Boulders, the penguin colony, "and cleaned out what little sizeable perlie there was". Twice more they stopped, scouring reefs that had once been thick with abalone and now bristled with urchins. (The predatory kreef, for some reason, had not proliferated inside False Bay.)
On the boat, in the sharp wind, it was freezing between dives, but still the men had not filled their pouches. Circling back, they submerged a final time at St James. It was "almost devoid of abalone", Shuhood wrote. "It had been raped to oblivion."
Although not solely responsible for its destruction, he knew that he was "part of it in every way".
Diving from shore at his regular spots he was encountering the same thing. From Sea Point to Simon's Town, beds he had once harvested were empty. To earn anything decent he had to dive deeper, or on reefs exposed to rougher swells, or in places he was more likely to be seen. The old places, he said, had been "worked out".
Poachers across the Western and Eastern Cape were confronting similar shortages. Abalone could still be found, erratically, but the harvests of a decade earlier - 80kg, 100kg per dive - were becoming impossible. Even so, said Shuhood, more and more people were seeking to join the trade. "Everyone wants fish, because they know it's running out."
Some Chinese men, newly arrived, got in touch through someone Shuhood knew in the horse business. They wanted "hundreds of kilograms" of abalone. Old drug merchants were becoming buyers. Men Shuhood barely knew approached him, asking for dive lessons. "It's like, you all wanna get in now?" he said to me. "It's too late. This thing is nearly finished."..