Skeleton Coast Park

Lions on the beach and the tug lost saving a liner

On 17 December 2024 a collared lioness known to researchers as Xpl-108 walked out of the desert at the Uniab delta, up the coast from the Torra Bay campsite in the middle of its two-month season. In the early hours of the 19th she killed a large Cape fur seal on the beach. She then worked the shore and the reed beds at the river mouth, and spent Christmas Eve resting in reeds just east of the main road.

Three orphans on an island in a spring

Lions hunted this shore until conflict with people inland wiped them out in the 1980s. The last ones in the park were dead by 1990. They came back from about 2002, but it took another fifteen years before any of them worked out that the sea was edible.

The ones who did were three sisters. Their mother, Xpl-55 of the Hoanib Floodplain pride, died when they were eleven months old. They crossed the dunes to a spring at the Hoanib mouth, holed up on an island in it and lived on cormorants, red-billed teal and the odd flamingo, stalked half under water in the reeds. In August 2017 they found the seal colony at Möwe Bay and fed on carcasses. By 2018 two of them were killing seals at the river mouth. Flip Stander of Desert Lion Conservation kept a tally for eighteen months: 60 cormorants, 18 seals and 2 flamingos, 86 per cent of what they ate by weight. Magazine writers call the three Alpha, Bravo and Charlie.

The third sister went inland, joined an older lioness up the Hoanib and learnt to hunt giraffe. Stander’s project lists her as Xpl-114, spells the name Charly, and calls her arguably the most photographed lioness in Namibia. On the night of 30 May 2025 she killed Bernd Kebbel, a 59 year old businessman, after he left his tent at a camp on the Hoanib. Kebbel had been giving the lion project money for collars and repairs since before 2010, at first anonymously. Charly was put down on 1 June. The project’s report blamed habituation. Safari vehicles had been sitting an average of 10.6 m from her, where the agreed distance is 50 m.

What a self-driver can expect at the Uniab

All of that happens in the closed north or inland around the Palmwag concession, on guided trips. The public road reaches one place where beach lions turn up, the Uniab delta between Torra Bay and Terrace Bay. Xpl-108 belongs to the Obab group inland and comes down for oryx at the springs and seals on the beach. One summer she spent more than thirty days inside the 40 km of beach around Torra Bay that the lion project has ringed with a virtual fence. A collar crossing it alerts the lion rangers and the camp managers. A party of anglers who got too close to a lioness there had their vehicle charged.

So the chance is real and small. It is best from late November to January, when she has been recorded there, and the seal kills on record happened at night or before sunrise. At Terrace Bay the place to look at dusk is the generator building. Expert Africa says cormorants roost on it for the warmth, and that jackals and sometimes a brown hyena hang about underneath.

Eleven police trucks and a bomber in a salt pan

The wreck that made the coast famous lies in the closed section, about 50 miles south of the Kunene. The Blue Star liner Dunedin Star, carrying munitions for the Eighth Army, hit something on the night of 29 November 1942 and was run aground. A motorboat put 63 people on the beach, eight women and three babies among them, before the surf put it out of action.

Then the rescuers started needing rescue. The Walvis Bay tug Sir Charles Elliot helped get the last of the crew off the liner, turned for home and ran aground north of Rocky Point on 4 December. Her first officer Angus McIntyre and deckhand Mathias Korabseb did not survive the swim to the beach. Captain Immins Naudé landed an air force Ventura near the castaways and it sank through the crust of a salt pan. A police convoy under Captain J.W.B. Smith drove up from Windhoek, fetched the last people off the beach and had its eleven trucks home on 23 December. Naudé went back in January, dug his bomber out in four days, took off on the 29th and was in the sea 43 minutes later. He and his two crew swam ashore. Nobody from the liner died.

John Marsh wrote it all up in 1944 under the title Skeleton Coast, and the book is where the name took hold.

The lawyer whose clients wanted a harbour

Louw Schoeman was an attorney whose clients were prospecting up here and looking into a harbour. He got hooked, pushed for the park that was proclaimed in 1971, and from 1977 took paying guests into the far north. He died in 1993 and his sons Bertus, André, Leon and Henk carried on. The firm flies its guests in by Cessna 210 these days. A deep-water port at Cape Fria has been proposed on and off since the 1980s all the same.

Not every scheme stayed on paper. The fallen oil rig near the Huab mouth was put up by Ben du Preez, who was after oil and diamonds in the late 1960s and early 1970s and found neither.

Six hours of gravel for one night

Expert Africa puts Terrace Bay at about six hours from Swakopmund, and says most people sleep once and leave. It calls the rooms functional, one of its guests called them very dated, and another wrote of having reached the end of the world. A 4x4 forum writer called the coast forlorn and massive in the same breath, and said it was the seals at Cape Cross that lived up to the hopes. This park suits people who like emptiness for its own sake. It will bore anyone waiting for something to happpen.