Author: 6000

There’s always Juan

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As the biggest floods in living memory hit the Agulhas Plain…

…and farmers try desperately to save their livestock and livelihoods by appealing to the community to come out with small boats and help rescue drowning sheep…

Group member (in the truest sense of the word) Juan Otto shared this:

Basically translated:

“You counted them. Poor planning if you ask me (no-one did), [they] knew what was coming.”

In a world that needs far fewer Juan Ottos, don’t be a Juan Otto.

He might be thinking that it was poor planning. You might think the same. And you were both free to voice that opinion, but he chose to and you didn’t. Well done, you.

The bar here is so low that it’s a tripping hazard in hell, but great news: you’re not a twat.

A quick skim of Juan’s timeline reveals – aside from his cell phone number: oops! – the inevitable plaasmoorde links, a love of Steve Hofmeyr, Toyotas, guns and sea fishing, a deep hatred of Jacob Zuma (fair enough), a 2017 post claiming that the Russian nuclear deal had gone through (it never did), and an unhealthy obsession with sharing news of arrests for abalone poaching.
All with a lovely underlying theme of thinly veiled you-know-what.

Amazing. All the usual boxes ticked. I was shocked.

The fact that the warning was upped from a Level 6 to a Level 9 merely hours before the storm hit can’t have helped the farmers. Not that we should blame the meteorologists. These sorts of low pressure areas are volatile and unpredictable and their effects can be extremely localised.

As for the community, they apparently turned out in their numbers to help the two farms worst affected. I haven’t seen a count yet (which will likely upset Juan), but it seems like at least hundreds of animals were saved.

Well done, Struisbaai.
(Not you, Juan.)

Gloomy

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I mean, we were warned. And that Level 6 warning was upped to a Level 9(!) for the Overberg.

But that was the one of the biggest, wettest storms to hit the Western Cape in the (almost) 20 years that I have lived here. Cape Town was bad (really bad), but a bit further south and east was worse.

Bredasdorp is completely cut off, as are Struisbaai, Arniston and Elim. But that doesn’t make a lot of difference, given that Cape Town to Caledon seems to be impossibly impassable as well. We were planning to go out to Agulhas this coming weekend, but now that all clearly depends on how quickly stuff drains down there.

The N2 has disappeared a bit at Bot River.

The road to Struisbaai

The road to Bredasdorp

Even the alternative routes around these problem areas are closed. Stormsvlei, Napier, Stanford – all no through roads at the moment.

Nearer home, as the weather gradually began to improve, we headed down to the V&A Waterfront, where I took this in the somewhat gloomy light.

No Galaxy A33 5G here. This was taken with an actual camera.

Sunshine tomorrow, we are told. We need it.

Sport as art

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Maximum effort and passion from everyone concerned in the SA v Saudi Arabia Dodgeball tournament this weekend. And a huge win for the local U21 boys in their 5 match series.

I’ve been watching and ‘togging.

It’s a fairly straightforward game, usually somewhat controlled and end to end with waves of attacks, but every so often there will be a few seconds of absolute chaos.

Like what’s happening in that photo above. I love the way that it’s all so still and calm in the image, but you can still absolutely feel the power, urgency and action.

Art.

Warning

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I’ve spent my day watching Dodgeball. It’s been fun.

Tomorrow looks like less fun, not because of the Dodgeball, but because of the weather:

Level 6 is pretty hectic. To put it in perspective, Level 0 is “Turned out nice again, Gromit”, and Level 10 is the Apocalypse.

So things might be a bit rough over the next 48 hours.

I shall shelter next to a Dodgeball court in town.

Incoming (Volume 17)

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Today is lovely. Blue skies, slight breeze, swallows swooping up above.

But remember how I predicted the end of winter about 5 weeks ago? In retrospect, that was funny because it’s been crap weather ever since. And I then said something of the lines of:

Actually, we want spring to come at the normal time, which is probably about a month from now. Because while the dams might be nice and full (99.6% this week, down from 100.4% last week, to be exact), we need them to be like that in the middle of September too, when spring should start.

Well, we’re there now, the dams are still full, and while there are a few signs that Spring is on the way, Winter is going to have one (last?) blast at us this weekend, but weirdly, in a Summery kind of way.

There’s a cut-off low expected from tomorrow through until Monday. More often seen in warmer months (which this is not), cut-off lows are characterised in the Western Cape by gale force South Easterly winds and heaps (and heaps) of rain. Experts will tell you that water is not known for its heaping properties, so if the rain is making heaps, you know that there’s a lot of it.

People in the know have been bouncing around numbers like 100mm and 90kph for the precipitation and the gusting winds. Those are fairly significant numbers at any time, but especially when our local ground is already saturated from a seemingly endless winter and our local trees have been battered very recently.

Will that be it then, though? Winter weather-wise? Well, while* there’s nothing nasty in the immediate aftermath of this long weekend’s fun and games:

You’d be hard-pushed to suggest that an average high of 20 would constitute a definite return of Spring to Cape Town.

But at least there’s the sight of a yellow blob each day from Tuesday onwards.

Maybe… just maybe… warmer times are ahead.

* argh! accidental alliteration. awkward.