Kalk Bay Harbour Wall

Wrinkles. Scare-etched by our southern sun into the faces of real fishermen, each millimetre representing another high-seas adventure thriller – around our Cape of Storms.

There’s an old guy, long past hauling the line himself, who watches the fish come into Kalk Bay Harbour. His name is Fred. Fred sells bait, sells fish, sells stories. Sometimes he just stands looking out towards Hangklip and even his silence has worth.

“Like Fredrick the Great?” I asked once I got to know him.

“Nie, my larney, just Fred.” He half- smiled, his eyes on a group of tourists snapping pictures of the gutting tables.

Then last week False Bay turned into a seething, whipped-up mess of white horses as the wind swung around from the north like a pike axe. Fred turned his collar up and drew deep on his cigarette and watched the ocean turn deadly. His eyes squinted under leathery eyelids. I handed him the bottle of Dragon Tree (his favourite) I owed him for last weekend’s red bait barter.

“Lyk ‘n bietjie woes, Oom Fred,” I said, cold-shouldering into the wind.

“Die wyn maak warm,” he said, but his eyes stayed focused on the horizon, watching for his son’s boat.

Somehow when our benevolent wind mixes with certain elements, it shows a bone-chilling malevolence. Wind and fire, wind and water… these combinations are terrifying. Our wind can snap vineyard poles, capsizes fishing trawlers, fan firestorms. That’s the edge we live with here.

But, it also keeps the vineyards clear of fungus and means we don’t have to spray as much as other winegrowing countries. Our wind clears the smog from wood fires and factories, keeping Cape Town healthy. It brings the fish in and helps direct the currents.

I’ve just returned from my 10 year old son’s class camp. I was roped in as one of the parents to help shepherd and cajole. We camped half way down our Cape Peninsula, just beyond the exposed Soetwater beach. We slept 50 metres from the crashing Atlantic, whipped up by a vicious, icy north-westerly that brought squalls of rain and pulverising winds.

The kids loved it. They ran up and down dunes through stinging sand. They swam in the old Khoi (Strandlooper) fish traps, where Harder are still caught today, a hundred thousand years after they were built by our ancestors. They hiked all over the beach and climbed to the top of Slangkop lighthouse, South Africa’s tallest.

The sea growled like a monster at night, the huge waves shifting tons of sand every second. The rain crashed down in bath loads. And somehow the deafening noise and presence of the storm just energised the kids. Maybe, like our vines and our fishermen, you have to be from here to love this weather.