The communities on this coast, sniffing tourist dollars in the sardine windfall, have dubbed the event "the greatest shoal on Earth." The public can phone a toll-free hotline to hear which beaches have the best sardine action, and the town of Scottburgh has started up a sardine festival, complete with karaoke, beach competitions, and cooking demonstrations using the traditional Afrikaner three-legged pot, or potjie, now jokingly referred to as the Mandela microwave. At the water's edge, Zulu mothers gathered fish into their voluminous skirts while their children darted forward, burrowing into the folds of each incoming net to scoop out the silver slivers and stuff them into supermarket bags, jackets, shirt pockets. Ten rand a basket was the going rate-just under a dollar for 40 pounds (18.1 kilograms) of fish. A barrel-chested Afrikaner, tanned the color of mahogany, talked to netters as they sorted their catch into baskets and grumbled about the price.
An Indian woman, glamorous in her fine sari and gold jewelry, laughed as she hurried up the beach with handfuls of fish wriggling in her manicured fingers. Forced inshore by predators, shoals simply wash up in the surf-glittering sardine waves that dump fish knee-deep on the sand.Īt Illovo Beach, 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Durban, I watched the "rainbow nation," as post-apartheid South Africa likes to think of itself, united in harvest. People flock to the coast, where beach seiners haul in bulging netfuls of sardines. On shore the fever can be almost as great as in the shoals. Sharks, seals, seabirds, dolphins, and game fish converge on vast schools of Sardinops sagax, the South African pilchard, or sardine, which migrates northward along the coasts of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal between May and August. Sardines are winter's gift to South Africa's east coast waters: an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet that attracts diners by the tens of thousands. "Fantastic! Look-three, four, five of them." Tails lashing, they lunged and rolled in an orgy of feeding. "Copper sharks!" said Mark Addison, our boat skipper. A pale pink dorsal fin sliced through the midst. Panicked sardines threw themselves into the air and splashed back into the melee. Scores of circling dolphins harried the sardine shoal into an ever tightening mass.
The kissing booth reparto Patch#
It was as if this patch of sea off the eastern coast of South Africa had been turned into a pot of bouillabaisse-and everyone was falling to the feast. They were hunting sardines, and the water boiled with fish. Wings folded to their sides, they plummeted into the sea like feathered missiles, leaving green bubble trails in their wakes. The sky was white with gannets and filled with their manic chatter.