Namibia

1988

   Most of the yachts that visit South Africa travel westward.  They enter the country at Richards Bay or Durban in October or November and work their way along the coast, until by January or February they are in Cape Town, preparing to sail for Saint Helena and the Caribbean.  But we wanted to see more of Africa and, after looking at a few charts and asking a few questions, decided to sail north to Namibia before heading out into the Atlantic.

    We left Cape Town on a Saturday morning in mid-February in bright sunshine that was soon lost in heavy fog caused by the cold Benguela current running north along an increasingly desert shore.  In the Namib, one of the world’s oldest deserts, this fog is the only source of moisture to support many life forms, which catch it in a variety of ingenious ways.  For the sailor the fog is not usually hazardous because the coast is relatively free of off-lying dangers.  One of those possible dangers is Dassen Island, a mile-long horseshoe of sand 30 miles to the north.  It was our first day’s destination.

    We beat slowly north all day in near zero visibility against a light headwind cold enough to cause us to dig out sweaters last worn during the preceding winter in Sydney, Australia.  There is a radio beacon on Dassen island, so we were able to get bearings.  We did not see the island until we were almost upon it.  The top of the lighthouse first, and then the masts of a few yachts and the deckhouses of lobster boats and a house and shed belonging to the island’s only permanent residents, a man and his wife who have lived there many years and whose job it is to prohibit anyone else from coming ashore.  South Africans know the regulation and don’t try to come ashore anyway.   The man stands on his pier and talks to you pleasantly as you keep station in your dinghy a few feet away, surrounded by penguins.  Not a bad job and rather exciting I imagine during winter storms.

    The normal anchorage is open to the north and I almost made the mistake of deciding that in this wind it might be better to anchor elsewhere.  Fortunately I looked first, thus saving us a lot of unnecessary work and from missing a great meal.

    We lowered the sails and powered around a rock, marking one end of the island, into the anchorage, which was safe so long as the wind remained light, which it did, or swung around to the southeast, which it later did.

    The biggest problem with anchoring was not dropping the anchor on a bird.  Small penguins, cormorants, gulls and terns were everywhere, as were a few rocks, a half dozen sailboats that had come up from Cape Town for the weekend, some of which we heard powering past us in the fog, the lobster boats and, below us in the sea, an abundance of life to sustain them all.

    Cold water holds more oxygen than warm water, and the cold Benguela Current supports the most abundant sea life I have ever  encountered.  The coast toward which we were sailing has  been called a great many fierce things, including the Skeleton Coast and the Sands of Hell.  The last by my favorite reluctant explorer, Diaz, who had rounded the Cape of Good Hope exactly 500 years earlier than we did.  However, our essential memory of that coast is of the variety and intensity of life we found there.  That is perhaps one of the keys to Africa’s attraction:  both ashore and at sea, among people and less complicated forms, southern Africa is an intense feast of life.

    In Cape Town we had been advised to buy bottles of cheap wind to trade with the lobster fishermen for their catches.  A good bottle of South African wine only cost a couple of dollars, so cheap was cheap.  For some reason we did not bother, and at sunset Jill began to prepare spaghetti.  The sauce was simmering and the pasta almost ready when there was a knock on the hull.  Jill suck her head out of the companionway and found a wet-suited South African man standing in a dinghy and holding a canvas sack from which he shook three lobsters.  Just like that. 

    The lobsters clack-clacked briefly about the cockpit, while the spaghetti was fed to the fish, and Jill filled our biggest pot with water.  With two butter sauces, one plain and one with a touch of curry powder, a bottle of white wine--the good $2 a bottle stuff--and with the warm amber glow of kerosene lamps reflecting in varnished teak, we did justice to the stranger’s gift in what was the meal of the circumnavigation.

    Four years and another circumnavigation later, we had just arrived in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, when a couple came over in a dinghy.  They were South African, departing for Florida the next day.  They wanted to say hello, because he was the man who had given us those lobsters at Dassen Island.

    On Sunday the Cape Town boats all had to head home against an increasing southeasterly.  By noon we pretty much had the anchorage to ourselves, or rather the island’s bird population had the place to themselves, except for the intrusion of us, rowing and drifting about in the dinghy.

