Here’s the thing about Meob Bay – for most of the last century, you couldn’t just go there. It sat inside the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden zone, locked up tight behind permits and checkpoints. No tour operators, no concession holders, none of that. If you weren’t connected to the mine, you weren’t getting anywhere near it.
Our lot got in anyway.
Back in the days when the diamond area was still tightly controlled, Oranjemund Angling Club members – working for the mining company as they did – were some of the only people on the planet allowed to set foot on that beach. And we didn’t just fish it and leave. We built a proper camp there. Showers. Freezers. Somewhere to actually stay comfortable in one of the harshest bits of coastline in the country.
There’s a story that does the rounds about the seventies, when the Club chartered a Dakota – an actual aircraft – just to fly members up to Meob to conduct maintenance on the equipment used by the prospecting staff. Landed right there between the dunes and the beach on a flat open plane. Think about that for a second: a beach that for two hundred years had only ever seen shipwrecked sailors and half-starved prospectors, suddenly getting a plane load of blokes with tools and rods as they were allowed some fishing when the job was done.
The fishing was worth all of it, and still is. That stretch of coast is one of the big spawning grounds for the Westcoast Steenbra and the Silver Kob along the Namibian coastline – the big ones, seventy centimetres plus, push south against the current every summer to breed right there off Meob and Sandwich Harbour. The Steenbras was found to be the “local inhabitants” of the shoreline in that area.
None of this happens without Namdeb, or DeBeers in the early years. Oranjemund itself was built and run by the mine for decades – school, hospital, the lot. That is the reason a small angling club ever had the access and the standing to run a camp at a bay that remote. Diamonds opened the door. We just walked through it with tools and fishing rods.
Since the 90’s, Oranjemund Angling Club partnered with the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine resources through a monitoring and research program, through which about 70 000 fish were tagged and released, but also two PhD’s and a Masters Degree culminated… the tellies are still adding up.
The Club still runs around six research & monitoring trips a year up to Meob. Same bay, same current, same group of dedicated anglers doing their bit for sustainable angling. Some things don’t change.
