A journey down memory lane for a boy who grew up wild in then-East London revealed an unpublicised pollution horror — but also a glimmer of a solution. Tony Dubber, now retired, recalled how he and his similarly feral boyhood friends would run around in the hills of yet-to-be developed Beacon Bay in the 1970s. Their favourite spots were two dams, one a quarry, in a valley.
Today they are swathed by Nompumelelo township, which has mushroomed in recent decades. Dubber says these formerly pristine waters, which he and his angling friends helped stock with fish, are now stinking, sewage and plastic-filled grease traps for a township which lacks basic infrastructure, in this case sewage and storm drainage systems. With the waters, once capable of producing good catches of bass, are now foetid, dead, Dubber recalled how it could be, if repaired.
“I grew up in Abbotsford, and as a teenager, we used to play in the hills between now-Nompumelelo and the Abbotsford Christian Centre. It was all municipal commonage,” he said. “There was one house that was on top of that hill.
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It was a wood and iron house where a couple lived, and the municipality allowed them to stay on that property. Nobody else lived on that land. “One of my friends’ uncle told him about bass that he had put in a dam at the top just behind where Homeleigh garage is now.
“There was another quarry dam 500m uphill so my cousin and I went fishing there and we caught 12 bass in half an hour. This smaller dam was full of bass, it was untouched. “After a couple of days of fishing there, we decided we’ll put some of our bass in the other dam, which was very deep with crystal clear water, and eventually, a few years later, we could see them in shoals, but we could never catch them. “They were not interested in our lures because they had so much food from nature.
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