Current
Articles
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
Young Apprentice
Cape Town Big Wave Rookie Frank Solomon Steps Up (Unedited)
African Surfrider Magazine, October 2008
Around the time original underground Cape chargers Pierre de
Villiers and Peter Button paddled out to surf Dungeons for the
first time, Frank Solomon was undoubtedly crawling around somewhere
nearby in his nappy. Little did the Hout Bay carpet grub know
that 24 years later he would be following their legacy - and crapping
himself in a different way - as he stroked out into heaving 15-20
foot waves at the notorious Cape Town big wave spot, this time
with the entire surfing world watching.
The affable, long-haired and bearded Hout Bay local has been knocking
on the door at Dungeons for a few years now, but kicked it down
in 2008 by making the cut the Red Bull Big Wave Africa. He secured
his debut nomination as alternate in the event by showing the
requisite bravado during a number of epic sessions through the
early big wave season. He then cemented his inclusion by charging
on some Dungeons bombs in the 10-15 foot official practice session
the day before, snavelling set waves from the more experienced
local regulars and handful of world-famous big wave surfers.
As this year’s BWA ran in the third day of the waiting period,
some of the other invited international riders hadn’t found
flights in time, so the next morning Frank found himself in a
BWA contest vest. Yet his path to that point hasn’t been
easy, and he says that to get there he literally had to force
his way into the tight-knit Cape Town big wave crew by not backing
down from anything - even them. Frank recalls how he became hooked
on big wave riding after watching Sean Holmes win the 2000 event.
“I was like... I really wanna do this,” he amps, before
becoming more pensive and adding, “but it was [also] kind
of a battle to get out and get respect from the guys.”
Only 18 at the time, Frank bought a big board and put in hours
at Crayfish Factory and some at Sunset, before quickly migrating
to his “local” break at Dungeons, along with his 14-year-old
mate, downhill skating freak Mike Zietsman. “I really wanted
to surf Dungeons,” explains Frank. “I mean I live
right here... and I didn’t always have bucks to go over
Chapmans Peak and it’s always closed... so we went down
to the harbour and asked the guys for a lift.” However,
much to their disappointment, the established crew responded with
an emphatic “no”. Undaunted, the fearless teenage
big wave wannabes hiked over the Sentinel and paid homage to the
old school by paddling out from the rocks across the shark-infested
gully. “And then, as we were getting out there,” continues
Frank. “They said: ‘what are you guys doing out here?
You have to go in.’ And we were like: ‘we paddled
out here, and you can’t tell us to leave’.”
After snagging a few insiders, the upstarts succumbed to the pressure
though and scarpered. Whilst it irked him that all these guys
in their 30s and 40s were barring the lightees, Frank is quick
to now admit that he had underestimated the force of the waves
that day, and he realises the attitude of the crew was justified.
“In the beginning I thought, ‘you just want this all
for yourselves’,” he says. “But [now] you can
also understand why they are like that, it is very dangerous and
some ous who don’t know anything shouldn’t go out
there... because if a wide one comes through you’ll get
absolutely destroyed.”
Still charging between lectures, Frank missed the epic XXL session
of 2006, as he was in Indo. But that freak swell also reminded
him of the promise he had made to himself, and on his return he
refocused his energy on surfing big waves. He then recalls a seminal
session in May this year, with fellow Hout Bay surfer and eventual
BWA semi-finalist Barry Futter. “It was massive,”
Frank smiles and lifts his arms. “It was actually a turning
point for me and Barry. We walked down the mountain and were going
to surf on our own, so we ran down to the Nauticat, and as we
got there Twiggy arrived and jumped on the boat. The waves were
absolutely perfect, like 10 - 15 foot, glassy, just us three of
us out, and that day Twiggy said to us, ‘if you can surf
this, you can surf anywhere in the world’.”
Motivated by words like this from a big wave Jedi such as Baker,
Frank began to chase his dream of surfing in BWA, one that in
hindsight now seemed his destiny. A stylish, standout freesurfer
with a full bag of tricks in small to medium waves, Frank learned
how to surf in the close outs of Hout Bay beach, before migrating
to Llandudno. Taught to surf by his dad Robin, Frank spent every
winter holiday with him at Supers. Frank has been lifeguarding
since the age of five, spearfishes regularly, isn’t shy
of the gym and - apart from a few dops - lives clean; so his fitness
and mental approach are also rock solid.
“I’ve always liked surfing bigger waves,” he
furthers. “I am friends with bodyboarders like Seth Phitides
and Sasha Specker, so when it was too big to surf at Llandudno,
I would just go out with them and pull into close outs. The lifesavers
also started to dare me to go out there on my Malibu board in
10 or 15 foot waves, and they would pay me R100 to catch a wave
so I think [that] really helped.” Although good enough to
make the SA Uni Team, by his own admission Frank’s not the
most savvy contest surfer, but is still is crony of the infamous
Tripod of Ricky-Bobby, Wok and Dan Redman, and good mates with
local resident and world tour campaigner Roy Bryson. Frank also
lives next door to the B&B where all the Red Bull surfers
stay every year, and tells with a grin how he eventually harassed
them into letting him go surf with them.
Even though it seemed like a pipedream, he then decided put his
name forward for the event. “I said, I wanna surf,”
says Frank. “I never thought I’d make it in, though.”
Whilst he waited though, Frank continued to put his time in at
Dungeons. Such was his devotion, he says, he sometimes surfed
it by himself, even though he occasionally took the inevitable
drubbings and hold-downs that made him question his sanity. He
laughs how all the established big wave riders even watched him
surf solo, which might had had something to do with his eventual
inclusion. “It was the Thursday before the practice session,”
says Frank. “All the ous were on the mountain checking the
surf and I paddled in and walked up the mountain.”
Yet despite his obvious sack, as an alternate, Frank concedes
the uncertainty of the days before the event was harrowing. “I
didn’t know for sure until Tristan phoned me like five minutes
before and said ‘you are surfing’ and I was like,
ooooooh, okay,” explains Frank, his wide eyes reflecting
the gravity of that moment. But then ironically, after all that,
Frank failed to catch a wave in his first heat. “It’s
not like I didn’t want a wave,” he blurts, clearly
still irritated, before adding that luck was also a factor. “Andrew
Marr didn’t get a wave, and he was in my heat, Tyler Fox,
Ramon Navarro, Thomas King-Kleynhans, they all never got waves,”
he rationalises. “But, ja, I was angry hey. ‘Cos I
knew I could do better, but the waves were also really big and
I was really nervous.”
