Sea and sky and a false bay

Cape Town is a city in large part defined by its geography - Table Mountain rises majestically over the city center and it is flanked by two Oceans and miles and miles of coastline.

 The mountains that run away from "the table" form a peninsular that runs out in to the sea, with the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meeting at it's tip. False Bay is a vast bay that sits on the Indian Ocean side and was given its name by explorers  who ran their ships aground when they thought they were following a coastline, not entering a bay.

I recently spent some time at the foot of the Overberg mountains in a small beach town that looks across False Bay towards Cape Town. Our days were governed by the sea, sky, clouds, wind and the views across the bay. 

A balmy blue skied winters day gave us views of the bay, that was a jewel-like shimmering blue with Table Mountain and the peninsular clearly visible across the water. The day slowly changed, hinting at what was to come. Clouds moved in and treated us to a magnificent sunset, but by morning the mountain across the bay had disappeared from sight and the wind gradually picked up, with an iciness that sent us inside. By nightfall the only place to be was indoors, along with anything that might blow away. We hunkered down, lit a fire and listened to rain pelting the windows and the wind battering windows, walls and roof.

It was about 48 hours of wind and howling rain before the sun came out and the world became calm again. We walked down to the beach to find the shoreline transformed - littered with the bright colours of a myriad plastic bottles, wrappers, caps, buckets and plastic fragments. The wind had blown seaweed on to our shore, but with it also a bays-worth of plastic debris.

It was plastic debris that told stories of carelessly discarded trash, waves that had swept away a child's bucket and spade and rainwater that washed streets clean but swept with it trash in to the ocean. It is as if False Bay has a gyre, a small version of the North Atlantic gyre and it had landed up on our beach. What was there to do, but clean the beach before the plastic got washed back out to sea. The power of a few people making a big difference turned out to be the lesson of the day as 3 of us (2 adults and a 10 year old boy) filled bags of recyclables and trash over the course of an afternoon. Once we were done, we headed back over the dune and looked back to see the beach restored once more to the colours of sand, shells and seaweed.