We had never dared do this before, but this once, just this once, it was just too convenient. We made stop without having reached our wanted destination, which was Cape Town. The winds were very strong and were more of an opponent than a help. And our intelligent books, or at least those written by intelligent people, recommend sailing around the most Southern point of Africa during optimal weather conditions. Plus, the city of Knysna (pronounced ‘nice, na’) was just around the corner and is said to be surrounded by some of the most beautiful landscape of all of South Africa.
Sailing around South Africa, we were generally far enough off coast to not be able to see the land. So approaching Knysna during sunrise, it was all the more impressive seeing the two huge rocky masses getting bigger and bigger to the left and to the right of us. It turned out to be true what people say – this place is gorgeous. The only thing that was slightly strange is the similarity to towns along the German North Sea coast. And meeting Germans during lunch wasn’t helping. It felt like a German town had lost it’s way to the Meditteranean Sea.
Even though we had not been at sea for very long, we still decided to have a bit of beer on the night after our arrival. The only down side to this was the unexpectedly high check. But being very stingy, poor sailors that we are, we couldn’t help but notice that it had actually been worth it getting our drink on at this exact location … and that is because this was still much cheaper than having to use our wireless 3G USB internet.
We were actually playing with the idea of enjoying this place for a couple more days, but the weather forecast is our boss. And our boss just popped in to say “GET A MOVE ON!”.
(Just a few hours later …)
But then an unexpected bad weather front left our boss all mixed up and confused. A warning was issued due to heavy winds of up to 35 knots.
(And just a couple more hours passed …)
It all turned around again. We’re off tomorrow morning.