A leap of faith!

Cape Recife - Port Elizabeth

Bridled Tern habitat 

At the sentient core lurks a behavioral response to stimulus, learned or inherent and when condensed, a simple derivative of three emotive forces - Certainty. Uncertainty & Fear, real or imagined. It's a formula for lifelong confusion and misadventure. It's also why we venture into an uncertain world brimming with certainty and quite often, hamstrung by fear.

It's a simple recipe but, like most subjective taste-tests, the outcome is almost always dependent on the buds anticipating the spoon and that, my enlightened friends, is what makes life worth living!

This story is a tale of three. The first - the least impressive; the second - an affirmation that wisdom is NOT commensurate with grey and the last -a confirmation that a step into the abyss is not always a venture into the unknown.

Addo NP - peaceful

Bridled Tern had been reported from Port Elizabeth's (EC) Cape Recife. Certainty. Would it still be there when we got there? Unknown. Worth trying? Fear.

Behavioral response - offset the odds against the disappointment of another long-shot, take in Tsitsikamma NP and settle the matter of the little bridge over shallow water. We'd return home certain in the knowledge that we'd done the right thing...

As it turned out we dipped on the tern (as we did for our 800 Challenge & as we've done on countless other occasions); confirmed our suspicions that Addo National Park is indeed a peace park and suffered the ignominy of a cracked windshield whilst cruising on Distronic Plus with proximity control. Clearly we were too close..

Natural spa - freedom

The tern thus discarded, perhaps for the more deserving, we made our way westwards to what is, for me at least, the jewel in South Africa's crown; Storm's River.

The Kirks - a sleep pile

Here the seas are as wild as anywhere I've seen & having spent three memorable years (a gap year...) covering the corners of this fine rock, it's fair comment I think. The air is moss-fresh, the natural forest hauntingly green and the seas above which White-necked Raven and tern whirl, wholly untamed. Black Oystercatchers bound from rock to rock seemingly in offhand pursuit of the many Hyrax (dassies) which call these jagged rocks home.

The Storms River suspension bridge

On a different note a brief comment on the newly renovated restaurant complex. The Cattle Baron is exceptional and kudos to Sanparks, Tourvest & the staff on site for their achievement. If this is the quality of service that Sanparks is going to deliver across its portfolio then WOO bloody HOO! Now complain you bast..s!

The weird & the wonderful

If the first part of this adventure was a miss, the second was a mega-slam of a different kind and as these things go I found myself the butt of the hit, as always. If the 'cling-to-anything-solid' uproarious laughter from the busload of foreign tourists is anything to judge these things by, then they too enjoyed the show.

The story starts slowly enough - 'get a picture of the sea. Leave the long lens in the house and take the spanking-new wide-angle. Take the new camera body too. That way you can take it all in...'

Storms River - Part 1 'Innocent intent'

Armed thusly with a small country's annual GDP clutched to my bosom & slightly less so perched atop my winners' hat, I bestrode the shore looking to immortalise the lucky wave.

Behind (far behind) the family watched. These pictures are theirs not mine..

Storms River - Part 2 'Last Rights'

When gazing through the viewfinder & through a wide-angle lens, one may miscalculate the proximity of the subject in view. As a seasoned 'get-much-closer-Pro' I take my craft quite seriously. Of their own volition and by enforced habit, the ten little piggies, attached to the end of my feet as these things normally are, scrabbled the rest of me closer to the break.

With Proximity Control consigned to the sissy-basket I edged even closer, well past the yawn of sanity.

I vaguely remember hearing the seventh whisper sweet nothings as it reared overhead. Click!

I recall a distant shore-based warning - 'damn fool' or something similar. Click!           Gotcha...

Storms River - Part 3 'Coronation'

I remember, quite vividly as it turns out, the freshly scrubbed rocks and startled fish, pretty little things, as I thundered by, cartwheeling merrily along the sea-bottom. Fortunately I swallowed enough of the sea, as I made my way southwards, to cushion the impact of a happy assortment of barnacles, muscles, sea-shells and other lethal debris which accompanied me on my way.

Overwhelmed, as you can get with the beauty of things, whilst in spiral towards the back-break, I thought it prudent, fair play if you will, to donate my winners' hat, designer glasses, three kilos of skin, scalp and nail and most of my pride to the grateful dead in Jones' Locker.

Storms River - Part 4 'The Aftermath'

Surfacing sometime later that afternoon, alongside a cavorting pod of Southern Right Whale, I recall concluding that the best lens for the job might have been a macro...

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then there is a satiating serving in Part 3 of this tale. Exit Dad - enter kids: - the insignificant matter of a little bridge.

Bloukrans Bridge - 216 meters of terminal truth

Whilst doing the backward triple along the seafloor it transpired that my son had drowned the rest of the cackling clan with unbridled screams of joy.

Double, double toil & trouble: Fire burn, and cauldron bubble..

Stir the pot, add the world's highest bungee bridge, sprinkle in surprise; a pinch of debut vertigo and viola - the makings of revenge!

Two hims & a her 

I confess a history & a love for heady-heights not encoded in the DNA of my son. My daughter, in turn, leaps, flies, abseils, glides and dives with the best of them. His face, on debut, haunts my happy dreams to this day.

Look Mom - no hands

Bloukrans Bridge, 216m above a hard-landing & a short scream down below, is the world's highest bungee-bridge. At 14, Sean [my son] was fair game, chronologically at least, at last. This then his debut jump and what better way to whet the appetite than a leap of faith over the abyss of demons past.

Father / Son - flight hurrahs & a good-bye

Of mice & men!

There is an emotive purity, hammered heart, harnessed to a knotted band of rubber, glass-eyed above the yaw. As time goes on the adrenaline is less on tap than it might once have been but I saw it in his eyes; a conquered terror - release; a bursting pride and a jump to freedom. True class, not in the jump, for nobody is defined by an event but in the conquering of an imagined fear & the realisation that uncertainty is a figment of inexperience, nothing more.

WTF?

A parting shot if you don't mind?

Jeffreys Bay plays host to the world's most radical right break surf; you might even call it mecca. It's also the place of my youth and with it the molding of a son of Africa. Who then decided to erect a gaggle of wind-driven turbines & indiscreetly so from skyline to skyline? If that's progress I'm a bag of hot-air!