Sep
8
Snoek Town Calling
Filed Under Live
It’s September in Cape Town. It’s snoek season.
Pop down to Kalk Bay harbour and envelope yourself on the sights, sounds and smells of the snoek season.
Cape snoek (Thyrsites atun):
Snoek is as much part of Cape as Table Mountain and Robben Island. It’s a Barracuda type fish and extremely aggressive. When pulled from the water it comes out snapping and it can deliver a very nasty bite which delivers a Haemo-toxic fluid. The fisherman’s’ cure is that you cut open the eyeball of the fish and use that fluid to wash the wound.
[A fisherwoman starts the laborious cleaning process]
[Entrails litter the cleaning table - caviar for the nearby seals who come on to dry ground and lap them up]
Cape Town has long had the moniker of ’snoektown’ which was immortalised by the Springbok Radio programme ‘Snoektown Calling’ with Cecil Wightman in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. Cecil started the programme with a blast of the ’snoek horn’, fashioned from dry kelp. The horn also made its way to Newlands rugby ground where it was blasted to signal a Western Province try or victory. (An early vuvuzela!)
[Freshly filleted snoek waiting to be snapped up by an eager buyer]
["You can have them cheep, merrem"]
Any interesting anecdote about snoektown was that it was the callsign used by pilots to denote Cape Town during the early days of South African Airways and small light aircraft.
[Each freshly filleted snoek is washed off in the trough - it gets bit mucky but it's all part of the show]
On our way back to the car, we discovered one of the fishermen, straight from the boats: he gives new meaning to the term ‘over-refreshed’.
A concerned Madame - we were then informed by a young child that “his wife made him dronk“. We were happy to find, he was still alive.
More about snoek: Snoek is an ocean fish. It can weigh up to 5.5 kg and measure to just above the average person’s waist, from the ground up. One of the heaviest snoek landed was in 1959 and it weighed 13kg. It has a silver colour and the scales are not easily visible as it seems to shed it’s fine scales when it’s pulled from the water. Snoek is caught using a hand-line and mainly from April to around August. Lately they are caught all year round, which is an indication, perhaps of global warming.
Snoek and Chips to a Capetonian is like Burger and Hot-dogs to an American. Dried fish (called ‘bokkoms’) is the cheapest form of protein for the fishing communities and fish is one of the cheapest most wholesome meals purchased in the Cape.
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[...] Snoek Town Calling – Fans of Living Stylishly Well will be aware that our boy is taking a break from Provence and is in the Mother City with “Madame.” They took a turn at Kalk Bay’s Live Bait restaurant. “It’s September in Cape Town. It’s snoek season. Pop down to Kalk Bay harbour and envelope yourself on the sights, sounds and smells of the snoek season.” More.. [livingstylishlywell] [...]
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