Civil Engineering May 2022 | Vol 30 No 4

18 May 2022 Civil Engineering is sticking to it. One evening the wizard of surfing, the late Dr James “Kimo” Walker, and his wife Phyllis came to supper. Daphne pulled her trick and came out of the kitchen with a tray overloaded with kreef. Kimo’s eyes came out on stalks and all he said was “turkeys”! In winter, the great storms would come out of the west, howling and moaning and, at times, roaring like Zeus castigating Poseidon. They were magnificent, magical, cathartic, each great gust harmonising with the crashing of the waves on the rocks below; snug at home, it cleansed the soul with a heightened sense of excitement and euphoria. I got to know the timbre of the storms and cock my ear and say, “ship ashore tonight”. Sure enough, next morning there would be a ship foundered somewhere on the Peninsula. One afternoon, in a howling, rain lashed gale, we got to watch a tragedy unfold. A great barge mounting a 3 000 ton crane was being towed to Cape Town when the storm struck. The towing tug was joined by another from the port, but together they couldn’t hold the barge. It was a titanic struggle. Like a great game of rugby at Newlands that surges back and forth, so the tugs battled the storm winds. In the end it was the storm that won. The helicopters came in to take off the crew, the tugs cut the tow and the barge was dashed on the rocks in Leeugat below Kabonkelberg. There it still stands, a sad remnant with the great girders of the crane visible above the promontory of the Oudeschip. In summer the winds reverse and the South-Easter plays across the land; a sad and lonely wind that sings and whines like the wind they call Mariah. At times it screams across the flanks of the mountains and out across the sea, flattening the sea like a faulty, chattering plane, sweeping great plumes and gyres of spray to the sky, leaving an olive-green sea with a lacework of spray above. The subliminal infrasound of the gusts against the glare of the pale blue sky engenders a strange, lonely depression. Summers were idyllic, languid days with twilight lasting ’til near 10 o’clock in the evening and always, wherever we looked, was the endless blue of the sea and the sky. Walking the beach in the early morning before the sun had crested Judas Peak was a time to watch how the waves would break, sometimes spilling, A howling South-Easter Me and my dog Rory watching the surf Green flash