GQEBERHA - Rivers and the ocean are consistently polluted, with devastating consequences for marine life.
But the metro has allowed the hosting of the Lifesaving National Championships at Hobie Beach in Summerstrand.
And environmentalists say raw sewage has been flowing into the ocean near the venue for 10 straight days.
Residents said they had been noticing dying fish since early this week. And at low tide, the rotten smell hits the community.
Professor Nadine Strydom from Nelson Mandela University says this is not a new problem.
"Essentially what we have now it's another ecological disaster. There's a waste water problem, it's relatively poorly managed, there's poor maintenance and once again we have massive spill entering the Swartkops Estuary.
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"We basically knocked out thousands of future fish. That would have been part of the ecosystem in anything between 3 to 5-years’ time. Now due to this sewage spills, I say we because it's a human error. It's human error what's causing the problems in this natural ecosystem, it's poor management, and poor maintenance. It's an environmental tragedy for all of us."
Pollock Beach in Summerstrand has also not been spared.
And it's just a stone's throw away from the Lifesaving National Championship venue.
Visionary environmentalist Peter Schwartz also raised a lot of questions.
"This is highly toxic at the moment, it does get diluted. All I asked was for the municipality - do you do samples for the water before the Championship? And make them publicly available. That s the law in the country, you got to make the results available. Are they hiding behind something? Are these tests positive? Are they manipulating the results? I don't know."