South Africa’s biggest inland marina

This article was also published in issue 153 of Marina World magazine. Click here to read the online version.

About one and a half hours south of Johannesburg lies the enormous Vaal Dam. With a surface area of 320 square kilometres and constructed in 1938, it is also home to Bayshore Marina, the biggest custom-built inland marina in South Africa.

“The original marina was started by my dad in 1989,” said Greg Pilling, director of Bayshore Marina. “In a previous life he worked in video training and the CEO of a company he had once worked for retired due to ill health. That CEO started building a small development of four or five houses, but in those days there was not really much at the dam at all.”

“Then my dad came in and realised that, in order to encourage people to come in, buy and see the vision, he had to build a marina. So the marina really got built as a sales aid to the property development just next door.”

Construction on the marina took three years and some 440,000 cubic metres of earth were moved. They started by building a retainer wall to close off the marina from the dam, but no sooner than having finished the wall did the water level in the dam drop to below the critical level.

“If we’d waited a year we would have saved a fortune because we wouldn’t have had to build that wall!” Greg recounted.

After the marina’s opening in 1993, residents living in the neighbouring property development began renting garages for their boats, which remains one of Bayshore Marina’s main income streams to this day. A restaurant, a small petrol station, convenience stores and a boat hoist were also added, but it more or less stayed the same with minimal development for 20 years.

“The boat garages are brilliant. About 99 percent of them are power boats and those people don’t really want to shlep their boats backwards or forwards from Johannesburg. Some of them don’t even come down for a year or two, they just keep paying for the convenience. But the yachts, they are the people who want to spend their weekends on their boats, on the water, fiddling away, what yachties do!”

‍Weather patterns and low water levels

This being a dam, however, means that the marina is vulnerable to low water levels. Particularly in this part of South Africa, in an area known as the highveld that covers the central-northeast part of the country, winters are cold and dry. June, July and August will only average a few millimetres of rain each month. The Vaal Dam is also the main source of drinking water for Johannesburg and many other surrounding settlements, putting enormous pressure on the dam especially after prolonged dry periods.

“There are cycles in the weather, a short, mid and long-term cycle,” explained Greg. “When a couple of them coincide, water levels will drop quite significantly. There are times when the dam is only at about 20 percent. When this happens, the water is about 200m from the mouth of the harbour and all the walkways literally sit on the ground.”

Bayshore Marina offers customers the chance to store their boats on the hard thanks to a lifting crane, lifting basin and stands. About 80 percent of customers take them up on the offer but 20 percent leave and store their boats at home. This does present a problem for Bayshore, however.

“Eventually the water comes back and some people put their boats back, but you will only be at about 60-70 percent of what you used to be. It is difficult to build that business up again,” said Greg. “But the garages are great, the fuel station is seasonal, the marina is all ready now for someone to throw a bit more money at it, whether it be marina upgrades, a marina village, a retirement home or investing in the campsite. We already have the facilities for that, but it could be upgraded into a sort of ‘glamping’ campsite.”

‍A busy day at Bayshore

The peak season at Bayshore Marina and indeed the surrounding Vaal Dam area is of course the summer, especially through December and around Christmas and New Year. On a busy day they will be launching around 30 boats, with sometimes a queue of up to 20 boats waiting to come in and fill up or be retrieved onto the hard.

“The restaurant is also pretty full,” said Greg. “In fact on Christmas Eve last year it was so full that we even ran out of food. So we had to close and then re-open again on Christmas Day. We have some day visitors coming in and in the very peak season we charge a nominal fee as well. In the peak summer weeks we will often stick around until eight or nine in the evening, taking boats out. But to be honest, we don’t market ourselves one bit, so there could be room to grow.”

During the austere highveld winters, Bayshore Marina will close the petrol station as very few people will be out and about on the dam at that time of year. Much of their work is “super seasonal”, according to Greg.

“However, the Midvaal Local Municipality in Meyerton has deemed our area to be a little island that forms part of the so-called ‘urban edge’ to try and grow tourism in the area. Beyond that, it’s all agricultural land where rezoning and developments are more difficult. The municipality is supporting developers with projects that will attract people to the Vaal Marina area. For example, we hope that a small soft game reserve with animals like antelope and houses all around will open soon.”

