Way off course in Arniston
It is tempting to do little other than amble around the fishing settlement, enjoying the benches, cliffs and beaches
Ask any seasoned Arniston “chuckie” boat captain (the old diesel engines make a chuck-chuck sound) what condition he’d least want to face in his fishing boat and the answer you’ll probably hear is, “being near the Bulldog in a strong southwesterly wind”. It’s the last stretch of underwater rocks in the shipwrecking Saxon Reef off Struispunt that can give rise to freak waves, which apparently “roar like a bulldog” (as described in Marius Diemont’s book The Arniston (1815-2015) — A Village Remembers) and can easily capsize small vessels.
Though numerous ships had been wrecked on these three reefs by the time the Queen of the Thames ran into the most northerly one at Skipskop in 1871, it was apparently the loss of this state-of-the-art vessel, one of 15 in a 20-year period, that finally caused the authorities to erect a warning beacon just south of Otto Bay on Struispunt...
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