On the 3rd of April I ran a hike for my patrol in the Cape Point nature reserve, after having this route planned for a few months I was very keen to get it done. We left early in the morning to get to Cape Point sadly early still had the sun up 2 hours before we started hiking, sadly I had forgotten to think about how early the sun was rising so I hoped that the day wouldn’t end up too hot. Luckily the weather forecast said it would be overcast and relatively cool.
What the forecast forgot to mention was that there would be rain all the way there, this lead to having a couple unenthusiastic scouts for the hike ahead, when we arrived we kitted ourselves out in our rainwear and set off. After the first km we had all taken off our raincoats and packed them away as the weather had suddenly changed and was sunny with a couple clouds to keep us company.
The hike was a relatively flat one, and was quite repetitive scenery for the first 7km with the occasional buck and ostrich spotted along the way. I had a few scouts who seemed to be determined to scale the tallest rock they could find. This lead to one lightly bonking their head on a rock and few funny photos. Eventually we started our descent to the beach, this took five minutes and we ended up having a quick snack at the bottom. After that we headed off onto the beach to locate some shipwrecks. After a few minutes of walking we spotted the first one. We examined the whole structure while running back and forth to dodge all the waves crashing down on the shipwreck which was halfway up the shore but seemed to be a magnet for the largest waves.
We headed off to our next shipwreck and examined it as-well. We eventually reached out finish point and realised that our message to our transport to pick us up early hadn’t gone through yet and after we were warned that a baboon troop was coming towards us we headed up the road to try and get to our transport quicker. We managed to finish the hike an hour ahead of schedule even with the wait. All in all it was a good hike to start off our patrol adventures for the year.
Tim vZ-S
