Gansbaai
Gansbaai (Afrikaans: "bay of geese," sometimes referred to as Gans Bay) is a fishing village and popular tourist destination in the Overberg District Municipality, Western Cape, South Africa. It is known for its dense population of Great White Sharks and as a good whale-watching location.
History
Gansbaai on Danger Point Peninsula has one of the oldest histories in the world. At the time when Neanderthal-man was still the dominating species of "homo" in Europe, a group of modern people (homo sapiens sapiens) had already made Klipgat Cave their home. Remains have been excavated proving that modern man was living here more than 70,000 years ago. Klipgat Cave is located in the Walker Bay Nature Reserve, next to De Kelders, the residential shore area of Gansbaai. As one of only three places in South Africa where such old remains have been excavated, Klipgat Cave is one of the most important cultural assets in the Western Cape. The reserve and the cave are open for the public.
Gansbaai is also known as BIG2TOWN. South Africa is known for the BIG5 but the other big 2 is the Great White Shark and the Southern Right Whale. Gansbaai (BIG2TOWN) also have its own website. Visit http://www.big2town.com for more information
The earliest evidence of the presence of sheep-herding "Khoi" people (after the hunter-gatherer-"San", the original indigenous population of the Western Cape) in the Western Cape has been found in Klipgat Cave as well. Until the arrival of the first white settlers at the end of the 18th century, the Khoi people thrived on Danger Point Peninsula and its hinterland. An expedition sent by Jan van Riebeeck to the area has described meeting people of the so-called Chainouqua-tribe near Baardskeerdersbos, a rural hamlet, 15 km from Gansbaai. The river flowing through the Baardskeerdersbos Valley is still called "Boesmansrivier" (Afrikaans for Bushman's river). "Bushman" is a derogatory name for San-people, but will in this case have reflected Khoi-people.
It was people of Khoi-descent that erected the first permanent settlement on Danger Point Peninsula. In 1811 fishing-cottages were built at Stanfords Bay in De Kelders.
The first white settlers in the area were "trekboere" (nomad farmers). They copied the Khoi herding techniques of using a grazing area until it was exhausted and subsequently moving on to greener pastures. The area was big and fertile enough for such purposes. On many of the large farms around Gansbaai, the old and original homesteads and mudstone-houses tell of the days that the white farmers settled down.
Danger Point was the place were the HMS Birkenhead wrecked in 1852. A barely surfaced rock 2 km from Danger Point (now aptly called "Birkenhead Rock") appeared fatal for the troopship carrying young Welsh and Scottish boys and their officers and family on their way to Eastern Cape to fight the Xhosa. The Birkenhead became famous because it was the first wrecking ship were the "women-and-chlidren-first principle" was rigidly applied. All women and children were saved, most of the men perished. The horses swam to shore and were the ancestors of a feral herd that roamed the plains east of Gansbaai until late in the 20th century.
In 1895 the Danger Point Lighthouse was built, providing more security for the ships in these treacherous waters: between Danger Point and Cape Infanta, to the east of Gansbaai more than 140 ships wrecked and thousands of sailors have drowned.
Gansbaai was founded in 1881 after 18-year-old fisherman Johannes Cornelis Wessels walked there across the dunes from Stanford and discovered how good the fishing was in the area. He settled there, and soon after other families followed suit. Up until the late 20th century, however, it was little more than an impoverished fishing village due to its isolation and lack of communication with the outside world.
Gansbaai's economy received a boost in 1939 when a small factory was built to process sharks' livers for Vitamin A and lubricant, which came into high demand during World War II. After the war, however, demand fell and the few short years of prosperity were over.
It wasn't until local school principal Johannes Barnard persuaded village fishermen to set up the first Fishery Cooperative in South Africa that the economy began to solidify. Barnard helped the fishermen obtain capital from the Fisheries Development Corporation, deepen the harbour and establish a modern fish meal factory. The town became a municipality in 1963.
Today, Gansbaai's economy still revolves around its fishing industry, but an increasingly large part of it now comes from tourism. It is considered the Great White Shark capital of the world, drawing National Geographic Society film crews and researchers from around the globe to study the wildlife. It has also become a popular whale-watching spot for the Southern Right Whale.
The Southern right whale can be seen in large numbers, especially from the rocky shores of De Kelders on Walker Bay. This is also the spot of the old whaling station. The look-out platform and the steps down to are still standing. Today whales are protected in South Afric and the descendants of the whalers are now the skippers on the boats that take tourists out for boat-based whale watching.
The hinterland is known for its vast natural and mountaineous landscapes covered with unspoilt vegetation of the Cape Floral Kingdom ('fynbos"). As the smallest of the 6 world's floral kingdoms, the Cape Floral Kingdom is -with 9000 different species- the richest.
The official website of Danger Point http://www.danger-point-peninsula.co.za provides in-depth information about the history of Danger-Point-Peninsula and Gansbaai next to a full description of its today's features and attractions.
Dyer Island, Geyser Rock and Shark Alley
The original name of Dyer Island was Ilha da Fera (Island of wild creatures), so named by Portuguese seafarers in the 15th century.
Dyer Island is the largest of a group of islands about five miles offshore from Gansbaai and less than that from Danger Point Peninsula. It is named after Samson Dyer, an emigrant from the USA to the Cape Colony in 1806, who lived on the island collecting guano, which he sold to mainlanders as fertilizer. The island is home to thousands of Jackass Penguins.
Due to centuries of overharvesting of guano, the African Penguins have difficulty making their nests: they use the guano to make burrows to protect their young from sea-gulls.Co-operation between Cape Nature and the local boat-operator, Dyer Island Cruises, has launched the project to place thousands of artificial burrows on the island to bring the penguin-population back to a sustainable level. The public can support this initiative by buying one or more of these "penguin-houses". For more information contact mailto:gansbaaiinfo@telkomsa.net
Geyser Rock is a smaller island nearby, and is home to tens of thousands of Cape Fur Seals.
The shallow channel between the two islands — popularly known as "Shark Alley" — is home to the densest known population of Great White Sharks in the world, attracted by the abundance of their staple food: the Cape fur seal.
Dyer Island is a nature reserve and cannot be accessed by the general public but boat-tours leave from Kleinbaai on Danger Point Peninsula to watch whales, stop at a shark-diving-boat, to cross Shark-alley and to go around Dyer Island.