The West Coast Tour

PART 1: Yzerfontein; Lambert’s Bay and Doringbaai.

- Nick Yell

When I first stumbled into the West Coast National Park it hadn’t yet been proclaimed. It was the early 1980s and my old mate “The Stone” had convinced me that going on a naval officer’s course during National Service was a good idea. That was all very well for him to say, ensconced as he was in his Namacurra patrol boat parked off the backline at Kalk Bay while I slogged it out across 16-mile beach, wondering what the hell I was thinking.

But as I gaze over the turquoise waters of the now protected (since 1985) Kraalbaai, the challenge of eating glucose rations and making potable water from a primitive desalinating contraption while surviving in a life raft, seems like a lifetime ago. The scene that presents itself now, houseboats tugging gently at their moorings and seabirds wheeling lazily overhead, couldn’t be further removed from those fraught naval survival training days, even though the comparison makes today’s savouring even sweeter.

A man I’ve always been quite jealous of is Frank Wightman. A loner by nature, and a naturalist and sailor by lifestyle, Wightman spent around 24 years aboard his self-built wooden yawl, Wylo, in this exquisite bay from the 1940s onwards. My favourite quote of his is contained in Lawrence Green’s biography (A Giant in Hiding; Timmins; 1970) and sums up what appealed to him about his newly found utopia: “Here the tyranny of time would be annihilated. The sweep of the tides would clean the beaches at the appointed hours but never would the sounds of the lagoon jar on him like a factory hooter. Here he could live by the values of remote ancestors. This was the way of life to which he had always been destined and he had reached it after many years of groping.”