Windy times #1

The current superstorm over New York reminds me that we in Cape Town are no strangers to hurricanes ourselves. The Cape of Storms has lived up to its name on many occasions over the last 20 years, although we haven't had a really good blow for about 10 years now.

Although time goes by so fast I can't put a date to it, there was a particular hurricane about 20 years ago that left its mark on Kommetjie. The interesting part is that the worst weather is always at night and no-one is out there to observe the might of Nature in action. In fact, we slept right through this particular hurricane, despite being within spitting distance of the sea, and only knew about it when we looked at the devastation around us the next day.

The road along the beachfront next to the Kom tidal pool was knee deep in kelp, a tangled mass of bamboo and fronds that required a bulldozer to remove. The strength of the storm surge had torn the kelp beds from their rocky anchors and deposited tons in the carpark and streets, as well as breaking through the surrounding wall of the only home level with the sea at that point and filling the garden with free fertilizer.

The narrow tarred path along the top of the rocks leading from the Kom to the lighthouse was no more, fragments having been flung into the bushes or sucked away to form part of the jumble of rocks on the seabed. Large rocks were deposited on the lawns at the Kom with more kelp, an area which is usually about 6 feet above the high tide mark. Small boats that were anchored in the bay had either completely disappeared, or lay broken to bits high on the rocks. One was found round the corner a few kilometres away at Long Beach.

Most of the trees at the top of our garden were flattened by the wind, but apart from that we were very lucky as a stretch of ancient milkwood trees protects us from the north-west gales. We have had a few more hurricanes since then, which I will tell you about another time.

For the moment, we use sea lice as our gauge of how high the tide will come. If you see them climbing up the walls on the other side of the road, you know it is time to batten down the hatches!