Windpomp 14

The camp the sea took, and the 38 days it took to get it back

By early November 2007 the sea had come through Mile 14. The camp was a strip about two kilometres long on a compacted bank roughly two metres above the beach, and something like 90% of it had been under water or was no longer safe to pitch on. Waves reached the access road. Concrete braai slabs and the concrete markers for each site went, and toilet blocks were torn off their foundations and dragged into the surf. Namibia Wildlife Resorts shut it for overnight camping a few weeks before the December rush. According to The Namibian, people already booked for the holidays were offered a site further up the coast at Jakkalsputz, Mile 72 or Mile 108.

It did not happen in one storm

The Namibian was already reporting in December 2004 that Mile 14 was closed to overnight campers because sites were washing away, so 2007 was the end of a slow loss. High seas were reported through that winter and kept getting worse. The fisheries ministry’s chief biologist at Swakopmund called it ordinary beach erosion, a shoreline changing shape, and was wary of putting it down to global warming and rising seas. In April 2008 the waves were still going over the camp road at high tide.

Then nothing. NWR said it wanted a private partner, and the camp sat. In July 2009 The Namibian found staff still posted there with broken vehicles and a dead generator, one of them a man who had worked at Mile 14 since before Independence in 1990. The other three coast camps were handed to an outside operator while talks over this one dragged on. Mile 14 stayed a ruin beside the C34 for six more years.

Why it reopened in such a hurry

In late October 2015 NWR announced that all four camps in Dorob National Park would be shut over the festive season, and suggested people try Torra Bay or Terrace Bay instead. Both are far up the Skeleton Coast. The chief executive of the Henties Bay municipality said he had learnt of it from the media, and that it came as a shock.

Afrikaner families from Namibia and South Africa were the December crowd at Mile 14, thousands of them each year before the sea got in, and they made a noise. On 3 November NWR formed a joint venture with Sun Karros, the hospitality arm of the Prosperity Group. Phase one was finished on 11 December, 38 days later, with 24 powered sites, hot showers, flush toilets and a pub and grill called the Barnyard. At the launch NWR’s managing director, Zelna Hengari, joked that it was the “angry boere” who had brought the partnership about, then apologised for not having asked them first. Kobus Struwig of Prosperity said he had driven up and down the wrecked camp a few years earlier, sorry to see what had become of a place he remembered fondly.

The camp came back with a new name, Windpomp 14. None of the reports from the time, and nothing Sun Karros publishes, says which windpump it is named for, so I will not guess.

What changed after 2015

Late in 2018 a poster on the 4x4 Community forum noted that the camp had just been given private ablutions, and recommended it over staying in town for that reason. That is one person’s post, but it fits what Sun Karros describes today: 21 sites where the launch had 24, each with its own bathroom. The company puts its total spend at more than ten million Namibian dollars, about five times what Struwig said phase one had cost.

On animals, be realistic. People come here for the fish, kabeljou, galjoen and steenbras above all, and those are covered under Henties Bay. Nothing I could find in print describes wildlife at the camp itself.