South Africa

Continents have their own, spceific style. For Africa that is the wild. Even the people live close to nature. The bush, dust from dry soil is never absent. In any place except the big cities you can come across wildlife. The wildlife determines the fauna. Trees are kept short and crummy due to grazing from elephants, giraffes and antilopes.

Every year 3000 people are killed by wandering hippopotumus at night. In the parks you come so close to the animals that you tend to forget that they are really dangerous wild animals. An urge to stroke a leopard, the cute face of a hippo the heartwarming play of a baby elephant. And oh so elegant small antilopes. Everything fits in balance.

In the area of South Africa where we are now a draught has lasted for seven years. Hospitals have to close, water is cut off for most of the day and toilets in schools can not be flushed. The large estuary park of St Lucia has been cut off from the sea due to lack of water flowing in the river. Climate change is having an impact here, in some places aggrevated by plantations of Eucalyptus trees that each use 1000 liters of water a day.

The essence of Africas wildness is that everything adapts to changes in nature and accepts that change. In Asia everything is dominated by mankind and Asia is shaped to the needs of people. Nature has been pushed to the perimeter.

We arrived here end of October from Reunion. We were very lucky with a good weather window and could avoid the storms that regularly make this crossing perilous. The WorldArc that arrived with 50 sailing boats two weeks later. They aim to circumnavigate in one year and thus have less options for a goof weatherwindow. 15 of the boats had major damage in a storm south of Madagascar. We had good wind that would allow us 6-7 knots of speed, except for a net with floats that hooked itself onto our keel for 12 hours and reduced our speed to 2 knots. We were unable to determine at sea what it was and speculated of whales pulling us in the wrong direction, a giant Octopus playing with our little Stamper. Only on the hard in Richards Bay did we find the traces of the net in the paint on the keel. Three days after our arrival cruisers underway from Madagascar were speeding up to arrive in the safety of the harbour. A storm from the south was coming. In combination with the strong (4-6 knots) Aghulas current that produces waves even dangerous to commercial shipping. Stamper was standing on the hard when 54 knots gusts hit the coast (the harbour control measured 70 knot gusts). One of the marina's here was severly damaged with pontoons folding onto themselves, crushing the boats in between. A presentation by a local experienced sailor sharing his knowledge on how to navigate on this coast was attended by many!

After that work the Kruger park enticed us for a visit. added that we thought there would be time enough to do that and sail safely to Knysna in time to meet Olm and Jose and later Jan and Fenneke in Cape Town.