Despite this early setback, Frank Solomon is upbeat about his
future in big wave circles. He has settled his rookie account
and although he’s sure to pay more dues in the future, once
he graduates as a quantity surveyor at the end of the year, he
plans to spend a season surfing on Grant Washburn’s couch
in Santa Cruz to take on Mavericks and will see what happens from
there. After all, though it’s a quarter century since he
blew out his first candle, in the big wave world, Frank Solomon
is still an infant. “The next five years I am surfing big
waves. I turn 25 this year and Twiggy told me when he was my age
he hadn’t even surfed a big wave,” he smiles.
Copyright Miles Masterson Media 2009 click
here for menu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Perfect Day
ASR Legend Johnny Paarman
The ‘Gat’, Llandudno, Cape Town. A solidly built
blond surfer politely waits his turn for a set. He eventually
snags a four-foot right hand wedge. Clearly no grom, he’s
marginally slow in getting up; but as his feet hit the deck, he
speeds into the bowl and carves into a deep forehand bottom turn.
He drives straight up the face and hits the lip with a resounding
“thwack”. His style is old school and resolute as
he wrestles his board down into another bottom turn and then into
a gliding, retro 360. He makes that, cracks the lip one more time
- and then tries to launch an air on the close out section, nearly
sticking it.
Not bad surfing by anyone’s standards, but especially a
53-year old. Yet when you’ve been a presence in these parts
as long as Jonathan “JP” Paarman has, you are bound
to learn a trick or two. Sitting at a wooden table at his home,
overlooking the ocean and mountain in nearby Hout Bay, Johnny’s
blue eyes widen as recalls his first surfs at Llandudno, four
decades ago. “It was really nice, we always camped on the
lawn and we used to surf those lekker peaks.” He mimics
the a-frames with his sun-freckled mitts, amped at the memory.
“My parents used to stay in what used to be a nursery shack,
which is the clubhouse today, and they all used to body surf and
party and carry on down there.”
In those early days, if he wasn’t surfing at Llandudno,
young Johnny Paarman would be hanging out in his home turf of
Glen Beach, where his grandparents Fred and Pearl had a bungalow,
and the Whitmore and Paarman dynasties held court - including
the Godfather of SA surfing, John Whitmore himself. “Oom
Jan, he’s the master of the whole thing you know,”
reminisces Johnny, who laid the wreath at his uncle and mentor’s
sending off at Glen Beach in 2001. “He and my father Ken
were big mates, they were bodysurfers and perlemoen divers and
from there we sort of all rode lilos and body surfed.” Of
Johnny’s five siblings, Donald, Marky and Roger all surfed,
as well as their cousins, big wave charger Mikey Luyt and flashy
ripper Gavin Heath. Further Paarman surfing influences at the
time, included among others, extended family members Frank and
Dave Meneses, who were some of Cape Town’s earliest big
wave surfers. “Pearl Paarman, she was the mommy of the surfers
at Glen Beach, my gran was,” adds Johnny with a fond smile.
“You didn’t get to surf Glen Beach without paying
her a visit.“
Johnny says at the time he never considered there would be a future
in surfing for him, but after riding his first longboard at the
age of six, it was inevitable he would be part of this water-orientated
family heritage. “I just remember my cousins and them saying
once that if there was anyone surfing Glen Beach it was me. No
matter how big or small or whatever it was, I was out there. I
remember one year my gran kakked me out because I hadn’t
been to Glen Beach for three months, I think the waves must have
been shitty,” he laughs. “My gran says ‘where
have you been?’ and I said ‘sorry, the waves have
been elsewhere’.”
That “elsewhere” was, of course, the nether regions
of the Cape Peninsula. “It was like you’ve seen in
the Endless Summer movies,” chuckles Johnny, who as a grom
used to cadge lifts down south from the older guys. “That
wasn’t put on, that’s the way it was; they would all
race along Chapman’s Peak in their cars, six or eight of
them and have a big dice. And here I am a little pik... just hanging
on and going with the flow.” Johnny then relates how Kommetjie
had no local surfers, so surfing there with the older crew such
as Sunset pioneer Charlie Marshall, his uncles Frank and Dave,
the Bokhorst brothers, and the likes of Kom legend Peter Basford,
meant he got exposed to waves of consequence early on. “Being
so small everything was big for me, but you weren’t going
to sit on the beach. You paddled out and took off,” JP bares
his teeth and mimics how he would scratch into sets.
When Johnny was about 11 or 12 (after 40 years, specifics are
understandably hazy), Kenny Colman, chairman of one of Cape Town’s
earliest surf clubs, Swamis, organised a comp at the Kom. JP had
been asked to be one of the dozen or so members of the club thanks
to his talent, but despite he the fact he was already a WP team
member in the U-18 division, the organisers said that the waves
were too big that day, and wouldn’t let him enter. Unperturbed,
and allowed a slot thanks to a no-show, JP paddled out anyway
and when the scores were tallied, won the whole shebang. Johnny
humbly reckons he never thought of himself as the top surfer,
and with a self-effacing laugh, says he probably only won because
he got the best waves. Loath to claim himself, when prompted,
JP acknowledges that after this victory he did gain a measure
of self-belief though, which over the next few years saw him winning
his divisions in SA Champs, regularly beating the likes of Shaun
Tomson, and making the Springbok team that travelled to Australia
in 1970. “There was probably some hidden talent there and
off it went,” he concedes.
However, JP is also quick to palm off major credit for his early
competitive success to the influence of his brother. Donald was
an SA champ in the 60s, perennial Springbok team member and Surfing
Hall of Famer, with whom JP never felt a rivalry per se, but rather
a close kinship that pushed both their surfing. “I can’t
even remember having to compete against him, because he was older,”
recalls Johnny further of Donald, who stayed on in Australia after
the world champs in 1970, vacating the space for JP to lead the
charge back home. “But he was an excellent surfer. We used
to go to J-Bay together all the time. We used to hitchhike from
the Strand with our boards and he’s got his music box and
we’d get there, no problem.”
When it comes to the topic of Jeffreys Bay, Johnny shuffles his
bulk in his creaking chair and becomes animated, clearly revelling
the memories of those halcyon days. He recalls how he first stopped
in there with his parents on the way back from a comp in East
London in ’68 or ’69, became hooked and quickly went
back without them. “I would spend all my school holidays
in Jeffreys Bay,” he says. “I mean, that’s probably
where my surfing went forward. When I was 15-years-old I was already
hanging out with hippies.” In spite of being exposed to
the raucous behaviour of the long-haired, wild men of the day,
including his brother, other local surfers and visitors such as
Bunker Spreckles, Johnny says he just focused on surfing and left
them to their night time shenanigans, setting a pattern he’s
followed all of his life. “I think to put it quite bluntly,
if I even smoked a cigarette I would get goofed,” he quips.
“All I was interested in was going surfing. I would surf
with them all day and then I would go home and they would go party.
