Yacht Club Eternal Light falls from Grace!

[Michael Alexander]

For many a year, in the dark Namib nights, just on the edge of the sprawling township, if one gazed towards the coast in the direction of the Yacht Club, you could always see the Orange glow of the eternal light down at the sailing basin...... It is with a great sense of sadness , I had to photograph the eternal light, still shining, hanging from her mountings..... no longer will she shine on through.....

[naftal]

there are great plans for that place, you just wait and see

[Michael Alexander]

Are you talking about the impending tsunami?

[Alfred Boehme]

Are they going to buy boats and things fill it with water and sail again?

[naftal]

There are great ideas for the Angling club to take it over, I figure they have great plans to resurrect it for other uses.

[Alfred Boehme]

I presume the Angling club is going to fix everything and will they fill it with water again?

[Clive Symes]

Get one of the Salt Companies to supply a few hundres tons of rock salt & return the pan to its original Salinity, why it may even begin to turn Pink again

[John Creedy]

Hi
Before the days of the yacht club, the pink pan was just that - pink with salt and hundreds of flamingoes.  There was a sole yachtman by the name of Mr Gerika (sp) who I believe was the first one to enjoy the sailing.  He was a teacher and aging in those days but sure had spirit.

[Michael Alexander]

Mmmh! Here;s a snap from the Yacht club in busier times!

[Alfred Boehme]

The gentleman sitting at the helm of this little boat where the children are boarding with spectacles on looks like Oom Peet Buzedenhout?
what do you think

[Bob Molloy]

Wandering through the archives brought me to this intrigueing topic: The Yacht Club.
It was once a weekend Mecca for most oranjemunders, whole famlies, young and old, frolicked in, on and even under the water in sail and power boats.
All that's left today is an abandoned yacht club building and an almost dry lake.
What happened? Does anyone know? What happened to the water, why did it dry up? Did they stop pumping? And if so why?
I could so easily and cheaply be resurrected. All it needs is a waterhole next to the beach and a pump to begin filling the pan again. If the pan needs deepening, this can easily be done in a few weeks with a dragline. Surely there's a surplus of these machines on the mine?
As for the pink colour, that will quickly return as the salt water evaporates from the surface and increases the salinity of the remaining water.

[Alfred Boehme]

Do you really want to know what happened....... nothing that's why it's the way it is

I do recall a story that curtain members could not handle the salt water in there eyes so they filled it with river water and the weeds took over sailor's where complaining the dagger boards would get tied up in the weeds.

another reason the clubs had to sustain themselves with out assistance from the company the cost of pump and water was not feasible. 

[Bob Molloy]

The cost of pumping and dredging was borne by the CDM in those days. Was there some kind of cost-saving/retrenchment that stopped it? If so, it was surely a very short-sighted view of what was indeed a tremendous community facility.
On that score, does the community theatre still operate? And what happened to the Recreation Club, the town cafe, Katie's Bar and Casey's Bar?.
I get the impression there were some radical changes to Omund since CDM left the scene.

[Michael Alexander]

I think that it was more to do with a lack of members.

To put it bluntly, the yacht club was the domain of the european expat community.
After independence occurred the expats who sailed started to leave as the new Namibian government wanted previously disadvantaged Namibians to fill the positions....

Between 1990 till 2001 the club saw it's membership dwindle, the older seadogs that had managed to hold out, eventually retired and moved out of the township....

The same occurred to other institutions in the town like the Cricket and tennis club to name but a few...

If more previously disadvantaged Namibians had been interested in the disciplines, we might have been sitting in a different situation today....

Just my two cents...

[Mike Thurtell]

Michael, did the white expat community do anything proactive about raising interest amongst those who were not only disadvantaged but actively prevented from participating in community activities, let alone economic activities except as labourers and a few higher up? I recall Oranjemund as a social experiment that would have made Verwoed proud.