Port Elizabeth may be a very nice place, but you wouldn't know it from our spot on the overripe fish pier. The Algoa Bay Yacht Club is inside the gates of the docks of Port Elizabeth and we are separated from what we are assured is a lovely city on South Africa's Sun Coast by a thicket of railway and multi-lane highways. The port itself is not on the scale of Durban, but we are surrounded by good collection of freighters and other industrial scale shipping.
The yacht club is an odd place. We arrived Wednesday night. It is now Monday, and though we make full use of their facilities, I am sure the club is completely unaware of our presence. The office has been closed every time we have been there. No one has approached us for dues or the like despite the fact that the three of us are the largest boats in the place and impossible to miss. It stands in stark contrast to the Point Yacht Club in Durban where we couldn't escape anything and they positively went out of their way to welcome us in. That said, they do have the most fabulous hot showers where you could drown and scald yourself in an unending deluge. I could do an entire blog post on the dissolute hedonism of it. The restaurant is not bad either.
A rather tired looking ketch motorsailor tied up the day after we arrived, the Howard Davis, a 54 ton, 66ft ketch rigged motor sailor with a generously glazed deck saloon that is destined to find an afterlife as a greenhouse. Built in the 60's as a sales training vessel it continues in that role now that it is in private ownership. It is crewed by ten or so students enaged in a five month RYA course that takes them from competent crew to Ocean Yachtmaster. Their skipper is one Dave (Wavy) Immelman, a colourful character who has, brace yourself, rowed across the Atlantic solo in a race for two man crew, raced in the: Governor's Cup (Cape Town to St Helena), Cape Town to Rio, the Fastnet, the Americas cup, the Volvo round the world race among others. He likes his rough weather and is making sure his crew is comfortable in 50 knot winds, something I could do with. We talked a lot about the weather and seas around the south coast. He was gone the following day while we still cower on the fishing pier.
I did of course escape the confines of the port and struck out for the beaches and away from the town centre. One does not, however, just walk out of the portal of the port of Port Elizabeth, oh no, one is escorted through a galvanised turnstile, that wouldn't look out of place in a 14th century castle, by a guard with a key and strictly one at a time. A stiff walk soon offered up a breezy and comfortable tea room. Suitably fortified, I continued on to King's Beach, a spectacular stretch of quiet sand that must be a great place to learn to surf on a calm day and punishing place when the on shore gales get up. It is backed by an attractive run of restaurants, promenade (boardwalk), and the like. It is very well kept with clipped and trimmed landscaping.
On the way back I hopped a fence to take a closer look at an abandoned narrow gauge railway yard. A little digging revealed that this was the coastal end of the 177 mile long Avontuur two foot gauge railway built at the turn of the 20th century to serve the Langkloof fruit growing region. Road haulage killed it off though it struggled on as a tourist steam train, using a Beyer Peacock Garrett locomotive, until 2011. It would be a real shame to lose this one, being the longest two foot gauge line in the world that has the highest narrow gauge bridge, at 252ft, in the world where it crosses the Van Stadens river.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avontuur_Railway
Link to today's photos: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xzcy17z6m5hg2lr/AAAVT1YzBnaWFPuZchJIfKVMa?dl=0
Link to all photos: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/777m1sl5uebzqey/AABaKPwzXV0e_WlXZC0LDhDja?dl=0
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