I was too young to even know what was going on and it didn’t
really bother me. I was there to surf. I think they probably respected
me in the surfing. It was quite a place when you close your eyes
and think back though... like the Wild West.”
Johnny regales how for years they would all camp, semi-feral,
at the Point outside of town, forming laagers with their Combis,
making “big fire” and using water piped from a big
tower on the top of the hill to have a hot shower. Back then,
one of the only ways to tell the time of day in the water was
when a bus came through from PE and kicked up dust on the road
at about 11 am. Johnny also remembers how Supertubes was at first
considered unrideable, although not for long. “You’d
get to Magnas and then road turned into gravel,” he describes.
”We had the Point and then you had Tubes and Supers was
sort of a little bit of an indicator; but it wasn’t long
before the guys started to go out there.... they surfed it wearing
those old white takkies.” Johnny recalls how an older oke
nicknamed ‘Slakkies’ first took him down to Supers:
“He said to me ‘You must come surf there – you’ll
handle it...’ and he showed me how to get out, and then
I was out the back and he was still left on the beach. And that
was probably about the first time I surfed there... no leashes,
riding a Whitmore longboard.”
Throughout the early ‘70s JP continued to frequent J-Bay,
surfing with his younger brother Mark, and the likes of Piers
Pittard and Gavin Rudolph. He benefited from the rapid progression
in equipment of the time, and from watching the likes of visiting
overseas surfers, such as Keith Paull and Nat Young, as well as
good mate Derek Hynd. JP also honed his skills other spots all
up and down the east and west coasts, and the beaches and reefs
of Cape Town, and dominated local contests, cementing his rep
as a fearless surfer and ruthless competitor (then-surfing buddy
Gary van Rooyen still calls him the “Iceman”). After
he went to the worlds in Oz in 1970, where he surfed Bells and
other nearby spots, JP then he placed second to Midget Farrelly
in the second Gunston 500. He also attended the world champs in
San Diego in 1972, where he reached the semis, and then went on
to Hawaii for the first time with, among others, Springbok team
mate Gavin Rudolph. “Johnny has a special place in my heart,”
recalls Gavin, who had already made name by winning the Smirnoff
event there in ’71. “He always was willing to paddle
out with me at any huge break on the North Shore.”
Despite his well-documented contest success, Johnny is more remembered
by the surfing world to this day for his groundbreaking aggressive
approach to freesurfing, particularly his quiet dominance at Sunset,
which he says he preferred to the even then-crowded Pipe, and
reminded of him of Cape Town, only without the cold and kelp.
“You know, surfing Sunset Beach, you get eaten, but at the
end of the day it is really a fun wave, you can carve all over
the show on that thing,” JP mocks a powerful top turn with
his chunky forearm. “I found it not such a difficult wave
to ride, having ridden big Kom, big Crayfish Factory, you could
just carve the place to pieces. Nice bowls, nice sections, nice
take off...”
Regardless, JP eventually won an event at Haleiwa in 1974 and
after doing his two-year national service stint, he returned to
Hawaii for a third and final time in ’76. On this visit
he placed in both the Duke and Smirnoff events at Sunset, and
thanks to these results and another second in the Gunston 500,
ended the year ranked a career best 15th on the IPS tour. “You
didn’t go to Hawaii to learn to ride to big waves,”
JP now motivates. “You went there to enjoy the warm water
and be part of what you read in the magazines, the Jeff Hakmans,
the Barry Kanaiaupunis, the Aikaus, all these famous surfers,
you go rub shoulders with them and look up to them and that’s
really fantastic. The only time you sort of scratch your head
and think, ‘Wow I’m not that bad after all’
is when you’ve just taken out BK and you’ve just beaten
Billy Hamilton or Jeff Hakman... you are winning heats, then it
sort of dawns on you.”
Unfortunately, lack of comprehensive sponsorship meant JP eventually
had to quit the tour “sometime in the mid-‘80s”.
Looking back, he now reckons he could have pushed it further had
he had a manager to promote him more. “I can’t do
that” he smiles. The attendant financial support, he admits,
might have prolonged things and helped him to compete in places
such as Bells Beach. However, back in Cape Town, although the
contest flame still burned bright, JP slowly began to feel marginalised
and the isolation eventually got to him. “There was only
one pro surfer in Cape Town: JP!” he exclaims. “But
once I’d turned professional my attitude was if I’m
going to surf I’m going to surf for money, pay me, I’m
over the tin cups.” JP goes on, more sombre now. “I
was totally on my own here. And for that period I very seldom
got a chance to surf in contests... and if I did I would have
to slaughter all the other guys.”
Although he still went up to a few events in Durban, in which
he would always place somewhere, Johnny underlines that it wasn’t
worth the money or effort. “To move to Durban to make a
career of it, there wasn’t such a thing,” he adds.
By then, Johnny had also married his wife Linda and started a
family. So instead, he put the experience working under his uncle
as a kid to good use, manufacturing surfboards and windsurfers,
as well as later things like Rip and Tear clothing and even fibreglass
bakkie canopies. John Whitmore had bequeathed much of this legacy
to his young heir apparent, including talking on the radio. “He
passed the damned torch to me to do a surf report,” laughs
Johnny. “He said to me one day,’ I’m bailing
out, it’s yours you’ve got to do it’.”
Johnny had also been exposed to Hobies in his early teens, sailing
them a bit around Camps Bay with his cousin Chele, Oom’s
daughter. Whitmore had been the first to bring them into SA and
Johnny eventually took on the agency himself and began racing
them, ostensibly partly in order to quell his competitive drive.
“I didn’t know rules of what was port and starboard
and right of way or whatever,” JP recalls his first forays
on Hobie 16s. “I just started sailing and learnt as I went
on. I did pretty well, went overseas once did the Worrall 1000,
which is a 1000 mile sea race.” When Hobie Cats faded from
popularity, and his franchise folded, Johnny moved on again, this
time to sailing and racing yachts. Unsurprisingly, he earned a
reputation as a hellman on these too. JP, who only got his ticket
recently, reckons he taught himself how to sail by the seat of
his pants, relying on his experience as a surfer and Hobie pilot
rather than a skipper (as anyone who has sailed with him can attest).
He laughs out loud: “The first time I go on a big yacht
with Geoff Meek and the guys and they go ‘here’s the
steering wheel’. And I end up flying along with this yacht,
and that’s’ how I learned to sail big racing boats,
from the back of the boat, which is totally unheard of... they’d
want me to take the boat and probably surf the boat, because they
know I can do that.”
