SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
Claire Keeton goes flying on the KZN coast. Marianne Schwankhart took the pictures
THE winter holidays are a good time to take flight. If you’re near Ballito, try microlighting over the ocean — if you’re lucky, you could spot a few stray sardines being followed by birds, dolphins, sharks and whales, since this is the season when shoals of sardines migrate to the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
On a quick microlight flight along the Dolphin Coast recently, I saw four manta rays gliding along the surface; one turtle diving; one fish eagle in flight, its mate perched in the forest canopy near a nest. The pilot, David Daniel, says: “I once saw a whale giving birth from the air. The calf was almost white and a midwife helped lift it to the surface.”
David runs Come Fly Microlights from an airfield near Mvoti, north of Durban.
He often sees dolphins and has observed enough sharks near the breakers to put him off surfing there.
“I once saw a shark that was longer than 6m just behind the backline. It was a Great White. I’ve also seen black-tip sharks and Zambezis,” he says.
Marine life is abundant along this coastline, although the sardine run takes place further south, off the Hibiscus Coast.
A microlight is a zippy, light aircraft — weighing no more than 450kg for take-off — which can launch from and land in small spaces and fly low, as long as it poses no hazard.
David has a hangar full of bright-winged “trikes”, the common name for flex wing microlights which he uses for recreational- and professional-pilot training. To fly in a microlight as a passenger, you need to sign up as a prospective student and sign an indemnity form, according to aviation rules. After I’d met these requirements, he pulled his microlight onto his runway — a short strip in a sugarcane field — and we prepared for takeoff. The engine noise reminded me of a lawnmower — although the microlight’s motor is bigger. After warming the engine, we taxied down the runway, turned around and took-off.
We flew across sugarcane fields towards the sea and above indigenous dune forest. Amid the trees were the ruins of mansions, which presumably belonged to sugar barons in their heyday. When we reached the ocean, we could see myriad luminous blues and greens below us, and rocks and reef through the swell. We flew at about 75km a hour and the flight was mostly smooth.
“Life is slow in the air and everything is clean up there,” says David. “I love the distance and can’t stand to be closed in. There must be a reason angels fly.”
I enjoyed the flight and he gave me a chance to take the controls briefly. Most of his passengers are holidaymakers but he has trained students from as far afield as Alaska, Russia and Turkey.
When David got his private pilot’s licence in 1981, he was pilot of the year at Rand Airport and has since racked up more than 5 000 hours of flying time. From the time he was a kid in Stutterheim, Eastern Cape, he has loved planes and used to polish aircraft at the local club to earn a chance to fly.
“I started flying in 1972 when I was still at school,” he recalls. He is also a hang-glider pilot and taught himself hanggliding in the early ’80s, spreading his wings in the Alps in the south of France. He moved to the KwaZulu-Natal coast in 1986 and stayed. “Here we have warm ocean, warm winters and everything is green.” But he still loves doing longer safari trips to the Drakensberg, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namaqualand on the West Coast.