Sailing Trips. NEXT
For sea kayaking, fishing, diving, bird watching, whale and dolphin watching.
Join us on our 35 ft luxury charter catamaran OYSTERCATCHER for a kayaking experience with a difference. We sail to Dassen Island for a few days and enjoy this remarkable wildlife sanctuary from a yacht as a base from where we explore this amazing Island coastline by sea kayak. Fresh seafood and living on board our yacht will make you forget the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
We are the only company in South Africa offering these unique live aboard sea kayaking trips!
A typical three day trip: You arrive at the pre arranged meeting point on the West Coast 150 km north of Cape Town and board the yacht after which we sail to a protected bay in Saldanha and spend the night on board. We sail from Saldanha bay early the next morning and arrive at Dassen Island 4-5 hours later after a delightful sailing trip past Malgas Island and Jutten Island . At the Island we kayak, fish, dive or just enjoy the peace and tranquility. We enjoy a fresh seafood supper and sleep in our comfortable beds. Next morning we kayak some more and sail to Paternoster stay the night at anchor and do some more kayaking in this very picturesque area. The next day we sail for our final destination, Port Owen in the Berg river. One day to five day trips can be done and gives you more time to have fun! Cost for a three day sailing trip
R 3240.00 pp for the trip, including everything.
Brief History of Dassn Island
Dassen Island had several names in the early period of its history. Joris van Spilbergen, a Dutch seaman, seems to have been the first to report the Island. In November 1601, Spilbergen named the Island Elizabeth Island (Green 1946). Early European seafarers landed on the Island in the early 1600’s (about four years after Spilbergen’s visit) and noted the abundance of wildlife. Sir Edward Michelburn of the English East India Company remarked about the Island’s abundance of conies and seals, and called the Island Coney Island. The conies he was referring to were actually rock hyraxes or dassies, Procavia capensis. Later, sealers sent to the Island by Van Riebeeck named the Island Dassen Island because of the dassies they observed there.
There is a long history of human activity on the Island. Van Riebeeck ordered the first settlement of Dassen Island in 1654 to prevent intruders from gaining access to the Island (Green 1946). The Island was used to provide ships with the products of penguins and other marine life. Although penguins were killed for food, for fuel to supply the boilers of ships, and for fat, the main attraction was their eggs. Not much is known about the quantities of eggs collected prior to the 1900s. Harvests of eggs at Dassen Island were very high in the early 1900s, with close to 600 000 eggs being collected in 1919 alone (Randall 1989). A penguin exclusion wall was built around the outer perimeter of the Island in the early 1940s to facilitate egg collecting. The commercial harvesting of eggs at Dassen Island was terminated in 1967.
The guano-scraping industry was initiated in the early 1840s. Guano, a Peruvian Indian word for seabird manure, was harvested for use as an agricultural fertilizer. At Dassen Island the guano was mostly obtained from Cape Cormorants, Phalacrocorax capensis. Penguin guano was not as suitable for commercial harvesting because of the sandy nature of the substrate on which the penguins nest. Phosphatic sand was also removed from Dassen Island to replace nesting material at gannet colonies on other Islands, where guano had been removed (Ross and Randall 1990). From 1898 guano scraping was conducted at Dassen Island by the Guano Islands division of the South African government’s Department of Industries (Siegfried and Crawford 1978). The scraping of guano on the Island for commercial purposes was discontinued in 1974.
A lighthouse was established on the Island in 1893, and has been manned ever since. The Lighthouse Services division of Portnet presently manages the Lighthouse.
As a result of human activity a number of alien plants and a lesser number of alien animals have become established at Dassen Island (Cooper et al. 1985, Brooke and Prins 1986).
The Island is also home to 10 000 African penguins. The African penguin is endangered as a result of oil spills and the collecting of their eggs in the first half of the 20 th century.
Currently thousands of European rabbits inhabit the Island and can be seen hopping around even on the beaches during late afternoon sunset kayak cruises. Nobody but the local game ranger and lighthouse keeper is allowed on the Island. Numerous bird species including several endangered species inhabit the Island and breed there. Ungulate tortoises abound and is more densely populated than on the main land.
History compiled by Anton Wolfaard for Western Cape Conservation board.