Klip Drift

Close to the beach there is a large and capacious rock pool which forms a basin 3000 square metres in size and is flanked by the two single-room traps which are 10 metres in diameter. Similarly to Cape Recife, we can imagine that the basin, in which there is calm water year round, along with the two single-room traps were used for aquaculture and became a permanent source of fish.

Klip Drift Klip Drift was “discovered” thanks to the help of my colleagues at NMU, Hansie and Lucy Vosloo. The survey was done using drones only. We only organized one visit to the site on 29/09/2018 with Lucy, “Alexis” Tsiotsiopoulos, the student who performed the drone survey, and a local person who generously offered to take us in his 4x4 to the private property from where the site can be accessed and then on to the traps themselves. The coast here is quite dramatic in cross-section (image 82) especially owing to a sudden drop between the vegetation covered ground above and the rocky shore (image 83). This made reaching certain places quite difficult. The site with the fish traps, however, is situated in a favourable spot because the hill pulls back from the ocean, forming a sort of natural amphitheatre with a gentle slope allowing easy access to the site from above and providing protection from the strong winds. From the other side there are tall rocks forming a ridge parallel to the shore which offer further protection. It is, in fact, thanks to the existence of these rocks that there is an area about 15 metres wide and 270 metres long where the water enters through three gaps in the rocky ridge. This creates a sheltered area of shallow water: the perfect spot for fish traps. Much like at Cape Recife, the tall rocks are also an important visual landmark for locating the fish traps from high up (see image 68). There are two fish traps located on opposite sides of the site at a distance of 200 metres from one another. They are positioned so that they would have both interacted independently with the two pools of calm water formed in the intertidal zone between the ridge and the rocky shore.

Fig.80 Dr Magda Minguzzi of the Nelson Mandela University School of Architecture with the students during the site survey in Oyster Bay

Fig.81 Site survey in Oyster Bay