There's two birthdays in the family this week, Denver and Teagan are born on the same day, 4 years apart. So we decided to stop boat work for a few days and head up to Kraalbaai. Denver opted to stay back at Saldanha.
Kraalbaai is in the West Coast National Park on the West Coast of South Africa. The park surrounds a large part of the lagoon. A paradise for hikers, cyclists & mountain bikers, birders and nature-lovers but what is awesome for yachties is the azure blue water and beautiful peaceful anchorage that we get to experience from a yacht. Looking at the video footage you would imagine you were somewhere in the Caribbean.
The trip across the lagoon to the bay is best done on a rising tide because the channels you need to follow get extremely shallow at low tide. The tidal range of the lagoon at spring tide can be as much as 1.8m.
As we enter Kraalbaai itself, in some of the channels at the shallowest point, we can have as little as 0.4m (+/-15") below our keel on a rising tide. Once through the channels, our anchoring depth is around 1.5m (+/- 5') about 100m off the shore.
Whilst there, we celebrated the birthday with a brunch picnic on the beach and a good walk in the afternoon. We crossed the ridge with the intention of possibly walking across to the 16 Mile Beach. We had headed off pretty badly prepared for a long walk and when we came across a huge, very beautiful but very dangerous puff-adder snake, we decided we'd do the walk on a day when we were better prepared and with better foot gear.
All in all, it was a lovely break away from the constant boat work but now we are back in Saldanha, back to sorting out the last of the jobs in preparation for our African departure - we worked it out and we have 8 weeks left to get the last jobs complete so that we can spend around 2 weeks with the passage preparation before we set sail.