Richards Bay

This was taken from the car park at the Harbour Control tower, looking south(ish) across the harhour entrance. The white surf about mid picture is the surf on the beach where we had the braai. To the East (lefthand side), straight out of the harbour entrance, there were a number of ships waiting to come into the port!

Usually the sea is more blue, but the wind was chopping up the sea, making white capped waves!

You can see the natural dune vegetation at the bottom of the photo, that is usually heavily populated by Blue Vervet Monkeys! On the beach were a number of Surf Kites, where the people stand on surfboards and use a huge kite to get moving at a fair lick!

On Saturday I was invited to attend a braai (barbeque for the slightly less educated) held at Richards Bay's Alkantstrand (Translation - Al = all/every, Kant = side, Strand = beach, or "beach on every side"!)

This Alkantstrand has parking for plenty of cars! The photo is taken from the parking,looking up towards the Harbour Control Building (White building up in the dune vegetation, on the right on the horizon) This is pretty well the best area in the Bay, although I am kind of anti huge crowds. The braai was held kind of behind the camera. I did try to photograph some of the ships waiting to enter the harbor, but typically, I managed to photograph the only stretch of unoccupied Indian Ocean on the horizon.

The afternoon was brilliantly clear, although it was windy! After 4pm, it was kind of chilly - as I blogged before - November (especially the end of November) is usually very warm. That is the reason that I am seriously in doubt that there is a phenomenon such as Global Warming! Winter is getting longer and the hottest month (February) seems to have all of the heat concentrated in our shortest month!

In the first photo, the one arm to the harbour entrance has been built with Dolosses (dolii?) a concrete structure invented specifically so that the waves do not erode the seasand! Amazingly enough they were invented particularly for the construction of Richards Bay harbour! They are like 2 interlocking T forms, end on end and 90 degrees to each other! These Dolosses are kind of interlocking somewhat like massive Jacks pieces.

You can drive out along this arm, past the helicopter landing pad for the harbour pilots to get out to the ships. Apparently you can view dolphins along this drive, although in the last 3 decades, I have never once seen dolphin along here!