That said, nearby Johannesburg is notorious for its poor infrastructure, creaking and crumbling after decades of mismanagement and underinvestment. Whether it be the state of its roads, water and electricity supply, crime or corruption, one cannot hide from the fact that South Africa is not without its fair share of problems.

“People are looking for a place to get away,” said Greg. “It’s got to be safe, secure and nice. It’s got to have a holiday-like atmosphere. Places like ours, which are about one and a half hours south of Johannesburg, are perfect for that. It just needs a bit of critical mass to take off.”

‍“Get them out of the shopping malls”

Given the relative dearth of boating opportunities in the region - it can be difficult to find large bodies of water at almost 2,000m above sea level - boaters have been known to come from over two hours away to enjoy Bayshore Marina and the wider Vaal Dam, which straddles the three provinces of Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Free State.

“The majority of people here used to be business owners from the southern half of Johannesburg, but then we started getting a few more from as far away as northern Pretoria because the Hartbeespoort Dam started having a problem with weeds. The Pelindaba nuclear power station is also nearby, and a couple of past incidents there made some people nervous. So they started coming down here for their boating fix,” Greg said.

In recent years, however, Bayshore Marina has seen an increase in customers from “career corporate people”, Greg explained, who would have children and want to “get them out of the shopping malls”. For many young people in South Africa, large shopping malls are often the place to go and hang out after school and on weekends.

“What tends to happen is that people’s kids get to around 10 years old, and then they start to see the lure of parties and shopping malls and that sort of thing. So the parents try to get their kids out of there, buy a boat and go out and have fun on the weekends out on the water.

“People tend to hang on to the boat garages for just over six years or so, which is roughly how long people hold houses for in the area. And it makes sense. By the time the kids are around 16 years old, they aren’t so interested in going away with their folks at the weekend! They want to go out with their mates and use exams as an excuse!”

‍Future developments

While the entrance to the marina and around the restaurant is around eight metres deep when the dam is at 100 percent, the opposite end of the marina is only about four metres deep. So if the water in the dam drops to about 60 percent, boats are unable to float in that corner of the marina, especially if they have a keel.

“I’m not sure if extending the marina into that part is worth the effort,” said Greg. “As far as the marina itself is concerned, I would like to get back to the 100 moorings with full rental occupancy. But this is more of a marketing thing.”

“But for the shallow half of the marina, my daft plan would be to build a wall, keep it permanently filled with water and, using the same walkways, moor a couple of boats there. I would then rent those boats out as apartments or mini-hotels. That way I don’t actually need any planning permission because they are boats, not buildings.”

The pontoons in the marina itself have been there for about 30 years, and while most of the wood and the floats are in pretty good shape, they need to spend “a lot of money”, according to Greg. “Just to replace the wood there will be about 350,000 rand,” he says, or about $21,600 USD. 

“I would also like to build a walkway that goes directly from the restaurant to the moorings and then another one from the moorings to the residential area. We have all the planning permission and approvals for these residences, we just need to work a couple more things out before getting started.

“But for many of these technological marina upgrades we see coming to market, a lot of them are developed in hard currency. We need to recoup the cost of investing in them in South African rand, which can be challenging.”

‍“A farmer makes a plan”

Nevertheless, Bayshore was conceived as and remains a truly unique marina in a part of the world hardly well-known for its boating. It was born during a time of seismic change in South Africa and has operated continuously for over 30 years, despite no shortage of challenges.

Greg Pilling is confident that no other marina like Bayshore will ever emerge, at least on the Vaal Dam. After all, the dam remains the main source of drinking water for Johannesburg and is managed by the Department of Water and Sanitation. The arrival of any more developments would bring concerns around water pollution, meaning that it is unlikely that any such development rights will ever be granted again. Bayshore Marina is therefore in a unique position to grow in an area with promising touristic credentials and without much competition when it comes to boating.

“There is a saying in Afrikaans and it encapsulates how many people in South Africa approach life,” concluded Greg. “We say ‘‘n boer maak ‘n plan’, which means ‘a farmer makes a plan’. We always find ways to do things very differently with what we’ve got. We always manage to find a way.”