Skeleton Coast. No need to try to find a more catchy headline for this post. And unfortunately for many, Skeleton Coast has during the centuries caught a lot of souls and ships in its traps. With dramatic consequences. This is the end of the world, you see.

Vast stretches of shoreline from Namibia to Angola are out-of-bounds due to diamonds in the rough hiding in the dune sand. If you look for them without a modern, trustworthy 4WD vehicle you will not survive long: in this lunar landscape there is no shade, no water except for salt water, and it is either foggy or hot during the day and very cold at night. Skeleton Coast hides countless skeletons of ships and unfortunate crews. The wrecked ships are scattered along the shore: old wooden ships like the Seal, and more modern, metal-hull vessels. Even warships have met their fate in the sharp underwater rocks and neverending swells and rip currents. The most famous warship is the Dunedin Star which wrecked near the Angolan border in 1942. The rescue ship stranded, as well. The rescue plane sent to get the two crews out got bogged in the sand and could not take off again.How long, dark, cold, and scary must the nights have been for those hunkering down on the shore, waiting for weeks in makeshift shelters. Most sailors and crew did not know how to swim and getting to the shore from the breaking ship was a nearly impossible task: life rafts got lost and broken in the swells.

After traveling through the vehicle-hostile Namibian country for 2 weeks, a truck convoy was able to rescue the two crowds. Everybody survived. This was a fate much different from other strandings.(Skeleton Coast, Namibia; July 2017)