Hout Bay Beach

About this audio guide

This guide to Hout Bay Beach in Cape Town starts with the salt-and-snoek families who worked this shore around 1900, then follows a Frenchman named Lucien Plessis, who in 1904 had the idea of gutting a wrecked sailing ship, the R. Morrow, and running a crawfish cannery inside its hull. For a decade the operation ran, the beach thick with the smell of brine and boiled shellfish, workers packing tins inside timbers that had already failed the sea once. Best heard standing on the ordinary sand where that hull once sat.