The Great Escape

My go-to place when life gets too much

 My favorite lighthouse must be the one on Dassen Island.

It is perhaps the isolation and the fact that not many people have had a chance to see it, being out at sea as it is. And this is part of its appeal. 

Surrounded by huge granite boulders and reefs all around, you have to navigate to the East shore past the “roaring sisters” and then, as you enter the calm waters of the lee shore, not forgetting to give the entrance of House Bay a wide berth to avoid the submerged reef that helps absorb some of the wave energy making House Bay the splendid anchorage it is.

Once you have dropped anchor and have begun to relax and unwind from the journey, the resident Bryde’s whale senses its safe and comes by for his evening boat inspection. If you’re lucky, the wind has calmed, and you become aware of the many birds calling each other as they fly in to roost for the evening. There’s the soothing lapping of water against the hull and later, you hear the cracker shrimp at work cleaning the hull. But the play of light as the sun goes down is incredible. The sunsets have been amoung the best I’ve ever experienced.

The island, when seen from the air, is shaped like a dolphin and is an important breeding ground for seabirds. Most notably the African penguin.

The penguin population, once estimated to be over a million birds in the 1920 ‘s have been decimated. Now sadly, only a few thousand birds remain. (The 2019 census counted 1912 breeding pairs) The steep decline can be attributed to overfishing, oil spills, global warming and more recently, Avian Flu. The island itself is off limits and managed by Cape Nature to protect the remaining birds. Guano harvesting and collection of penguin eggs certainly also contributed to their decline with around half a million eggs harvested a year; mostly so that Parliament could have poached penguin eggs for breakfast.Read more about the Guano war and SA’s Parliament’s theft of eggs by Dr Don Pinnock here:

https://www.wildernessfoundation.co.za/news/parliament-s-poached-penguin-eggs-and-the-great-guano-war

Not only is the island an important breeding ground for penguins but other seabirds too. 147 bird species have been recorded on Dassen Island, 23 of which breed on the island, 7 of which are classified vulnerable or endangered.

I remember stopping off one afternoon in House Bay and a black cormorant promptly jumped onboard and began to wander about unperturbed. I eventually had to fetch the bird out of the cabin. Unperturbed, it decided to perch on my crew. Here’s the pic:

Crayfish have also seen a steep decline due to overfishing but when they were still bountiful, we could drop anchor and hoist a box of wine up onto the spreaders to show our willingness to barter, then retreat to the cockpit for a leisurely sundowner. In no time at all a commercial vessel would pull alongside and start lobbing crayfish into the cockpit until you yelled “ That will do!” and straight onto the braai they went. Those days are gone and the estimate is that the crayfish population is just 2% of what it was before Exploitation. “Out of sight, out of mind,” the saying goes and it certainly rings true for these fascinating, little understood, threatened crustaceans.

There are many theories as to how the island got its name. The one I prefer the most was told to me by the former German commodore of Swakopmund yacht club.

It was known to the German community living along the coast and Nazi sympathizers that U-boats used to frequent our coastline during the war. They would sneak up to the surface to recharge their batteries and catch a bit of sunlight.

On one such trip to the surface, the Captain, as the periscope went up, called” What do you see?”

To which the sailor replied; “Das ein Eiland. Kapiten!”

And the name stuck…

I can’t wait to return to this wind swept desolate place but in the meantime, I’d love to hear about your favorite place to escape.

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