Wind, and then some!

We have been having some very hot days lately. Far too hot for me.

It happened very quickly though as a few weeks ago we had several days of the most unbelievable wind, gusting up to 65kph at times, causing tremendous damage both on land and sea. Ships were stranded in Cape Town harbour, unable to leave. One of them was the cruise ship 'MSC Sinfonia' and the passengers spent two days of their cruise, tied up! (Not the passengers, the ship!) Roofs were blown off, trees blown down and at one stage we heard on the radio that the SPCA had warned owners of small dogs not to let them out in case they blew away! Seriously! One lady phoned in to the radio station to say that her large Labrador had been blown sideways into a tree!
Fortunately we were fine here, we walked a little bent into the wind, but Alfie remained firmly on the ground, although his ears flapped a lot! Our roof did a fair amount of creaking and we did wonder if we would wake up to see the stars where the roof once was, but fortunately it held.

The Dry Dock at Saldanha harbour.

We went for a drive to Saldanha harbour, another favourite place of ours, to see what was happening in the dry dock. We were glad to see that two fishing boats were being repaired and painted, they look so different out of the water. Then we had a wander along the wall.

Poor boat.

Sadly we saw that one of the boats had sunk at her moorings, we don't know the story, but it's such a sad ending for a boat somehow. Like a fire engine burning, or a tractor being buried!


Even worse when we saw her name 'Atlantic Pride'.

Atlantic Pride is no more.

We then drove to the Sea Harvest area where the huge boats come in and offload their catch to be processed, (we love their products), and saw that one of the barges that had been saved from the mother barge 'Margaret', had had a complete superstructure welded on to her. She was being worked on in readiness for the next stage of her journey, but there was nobody around that we could ask where she was going. Or when. (See 'Shipwrecks and Near Misses', October 28, 2011, this blog)

The old barge with a new look!

The name on the bridge area is 'Discoverer', but that had been painted over and had obviously come from another boat. Rob did some research when we got home and found the original  'Discoverer', looking a little different.

The original ''Discoverer', before her 'facelift'.

I wonder where the rest of her is?

A great example of re-cycling!