Quick question. What do you do when the 2 sides of your bridge site are 600 metres apart, but 3 hours apart by road?

If you are SANRAL, you build a cable car.

This week, the Wild Coast bridge with its own commuter ride, a Cape Town marina being built by shipbuilders, and the real reason there is a Christmas tree on that crane.

Plus a free wind map for your next lift, and what to ask your steel supplier before their cash flow becomes your problem.

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Welcome to the Wild Coast, where Africa’s next tallest bridge comes with a staff commuter ride.

Out in the Eastern Cape, SANRAL is building 2 of the biggest bridges the continent has seen. Msikaba is a cable stayed bridge about 580 metres long, with 127 metre pylons and a deck roughly 190 metres above the river gorge. Its neighbour Mtentu is set to become the tallest bridge in Africa at 223 metres.

Here is the part nobody warns you about. The north and south banks of the Msikaba gorge are about 600 metres apart, but the only road between them is a 96 km drive that takes almost 3 hours. So SANRAL had a Swiss cableway company install a temporary cable car that carries up to 6 people, or 500 kg, across in a few minutes. Before that, senior staff relied on a helicopter a few days a week. The cable car runs 24 hours a day, in most weather that would ground the chopper, and costs far less to run.

The latest from SANRAL, in July, is that Msikaba is 70% complete and heading for a 2029 finish. It has already missed completion targets in 2022 and March 2025.

The culprit is not the gorge. SANRAL has pointed to the partial collapse of South Africa’s steel fabrication sector. The deck segments are fabricated at Highveld in Mpumalanga and trucked to site, so cash flow and production problems at the fabricator slow down the whole bridge.

When it finally opens, SANRAL says the bridge will cut the trip between KuGompo City (formerly East London) and Durban by about 85 km, and by 1.5 to 3 hours depending on the vehicle. For freight operators, that is a serious saving.

The trade lesson goes well beyond bridges. If your job depends on structural steel, your fabricator’s cash flow is now part of your programme. More on that in this week’s Build better.

And for the quirky bonus round, the project landed on National Geographic’s Building Impossible, where the host crossed the gorge in that same custom cable car.

A 3 hour detour, solved by a cable car. Never underestimate site logistics.

R230 million, 6 floating steel pontoons, and a ceremony straight out of the shipbuilding handbook.

Quay 7 at the V&A Waterfront will be South Africa’s first purpose built superyacht marina, with berths for 8 vessels of up to 90 metres. The R230 million project is due to be finished on 31 October and to open on 1 November.

Here is the twist. It is being built by shipbuilders, not marina builders. Damen Shipyards Cape Town is fabricating the 6 pontoons, each 30 metres long, 6 metres wide, and around 48 tonnes before fit out. Its managing director says the yard simply brought its patrol vessel, dredger, and tug building discipline to a marina.

That is why the project kicked off with a keel laying ceremony on 16 July. In shipbuilding the keel is a vessel’s structural backbone, and the ceremony is its official birth date. Here it was marked by welding the first structural steel plates.

The tech list reads like a shipyard’s too. 3D modelling, digital scanning, underwater survey systems, and a seabed anchoring system designed for Cape Town’s marine conditions. Each pontoon gets fire and lifesaving gear, water and power kiosks, IT connectivity, and bamboo decking.

The money is staying close to home. About 120 people are on site, 9 local subcontractors are involved, and 76% of procurement spend has gone to local suppliers.

There is a clever bonus use too. Outside superyacht season, the marina doubles as a commissioning and export staging area for Cape Town’s catamaran builders, including Robertson and Caine, Two Oceans Marine, and Balance Catamarans. Superyacht visits to the V&A Waterfront had already grown to 35 vessels in the 2024/25 season.

Built in a shipyard, 76% local spend, due to open 1 November. Not a bad list.

No, it is not an early Christmas. When the last beam goes up on a structure, builders around the world traditionally fix a small evergreen tree to it. It is called a topping out ceremony, and the tree often stays up there until the building is finished.

Nobody knows exactly where it started. The most quoted story points to Scandinavia around 700 AD, where a tree went on top of a new building to appease the tree dwelling spirits displaced when the timber was cut. Other versions credit Native American builders, who believed no structure should stand taller than a tree. One industry guide admits that no version is certain.

The Empire State Building was big enough for 3 separate topping out ceremonies, including a flag raised 1,048 feet (about 319 metres) above the city when the steel frame was complete.

Shipbuilders have their own version, the keel laying we met above. Builders love a ceremony, and honestly the trade has earned a few.

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