Tag: western cape

Who knew? (Whale spotting edition)

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Big news from EWN this week:

Yep. Same as every year:

Southern Right Whales have come to visit Cape Town shores to give birth or to find a mate – this is done every year between June and December. 

But while these are indeed magnificent creatures to see, and while they are here each and every year, some locals might not know where to look. It’s ok. EWN has got you covered, with a list of places that you can spot a whale “in Cape Town”. They’ve listed 22 different places that you can see whales.

From Doringbaai up the West Cooat (marked in red, top left) through to Nature’s Valley on the Garden Route (blue, bottom right).

Eagle-eyed readers (who will also be best at spotting whales) might notice that that’s basically the entire coastline of the Western Cape. And anyone clicking through on that link above will see that, yes, all of the 22 locations on the list are located on the coast.

So it seems to me that if you want to see whales… you probably just need to go anywhere in the Western Cape and look out to sea.

Who knew?

It’s actually rather unhelpful that they don’t also mention that you should probably do it during the day to increase your spotting success rate. Or to use binoculars to make the whales look closer.

Anton’s grave warning

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No. Not you, Anton. This Anton:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of emails from readers struggling to work out exactly what might happen regarding the drought situation during the upcoming summer, and I’ll be absolutely honest here, I’ve fobbed them off with answers that most politicians would be proud of. I’ve meandered around the subject, filibustered relentlessly, and fed them current statistics which actually have no bearing whatsoever on the medium-term status of our water supply here in the Western Cape.

But that’s because I’m just a humble blogger. I don’t have the massive resources of Provincial Government backing me up. I can’t call upon supercomputers, meteorologists, hydrologists and Mystic Myrtle from Accounts to give me expert advice and information on how things are likely to progress from this moment onwards.

Anton has all of this (and, I suspect, more) right at his fingertips, and wow… doesn’t it just show…

Because here’s what he said yesterday:

I mean… who knew?

I had several possible scenarios for the summer planned out on the giant Western Cape water crisis whiteboard which dominates our bedroom, but I have to say that each and every one of them suggested that things were bound to improve on the drought front – at least until the next rainfall season. I certainly couldn’t have predicted that things would – and here I borrow the erstwhile MEC’s exact words – “in all likelihood” “get worse”.

And looking now, I still stand by my previous thoughts, too, because actually, without the assistance of experts, who ever could have come up with this sort of prediction: that 6 or more months of hot, dry weather locally could possibly make a drought worse (in all likelihood, at least)?

Of course, now I will have to get my (waterless) eraser out and revisit my mental machinations on the most probable consequences of the dry season on the Western Cape water crisis.

I sincerely hope that I haven’t predicted the outcome of the next rainfall season incorrectly as well. Right now, I can’t see it having any positive effect. How will water, falling from the sky make any difference to our dam levels? It clearly won’t, and it’s laughable to think otherwise.

Although, thinking again, maybe we should wait for the experts to confirm that.

After all, insight like this is exactly why we pay them the big, big bucks.

Western Cape Number Plates

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Here’s a comprehensive guide as to where in the Western Cape those two and three letter C codes belong. Why not print it out and take it along on your next (Western Cape) road trip to amuse the kids, the wife, or the (intelligent and literate) beagle? It’s also useful as a tool to work out where hitch-hikers want to end up.

TBCPRPl(click it for bigness)

From this map, you can see how the curse of generally poor and overly aggressive driving has leached from CY into CF. CF is a particularly thin area, and thus it seems likely that CL will soon be affected. They’re already mostly drunk on the heady mix of fine wine and Afrikaans in Stellies, and I fear that the curse of the CY may be altogether too much for the roads to handle.