Some recent highlights :-

The Whale Festival brought thousands to Hermanus last year. Apart from a disastrous start, when the worst storm in fifteen years destroyed hundreds of thousands of rands worth of marquees, the weather was fine and we enjoyed wonderful sightings of whales.

The Whale Festival also brought Mark Carwardine, the internationally famous author, TV & Radio presenter to Hermanus. Mark is famous for his books on whales and his Whale Watching tours to all parts of the world. He presented a talk and slide show, showing whales and people watching them by the thousands. We were delighted to have confirmation of just how good whale watching is here in Hermanus - The Best Land - Based Whale Watching in the World.

During the Whale Festival, the BBC was here and they prepared a half hour program on the Whale Festival and of course enjoyed some spectacular displays from our friends - the Southern Rights.

Some weeks prior to the Whale Festival the Publicity Office received a letter from British Airways saying that Hermanus had been selected to feature on their in-flight cameos on destinations of interest - would we help?

Again the whales were the star attraction. Not only did they get excellent footage of whales almost on the rocks at Bientangs Cave, but even better footage filming in the New Harbour. We had a local take a rowing boat out to the mouth of the harbour. As the boat approached the mouth, a whale surfaced right next to the boat, spy-hopped to get a good look at the occupants, subsided back into the sea and with a parting blow disappeared from view.

This sequence has been shown on all SA bound BA flights for the last six months.

A memorable weekend of whale watching: they positively out did themselves for the tourists! The weather was perfect and the sea was like a mill-pond. I went for a walk down town to see what was going on. Town was as busy as during the Whale Festival - hundreds of people on the rocks around Bientangs Cave and the Old Harbour Museum and on the cliff Paths over looking the Old Harbour.

There were whales every where - I counted at least twelve close by, with at least another dozen or so in the middle distance. There was a cow/calf pair on the kelp twenty meters off Bientangs Cave. I went to join the hundred or so people standing on the rocks opposite the cave and watched the cow and calf lolling around just off the kelp: at one stage the calf had it's tail draped over the mother's back, and they just lay there like that for about twenty minutes. The two submerged.

As I said before, the sea was like a mill pond and sitting on the rock with my feet almost in the water I could see that the water was crystal clear as well. And then I just couldn't believe my eyes! Out of the depths, heading right for us, was this giant shape looming. No sound - just this massive, apparently motionless shape of a whale, with the calf just behind it, coming towards us. She turned parallel to the rock as she broke the surface about two meters from my feet.

This overwhelmingly large, glistening animal was so close you could see the patches of coloration on her skin. Huge and silent. Completely silent. All you could hear was the gentle 'swish' as the water lapped the rocks. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. The moment was frozen in time! And then she breathed; right next to us - PWOOFFFF!!!!

The cow and the calf floated off the rock, hardly moving. It was as though she had come to show her baby these funny stick things crawling all over the rocks and they just lay there in the water, watching us.

People were now scrambling in all directions. They were pouring down the path from the street above. Eventually there must have been over two hundred people on the rock, photographing, videoing and talking and being overwhelmed by the shear majesty and beauty and primordial experience of it all.

Whales have been coming into Walker Bay to calve and nurse their young while waiting for them to get big and strong enough for the trip south at the beginning of Summer, just like these two we had been watching, for thousands of years. Nothing has changed except the numbers.

In the past, with an estimated population off the South African coast of about twenty thousand, there were probably a couple of hundred whales in Walker Bay in Spring, their calving and mating season. Lots of leaping and breaching and lobtailing and spy-hopping. In the sea, a sea teaming with life, there were huge great white sharks, giant mussel crackers, steenbras and fish of all kinds. There were vast shoals of sardines and millions of birds. There were schools of thousands of dolphins cutting and prancing their way around the bay.

Now, after almost being wiped out - their numbers were reduced to about fifty in 1935 when whaling stopped in South African waters - their numbers are increasing again. Now again a healthy population, doubling every ten years. Still only a population of about a tenth of what it was, but healthy and unfazed by man. A population of whales still doing what it has always done. Whales feed (an adult whale gorges itself on from 1,500 to 3,000 Kg of copepods - a 2mm long zoo plankton - a day) and store up energy reserves three thousand kilometres south of Hermanus, and then make their way up to Walker Bay to calve, mate and have a whale of a time for a couple of months before heading south again. Living for up to a hundred years and occasionally examining the rocks more closely, weather and sea permitting, to see if those funny little moving sticks were on the rocks again.