Every year the world looks upon the greatest marine migration that passes Buffalo City by.
It really does pass us by.
All over the world, places like ours embrace some aspect of their lives and uphold it as their special offering to society – some are truly bizarre like a buffet for monkeys, goat tossing and a sleep day.
But have an authentic marvel of life on Earth, an ancient, magnificent spectacle: the Sardine Run.
We may be asleep, but every year at about this time, it stirs and then bursts forth.
Billions of marine animals surge north in a swirling chaos – one planet’s greatest natural feeding frenzies.
We are a city that proudly bears a name that booms out our oceanic nature – that of waves crashing and echoing against the sacred Gompo Rock – but out instruments are muted or unheard in the great marine orchestra that is the Sardine Run.
Where is our marketing, our educational information, our invitation to the world to come here and witness this marine Serengeti? Why are we not claiming our place on the global eco-tourism map? .
Where is our enviro-tourism imagination?
Do our own city residents actually see this raw, most visceral drama – massive dolphin pods herding sardines into tight bait balls, great whites and bronze whalers slicing through the frenzy, gannets and terns plummeting from the sky like living arrows. Are our people lining the shore on good days, having fascinating, informed awesome time?
Where is our grand season opening event, our travel and tour accommodation packages, our access to our piers, our deck at the aquarium now languishing in a budget doldrums, our hotels with view spots, our township-raised tour guides who could be trained from projects like Waves for Change or Jonginenge?
Are our tour operations running at full steam with multi-day packages for snorkellers, divers, photographers and the people simply getting the best shoreline vantage point?
Where are our marine environment programmes and cultural festivals? Where is our art, music, podcasts, our relentless reporting so that we all get to follow every act, every movement?
In Hermanus they watch whales – we have everything.
We applaud those dedicated operators in the city, at Chintsa and on the Wild Coast who, like Atlas, carry the world on their shoulders. Let us wake and start to think about how to do the Sardine Run properly.
We have an international airport, decent roads to the seaside, hotels, restaurants and proximity to both urban amenities and pristine coastline. Where is our KuGompo City Sardine Run Spectacle programme? How do we blend adrenaline, with education, culture and conservation?”
Where are our marine education hubs teaching visitors about ocean currents, climate impacts on migration patterns, and the delicate balance sustaining this migration?
Why are city lifeguards, our Esplanade monitors, our Waves for Change graduates, not trained to become marine rangers who educate the public about the Sardine Run and use this as a start to wrangle for a wider programme of cleaning up, improving and conserving our social and marine environment?
There is so much energy in the ocean at the moment, yet on land, we worry that our city is in a crisis of imagination, a mental slump.
Yet, the ocean’s energy is free and it is a good place to start to build a marine and coastal tourism economy with real, sustainable jobs.
Why are we not talking about sustainable seafood centred on the sardine with special dishes on our menus that celebrating this local marine culture in all styles of cuisine.
Where are our art installations, our marine craft market, our scientists talking about whales and great white shark movements, and our marine sporting events, our walks, runs, swims, paddles and dives celebrating our city and it’s great natural bonanza?
Can we imagine the economic benefits, the mood shift, the new social and commercial energy?
Could we not formalise our journeys of excited rural schoolchildren into this programme? Imagine the learning, the inspiration, the careers that could be started in this new way of seeing?
Yes, our packages would have to be as flexible as the run’s unpredictability – scattered shoals, variable weather, shifting currents. And we should make this uncertainty part of our honest messaging. Climate change is already altering ocean patterns, as we’ve seen with this year’s early and fragmented Agulhas current trajectory. It would be part of this great story.
Kevin Harris is a spokesperson for public interest group Green Ripple.
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