Lines ashore and we were soon downing a cool glass of non-alcohol beer, quickly followed by a lengthy walk around the V & A Marina to the office, past the canal weirs, ‘lawns’ being laid on the brand-new Leopard Cats. Apologies for any confusion but while trying to keep a story line going through this log the photos were taken on a couple of trips to the office and facilities.
Janneke and Weitze on Anna Caroline, our neighbours, brought us the immensely good news that president Cyril Ramaphosa, in his recent speech, had, while we were at sea, rescinded the ban on alcohol sales and allowed all the bars and restaurants to re-open!
In our absence the weather window at sea, of which we had used the first three days, continued for another three days after we were safely tucked up, proof that waiting until after New Year to round the coast westwards as the season settled in, was not a bad idea.
The harbour area, named Victoria and Alfred after Queen Victoria and her son, Alfred, is partly what puts Cape Town on the world map as one of the most beautiful cities. We are no experts and I have heard mention of Rio as another fine city but the views of the clean, vibrant harbour area with the unique Table Mountain overlooking everything is very special. The mountain is one of the oldest in the world consisting of layers of sandstone and granite, it was formed by igneous and glacial activity 520 million years ago making it six times older than the Himalayas. Yet to be climbed and descended by us!
On our first sortie we soon found the Scottish Pub, Ferrymans for a real craft beer. It is in the same old stone/brick building as Mitchells, The Irish Pub and looked as if they might be under the same ownership. The Six Nations was about to start and we arranged with the Irish Pub next door, on a courtesy visit to them (!) to return one evening to watch the England V Ireland Match.
However later that evening there was a power cut in the marina so we couldn’t exit through the electric gates. Instead, we listened to the match on the BBC Sounds Sports Channel App. When we visited the next day to apologise for not turning up the lady said they also had the same power cut and the battery to their generator had caught fire so they had to close anyway!
A stroll down to the waterfront after our Scottish aperitif took us into Quay Four for our first meal not out of Zoonie’s fridge since Richards Bay. We luxuriated in the great views over the water watching the tripper boats in and out filled with punters out for a good time, including aboard the ‘Olde Pirate Galleon’ with the figurehead curious as to whether she needed some extra support.
As you can see Zoonie is moored at the furthest in pontoon nearest the harbour side activities. Between the apartments and the six star ‘One and Only’ Hotel, yep that’s its name’, is Signal Hill, again as yet to be assaulted by us, and the listing ship on the right looks to be an old cable layer, but research into her details is ongoing. The red brick building on the extreme right is the aquarium.
Clearing in to Cape Town
Even though we officially cleared in to South Africa in Richards Bay last November, we have to follow another process in Cape Town which involves collecting letters from the Yacht Club and the Port Control Office atop the Control Tower. With the help of a Bolt car (like Uber) the process was all easy and pleasant especially taking photos of the views over the harbour from the top of the control tower of the route we had taken in to the V&A Marina through the outer and inner harbour.
The Red Clock Tower you see adorning the pedestrian area is the oldest building in CT and once enabled the ship’s captains to keep their time pieces accurate; an essential aid to navigation and the calculations of longitude back in the days of sail and pre-GPS, iPhones and quartz watches. There is also a time ball, you may have already spotted, like the one in Whangarei, that still does fall at midday each day along with the firing of the midday gun, but as they are set back from the harbour and as sound takes time to travel to the ears of the captains they were not as accurate as the clock; but they did tell the convicts and workers when they could break for lunch.
The days are hot here in CT and even with the rides from the bolt taxi we were ready for lunch ourselves by the time our errands were done. The Fish Market Restaurant proved delightful and gave us ground level views of this corner of the harbourside. We were returning to where we had motored through on Zoonie. The first of the two bridges that opened for us was just outside the restaurant. The new Swing Bridge was opened only two years ago, avoiding a long walk for pedestrians around the harbour and on the other side we looked back from whence we had walked from the immigration office and our lunch venue.
While the Riggers were away
As you can see from the previous photos, we need some new rigging. Three of the stays that were replaced in Mooloolaba have failed with strands breaking clean away from the swages, and we need sound rigging for the remaining 7,300 miles to Falmouth! So, after their inspection, while the riggers were away it was time for us to play.
After our lunch at the Fish Market and just across from the Swing Bridge stands the old Harbourmasters’ Office, like so many of the old buildings an immaculately restored three storey classical European style building painted with white borders and corners and pastel green panels. It now houses the African Port, a warehouse of new and old handmade craft objects for various purposes including modern tourism to ways of expressing historic decorative and traditional culture. I was amazed that even the clearly old and anthropologically interesting artefacts had a price tag on them. They looked like museum pieces to me. We bought seven colourful new (!) cushion covers of African animals to replace our saloon covers and they have had the effect of making my recently cleaned grey settee coverings look quite classy.
