Hout Bay and beyond ... the Oude Skip hike

I will let you in on a secret. At the top of Eustegia Way (or 'Sandton-on-the-hill' for obvi­ous reas­ons) in Hout Bay is a little park­ing lot from which you can access a wide sec­tion of sand dune on which young­sters spend a large part of every week­end rid­ing the sand waves. It's also a way to reach Sandy Bay, although the path in from Llandudno is by all accounts easier, or join part of the lar­ger Karbonkelberg Traverse — one of the six best Cape Town trails, accord­ing to Getaway magazine ...

I had never seen the strip of coast­line between Llandudno and Hout Bay. From the top of the hill, look­ing down over Sandy Bay, this part of the coast­line is excep­tion­ally beau­ti­ful. For miles there is no appar­ent devel­op­ment (this changes as one heads out on the con­tour path towards Hout Bay and Llandudno makes its pres­ence known) but in the brief moment that we cres­ted the rise and stood look­ing out over the bay, my breath was taken away.

It was a per­fect day. The sky was a bril­liant blue, and the waters below us were clear and calm, dis­turbed only by the rest­less sur­fa­cing of whales and their calves. There were no fewer than five whales in the Bay in and around Sandy Bay, some of them fairly close to shore – an awe­some exper­i­ence for me as I feel an incred­ible affin­ity with these giant beasts of the ocean.

Each of us was heard to mumble grate­fully that if it weren't for the fact that this por­tion of coast­line forms part of the Table Mountain National Park, man would no doubt have ruined it for us with devel­op­ment, for what an incred­ible view and out­look! There is a wild­ness and naked­ness sel­dom appar­ent in Cape Town any longer. The board in front of us instruc­ted that we had reached Sandy Bay Nek with Sandy Bay down to the right (no, we couldn't see from up here just who had clothes on or off), whilst Rocket Road took one along the con­tour path. Residents of Hout Bay are famil­iar with this con­tour path and we were passed en route by jog­gers, dog walk­ers and hikers.

A sand dune lay right in our path as we star­ted out and someone described how sand blows in eddies from Sandy Bay back down to Hout Bay along the way we had come, mov­ing sand into ever chan­ging dunes in much the same way as it would if this were a desert. There is a par­tic­u­larly unusual view of Sentinel Peak from here as you look back towards Chapman's Peak, and I kept stop­ping to watch the whales and drink in the views, which in hind­sight I prob­ably should not have done as we got caught in the heat of the day on the ver­tical climb back from the shipwreck.

The Oude Skip (or Oude Schip) walk, named after the ship­wreck and also known as the Sandy Bay ship­wreck hik­ing trail, shares por­tions of its hike with the lar­ger Karbonkelberg Traverse, which is roughly seven hours of hard walk from Hout Bay har­bour to Llandudno around the coast. We didn't walk along the coast but up on the con­tour path above the coast. It is part of a longer walk from Llandudno to the wrecks, but we found join­ing at Sandy Bay more than long enough, as we were with young children.

At a given point along the path look out for the cairn (it's fairly large, so you won't miss it) that marks the start of the des­cent to the ship­wrecks. There are two of them – a rust bucket on the Oudeschip point itself (when it is high tide, part of the small rocky out­crop into the sea is cut off from the main­land), which are the remains of the Harvest Capella that was wrecked here in 1986. The other is appar­ently the remains of two ships – the Maori 1909 and Bos 400 from 1994, a little fur­ther up the coast on the next out­crop of land just before one rounds the bend into Hout Bay. So don't attempt this hike, if you do want to des­cend, at high tide.

It's a steep decline down to Oude Skip point. The first bit of the hill you'll have some help in the form of innov­at­ive steps made up of stones held by sturdy wire in the shape of steps, but from then on, you can end up hav­ing a pretty slip­pery time of it, as a lot of the stones and soil have been eroded and are loose. I wouldn't advise push­ing on to the second wreck along the coastal path — it is clearly marked as unsuit­able for day strollers and would prob­ably need a guide.

At the start of your des­cent, down past a lookout hut, there is a sign sig­ni­fy­ing that from here you're wel­come to push on to Hout Bay, but that it'll take you a fur­ther 6.5 hours to do so on the coastal route. By this time though, I was pretty dis­trac­ted by the whales. Halfway down I became aware that a mother and  her calf were swim­ming right up against the shore and that half of our party hadn't even seen her! What a fant­astic sight! So close – we were only about 300 metres away from her.

We stumbled over boulders once down at the bot­tom, until we reached the 'island' where there is a won­der­ful space to just sit and drink in the views. It was pretty dev­ast­at­ing to see the amount of lit­ter that had washed up in the area usu­ally under water dur­ing high tide. Slops, plastic bottles, old car seats, ten­nis balls, and end­less paper bags brought sharply home to us the effort we all need to make to pre­vent this non­sensical dev­ast­a­tion of our nat­ural heritage!

Over sand­wiches and ice cold water­melon (how is that for plan­ning!) we man­aged to see a seal sun­ning on the rocks, whilst watch­ing a num­ber of speed boats head out our way to catch a glimpse of the whales. As we approached the island there was already a boat that had been sta­tioned close to a mother and calf some­way off the shore for some­time, which I guessed to be sci­ent­ists or whale mon­it­ors. I'm amazed that, des­pite the need for licences to go close to whales, people think that if they have a boat they can simply do as they please – speed­boats came within metres of them.

The way back was pretty tough going as we ascen­ded in the heat of the day. We were tired and cer­tain younger mem­bers of our party were par­tic­u­larly unwill­ing to do the climb at all, although sit­ting on shoulders was out of the question!

Would I do it again? Most cer­tainly. What a beau­ti­ful hike.

Video: Short video show­ing the views from Hout Bay to Llandudno:

Photographs taken on the Oude Skip Hike

Photos — Click thumb­nails to view the large photos.

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