Wild Coast Region

Now, if you don't know the waters off the Transkei coast of South Africa, consider yourself lucky, friend.

The locals call it the Wild Coast, and it is a graveyard of jagged reefs, shrieking gales, and the dreaded Agulhas Current.

When the warm, fast-moving waters of the current smash into a cold Southern Ocean gale, the sea doesn't just get rough.

Oh, no.

Now, you'd think the story ends there, but the sea doesn't let go of her prizes so easily.

Oh no.

For decades after the disappearance, sailors navigating the wild coast would tell whispered tales over their rum rations.

Men standing the midnight watch claimed to look out into the fog and see a massive twin-masted steamer with a blue anchor painted on her funnel plowing silently through the heavy swells.

Yeah.

So the Transkei is this country within, and it's called the Wild Coast.

It's not very inhabited.

It's pretty sketchy.

So it's a lot of speculation at the moment in terms of the extent of the damage.

It is likely high because we've had wash-ups throughout most of the range of sardine, from Namibia all the way to the Wild Coast and the Eastern Cape.

The rate of spread is similar to the rate that's occurred in Australia in the 1990s, so we need to earn the side of precaution with any management measures possible.

that we implement at this stage to give the residual stock, the stock that isn't harmed by this virus or the stock that becomes immune to this virus, a better chance of rebuilding the greater stock, both for the economic benefits for the industry, the long-term survival of the industry, but from our perspective for species like African penguins and other threatened species that are limited to the Spanguela upwelling system.

But what happened after that? What did you do after that?

So after that, we returned to South Africa and we joined some friends of ours at a small rural hospital called Zitulele, which is situated on what we call the wild coast of South Africa.

It's up the east coast between, if you look on the map, East London and Durban.

And it was in an area which was called the Transkei, which is one of the the Apartheid homelands.