    Monday morning saw an absence of fog, so we raised anchor and headed for one of the best all-weather harbors in South Africa, Saldanha Bay.  By the time we reached the entrance at noon, the southeaster was blowing at 30 knots.  Though I would not have thought it possible, we could still make out the faint straight top of Table Mountain more than 70 miles to the south.

    The southeaster made it unwise to try to investigate the lagoon on the south side of Saldanha, which we had been told is lovely.  We went into the main harbor and found a vacant buoy off  a vacant yacht club.

    A sailor will naturally wonder why Saldanha with its fine harbor did not become the center of activity along the coast rather than Cape Town, whose anchorage became useful year-round only with the construction of a breakwater in the mid-19th century.  The practical answer is that Saldanha has only meager sources of water and wood.  However, I think the beauty of the region around Table Mountain would have caused people to prefer to settle there anyway.

    We walked into the small town, bought a few supplies and stopped at the fish processing plant on the way back to the boat.   Naturally we bought two lobsters for dinner at $4 each.

    Once a southeaster settles in it usually lasts for several days.  The next morning it was still blowing hard, gusting to 30 knots, making it not just unwise, but impossible for RESURGAM to power through the winding channel to the south lagoon.  Instead of waiting for a change, we decided to use what we were given and left Saldanha for Lüderitz, some 435 miles north.

    This is a good coast along which to have electronic navigation, for we saw little of the sun or of the land for the next four days.  We did see and hear many seals.  Sometimes hundreds of them were swimming and leaping around us, sometimes we would ghost quietly through the fog toward one sleeping on his side with a fin extended upward like a sail.  The Aries was steering and it never quite managed to run a seal down, although several times it came close enough to startle one.   An indignant eye opened and in a swirl of water the seal would disappear only to resurface behind us and watch until the intrusive apparition vanished.

    A couple of nights out, when the wind went light and the fog became impenetrable, we heard seals breathing around us.  I recalled the first night I ever spent at sea, sailing a 26’ sloop from San Francisco to San Diego in 1967, with the woman who was then a part of my life.  Just after nightfall, beyond the Golden Gate on a similar foggy night, we also heard the sea breathing around us.  Fear is usually inverse to familiarity and those sounds of breathing caused an interruption of our own respiration on that first night when the sea was an unknown.  Now, along the Namibian coast, Jill and I found a kind of comfort in the seals’ breathing, a sense of kinship with other creatures who happened to be sharing this planet for the same brief interval:  generations of men, generations of seals, and as I once wrote in a poem, generations of albatross.

    Almost becalmed for a day, we reduced sail on Friday so we would not reach Lüderitz before dawn on Saturday.  The wind increased during the night and we had to continue trying to slow down.  It would be two more days before we would learn that another couple, as inexperienced as I had been in 1967, were in trouble near us in that darkness.

    For a thousand miles sand dunes come down to the coast of Namibia.  At first they were difficult to distinguish from the layers of fog.  Only when we got close enough to see the wrecks that make this the Skeleton Coast were we certain we were seeing land, or sand.

    As we followed the dunes the last dozen miles north to Diaz Point we had the same wind, 30-35 knots from the southeast, that had pushed us out of Saldanha.  Visibility was about a half mile as we furled the jib  and powered around the Diaz Point lighthouse into a huge flock of cormorants, thousands of them resting on the water.   At our approach, they took flight until the sky became dark with wings, but we had no time to dwell on the spectacle as we fought to bring RESURGAM across an exposed stretch of water and around a second point into the small harbor.  There we were directed to go alongside one of the many lobster boats tied to the two piers.

    Only when the sloop was secure did we have time to look around.  Lüderitz was founded at the turn of this century when diamonds were discovered in the desert.  Almost all the several hundred miles of Namibian coast we had been sailing since the Orange River, which marks the boundary between Namibia and South Africa, was at the time of our visit still under control of the diamond company, although by then most of the actual diamond mining was taking place near the Orange River.  The fields around Lüderitz had long been exhausted.  The town was almost a ghost town, sustained only by the lobster fleet and a few tourists.