Yet through the peaks and troughs of life and sailing, JP, ever
the waterman, continued to ride solid waves. Whilst he sessioned
all the usual CT spots, he confesses he’d never thought
of surfing at Dungeons until the late ‘80s, and only used
it as an indicator when driving along Chapmans Peak to the Factory,
Sunset or Kom. But once Pierre de Villiers and Peter Button had
popped that cherry, JP ventured out there sometime around ’89
or ’90. It was an act that heralded his return from relative
obscurity to the international realm. His fearless freesurfs beneath
the Sentinel (“an adrenalin rush of note” as he describes
it), as well as no doubt his reputation from his Hawaiian heyday,
also earned him a slot on the invite list of the inaugural Red
Bull Big Wave Africa in 1999. Johnny underplays the significance
though. “They asked me to surf in it, and my thought really
was ‘I’m not really into it’, but I would do
it for the sport,” he says frankly. “To get this thing
going. It wasn’t that I was thinking ‘I’m going
to win this thing’ or anything like that. My feeling toward
it in the beginning was just to go. I mean, I enjoy it, it’s
fun.” After 1999, Johnny stayed involved with BWA, ferrying
surfers out on a yacht (he has a share in and looks after a vessel
called Beluga), and is now a contest director. He reveals, with
a sigh, making the call to green light the event is one of the
hardest things he has ever done. But he’s quick to add he
was and still is stoked to play a part in the decision making
process, so that the surfers can benefit from his experience.
With the publicity gained from the first BWA, Johnny snagged an
invite to the Quiksilver World Masters event that year in France
too, which he says was like a blast from the past. “I stayed
at Guethary, I saw Michael Tomson again. Mickey Dora was there,
and I chatted with him and surfed with Michael and Derek Ho, it
was good to see all of them.” Unfortunately, thanks to marginal
surf at the following event in Ireland in 2000, Johnny failed
to qualify for the next one. It was in Hawaii, which he says is
a pity, as he would like to have gone back there after so long.
But then he perks up, and tells how he’s been stoked to
go to boat tripping in northern Indonesia a few times recently,
which more than made up for it. “There was me and my brother,
Roger, Marky, Dave Fish and some other guys and it was fantastic
surfing,” he smiles at the memory. “I mean I was standing
in these tubes going ‘eeehh, how great is this?’ -
just going apeshit.”
It was also inevitable that with his history that Johnny would
evolve to building yachts himself, which he started doing about
seven years ago. “It’s like building a huge surfboard,”
he jokes about the process, before adding more seriously. “I
build the whole thing, all the bulkheads, laminate it, paint it,
lay the decking, everything. It’s a huge project.”
It’s another no-brainer too when Johnny reveals part of
his ultimate plan is to set off on in one, to surf and live off
the Indian Ocean. “The boat is purely designed for surfing,
long range fuel tanks and fully self-contained,” he beams.
Right now, Johnny is dividing his time between Cape Town and constructing
said vessels with brother Mark in the Eastern Cape, where he has
also been revisiting his old haunt of J-Bay. Enjoying his life
surfing in Cape Town, he explains how he didn’t bother to
go back there for many years, as late as the mid-90s. Even then,
he reckons, the town of Jeffreys Bay had changed and the now the
surf has become so packed it will never be what it was. Johnny,
ever resigned, reckons with a shrug though, that’s progress,
and that he still finds the wave as good as ever. Like most long-time
surfers, Johnny understandably gets irked from time to time by
the sheer numbers of clueless surfers in the water everywhere
these days, but not enough to discourage this eternal ‘stokey’.
He keeps fit by cycling (JP does the Argus race every year), and
whilst at home, still finds the time to get in the water as much
as possible, be it at Llandudno, Hoek, Dunes or even the Outer
Kom, where he still takes off as deep as anyone. Despite a recurring
back injury from an old slam at Rocky Point and his infamous chronic
ear problems, Johnny adds that these days he simply considers
himself lucky to get into the water at all; although, he reckons,
a few months before Oom Jan passed away, he was still riding waves,
in his 70s, on a bodyboard at Elands Bay.
As we walk down the Paarman driveway, escorted by the barking
trio of Johnny’s pet dogs, past his home shaping bay, where
he makes boards for Linda and the odd one for himself, we stop
alongside his old-model white Bantam bakkie. He turns to me and
describes his perfect day. “I tell you what I really enjoy
- getting up, going down to Llandudno, having a nice surf, uncrowded,
come home, chill out here, do whatever I have to do, go back to
the beach, have a nice surf and come back home again.” He
smiles as he sums it all up. “That’s the answer.”
Copyright Miles Masterson Media
First Published in African Surfrider Magazine, South Africa,
November 2006
Copyright Miles Masterson Media 2009 click
here for menu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Rape of The Stock
(edited)
Best Life Special Report, October 2008
Since being denied his favourite fish at a local seafood restaurant,
one outraged consumer embarks on a journey to explore what is
going in our oceans - and what this means for you.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the waiter said with a shake
of his head. “We’re out of kingklip.” My mouth
fell open. “What?”
I was at my local seafood spot, Hout Bay’s Dunes restaurant,
and had interrupted the waiter’s recital of the specials
to order my hometown favourite: a succulent portion of Genypterus
capensis, aka kingklip, grilled with lemon butter.
“There’s been a shortage,” the waiter continued.
“Kingklip isn’t on the menu.”
Damn! I’d heard about “overfishing” and “dwindling
stocks” so was vaguely aware there was something fishy going
on in our seas. But in all my years of eating kingklip never been
denied it. What had happened to this species always thought was
teeming in the ocean?
At a braai a few days later, I mention my experience to a friend,
Grant Spooner, a recreational fisherman. He whistles softly and
lowers a spade-like hand below his knee. “I’ve been
catching fish since was that big. I started in Gordon’s
Bay catching harders and then white steenbras. But now white steenbras
is five percent of what it should be on our coastline.”
According to Spooner, illegal fishing methods, fuelled by greed,
are factors in the decline of all fish stocks. This counts both
internationally, especially in the North Atlantic where once abundant
species such as halibut and cod have collapsed, as well as in
our waters, where many species are under threat or overexploited.
The authorities introduced quotas, but dodgy fishermen have found
a way around that by dumping smaller fish in favour of more lucrative
larger ones. Apart from wasting many fish (especially the deep-sea
species, which are usually returned to the ocean dead), this dumping
has the added negative effect of not being recorded on the fishing
quota.
The compound effect of this is that unscrupulous fishermen can
still fulfil their permit conditions and remove an equivalent
amount of fish from the sea, effectively doubling their impact
on the resource.
Spooner has watched uncaring fishermen dump bycatch species, catch
endangered fish, shellfish and crustaceans, fin sharks, shoot
seals and birds, and pollute the ocean.
That’s over and above allegations of false recording of
catches and ineffective policing by our coastal authority, Marine
and Coastal Management (MCM). It’s no wonder the ocean is
in such a mess.
These are all major problems that adversely affect ocean food
chains and the long-term sustainability of ocean resources. “We’ve
played with those ecosystems to a point where we have totally
disrupted them,” says Spooner.
