Gansbaai to Cape Town

Hermanus is the centre of a massive abalone or perlemoen (as they are known locally) farming industry and I discovered that tours were offered at one of the biggest.  Having never tried them I also opted for the post-tour tasting to see what all the fuss was about.  I arrived at the appointed hour and found the guide - Johann - and one other guy and was told that the other two guests were stuck in a traffic jam and would be late. So as we were both engineers he offered to show us some of the nitty-gritty before the farm tour.  As they manage to get through 2.5 MW of electricity a month and with Eskom's dodgy record of late they have come up with a plan - wave generated power.  This involves building a wall across a small bay with a system of one-way valves which allows water to build up a head at high tide and generates power as the tide recedes.  The initial installation will provide 1 MW and if it proves itself another 3 MW will be added, with the excess sold to neighbouring businesses and Eskom can go whistle.  

He also showed us the necessary to maintain the 10 million liters per hour water flow through the farm, with the above structure being a giant settling tank to get rid of any unwanted solids - wont bore you with the details but it is pretty impressive.  And on to the farm suitably attired in wellies.  They have a stock of mature abalone that provide the eggs and sperm and once they get to a size visible to the naked eye they are transferred from spawning tanks to this lot where they huddle beneath cones (they don't like sun) in shallow, well aerated water and after about 3 months are about the size of a pea.

As they get bigger they are thinned out and placed in larger tanks where they hang around on black plastic sheets suspended vertically munching kelp and a formulated seaweed mix.  Each tank has it's own water supply and drain so that if any disease breaks out it is limited to a single site.  Outlet water drains back into the sea but not before they squeeze 100 KW of electricity out of it's downhill rush back to the ocean.

After about 3 years they get to this size and a year later they are canned and sold exclusively to the Chinese, a 400 g tin goes for R390 - guess that's why the company is called Abagold.  At any one time the farm is home to over 14 million of the beasties and the tins contain either six or eight of them, do the math.  So what do they taste like?  Think chewy pilchards, guess you've got to be Asian.

One Sunday I went and collected the paper then drove down to Franskraal beachfront where I parked near a group of fshermen who were trying their luck off the rocks.  I sat and watched them for about 20 minutes to see what they were catching and in that time six out of seven of them caught rocks.  They would try and jiggle the hooks free but eventually gave up and snapped the line.  Seems to me it would be far less of a waste of time if they just threw 10 hooks into the sea and went home for a beer.  Further along from where I was parked was this quaint little fisherman's cottage which had been turned into the Strandveld Museum.  Though not open on Sunday I went back the next day and for R5 was transported back to the days when Dyer Island was occupied by guano miners.  It's actually a private museum and the huge Afrikaner who owns it was a professional diver and spent quite a bit of time lifting artifacts from the Birkenhead, that hit the rocks off Danger Point back in 1860 something.  As the ship was short of lifeboats the captain ordered "woman and children first" and virtually all the men drowned.

The following Sunday it was Kleinbaai and it was rather like Heathrow with all the coming and goings of shark boats and anglers.  The two biggest boats (one being launched below) merely load up 40 or 50 spectators and don't even carry cages.

Cape Agulhas beckoned as it was only 90 k's up the road and I felt I had to visit the southern tip of Africa again.  My route there was through a little dorp called Baardskeerdersbos which was such an intriguing name that I looked it up in our local travel bible,TV Bulpin.  Turns out baardskeerder is the Afrikaans name for a solifugid or sun spider (odd as they're nocturnal) - rather terrifying things that when exposed to the sun will immediately seek shade and will charge towards you if you are providing some.  The translation is beard shaver and arose from the incredible belief that these critters cut chunks of hair from sleeping peoples' beards or hair.

L'Agulhas is apparantly Portugese for needles and does not refer to the dangerous rocks all around the Cape but rather the fact that magnetic compasses point to true north there and nowhere else on the planet (the magnetic pole and north pole are not coincident).  It also appears that in spite of the dirty great lighthouse some people never learn....

And so to Cape Town with The Beast stowed on a smallholding near Atlantis and of course I had to get it stuck in the sand and was extremely fortunate to have the owners' son there who managed to extricate it.
I had planned on staying in Kleinmond and completing the coastwise leg through Gordons' Bay which didn't happen so I took a drive from Muizenberg along the coast road to Strand, G-Bay, Hangklip and Betty's Bay as a token completion.  It started out cloudy and rather dramatic with a weird cloud creeping up the mountain behind G-Bay that looked like a waterfall.

As with most other towns in the vicinity development has been intense with dozens of high-rises in Strand. Near the G-Bay harbour I noticed a rather unpleasant odour and the water looked like blood - a red tide which was a first for me.

It's a natural phenomenon caused by an algal bloom that arises irregularly when conditions are right but it is toxic and makes all shellfish inedible.  It was very difficult to get a shot of the effect as the sun was high.

That little knoppie on the right (below) is esentially the end of False Bay and for fairly obvious reasons is called Hangklip (hanging sone) as it looks about to keel over and land on the villlage below it.  The red tide is also more apparent in this shot, dark water in the foreground, normal blue background.

Once at Hangklip you look straight across the bay to Cape Point in the distance - there have been a few brave souls (read headcases) who have swum it.

Some mighty mansions have sprung up on the slopes above Gordons Bay of which I thought this was probably the most peculiar - keeping well above the raging infernos that have been plaguing the Cape is all I can imagine.  Notice the blue sheen above the tub on the lower right - yup the reflection from the hanging pool!

Though I'd noticed it before there was this crazy stuff happening just off the N2 near Kyelitsha which I had to investigate.  Cape Film Studios and the galleons are full scale replicas used for a TV series which I seem to recall is "Black sails" or some such.

Kalk Bay is one of my favourite spots and if you are around in the late afternoons the fishing boats arrive and put their wares up for sale on the harbour wall.  Haven't yet but am sure that I will induge sometime as fish in the supermarkets is diabolically expensive

An added attraction are the Cape fur seals that hang around waiting for scraps.

Further along near Simonstown the M65 climbs the hill and a road I'd never noticed before leads to one of the numerous batteries in and around the harbour.  These dudes were fairly serious with massive 8" (200 mm) barrels which I reckon could probably drop projectiles on ships coming through the straights 10 k's away.  Decommissioned now though.

And the view, well this is the Cape you know.