    Prior to WWI, Namibia was German Southwest Africa.  The German influence, particularly in Lüderitz and in Swakopmund further north, is still strong.  In both places English is the fourth language after German, Afrikaans, and a native dialect.  One has the same feeling of isolation in Lüderitz that one has along the north coast of Australia, except that the desert surrounding Lüderitz is harsher.  The early German settlers used their diamond fortunes to build ornate homes, locally known as castles.  Every stick of wood and pane of stained glass came from Europe by ship.

     There were never many people in Lüderitz, and now the three or four dusty streets, set on the edge of the severe monochrome of the desert, are empty.  In Lüderitz one is constantly aware of the shifting of sand and time.

    At about 10:00 p.m. on our first night in port, with the wind still blowing hard, we heard loud voices, followed by the sound of a lobster boat engine pulling away from the fleet in port for Saturday night and disappearing at speed into the darkness.

    The next morning we noticed a sailboat tied to the other pier.  The boat was a foot or two larger than RESURGAM and appeared to be new, but damaged.  Lifelines and stanchions were twisted.  Her jib furling gear was bent.  A storm sail drooped over the side.

    We walked over and found a South African couple in the cockpit.  Their story was a sad one, composed of misdirected effort and following bad advice.

    The man had finished off the professionally-built aluminum hull himself, working toward a deadline when he had to return to his job on Ascension Island.  He was good with tools and enjoyed working with them, so he did a great deal of customizing rather than use proven gear.  This was not done particularly to save money, for the custom work, such as fabricating his own self-steering vane, was expensive even discounting his own labor. He also had made an unusual stern gland fitting for the propeller shaft.  He had been advised by someone that if he was going to have an adjustable backstay, he should have a tilting adjustable maststep so that the after side of the mast would not be compressed.  This is something I have never heard of before or since.

    I can picture the man working happily away in his machine shop at these projects.  What he didn’t do was sail the boat.  And, before he left Cape Town only 48 hours after the boat was finally launched, a sailmaker told him that even though he had a furling jib, he should not reef it down in heavy weather, but change to a smaller jib.

    After a few days at sea things began to break.  The custom stern gland leaked, the custom steering vane failed.  And then the wind began to blow.   This was not a severe storm, just the 30-35 knots from astern we had experienced in RESURGAM.  However, where in RESURGAM we simply lowered the main and continued on under a deeply furled jib, the South African was out getting cold and wet making headsail changes on his furling gear and going sleepless night after night. 

    With the leak and exhaustion gaining on them, he and his girl friend tried to make their way into Lüderitz, but could not find the harbor entrance in the fog and called for help on their radio.  The lobster boat we saw leaving the preceding night went a few miles out to them, charged them $1000 for the tow, and with the tow line caused the damage we saw.

    The lessons from the South African’s experience are several:  not all effort in preparing a boat is of value, not all advice is worth following, get sleep, and don’t make sailing any harder on yourself than it has to be.  Ashore, in what might be called “normal life”, one can sometimes fool oneself about what is important, at sea one can’t.

     After spending two days in port eating lobster, we sailed for Walvis Bay, 240 miles to the north.

    The sailing was uneventful, but led us to Pelican Point at the entrance to the harbor after dark.  In good visibility and light wind I decided that we would break our rule about entering harbors at night and follow the 15 fathom curve around the point to the lights of the small town.  We did so and ended up anchoring a few hundred yards off the commercial docks. 

    At  8:00 a.m. the next morning I called the port captain on the handheld VHF bought in Cape Town specifically for this purpose.  He came on the air and politely asked when I had anchored.  “Just before midnight,” I replied.

    “When I came on duty about an hour ago,” he said cheerfully, “I called Pelican Point lighthouse and asked when the yacht entered the harbor and they said, ‘What yacht?’ and I said to myself ‘So much for our defense forces.’ “  Walvis Bay is the first port south of Angola, where at that time there was still fighting and all lighthouses were manned by the military.