Outside scrap metal from machinery and cars was skilfully used to create animals and I particularly liked the warthog with the spark plugs for whiskers.
Lazy Seals
We haven’t been to the Life Grand Café yet, although we are slowly working our way through the hostelries on the Waterfront; but we have witnessed the seals up close and friendly.
I remember the one that lived for a while on the pontoons in Whangarei. It was aggressive, causing boat owners whose vessels were beyond the seal and the shore to inflate their dinghies if they wanted to go walkabout. This one seal saw off most of the ducks in Whangarei Town Basin too. But on the long walk around the marina to the facilities many of the fur seals here relax on the finger pontoons their heads using the plastic covered foam fenders as pillows; well wouldn’t you.
The way they hang in the water on their backs with their heads flopped downwards, fast asleep, or lie on their special platform with their rear end over the side into the water at a right angle to their upper body is comical.
During the might they grumble to eachother, or one will start a gravelly laugh like an old man with emphysema. Sometimes they will come alongside and tap tit bits crustaceans off Zoonie’s hull, or emerge from a dive with a splash just to make one jump. They can be as languid and elegant in the water as flowing water itself, arching and rolling without even creating bubbles; but also, shocking, when we first saw one snatch a sitting cormorant from underneath, shake it violently, just as orcas shake them when they catch them in the surf near a beach. Within seconds it had eaten almost all of the pitiful bird, leaving just a few bloody pieces in the water.
Often, we see the up turned remains of cormorants with just one bite taken out of them. Every day their sad remains are collected and disposed of by the marina workboat. That is part of the problem here. The seals are successful because of the abundant food supply but they have no natural predator in the marina except man; so, they are numerous and growing in numbers, enjoying the easy life.
You might well wonder about the last photo. It is of an upstairs window at the aquarium and I took it from Zoonie’s cockpit. It is the penguin floor and there are two ‘natural’ penguin habitats in there. The one you see here from our vantage point contains the African Jackass Penguins whom we often see looking out of the window at the wider world. In between us from a previous photo the listing ship is the SAS Somerset, Warren from our rigging company tells us was built in 1941 to lay anti-submarine nets for coastal defence in WW2. Not a cable layer as I had thought, but at least its purpose was laying something.
Monday is Maintenance day for some…
But not for us as we wandered around the Waterfront. The massive dry dock, built in the late 19th century, has served many purposes apart from the obvious in its long life including the first public swimming pool; hope they didn’t fill it to the brim, and a venue for live concerts, imagine the acoustics! But today it was a base for the repairs to the bow section of this local trawler. The South African fishing industry and locals are raging against the Asian fishing fleets that are depleting their local stocks of fish and bycatch in order to feed their animals back home. The dry dock reminded me of the similar ones at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard one of which was used for the opening scene of the convicts hauling in a square rigger for repairs at the opening of the film version of Les Miserables.
There is a pretty café/bakery, Vovo Telo, opposite our twin pubs, where the café courtyard is shaded by ground growing mature trees and tubbed young olive trees skirted with white rose bushes. We had coffee and danish pastries there as the sound of hammers on metal came from the Cape Town Ferris Wheel next to us. It was open again in the evening. Time for a little harmless voyeurism; fashions, shapes, masks worn properly or not, tut tut, children paddling and splashing in shallow decorative ponds, young slender police officers everywhere adding to folks’ sense of security and relaxation.
A gentle wander back through one of the many malls, this one a craft mall where there are workshops upstairs for punters like us to learn local African craft making. Everywhere is uncrowded, many locations we have almost to ourselves, with no foreign visitors’ trade is light for the stall holders and shop staff.
Right next to Zoonie above the lock gates into the upper canal is the only 6-star hotel in Cape Town, ‘The One and Only’ is its name. We wondered if we could do a canal walk along one short bank and back down the other, English canal style, but the only part we could access is what you can see here. The shady courtyard of the very quiet hotel, we only ever see staff there, looking over to a little island, home to the hotel spa.
The Rhino is one of the many colourful life size models dotted around the waterfront each telling the same story of how 3 precious rhinos a day are poached for the Asian alternative medicine market. Thank goodness for the many reserves like Rhino River Lodge.
On Tuesday our Riggers Returned…
Before they arrived, it was fun to watch the goings on in the marina. All day long ribs with three pupils and their instructor aboard do what must be their first, very gentle lesson in the art of driving a rib, a rigid inflatable boat. I remember doing my training in one as a safety boat skipper for part of The RYA Sailing Dinghy Instructor Course at Calshot near Southampton. The fun part involved motoring flat out and then doing an emergency stop by turning left or right at the same time as throttling down so as to avoid being pooped by one’s own wash. One chap lost his cap so we did an extra man overboard practice as well.