At the root of the problem, adds Spooner, is the world’s
increasing appetite for seafood. After all, these fishermen are
not raiding the ocean’s bounty for themselves alone. The
health benefits of seafood have resulted in the shortages of fish
stocks. “Look at how fashionable it has become with sushi,”
says Grant. “It’s become cool to eat fish.”
And even though our fish is under threat, we dunk our sashimi
in soy sauce at alarming rates.
FISH FRAUD
Quenton Spickernel plates up the Catch of the Day at Dunes, gives
instructions to his sous-chef and carries the fish to the table.
It isn’t kingklip, but it will do. Tastes will change. They
have to. No one knows that better than Spickernel, Dunes’
manager.
Across the bay, a fleet of fully laden fishing boats chug home
into the harbour. “I’ve seen our indigenous stocks
decreasing at an alarming rate,” he says. More than three
decades spent in the ocean as a fisherman, diver and purveying
seafood have led Spickernel to become deeply concerned about the
state of southern Africa’s fish resources.
“People don’t understand how plentiful these stocks
once were. All your reef and bank species like grunter and seventy-four,
musselcrackers, romans and stumps, all of those are gone; well,
not gone, but threatened, and now the same thing is happening
with your core restaurant-listed items: kob, Cape salmon and kingklip.”
When it came to why the kingklip didn’t land on my plate,
Spickernel says kingklip was taken off the menu partly because
of economics, as scarcity had pushed up the cost (“We used
to pay R50 a kilo for kingklip, now it’s more than doubled”),
but also out of a moral duty. Dunes, which goes through up to
50kg of fish a day, felt they had to help reduce demand for this
and other exploited local fish species.
It’s one of the few fish restaurants to join the Southern
African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (Sassi), which has launched
a red-orange-green fish campaign to educate consumers and sellers
of fish. Fish on the red list are illegal, fish on the orange
list are best avoided and fish on the green list can be eaten
at will. SASSI hopes to create an army of informed consumers,
wielding pocket guides distinguishing between green, orange and
red.
2002 Sassi study found that 92 percent of seafood outlets in KZN
contravened at least one aspect of our Marine Living Resources
Act. These were mainly focused on trading in red-listed or undersized
fish, but also touched on duplicity.
According to Spickernel, many seafood outlets dupe their customers
into assuming they are consuming one fish species when they are
eating another. “They’ll take blue fish trawled out
of Saldanha and call it musselcracker.”
Jaco Barendse is a passionate environmentalist and Sassi researcher,
who I met in the coffee shop at the Two Oceans Aquarium, says
that a small – but significant – group of dishonest
operators among the hundreds of seafood outlets countrywide con
their customers.
“They think consumers don’t know any better. The ‘local’
kingklip we think we’re eating is more often than not ling
or cusk eel, shipped in from Argentina or New Zealand.”
Closely related to kingklip, these species are virtual gastronomic
doppelgangers to the genuine article and, as they are imported
cheaper than it costs to obtain domestic kingklip, are sold at
a higher profit.
According to Sassi credo, this fraud exerts unnecessary consumer
pressure on overexploited species, as in the case of kingklip;
even though they’re caught legally (mainly as a bycatch
by deep-sea trawlers and longliners), the true status of these
stocks is masked from an unsuspecting public. Understandably,
we then still think they are more plentiful than they really are.
“Which,” adds Barendse, “kind of undermines
what we’re doing.”
And if selling goldfish as marlin to an unsuspecting public wasn’t
enough, Barendse reveals that over 100 SA fish stocks are in serious
jeopardy. Linefish, caught commercially or by SA’s 500 000
recreational fishermen, form the majority of the most exploited
or depleted stocks on the Sassi danger lists.
Seventy-four is the prime example of a red-listed fish stock that
has recently collapsed. A favourite in seafood curries, this fish
once made up 70 percent of the total catch in KZN. In 1910, more
than 1 000 tons a year were landed, but by 1997 the total reported
catch had plummeted to 1.4 tons a year. A decade on, seventy-four
has barely recovered and is still illegal to catch.
Barendse warns that kob (kabeljou) is under immense pressure.
“Silver and dusky kob are below five percent of their historical
breeding stock, which is a crisis.”
The catch rates of many of South Africa’s commercial stocks
have declined over the years. The numbers don’t lie. Even
our most plentiful marine resource, the fast-breeding hake stockfish,
has been reduced from a catch of more than a million tons a year
in the Seventies, to 165 tons in the Nineties, which has further
decreased by an average of 10 percent a year for the last few
years.
Kingklip is not in as much peril as the orange-listed kob, but
uncertainty regarding the numbers of its stocks has necessitated
a cautionary approach to its fishery. Says Barendse: “The
total allowable catch for kingklip as a bycatch is 3 500 tons
a year compared to hake, which is 130 000 tons, so it’s
unrealistic to think that kingklip can be in every restaurant.”
Kingklip wasn’t always so scarce. Sea Harvest trawler skipper,
Louis Coetzee, a stocky, silver-haired fisherman with fading seaman’s
tattoos on his forearms, has spent more than 40 years over the
horizon. On his company’s bustling wharf in Saldanha on
the West Coast, he remembers how kingklip was once so plentiful
it often filled up the entire deck of his boat. “Then they
allowed the longliners to come in, which was a disaster,”
he groans.
Traditionally the preserve of hake trawlers, who had always caught
kingklip as an unrestricted incidental bycatch in their nets over
“soft” sandy seabed in the early to mid-Eighties,
longliners were permitted by then marine management authority
Sea Fisheries (later MCM) to start casting their multiple-hooked
lines for kingklip. Within a few years, the catch rates of kingklip
dropped dramatically.
“Longline fishing was new to South Africa and skippers had
motivated for a trial period on utilising longline fishing for
hake,” explains Dave Japp of fisheries consultancy Capfish.
“But when they found they could catch kingklip quite quickly,
the whole emphasis moved onto kingklip. Then [in 1989] we realised
it was more than likely going to damage the stock, so the fishery
was stopped.”
Apart from affecting a sharp decline in kingklip, this “experiment”
contributed to the animosity between longliners and trawlers.
And this feud continues to fester, since longliners were again
allowed to catch hake along with a bycatch quota of kingklip in
the Nineties.
If you speak to trawl skippers like Coetzee, it’s the longliners
who are causing the most damage to fish stocks, some by illegally
targeting bycatch species such as kingklip. You’ll also
hear how longliners, who are able to fish over “hard”
or rocky ground (where kingklip congregate) and soft ground, impinge
on traditional trawl grounds and drag their lines through trawl
nets, destroying them.
Josie Fransico, a longline skipper with four decades of fishing
to his name, is vociferous in his rage towards trawlers and the
big fishing companies they supply, which, he claims, are out to
ruin longliners, who are mostly small, independent operators.
