The weather forecast for the (long) weekend of 9-12 August was grim – and this after a series of winter storms that made Tony and I wish we’d scheduled our trip to Denmark to visit family for July, rather than December! The weekend was notable for being the dates on which the Cape Town Dive Festival was originally planned to take place, but the predicted wind (gusting up to 80 kilometres per hour), swell (up to 9 metres late on Saturday), low temperatures and heavy rain led the organisers to postpone it to 8-9 September instead.
Tony and I were keen to see what the storm would do to False Bay. Also, he had a bad case of cabin fever, having been trapped indoors with the cats for days by the weather. We thus took two drives down the peninsula, on the morning and late afternoon of Saturday 11 August. There are a number of pictures from that day here, and this post contains some more.
Runoff from the mountain had made many of the inshore sites spectacularly muddy. The yacht basin outside False Bay Yacht Club looked like milky tea, with a distinct line further out (just visible above) marking the boundary of the murk. As we ate breakfast at the yacht club we listened to the sailing race scheduled for that day being cancelled – the wind was so strong that the sailors feared breaking things off their yachts!
Froggy Pond, Miller’s Point, and many sites in between suffered the same fate. The picture below was taken during a vicious hailstorm. I sacrificed picture quality for camera integrity.
The venue of the dive festival, the Cape Boat and Ski Boat Club, was waterlogged and battered by strong winds and hail when we stopped by. The lawn area where the sponsors’ gazebos were to be erected was soaked. Shark Alley, where shore dives were to have taken place, was the colour of Coca Cola.
This picture was taken the day before (10 August). The swell was fairly large. The extremely large swell promised by the weather sites did not materialise at all in False Bay, although the sites on the western side of the Cape Peninsula did experience some swell that day. The direction was very westerly, which perhaps spared the bay from the full force of it.
Late on Saturday afternoon Christo alerted us to a deep sea trawler, the Andromeda, sheltering in Smitswinkel Bay. She joined at least two other (much larger) ships hiding from the storm near Muizenberg, with a Smit Amandla tugboat to watch over them.
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