Anthropological research in South Africa from 2020 to 2024 reveals deeply spiritual relations with the sea and coast. In the following chapter I indicate that the national government of South Africa is not yet acknowledging these spiritual relations. It is holding on to more utilitarian framings of the sea and coast, articulating its coastline and ocean as economic assets to be leveraged for future growth. The discussion in the chapter proposes, however, that coastal cultural heritage in South Africa is spiritual and deeply historical. It can be more fully understood through the analytical lenses of superposition and recursive loops, for the coast is simultaneously a site of exploitation and care, injustice and belonging, rupture and continuity. These overlapping realities generate ‘echoes’, where historical dispossessions reverberate in the present, shaping contemporary struggles for recognition, justice and sovereignty. In this sense, the coast becomes a mirror universe in which multiple ontologies coexist, fold into one another and demand vernacularised approaches to ocean governance. To navigate this complexity, I offer ethnographies of coastal South Africa to propose that the coast is not a singular space but a multidimensional site, where management decisions affect not only living generations but also ancestral and future ones.