Today I want to share with you some photos I took at one of the most beautiful beaches on the entire south coast of Africa. It's called Robberg beach, at the town of Plettenberg Bay.
In the background you can see Robberg peninsula, a marine protected environment and home to a prolific seal colony. The bay is beautifully protected by the peninsula as it juts out from the land mass into the Indian ocean. This creates a sheltered bay for seals to thrive and reproduce.
In the past months some large storms and swells have washed this curious metal barrel up into the beach. It probably came off a passing cargo tanker. They pass by here on their way around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, just about 550km to the west of this beach.
The strange and very heavy object has been lying on the beach for months and the municipality presumably have no way to carry it off, despite their large digger construction vehicles.
Or maybe they don't care to move it as it's not harming anyone. It's just an eyesore on the otherwise clean and empty beach.
The ocean and wave power has outdone our human machine power to move this heavy object, so there it sits. Nature is truly supremely powerful. We ourselves are part of nature, and sometimes we can harness the power while at other times it simply overwhelms us.
Besides that, the last big storm washed away the nice wooden stairs that led down the dunes and into the sandy beach. As a result people had to reconstruct their private steps, or the municipality rebuilt some steps for the public to be able to access the beach.
Perhaps they will last until the next big storm in a few months. September usually brings the Spring tide and heavy swells for the year. I'm of the opinion that those steps won't last very long, built as they are on soft sand and using sand bags to sort them.
The power of nature is readily visible at the coast and all we can do is work around it.
Photos my own.