Dear Supporter, Friends and Ocean Lovers,
A tragic event played out along our coastline on Sunday 24 March 2013 when 20 False Killer Whales beached themselves on Noordhoek beach, Cape Peninsula. Our intrepid AfriOceans team were there, both to witness the organisational strategy around the stranding and to offer assistance to the whales.
AfriOceans believes that the response by the authorities to the stranding fell well short of international best practice and we are presently interacting with the relevant authorities in this regard, although we have been excluded from the debriefing process.
This newsletter aims to give you two different perspectives: firstly my experience on the beach and throughout the day’s events while attempting to document the stranding as a filmmaker and as the head of South Africa’s longstanding marine NGO; secondly, AfriOceans Head of Education Terry Corr gives his first hand account of his efforts to save the whales in his moving blog.
As a new era of cooperative governance, shared decision making, transparency and accountability have been recognised as the cornerstones of the Integrated Coastal Management Act in South Africa, many questions arise as a result of this mass stranding.
As AfriOceans speaks for those that cannot, in this case the whales, as the ‘Voice of our Oceans’, we believe it is our constitutional right and responsibility to ask questions and raise our concerns in the interests of significantly improving the response to strandings in the future.
For the whales,
Kind regards, Lesley Rochat
Founder & Executive Director, AOCA
More information supplied here;
http://tinyurl.com/bnqnxzz
and here
http://tinyurl.com/cdkqhbk