Ladies in pink in their customised dragon boat giving it their all and three boats leaving for their non-stop voyage to Brazil. The two men on blue hulled Milanto are Italian and we first met them in Le Port, Reunion, and then a Chilean father and son whom we also met in Reunion and lastly the catamaran Sea Lover, of whom we have only heard the name. The Covid restrictions do not encourage too much mingling with other yacht crews unfortunately. As far as we know we are one of only three boats planning similar routes via St Helena and the Azores back to Europe; we know both the others, Anna Caroline with Janneke and Weitze, our neighbours here and Jori with Henk and Marylein. Of the others some are calling in to Namibia and Brazil, destination the Caribbean.
The sluice gates next to us opened to allow a tour boat to enter and the blue workboat you see facing the Somerset and Aquarium is doing one of his daily rubbish rounds.
Apart from having three stays replaced we were also fortunate in that another vessel had required a new VHF aerial part of the masthead Windex fitting while we required the wind direction indicator part and not the VHF aerial. So we shared the contents of the same package. If you remember a night time visiting blue footed booby bird decided to alight momentarily on ours, breaking it off, the arm to be found useless in the scuppers the next morning. The good riggers also replaced the blown steaming light bulb.
A Jackass Penguin View
After the riggers left, we headed for the aquarium with mixed feelings about wild animals being kept in captivity. The penguin floor, from which you can just see Zoonie out of the window, is divided into two ‘natural’ habitats; the window view is for the African feathered residents, the same as we saw on our way to Cape Town, and the internal pen is for the pretty little tufted Rockhopper penguins. They looked healthy and are an asset for teaching children about local fauna and hopefully grow up with feeling of kindness towards animals and great efforts had been made to create rocky beaches and real waves. Sometimes the residents have been rescued from the wild and for a host of reasons cannot be returned there.
In the three-floor coastal sea-water tank the kelp plants were attached to the rocks with cable tie hold fasts and heaved and flowed up and down with the swell movement created by another wave machine. It was quite mesmerizing sitting watching the fish and kelp move one way and then another as if the whole environment was breathing in and out. So, we can picture our little neighbours now, living their protected lives.
Being up close and only a few inches from a great white shark in another tank enabled to me marvel at an animal form that has not needed to evolve for millions of years. I wonder what humans will look like in a million more years of evolution. Maybe babies will be born wearing natural masks and holding anatomic iPhones?
After all that swaying, we needed some fresh air and a drink so we wandered along the seaside walk just a little way to Grand Beach and the sparsely peopled, extensive area where the tables and settees are set out on imported sand overlooking the rocky shore line, more heaving kelp this time in its natural habitat, and the harbour. One could imagine how busy this place will be when Covid is just a sore memory and the foreign tourists have returned. For us we were able to sit comfortably in deep shade and tuck into a South African Sav and an equally sparsely populated pizza. The interior of the bar was comfortably Bohemian, amazing what you can do with a corrugated iron barn!
Up, Up and Away
An afternoon meander, following our noses and inclinations, took us for a closer inspection of the One O’clock time ball, built to give ships’ captains an accurate visual of the time so they could adjust their watches. This one now works automatically for historical; educational and entertainment purposes and the warm brick building sits in an elevated position amongst buildings such as the Harbour Engineers Building, an attractive array of historical buildings in modern day alternative uses, some of them looking Cornish in style.
A short walk away is the pale yellow painted New Somerset Hospital, built in 1862 for the use of everyone in need of care and designed using some of Florence Nightingale’s ideas of wide balconies for wheel chairs and beds and big windows to provide the patients with plenty of fresh air and light. The building has gone through phases that reflect early apartheid thinking; some councillors and managers considered mixing the races undesirable and then their successors would disagree and the hospital would be open to all again.
It was a lovely afternoon for a spin on the wheel and at the ticket desk the nice lass also gave us complimentary tickets for the harbour cruise. It was fun seeing the time ball and our twin pubs from above but we didn’t quite make it to the height of Table Mountain; that was reserved for the next day.
The sea looked as beautiful as ever above the Breakwater Hotel with Robben Island in the distance and Rob looks better doesn’t he. I think the fresh air and freedom in Cape Town is doing us both good.
The cruise started from just behind Zoonie as you can see and took us all around the harbour, past the six, tall, sand-coloured silos and the rectangular building behind, with its faceted windows, all part of Silo 1, once a grain silo, now a one hundred gallery art centre, on past the fishing fleet old and new and the tall Harbour Control from which I took those panoramic shots while we were collecting one of our arrival letters. We sped back through the two bridges on the same route as our arrival, enjoying the breeze created by our motion because it was a hot afternoon, well into the thirties. Looking at photos from back home with snow and freezing temperatures, we were enjoying our last hot months in a southern continent summer.