He accuses trawlers of ruining longlines by dragging their nets
across them and says trawlers are illegally targeting overexploited
bycatch species. “They are working on hard bottom, they
are working on semi-bottom, they go over your gear, they trawl
anywhere.”
Overseas vessels aggravate the problem. “They’ve got
a couple of foreign trawlers coming here and destroying the bycatch,”
he says. In 1977, SA declared a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic
zone and banned foreign boats. Overseas fleets have intruded illegally
since then, but most are Spanish trawlers who have entered into
joint agreements with fishermen and companies, many of them empowerment
quota holders who don’t own vessels. These foreign boats,
accused of the most wicked fishing practices, are then “re-flagged”
South African to get around our marine law.
At Capfish HQ, Japp remains neutral. While there are questionable
practices on both sides, the biggest issue is the compound effect
of having so many people fishing a finite resource.
The pressure of political transformation to more evenly distribute
our marine resources among the fishing industry, subsistence fishers
and hobbyists, means there is a huge demand for commercial and
recreational fishing permits, while at the same time MCM struggles
to police our 3 000km coastline.
Once only a handful of operators plied their trade in hake fishery;
now there are hundreds. “The pressure comes onto the spawning
stock. The fish can’t spawn properly, they can’t breed,
and you can’t get your recovery,” explains Japp.
Despite improvements in technology, the setting of limits and
assessments of all fish stock is an “inexact science”.
ocean is a vast three-dimensional entity and most independent
assessments are at best a close guesstimate.
Regarding the actual status of stock such as hake and kingklip,
many feel environmental factors also play a role and that recent
declines are less to do with the fisheries and more to do with
global warming, which, some experts believe, has affected ocean
currents, causing many fish in the food chain to move away from
their traditional grounds to find food.
CAST THE NET WIDER
Added to all of this is economic pressure. As the cost of fishing
increases, so does the price of all fish products. This is compounded
by the fact that most of our hake and much of our trawled kingklip
is exported, further affecting their spread locally. Like our
fruit and wine, these products fetch a higher price on the international
market, which affects its price and availability at home. “If
you had 10 000 tons of good quality hake and the best money is
the Spanish market, you’re going to sell [to the Spanish],”
says Japp.
Spickernel believes many restaurants lack imagination when it
comes to promoting more plentiful, if less well-known, species.
“The chefs are still stuck in a rut of offering the same
three species when we’ve got access to 30 or 40 different
species. You’d think all chefs would key into this because
it represents variety and different cooking techniques, but it’s
just the same old kob, Cape salmon, kingklip, lemon butter sauce,
klaar!” Fish eaters should be more adventurous, he says.
“It’s demand, and demand is going to cripple these
stocks.”
But the tide is turning. There have been thousands of responses
to Sassi’s SMS service, which indicates public awareness
is on the increase. Many retailers and restaurants are refusing
to trade in red-listed fish.
Chris Kasten of Robberg Seafoods, one of the few independent retailers
signed up with Sassi, says: “US scientist once said people
will go into a fish store and even if they see red-list species,
they don’t seem too concerned, but if they go into a butchery
and see tiger chops or rhino steaks they’ll do something
about it. You can’t expect people to make choices without
information. You have to take a role in influencing consumer trends,
as it will also have an impact on the longevity of your business.”
If nothing else, like the ocean itself, the complexities of not
only our local but international fisheries are myriad, as are
the challenges facing the human race when it comes to preserving
the world’s fish stocks.
The next time go into a seafood restaurant, I’ll take the
Sassi list. I’ve come to realise that it’s the consumers
who really hold the power; one by one, we have to take responsibility
to ensure our local fish stocks survive.
Sidebar: Become an Empowered Fish Consumer
Find out more about our fish stocks and which species are on Sassi’s
green, orange and red lists (panda.org.za/sassi). Keep the guide
in your wallet.
Spread awareness among your family and friends and local restaurants.
Eat more fish on the green list and less on the orange, which
will reduce demand on overexploited stocks. Never eat red-listed
fish.
Assume your rights as a consumer and ask restaurant managers if
the seafood is actually what they claim it is and where it came
from.
If you suspect restaurants/retailers of questionable practices,
use Sassi’s “FishMS” SMS service (079 499 8795)
to find out if their fish is legit.
Report any exploitation of marine resources to MCM on its anonymous
hotline: 0800 116 110.
Become a fish reservist. MCM is developing a programme to take
on honorary fishery patrol officers (similar to police reservists)
as extra eyes and ears in its fight against poachers and other
transgressors of marine law. Contact MCM on 0861 123 626 for more
information.
Contribute funds to the WWF or similar organisations to help with
the quest to preserve our fish stocks for future generations.
Sidebar: The Kingklip “Chain of Custody”
Kingklip is primarily landed as an “incidental bycatch”
of the SA “demersal” (bottom dwelling) targeted hake
fishery. Participants in these fisheries require a permit of total
allowable catch (TAC) quota.
For kingklip, this is usually about three to five percent of the
hake TAC, within a current total sector bycatch limit of 3 500
tons. Hake and kingklip are mostly trawled, while 10 percent are
caught by longline.
Some large trawl companies have factory vessels that process,
package and freeze their catch at sea. But on the smaller “wetfish”
trawlers and longline vessels, fresh hake, kingklip and other
valuable quota bycatch reach the shore on ice, where they are
then offloaded for processing at shore-based factories and distributed
to markets. The bigger fisheries own their own fleets and despatch
this fish within their internal networks.
The fish is then either vacuum-packed in fillet form and packaged
for local supermarkets or for the export market, and to a lesser
degree sold on to independent retailers and restaurants. Some
trawlers and longliners sell their catch on to the big companies
or to retailers, and some have their own retail outlets and sell
their catch themselves. This is how most “fresh” fish
finds its way to local fishmongers and restaurants.
Depending on availability, at the first point of sale kingklip
can fetch anywhere from R30/kg from the independent boats through
the middlemen to R65/kg. It then climbs to between R90/kg and
R180/kg in subsequent retail outlets and supermarkets. Once it’s
on your plate, kingklip can then fetch up to R200/kg, depending
on the restaurant.
Copyright Miles Masterson Media 2009 click
here for menu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy
de Klerk
Natural Born Daredevil
(Unedited)
Sunday Times Lifestyle January
2008
Mountain climbing is ostensibly the preserve of only the brave
or crazy. Those inspired, for reasons unfathomable to the rest
of us, to take on frigid, oxygen-starved, crippling conditions
and risk harm and death to summit the world’s tallest spires.
Of course, for some, even that is not enough, and the truly fearless
will then leap off these, with nothing but a glorified bed sheet
to break their fall.