    The port captain directed us to a wharf for customs clearance.  Walvis Bay, pronounced as though the ‘v’ were an ‘f’ and meaning whale bay, is a part of The Republic of South Africa rather than Namibia.  When the Germans were trying to scrape together an empire, the British did not want them to have the port.  The British had the navy to make their wishes stick back then, so they annexed the bay and a mile or two of surrounding sand to their colony of the Cape of Good Hope.  The Germans built Swakopmund at an open roadstead some 20 miles north as a very second-choice harbor.  This was one of the minor grains of irritation that cumulatively lead to the cataclysms of our century.

    Few yachts visit Walvis Bay.  We were only the fifth in a year and were made extremely welcome at the small yacht club at the sound end of the harbor, off which a half dozen boats swung at moorings and thousands of flamingos waded.  When you walked toward them they rose into the air with a clacking of beaks and a cloud of color.

    Other than the bird life--cormorants and pelicans were as abundant if not as exotic as flamingos--and the friendliness of the residents, Walvis Bay proved to be a safe place to leave RESURGAM while we rented a car and drove several hundred miles north to the largest game park in the world, Etosha Pan. 

    From the sea Namibia is all desert, but beyond a relatively narrow coastal strip of sand dunes, followed by a hundred-mile wide rocky desert, we found a high well-watered green plateau which stretched north all the way to Etosha.  We entered that plateau under a majestic massing of clouds that soon turned into a thunderstorm.  When it cleared the temperature had dropped and the air was fresh and smelled of wet grass.

    Namibia is sparsely populated and only a single two-lane road runs north and south from the capital Windhoek, where we spent our first night.

    We were the only vehicle on that road until mid-morning when we came upon a long military convoy heading to Angola.  The convoy was moving at only thirty-five miles an hour, but I hesitated to pass it until the soldiers in the last truck waved us on.

    The dissonant implements of war left behind we continued on for another hour until we came to the first cross road.  Off to one side, in an otherwise empty landscape, we saw a folding table with a china tea pot and cups, and a few uniformed men sitting sipping tea beneath a beach umbrella.  One of these men jumped up and ran out and waved us to a stop.  He stood beside the car, shifting his weight from foot to foot like a small boy who needs to go to the bathroom, before he said, “Umm.  Have you..  Er…   Have you seen our army?”

    “Yes.  They’re about a half hour behind us.”

    His relief was palpable.  He broke into a huge grin, turned and shouted to the others, who raised their tea cups in salute.

    “Thank you.  Thank you.”

    And we smiled and drove on.

    Etosha Pan is a huge, largely dry, depression, which was once the bed of a lake the size of one of the Great Lakes.  The best time to visit, as in Kruger National Park in South Africa, is the southern winter.  When we were there in early March only about a third of the park was open to the public.  This is still enough to keep the visitor occupied for several days.

     In Kruger, which is hilly and has more vegetation, the views are often limited.  On the edge of the pan at Etosha you can see for miles.  Many species of animals are found in both parks, but some are found in only one.  Of the many vivid memories we took from Etosha perhaps the most typical was the sight of a herd of gemsbok, with their beautiful black and white markings and long straight horns, glancing up at us from a water hole and then turning and galloping effortlessly across the dusty pan. 

     And I can still clearly see the huge bleached bones of an elephant skeleton beside one of the trails.

    After Kruger and Etosha, zoos can never be the same.

    On the way back to RESURGAM we stopped in Swakopmund to celebrate Jill’s fortieth birthday and spend a last night ashore before embarking on the 5,000 sea miles to the Azores via St. Helena.

    The Germans built a charming small town around their inadequate harbor, which is still the only coastal resort for those living inland.  There are several good German restaurants.  Many of the houses look as though they have just been moved from Bavaria.  Amazingly, for such a small place, until you remember that it is the facility for an entire country, there is an Olympic-size, 12-lane swimming pool.   Here, in this improbable setting, we had our only swim in African waters.

    After some minor reprovisioning we sailed a few days later from Walvis Bay. 

    It was a sunny morning and the wind was fair.  RESURGAM was making seven knots as she cleared Pelican Point.

    Although we had been coasting for six months and were eager for the open ocean, we both watched with regret as the narrow yellow band of sand disappeared into an immensity of blue sky and sea.  Perhaps it is just as well that we did not realize that we were leaving  behind us more than we knew.