Tsunami and salvage

On my way to the Saldanha Yacht Club I heard radio reports of a "mini-tsunami" that had hit South Africa's West Coast. Abnormally high and low tides and damage to a few buildings in St Helena Bay, they said. Since our newly acquired boat, Elegance, is moored at Saldanha and this is just around the corner, we were concerned but found that nobody had noticed anything strange happening there. But we sailed past five or six boats towing loads of highly-prized timber - valuable salvage in a time when the world's forests are disgracefully disappearing - that had been shed by a cargo ship, offshore, and we wondered whether the two circumstances were related.