Harbour Boat Cruise with Seal Watching, Cape Town

The V&A Waterfront's working harbour

The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront is built around Cape Town's original harbour, whose two basins were dug in the nineteenth century to give ships a safe anchorage in Table Bay. Unlike many redeveloped waterfronts it is still a working harbour: fishing boats land their catch, tugs guide ships in and out and the Robben Island ferry departs from its own gateway. The cruise departs from Quay 5 in the middle of all this activity.

Many visitors search for things to do at the V&A Waterfront with children, and the harbour cruise is one of the simplest answers: thirty minutes, no transfer and a boat with an open upper deck. We ask you to check in at the jetty a few minutes before your chosen departure; boats leave every hour from 11:00 to 15:00, so it fits easily around lunch, the aquarium or shopping.

Seal watching around the quays

The Cape fur seals of the Waterfront are the stars of this cruise. Dozens of them live in and around the harbour, resting on the wooden jetties and old tyres, sunning themselves on the quays and swimming between the boats in search of fish scraps. The boat passes slowly by their favourite resting places so that everyone, especially children, can watch them at close range from the deck.

Seal watching in Cape Town is possible all year, with the harbour colony present in every season, but the seals are wild animals and come and go as they please, so sightings are usual rather than guaranteed. The host explains how the seals live, why they are protected and how to watch them responsibly: no feeding, no touching and no loud noise, so that the harbour remains a safe home for them.

Table Mountain from the water

From the open upper deck the boat gives you the classic view of Cape Town that only the sea can offer: Table Mountain's flat summit directly behind the city, Lion's Head rising to its right and Signal Hill sloping down towards the stadium and the Atlantic. The low angle from the water makes the mountain look even taller, and the Waterfront's Victorian warehouses and modern hotels line up in front of it.

The light on the mountain is best in the middle of the day, which is exactly when the cruise operates, and on clear afternoons the famous tablecloth of cloud sometimes spills over the summit. If you want more time on the water afterwards, our longer coastal and sunset catamaran cruises leave from the same jetty and can be booked on this site.

The dry dock, Clock Tower and swing bridge

The harbour cruise passes the oldest corners of the Waterfront. The dry dock, opened in the 1880s, is still in use for repairing boats and is one of the oldest working dry docks of its kind in the world. Next to the entrance of the Alfred Basin stands the red Clock Tower, the original harbour master's office from 1882, with its Gothic windows and the swing bridge that opens to let boats through.

The host's live commentary ties these sights together with stories of the harbour's history, from the first ships that called at the Cape for fresh water to today's fishing fleet. Thirty minutes is enough to see all of it without tiring small children, which is why this is the most family-friendly cruise at the V&A Waterfront. Back at Quay 5 you step straight into the shops and restaurants.