Capetonian Andy de Klerk is famous in mountaineering circles for
opening scores of routes at home and worldwide, often on a meagre
budget, in remote, backward countries. He has climbed to the summit
of some the planet’s most arduous peaks, many of them alone.
Plus, he is one of the few climbers who BASEjump, a fringe skydiving
practice involving parachuting from stationary objects, usually
the highest cliffs. Andy is also a man of letters, with a Bachelors
degree in Psychology, Anthropology and Philosophy, and he recently
completed an engrossing, emotive book of stories and essays about
his life and daredevil exploits.
Predictably, Sharper Edges - chosen as a finalist in the 2007
Banff Mountain Book Festival - is full of dangerous action, such
as rock falls and cliff-strikes (BASE jumping’s worst scenario)
and broken bodies, as well the crushed dreams of routes unconquered
and the plunging despair of death at altitude. Yet the book avoids
any kind of self-flattery. Through Andy’s stirring and accessible
vernacular, it is rather full of penetrating insights, humour
and rollicking good tales.
However, 40-year-old Andy – a.k.a. ‘AdK’ - initially
struggles to verbalise his motivations for climbing. “I’ve
tried to think of why,” he says, almost wondering aloud.
“But it was just clear that’s what I wanted to do,
even from an early age.” Andy takes a long drag on a Chesterfield
cigarette (he meets me at a Bree Street coffee bar next to his
new furniture store, Bamboo, clutching a half-empty ciggie box,
keys and a cellphone, which he jokingly calls is his “Gauteng-earring”).
“I’ve just always wanted to get on top of things...
to look down.”
Diminutive Andy has just come from working his day trade, fitting
cabinets. He is dressed in dusty, tight, pitch-black jeans, scuffed
running shoes and a grey t-shirt. His face is lined – deeply
in some places - as expected of someone who has lived a life outdoors,
much of it in cruel weather. With a shock of thinning, sun-bleached
hair, he looks like a fisherman, one maybe lost in the bowels
of the Mother City. Yet his hooded blue eyes are clear and intense
when he makes a point. Andy also moves with ease and - as you’d
deduce if you’d read his book – has the calm presence
of a man who has endured incredible challenges.
Falling into his past, ‘Maritzburg raised Andy tells how
his doctor dad was an alcoholic and he and his mother, a nurse,
divorced when he was twelve. He then goes on to describe how he
had been hiking in the Drakensberg with a friend’s dad since
he was eight, became devoted to climbing magazines and books by
the likes of Reinhold Messner and Walter Bonatti, and by his early
teens was scaling things regularly. “Something in me always
knew I would be climbing the Himalayas one day,” he reflects,
adding, “I liked that it was outside, in the wild places,
where it was just me.” When he and his mom moved to Cape
Town, Andy came across kindred spirits, practising under Newlands
Bridge, where he met and Greg Lacey and Ed February, two legendary
SA climbers. Both eventually became his mentors and friends; Ed
in particular filling a paternal void, admits Andy - to me and
in the book - when he needed it most.
Under their tutelage, he embraced climbing with total dedication
throughout his teens and into his early twenties. However, when
he finished his degree at UCT, Andy was offered an Oxford scholarship.
He laughs and tells me that many people are amazed he turned this
down to go climbing around the world, with a woman he’d
just met, American Julie Brugger, who soon afterwards became his
first wife in Peru. “Life is too short for regrets,”
he justifies bluntly. “I would like to have done both, but
I made that choice and I stick by it.” Brugger, of course,
appears in the book often. After nine years together, the couple
drifted apart though, but not without climbing together on a number
of routes, including the infamous ‘Dru’ in the Swiss
Alps, where they first crossed paths.
This region, rich in climbing lore, also features a lot in Sharper
Edges as it is where Andy has had many triumphant, and scary,
climbing moments. “It’s a quite unstable part of the
Alps,” he holds up his gnarled hands, setting the scene.
“All frozen rock; and I was rappelling down at three in
the morning, first light, and there’s a big rock fall...
and all the rocks missed me.” He holds a hand very near
his shoulder to demonstrate. On a roll, he then dredges up another
shocking tale, this time when climbing a difficult route in the
Canadian Rockies. “It was really sharp limestone, like a
knife... and the whole block I was on came off and slipped onto
my lap and cut through my two nine mm ropes,” he relates
matter-of-factly. “It cut clean through the one and halfway
through the other. You are 1000 meters off the ground, and your
rope gets cut and that’s you, dead.”
Apart from these climbing mishaps, Andy has also had and seen
his fair share mixed fortunes BASEjumping. The book’s first
chapter ‘Bird People’ is an account of how good friend
Karl Hayden barely survived a cliff-strike on Table Mountain,
as well as Andy’s own story of how he broke his knee jumping
at the infamous Milner Peak in the Hex River Mountains. “What
is it about our yearning to fly like birds that makes it worth
the trauma, heartache and pain?” he writes, before answering
his own question. “It’s because bird people simply
love to fly. It gives us glorious freedom to soar above our own
given element, and nothing makes us feel as intently alive."
It is precisely this affirmation of living, rather than confrontation
of mortality, says Andy (a self-confessed atheist) that is for
him the whole point. “It’s a celebration of life,
but in a rather odd way,” he motivates. “Some people
are not content to sit in the valley, they’ve got to go
up to the top of the mountain and then at the top of the mountain
they want to jump off. I mean, when you are standing on the edge
you don’t really want to... but at the same time have to
because if you don’t it will be worse. And it’s more
confronting with your fear and challenging goals within myself,
my own drive and ambition, rather than a fear of death, or fear
of anything.”
Now settled in Scarborough, Andy is married to Charlotte Noble,
herself an athlete of note, who once came fifth in the Comrades
Marathon, and they have four young children. His family, he says,
have made him really appreciate his making it this far. Thanks
to them, he has slowed down considerably, although he scratches
the BASE itch occasionally, and still skydives and climbs. “I’ve
started taking my five-year-old son climbing and it is awesome,”
he adds enthusiastically, “and he just loves it, so my passion
is turning to joy because I am sharing it with my children.”
To support his family, (having taken up cabinet making years ago
to fund his climbing), Andy now also runs Cabinetworks, a furniture
company with a multi-million rand turnover and 35 employees across
SA. A somewhat reluctant businessman, who has done his best to
avoid the world of commerce and material gain, he is amazed at
its quick growth. “I have surrounded myself with talented
people and given them a little direction and it has blossomed,”
he says humbly (a good measure of his lack of vanity comes from
a receptionist at his store, who told me, while I was waiting
to meet him, that she didn’t know anything about his climbing
achievements until she read Sharper Edges).
