Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Navigating a bridge between two worlds
Cape Town’s 112-year-old Royal Cape Yacht Club is charting a course into the uncertain waters of a changing maritime future, convinced it has an important role to play, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
THERE was a time, Lindani Mchunu confided recently, when sailing “was as foreign as Mars”. The man who would later go on to deliver yachts as big as houses across the Atlantic and skipper luxury charter craft among the Cape Verde islands, acknowledged that, in his former world, boats or boat builders were unknown to him.
If his was not the archetypal childhood of deprivation and disadvantage – both his parents were lawyers who had managed to evade “their predetermined destinies” under apartheid – he was no less conscious of South Africa’s divided universe. It was only a chance encounter on a train that introduced him to the world of spinnaker and spray on the open sea.
Today, Lindani Mchunu is the manager of the Royal Cape Yacht Club’s Sailing Academy, whose reason for being is precisely to bridge the universe of experience for scores of young people to whom sailing might otherwise have been just as foreign as Mars, as it once was to Mchunu himself.
Graduates of the academy were on the water last week in the 64th edition of the Lipton Challenge Cup, a six-day event tightly contested by 11 boats from across the region, and a competition that harks back to the earliest days of competitive sailing in Cape Town.
Tea merchant and sailing enthusiast Sir Thomas Lipton donated the cup – now said to be worth about R1.5 million – in 1909, when the club was just four years old.
The Royal Cape has come a long way since its founding in 1905, born, back then, of the earlier enthusiasm for open-sea rowing. In those days, the clubhouse was a boatshed situated just a stone’s throw from the bottom end of Loop Street, and, although it gained a royal charter about a decade later, it was, as the club’s website puts it, “buffeted by change” – and moved from clubhouse to clubhouse – until it settled down in its present location after World War II.
The most dramatic change – a “local yachting boom” – came with the inaugural trans-Atlantic Cape-to-Rio race in 1971.
Today, it boasts a marina, professional staff, a membership of some 2 000 and a reputation among mariners across the oceans as a hospitable haven at the southern tip of Africa, and a notable portof-call for big international events of the stature of the Whitbread Race, the BT Global Challenge, the BOC Around Alone Race and the Volvo Race.
The Royal Cape is also at the centre of a working harbour which, in turn, is subject to the demands of the global maritime economy, and the needs and pressures of domestic trade and economic imperatives. One of the most far-reaching changes has been the revolutionary shift to container shipping.
This is the larger setting in which, as a port partner, the 112-year-old club is engaged in charting its future – which may not necessarily be at its present site at the Paarden Eiland edge of Duncan Dock, where its lease comes up for renewal, or renegotiation, in 2023.
The long-term vision of the Transnet National Port Authority (TPNA) incorporates an extensive expansion of the commercial operations in the harbour, focused largely on container shipping, and – though nothing is entirely set in stone – moving the yacht club and filling in the marina to form part of a ship repair facility.
A key part of the plan and a more immediate scheme is the creation of a new cruise liner terminal at E berth, with an associated public precinct. Plans for this are being fleshed out jointly by the city, the province and the port authority.
Allied to the greater scheme is what TNPA chief executive Shulami Qalinge – the first woman to hold the post – has described as a “mandate to address transformation in the port industry and the commercialisation of historic lowvalue rentals”.
Yacht clubs have traditionally benefited from lower-than-market rentals, relying as they do chiefly on membership fees and income from catering facilities.
Equally, yacht clubs can and do play a significant transformational role in providing access to marine sport, careers in the wider maritime sphere and recreational opportunities to people in communities for whom sailing might remain “as foreign as Mars”.
Among the notable beneficiaries of this process – and a sailor in last week’s Lipton Cup races – is one of South Africa’s Olympic yachtsman, Asenathi Jim.
A recent initiative, in collaboration with the city, saw Lindani Mchunu taking 21 children from Manenberg out into Table Bay, among whom were some who had never even seen the sea, according to RCYC commodore Vitor Medina.
In an interview, Medina and his vicecommodore, Luke Scott, emphasised the club’s commitment to extending access to the sport through its Sailing Academy (and partnerships with other clubs, organisations and institutions), and its hopes of going a step further in seeking partners to establish a marine-industry training facility to expose new sailing enthusiasts to, and equip them for, careers in the wider field of yachting, from boat building and sail making to maintenance and other allied services.
They pointed out that Cape boat builders were already significant suppliers to the world yachting market, and there was considerable scope for a training facility.
These features of the RCYC’s longer- term activities, they said, formed part of the club’s ongoing engagement with the port authority and other harbour stakeholders on the future of the port.
Medina said the most immediate development was a study to be undertaken by Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA ) over the next year to assess the feasibility of filling in the yachting marina, as envisioned in the port’s longterm plan.
The outcome of the study would guide negotiations on the club’s future location.
“There is no plan to move us at this stage,” said Medina. “Our lease expires at the end of 2023, so there is still time for us to plan our future.”
There were other location options in the harbour precinct, but the first step was the feasibility study on filling in the marina.
Scott pointed out that the expiry of the lease was not automatically the end of the road, as renewal of port leases was a routine cycle. The club was confident of remaining a part of the harbour and was an active participant in ongoing discussions with the port authority and others.
In the meantime, the Sailing Academy was extending the reach of sailing enthusiasm and emphasising the potential of the RCYC to be “an everyman club”.
Medina and Scott said that while owning a boat could be expensive, being a sailor – and serving as crew on boats at the club – was “inexpensive”, and that, through the Sailing Academy, it was an opportunity the club was extending to young people who might never have imagined taking up sailing as a sport.
The academy programme, which is held on Saturdays and Sundays, is broadly aimed at people aged between 16 and 23.
Scott noted that “all young sailors get the same chance to excel” through training and racing on the academy’s four L26 boats, and all became club members free of charge.
In addition, Scott said that from the beginning of this year, the RCYC had been funding full board and tuition for two learners, Aphelele Ntshinka and Thapelo Moletsane, at the Lawhill Maritime Centre in Simon’s Town. The club had formed an alliance with the General Botha Old Boys’ Association to provide mentorship and extracurricular support for the learners.
There was an international dimension, too. The Marine Inspirations organisation, based in Palma de Mallorca and geared to empowering would-be seafarers who would otherwise not be exposed to yachting or the maritime industry, had recently invited Sailing Academy member, Mphumzi Tsholoba, and a learner from Lawhill, “to experience the heart of the European super yacht industry first hand”.
Writing in the club’s magazine, Sail, Lindani Mchunu described how he would never have dreamed of a career in yachting had he not been exposed to it.
“Inspiration must be tangible,” he wrote, “otherwise it’s daydreaming.” And, in his role as manager of the Sailing Academy, he added: “I am a bridge between two worlds.”