Cape Town - Hout Bay harbour is being taken to pieces bit by bit by vandals who have even chipped away at the concrete jetties to get at electrical cables.
On one of the jetties, all 10 of the taps have been stolen, leaving water gushing out of some of the pipes, for weeks at a time.
About six months ago, the Department of Public Works spent thousands of rand upgrading the disabled ablution facility on the Snoekies side of the harbour.
But harbour users say that within a week it had been vandalised with stainless steel urinals and cisterns ripped out. The harbour’s only crane is also not operational after its electric engine was stolen weeks after being refurbished.
There are between 13 and 17 sunken boats in the harbour, some lying on top of each other, which are a navigational hazard as well as preventing access to limited harbour space.
Even the NSRI has been targeted, with thieves breaking into the cars of volunteer members when they are out on rescues.
NSRI Hout Bay station commander Lyall Pringle said the NSRI had regularly had locks broken off at the base and even had “guys running in to steal” items while members were there.
He said some boats had sunk because fittings had been stolen.
“And the owners don’t always have the money to salvage them.”
The navigational lights at the harbour are also frequently vandalised which made it dangerous for people entering the harbour who were not familiar with the area.
Pringle said it was hopeless trying to communicate with Public Works or the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries because there was never any response. He described management of the harbour as “dysfunctional”.
“Everyone has resigned themselves to the fact that nothing is likely to change.”
Fishing industry company Feike, headed by former senior department officials including Shaheen Moolla, described Hout Bay harbour as a “classic case study of harbour mismanagement”.
“Criminals operate freely in the harbour and no boat is safe from being stripped bare overnight by the marauding thugs and drug addicts that easily access the harbour precinct.
“You can regularly observe abalone and lobster poachers offload their catches within a 100 metres of the fishery control office,” the company noted on its website last year.
Tarryn Hemmes of the Atlantic Boat Club, a fishing club based in the harbour, said the club had had its electrical cables stolen last week for the second time.
“As the boat club, we run our own jetty but the harbour is in a shocking state.”
Last year at a rally in Hout Bay harbour Western Cape Premier Helen Zille slammed national government for having no coherent policy or strategy for small harbours.
She said decision were made in offices in Pretoria by people who had never even visited the area.
She said she would declare an inter-governmental dispute with the national fisheries and public works departments for “ignoring the plight of harbours in the Western Cape”.
This week her spokesman Michael Mpofu said that since then, Zille had now sought and received the necessary legal advice to conclusively determine that the future management and control of the small fishing harbours in the province, including Hout Bay, vests exclusively in its municipalities.
He said that the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town were in the process of considering the best method of applying this advice.
Cape Argus