Winding down from his once relentless globetrotting schedule also
gave AdK the opportunity to finally write his book. Although it
has been well received by those – climber and non-climber
alike - who have read it, he is somewhat ambivalent about the
writing process and underplays the end result. “Deconstructing
the ‘extreme’ world is not an intellectual challenge,”
he explains. “But at least I was able to share some of the
lessons that I've learned along the way - about success and failure
and about what it means to have spent time in some wild places
far from home.”
Ultimately, Andy and Sharper Edges are perhaps summed up best
in an excerpt from one of the book’s most poignant chapters.
‘An Instant of Joy’, which is about a solo climb on
the north face of the infamous Eiger in the Alps, a story Andy
himself says goes right to the heart of what he was trying to
achieve. “I had risked everything to get there,” he
writes. “Only to discover that there had been nothing there
for me in the first place. It was like I had been trying to catch
a cloud with my hands. I suppose I had been looking for something
more, but there really is nothing to find on the summit of a mountain
other than yourself.”
Copyright Miles Masterson Media 2009 click
here for menu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
St Helena Bay -
Hidden Gem of the West Coast
abouTime Inflght Magazine Jan 2008
Travel brochures and websites will tell you St Helena Bay is
more than just a typical west coast town. It is the landing point
of some of the first Europeans in Southern Africa (in the form
of Vasco Da Gama and his entourage in 1497), and that it is surrounded
by a bounty of picturesque natural land- and seascapes.
The flocks of calling seagulls, following the trawlers as they
return to the bay, attest to the essential livelihood for this
community that local fishermen bring in from the cold Atlantic.
The St Helena area, a.k.a. “Die Agterbaai” also boasts
and abundance of flora and fauna, such as colourful wild weskus
flowers and a vast array of bird life, as well as pods of visiting
whales and dolphins.
Nestled in the hook of a vast bay, the town, which comprises the
small fishing village of St Helena, adjacent Stompneus Baai and
Britannia Bay to the west, lies south of the mouth of the Great
Berg River, about two hours north of Cape Town, on the R27. A
once quiet village, St. Helena has grown quickly since the turn
of the millennium, and real estate here is now booming.
The “town” itself consists of a small retail hub,
near the petrol station and main shop, as well as a hotel, police
station, corner cafes and a smattering of houses and churches,
spread down a couple of kilometres along the main road and on
the adjacent ridge. Unfortunately, there are also a number of
often foul-smelling fish factories, which to be honest, along
with unkempt warehouses, dirty townships and unemployed drifters,
can give the place an unwelcoming and sparse industrial feel.
In fact, at first glance, St Helena doesn’t seem to really
warrant any realtor hype. But, if you work your way behind its
Spartan exterior, you will begin to understand the attraction.
Beyond the rough façade, St Helena boasts kilometres of
postcard-pretty beaches, hidden tidily amongst its granite rock
points and bights. This unassuming magic is mostly focused on
Britannia Bay, so named after a shipwreck on a notorious reef,
which incorporates a small, older hamlet of eclectic homesteads,
and shiny, newly gated communities, beyond the promontory to the
southwest of St Helena, toward Cape St. Martin.
A long white beach curves north from here, toward another peninsula,
where the sprawling palm-treed development of Shelley Point has
more quiet coves of its own, lying in wait behind its vast white
gates, which are open during the day to visitors. Mimicking St
Francis Bay, all buildings in this latter stretch are restricted
to white walls, mostly with dark tiles or thatch roofs. Like its
east coast counterpart, this lends Britannia bay a pleasant visual
aesthetic, one quite contrary to the random (and often gaudy)
choice of architecture found in many South African seaside towns.
Despite all of these holiday houses on the Britannia stretch,
the beach here is almost always deserted, even in the height of
summer, and is perfect for long, lazy walks where the only footprints
in the sand are usually yours. Indeed, spend enough time in this
place, surrounded by the beige and green landscapes, grainy beaches,
sparkling cobalt blue sea, and whitewashed walls, and you begin
to think you are somewhere more distant, perhaps on an island
in the Mediterranean.
Apart from the sporadic chugging of the fishing fleets out to
sea and crying birds, of most of the time all that is audible
is the hypnotic sound of crashing surf. You can’t help but
unwind and shed the woes of your manic urban life, which by now
seems like it is on another planet. In the cool evenings, once
you’ve visited the St Helena fish markets (or even gone
down to nearby Paternoster to haggle for some fresh kreef), you
can watch the sunset as you kick back with a drink and fire up
the braai. Then you can relax and truly savour the serenity here,
something no travel blurb can ever convey.
They’ll also tell in the brochures though, that due to its
quirky geographical location - at the end of the curving peninsula
at the tip of St Helena Bay - this is the only place in South
Africa you can not only watch the sun set over the ocean in the
west, but can also watch it rise over the waters of the bay to
the east.
Not that you ever will though, because when it does rise in the
quiet mornings, you’ll probably still be in a deep, comatose
sleep.
Things to do in St Helena
If you want to do more than laze around and soak in this incredible
place, consider these options:
- Whale and dolphin watch: Southern right and humpback whales
come here to mate from June to as late as early November. The
area is also home to the cute Heavisides dolphin, found only on
the west coast.
- Visit the St Helena Hotel: this typical small town establishment
on the main road is a great place to have an evening meal (their
fish dishes are excellent), or catch a game of rugby in the bar
with the farmers and fishermen. It also has a trinket shop where
you can buy souvenirs.
- Play Golf – the Shelley Point complex boasts a fun nine-hole
course.
- Relax and eat: in the Shelley Beach Country Club and Spa, which
features a decent restaurant, Venizia Ristorante.
- Birdwatch: Catch Black Oystercatchers and Swifturns among other
species, on the point or visit the bird hides on the Berg river,
in nearby Velddrif.
- Go Surfing: the area has a number of decent breaks suitable
for everyone from beginners to experts.
- Go Wind/Kitesurfing: thanks to the frequent south easter in
summer, Britannia Bay is also ideal for these wind sports.
- Go: 4x4ing, hiking, kayaking, cage diving or horse riding and
more.
For more info check out/call:
www.sawestcoast.com
www.capewestcoast.org
www.shelleypoint.co.za
Editor’s Choice: Benign, Britannia Beach
Situated in a cul-de-sac inside the boundaries of Shelley Point
complex, Benign is a comfortable and reasonably priced, sea-facing,
semi-detached thatch-roofed self-catering accommodation, which
can sleep up to six. The ocean-facing bedrooms are joined by a
balcony, which is ideal for early-morning whale watching, or late-afternoon
sundowners. Downstairs there is a cosy lounge, dining and kitchen
area, which leads onto the ground floor entertainment area and
lawn, where you can braai your fish, listen to the ocean crash
and enjoy the unique ambience of St Helena. Check out www.benign.co.za
for more info.
Copyright Miles Masterson Media 2009 click
here for menu
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
