Paternoster. or from the Latin.. Our Father....

 Paternoster is this little fishing village on the east coast some 160 kilometres north of Capetown.

They still like to call it a fishing village. And it is. The small kernel at the centre of it. It is what they have been doing for hundreds of years. because this is one of the places in the world where Crayfish make their home on the floor of the ocean. 

There is just the one shop. Known as " the shop" that sells everything from firewood to stamps, bread to toothpaste. 

There are a few shops selling preserves and things made with shells. There is the one church. One school.

One township, where the people who work in the hotels, the guest houses, the rental houses live.

Around this village has grown another village. A whitewashed rural village where many houses have been built. For tourists to come and stay for a few days. Luxurious low-key hotels. Restaurants serving these visitors with excellent complicated or excellent simple or excellent foraged dishes in covered terraces overlooking the beaches. 

  But in the centre of the village, that is where the fishermen still live.

This is how it goes. The boats are parked in front of their houses.

                        

 when it is time, the fishermen and their friends pile into the boats and a truck comes by and hauls the boat on it's trailer down to the beach. The truck reverses back into the water and everyone pushes the boat into the water. The fishermen, dressed in their bright oilskins, get out the oars and pull through the waves until they reach a depth where they pull the cord on their outboard motors and off they roar to drop their baskets.

 Everyone, except for the children, go back somewhere. The children finished with school for the day, play in the water. And oh, is it cold.  Great for crayfish, bracing for everyone else. 

Eventually there is a sound of one, two boats heading back and the beach is now filled with people and an old diesel fuelled jeep. the boats come piling back in. 

They wade out to the boats and throw ropes to the fishermen. The jeeps pull the boats in and onto their waiting trailers. The fishermen hop out and carry their baskets of snapping crayfish up to a metal shack which weighs their catch and it is transferred to small trucks driving them to points south and north where they will be delivered to restaurants. The trucks then take the boats on their trailers filled with people back to their homes on the hill.

 Tomorrow it will start all over again.

It is the most charming place.  Quaint, quiet, welcoming, clean. But it could also become strangely artificial as these little white houses pop up everywhere they can, and new hotels are planned where old abalone factories once stood.  It is the fishermen, who go about their business day after oilskinned day, who give it a pulse. Even though Paternoster now houses one of the 10 best rated restaurants in the world, he is the son of a local family and he just knew how to turn local things he found and foraged into gourmet food. It is the fishermen, who have been finding mussels on the rocks and lobsters and crayfish in the seas since 1863, hopefully they will always own this place.