Simon’s Town Real Estate News

Who Cares If The Tourist PASS Simon’s Town?

Some don’t care but many do care and one such person is my great friend at Boulders Restaurant. Janine wrote me this letter;

Hi Johan,

I look forward to reading your interesting articles.  I sometimes feel so cut off from the outside world, Boulders is my world.  It is a great way to keep in touch with what is happening in our own town.

We really do not appreciate what we have right here in front of us. Every tourist I ever speak to cannot describe how wonderful Simons Town is in one sentence.  Our tourists keep our little town alive and well.  They bring much needed money into our town, and I often wish that there could be a great big welcome board to all who enter this town, to show our appreciation. 

Many tourists and local visitors have travelled through the town and missed so much, they all end up at Boulders. Parking is a problem
so most people just drive on to see the penguins and miss out on a whole experience that our much loved town can offer.  There should be some type of infowelcome board at the entrance to the town to inform our visitors where to go and what not to miss. 

So many people ask about boat trips etc, but could not find the jetty.

In a nut shell we are not a user friendly town, if you are approaching from the station side, you have pretty much travelled through the town before you reach the info office.  By this time our visitors are well on their way to Boulders and Cape Point.
 

I know that I do my bit to keep the business in the town.  We offer our guests an array of activities that we can book them in the town before they even arrive.  Once our guests are here we need to offer them as much as possible to keep our guests here not for one night, but for 3 or 4 nights.

The above is just my thoughts about ways we need to look at promoting our town; we are so seasonal and need all the business we can attract to our town over summer.

Thanks for your input; we need more people like you.
Enjoy this beautiful calm, windless, sunny day in Cape Town,
Janine

Janine. Thanks for the excellent suggestions. I do like your attitude. Your suggestions make a lot of sense.

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The Sagres (III) Tall Ship and school ship of the Portuguese Navy since 1961.

According to Arne Soderlund

The Portuguese Sail Training ship SAGRES arrived in Simon’s Town this morning and leaves Sat at 1700.  She will be open to visitors as follows:

Fri    -    1400 to 1800 and 2000 to 2200

Sat     -    1000 to 1200 and 1400 to 1530

She is lying at Oscar wall in the Naval Dockyard.

The Sagres (III) is a tall ship and school ship of the Portuguese Navy since 1961.

The three-masted ship was launched under the name Albert Leo Schlageter on 30 October 1937 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for the German navy (Kriegsmarine). It thus is a sistership of the Gorch Fock, the Horst Wessel, and the Romanian training vessel Mircea. Another sister, Herbert Norkus, was not completed, while Gorch Fock II was built in 1958 by the Germans to replace the ships lost after the war. The ship was named after Albert Leo Schlageter, who was executed in 1923 by French forces occupying the Ruhr area.

The ship is a steel-built three masted barque, with square sails on the fore and main masts and gaff rigging on the mizzen mast. Her main mast rises 42 m above the deck. She carries 22 sails totalling about 2,000 m² (21,000 ft²) and can reach a top speed of 17 knots (31 km/h) under sail. She has a sparred length of 89 m (295 ft), a width of 12 m (40 ft), a draught of 5.2 m (17 ft), and a displacement at full load of 1,755 tons.

Following a number of international training voyages, the ship was used as a stationary office ship after the outbreak of World War II and was only put into ocean-going service again in 1944 in the Baltic Sea. On 14 November 1944 she hit a Soviet mine off Sassnitz and had to be towed to port in Swinemünde. Eventually transferred to Flensburg, she was taken over there by the Allies when the war ended and finally confiscated by the United States.

In 1948, the US sold her to Brazil for a symbolic price of $5000 USD.^[1] She was towed to Rio de Janeiro, and for Brazil she sailed as a school ship for the Brazilian Navy under the name Guanabara. In 1961, the Portuguese Navy bought her to replace the old school ship Sagres (II) (which was transferred to Hamburg, where she is a museum ship under her original name Rickmer Rickmers). The Portuguese Navy renamed her Sagres (the third ship of that name), and she is still in service.

Source: Wikipedia

Read More The Sagres

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Tall Ships Blog

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