Noon gun Cape Town SA.

[broadarrow]

Hi Folks, I just thought I would share these pics with you I took in Cape Town South Africa when I was there on holidays earlier this year. Each day midday is marked with a single shot from one of two cannons at the South African navy Lion Battery which is located on Signal Hill above Cape Town and this is audible around the area and right into the city, as to all the details I could not sum it up any better than the sign in picture two below. The first picture gives the total of firings shared between the two guns on the platform and the Durr Estates logo belongs to a local winery who I was informed are sponsoring recovery, restoration and preservation of some of the regions rare cannons from their current locations ie. bollards on the local wharves for ships to tie up to some of them have suffered extensive cable errosion damage from years of ships being tied to them as they are buried in the ground.

Both of these cannons are online to the local observatory for time keeping accuracy which explains the arrangement in the breech area of the guns only one of the guns is loaded with a cartridge each day then they are both primed, as the other one has had a cartridge remaining in it from the previous day the primers one spent one live having being removed after the previous days shot and how they work it is they have a fail safe system that if the first gun to get the signal fails to fire on the day it automatically switches to fire the second gun so no matter what happens the signal shot will ring out over the area should that days primary gun fail to fire. The interesting thing I found is that once the officer explained that a cartridge remains in one gun after that days firing that will become tomorrows primary gun there were people walking around the platform that were happy to cross in front of what was essentially an unprimed but live muzzle, in my opinion, and I was actually laughed at for ducking under the muzzles of both guns in front of the carriage whilst exploring the platform and this was after the other members of the public were informed as to what was going on and after they were reminded they changed their path, interesting!

I have included below a couple of shots that are representative of the uses that old cannons have been put to thankfully something is being done about this. All in all well worth the visit to the area I was amazed at how many different types of muzzle loading cannons I spotted from different nations whilst there a few that spring to mind are Swedish, French, British etc. it almost caused sensory overload, hahaha! I hope this has been interesting and I apologise in advance for the length of the post, Regards, Peter B.

 

[mckutzy]

thats so cool, im glad they keep useing some of these old gun for something.

here in Vancouver we have something similar to that one, it is called The 9 o'clock gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_O'Clock_Gun

it was a signaling for chronometers on ship, i think it is fired by gas, im not too sure, but it is cool to see.

 

[Coot]

Thank you for the post! Good to see a fine tradition respected. :thumbsup:

 

[paulab]

peter.... hope you got a chance to shoot your long range m/l while you were there! cheers paul

 

[broadarrow]

Hi Paulab, no sadly I did not, when I was due to visit with the local M/L club my young bloke ended up in hospital with a bug that was going around locally. My brother-in-law is a local so next time I visit Cape Town I intend to compete at an event and some other shooters from my club have expressed interest in going over for one of their bigger events too, I must say the Cape Town muzzle loaders made every effort to help me get organized to visit with them for which I must say Thank You, and I had only intended to do a social visit on this occasion, Regards, Peter B.

 

[Titus]

Thanks for the post Broadarrow. :grin:

Personally I have never before seen the guns firing but they are well known here in SA. :grin: