But all of this effort thus far proves to be only a down-payment on the real effort that is to come.
We agree to go ashore, relieve ourselves of unnecessary equipment, and then wade back out to complete the landing of our precious cargo.
Jacques’s plan involves pressing three unsuspecting surfers we know well into lending a hand. They’re chatting up some bikini-clad nymphs who are leaning against the big whale rock with my dingy lying on it.
Participation implies a share in the bragging rights if they lend us some muscle for a while. They come with us and the girls don their bikini tops.
Three fresh sets of limbs mean the five of us make better headway coming to shore, and pretty soon we jettison the lift bag that has assisted in deeper water and stagger into the shallows with our barnacle-encrusted treasure.
“What is it?” one of the surfer boys asks.
It’s a reasonable question. Hidden by the debris of sea life, it could just as well be a column from a building site.
“Torpedo,” Jacques says nonchalantly, evidently on impulse. “Off a U-boat.”
“Bullshit!” the guy says, but takes a few steps back anyway.
“Seriously. It’s a torpedo. Old Mr. Hall said we could find it there. It’s a dud.”
“You’re full of crap,” one of the other guys says just as the girls who our helpers are trying to impress arrive, adjusting freshly-donned bikini tops.
“Seriously?” one of the girls cuts in.
“Naaagh,” Jacques relents and gives me a sly grin. “Just a piece of teak driftwood.”
“Doesn’t feel like wood,” one of the guys chips in.
“I promise you… It’s been down there a hundred years. Waterlogged. Off an old coal barge—I’ve got the salvage papers.”
“So, what’re you gonna do with it?” a girl pipes up.
“Dunno. Clean it up, let it dry. See if I can sell it.”
“You wouldn’t waste your time with this if you could get fish that are worth more for less effort.” Another one of the surfers who doesn’t smoke quite as much of that mind-numbing weed gives his verdict. He’s less apt to be fooled.
“Check the water conditions,” Jacques parries. “Can’t get fish in that… so took this old piece of crap out. You guys gonna help us to the road or not?”
They hesitate.
“I’ve got fish in my freezer… crays. You girls eat crayfish? Lobster? Perlie…? That’s abalone in case you don’t know,” he bargains.
“Oh yeah!” the girls sing in unison. “We’ll bring some wine.”
And so it’s set. The musclemen help us lug our load up to the road and Jacques goes off to fetch his Baja buggy.
The deadweight’s the size of an ironing board and now beginning to crawl with the worms and other sea life that have made their home amid the kelp and barnacles.
Small tentacles test the air, perhaps confused about their new dry surroundings. Others leave their homes and begin creeping between the micro kelps and crustaceans studding the surface.
“Gonna make a mess,” I observe the obvious as we gingerly lay our bounty onto the fiberglass back seat. The old VW Bug chassis and leaf-sprung suspension splay dangerously wide under the weight.
Chapter 5
We drop anchor in ten fathoms and I look up in awe.
Above us soars the thickly knotted flora, fynbos slopes of a virgin mountain, untouched by the hand of man.
We’re in a time slip, plunged back hundreds of years into antiquity, right on the mark of a tragedy that happened less than a century ago.
Unusual for this wild coast where ships are quickly dismembered by the elements and barely recognizable as wrecks within a few decades, this wreck is still intact, it’s frame and ribs holding out.
Often, I look at our coast and try to paint out the houses and roads to imagine how it must have looked. Now I do the opposite, and try to paint in what it might look like teaming with humanity and our pigeonhole edifices we call ‘homes’, cut into the slopes.
“You okay?” Jacques asks. “Afraid?”
“Terrified,” I humour his quirky banter.
“No, seriously. You okay? Not even seasick?” He knows I’m better in the water than on it. I love boats, but they don’t like me.
I do appreciate where he’s coming from though—it’s unhealthy to not be a little fearful. Fear stops you from doing stupid things, and when you’re out of your comfort zone—in our case, going deeper than I’ve ever gone, into an environment I’ve never been—it’s good to feel some fear. And fear, from my experience, can trigger seasickness.
“Yeah. I’m apprehensive,” I allow.
“Good.” He pulls his hood on. “Gonna be long?”
“You get in, I’m just thinking.”
“Quit being nostalgic. Concentrate on the job. What’s our objective?”
He asked me this on one of our first dives together when we were out to harvest a sack full of fish, red gold…lobster. I gave him the obvious answer, “To catch as many as possible.”
“No.”
“To get the biggest?” What else was there?
“To not get caught.”
I’d mulled that over and realized he was right. We were doing our teenage business in a sanctuary, and although we would only take out a small bag’s worth from a multitude, always handpicking the biggest so as not to exploit, doing our nefarious business without getting busted was the prime goal to keep in mind.
“To not get caught?” I tentatively venture now.
“Who’s going to catch us here?” He gestures around theatrically with his hand, directing my attention up to the non-existent crowds of a deserted mountain amphitheatre.
The only chance of us getting busted would be if the police boat Wagter showed up. Pronounced ‘Vagter’, the ‘g’ sounds like that throat-clearing rasp a Scotsman makes when he says “Loch”. Wagter is Afrikaans for sentry or guard.
It is a diesel-belching crash-boat. A holdover probably bequeathed to the local coastguard by the British Royal Navy after the Second World War. It has a top speed that most rowing boats can outrun and a thunking engine that announces its slow arrival long before it comes into sight.
But whatever contraband we happen to land today will be entirely incidental to our scouting around the known wreck of the SS Maori.
The Maori evidently shelters some giant crays, but they’ll be entirely for our own pot and laundered into legitimacy by a short run we can make across the boundary at Chapman’s Peak, into the legal-catch area of the southern peninsula.
If we need to legitimize a catch, we’ll drop anchor again on the legal-catch reefs off Noordhoek out of the sanctuary, spend a few minutes flopping around in the kelp beds, and then return to Hout Bay Harbour on a heading that will leave the authorities with no claim against us.
“Okay… I give up,” I admit.
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” he’s taking the piss again.
“Gee thanks,” I answer sarcastically. “I was planning to try to kill myself.”
Somehow he finds this hugely amusing.
The time-slip we’re in is a sortie seven or so nautical miles southward, down the coast from our wreck at Clifton. It’s put us around the corner from civilization.
One day the land surveyors and architects may arrive at this spot as well, to absorb this piece of pristine coastline into the city’s economy, but for now it is how it has always been. Rough, wild and magnificent.
We’ve borrowed an inflatable boat with an outboard and have put in at the slipway in the small fishing harbour at Hout Bay, just around the headland past the renowned big-wave surfing spot Dungeons, and Seal Island—the tourist attraction and pantry for Great Whites.
Above us soars Karbonkelberg, a monolithic mountain that juts into the sea and divides Hout Bay from the upmarket suburb of Llandudno, just out of sight from us. We’re tucked into seclusion by Duiker Point, a ridge of rock that creates an isolated bay that makes us feel like
we’re the only humans on the planet.
We’re doing this dive in midweek, bunking out of our naval duties again. Actually, I’m bunking out for today with a colleague on the base covering for me. Jacques hasn’t bothered to show up for several days, and with no cover.
Two days ago, at my insistence, we went looking for the slave ship off Camps Bay, right where the nautical chart in the Archives indicates it should be.
Jacques would be the right guy to find it because there’s something uncanny about his instincts below the water, but he was utterly disinterested. Half the wreck’s human cargo died on the day it went down, the other half salvaged and sold off the block in Cape Town two days later. There’s nothing of value left for him to invest the time into and he only dived the reef to humour me.
I was loathe to swim much deeper than we’d gone out. A decade earlier, a sewerage line serving the Camps Bay community was affixed to the ocean floor out there, and it’s belching mouth was not much farther toward the horizon than we’d gone.
Ironic, I think; pumping raw sewage into the site of a slave graveyard.
Without fanfare, Jacques goes over the side and disappears in a rash of bubbles, his fins breaking up his exhalations as he goes down fast.
Within thirty seconds, the fizz of small bubbles that have been churned through the motor of his kicking fins as he descends, gives way to pots of rising bubbles that have the appearance of mercury globules bigger than a fist.
Each bubble pops open at the icy surface, releasing a wisp of warm exhaled breath originating from maybe fifty feet down.
I watch the slow trajectory of progress that my friend is making toward the rocky shore, a football field’s distance away.
This location will be utterly different from our wreck. It lies on a steeply cantered submarine trench that follows the same profile into the depths as the cliffs soaring above us toward the sky.
In August 1909, under a blanket of fog, this old steamer went bow-first into rocks just over there, where Jacques is headed. She took with her thirty-two unfortunates, and the tale her survivors tell is an epic in itself.
We’re in twenty-five metres of water, or eighty feet. Recently, the authorities have been trying to regulate scuba diving and we’re supposed to be strictly qualified through a diving course to strap a scuba tank on our backs. Both Jacques and I learned this art before we were teenagers and we haven’t yet gotten round to conforming and qualifying.
I doubt he ever will.
This means we pick up flack when we try to get our bottles filled with compressed air, but we know all the local shops that provide the service and they turn a blind eye and fill it up without question.
Were we qualified, though, the stern of this vessel down eighty feet would be beyond the legal limit for the qualification anyway. With so many laws and their restrictions, why bother? we ask ourselves.
Our other argument against strictures of conforming to coming laws is that we’ll be dogged and hampered by all the newly invented equipment that’s been made compulsory—ostensibly, we’re told—to make diving easier, ‘more fun’, and safer. We find it a bit laughable.
Buoyancy compensators, BCs for short, are now all the vogue; glorified life-vests that can be inflated by the frightened and lazy so that they can “maintain their height within the water column”.
The BC is inflated from the scuba tank or deflated to give the effect of an elevator, buoying the diver up or letting them plunge.
They’re for sissies. We swim with honest effort to wherever we want to go.
There’s also a hullabaloo of late about using pressure gauges to know how much air is in one’s tank. Now, maybe a beginner needs this kind of information, but we know how long we’ve been down and how hard we’ve been breathing.
My recent run-in with the abalone aside, running out of air is neither a surprise nor a problem. When it happens, you just rise slowly. The pressure eases off and the tank doles out a little more air. Easy.
To us, it all seems like a money-making fad to catch newbies.
Jacques has been in the water a minute or two and I catch myself daydreaming again.
The bow of the wreck, inshore as it is, lies less than half as deep as the stern—and I see that Jacques must be about halfway amidships on the wreck.
I notice that the neat bell-shaped bubbles are being broken once again into a rash that relays news from the depths. It means he’s head down again, probably wriggling into some tight spot on the trail of a souvenir or tasty-looking addition to the dinner table.
I look up one more time at the wild shore and slopes, projecting my mind to shift this location to a setting so similar in many ways to the one our wreck down the coast rests in. I’m a dreamer and for a moment I see this mountain, not for what it is, but for what the bullion ship or coal barge—or whatever it is that we have at Clifton—would have seen as they were driven ashore, long before more recent humans swarmed over those slopes.
I sigh with nostalgia and drop my mask into place, check the seal and tumble backward into the one thing that hasn’t changed—the icy embrace of the South Atlantic.
Chapter 6
“It’s not Dutch, and it’s too late.” Jacques is as pissed off as I’ve ever seen him. “And I wasted my fish on those bums,” he laments.
“But you scored a girl too,” I point out.
He shrugs and laughs, “Too little value for the price.”
This guy has stratospheric standards in women.
The girls who’d brought the wine had shown up with a few friends and it turned into quite the party that landed me in the dogbox with my folks.
In their usual kind nature, my parents had left the pool and BBQ area to us kids to do our thing. Jacques slipped in unnoticed by them. They wouldn’t make a scene if they knew he was there, but it hadn’t hurt to leave them in the dark.
He’d left early and one of the girls that the surfers had done the most spadework on was also conspicuously absent.
The guys were furious and the mood had changed. I’d packed everyone off a little after midnight before I picked up any more flack for noise violation.
He now had the cannon out of the saline bath he’d prepared for it.
Had it been Dutch and of the right design or era of his bullion ship, it would have continued languishing in its anti-oxidizing spa for a while longer. But the design of the exposed metal and its general shape was not Dutch. It was a breech load—definitely from a later era, and therefore, of no value as a clue to the treasure.
“Yeah, but it’s still a cannon!” I insist, looking down on the corrosion already beginning to eat and fracture the iron.
“You can have it then,” he said in a peeved voice.
If it had been bronze instead of iron, we’d be in the money, but this artefact would soon crumble to sludge if not treated and kept out of oxygen’s corrosive way.
“So what are we gonna do now?” I ask. “The water’s cheered up. You up for a dive?”
“Pfffft,” he huffs at the suggestion. “What’s the point?”
“The point is that this isn’t a coal barge. It’s something else. It has historic value.”
“Then you can have it. I need cash-return on my efforts.”
He was pragmatic. Someone who lives on their wits has little room for romance.
“It’s not mine to have,” I point out. “But I am curious. I want to know about that tooth…”
“A tooth!” He cuts me off. “There’s a ship out there with a hundred million dollars in gold and you want to waste time with an eff-ing tooth? You need to get your priorities straight.”
Something rang through his voice to me that, as a partner, I was slipping in his estimation. I really bought into his, and our, quest for fame and fortune, but surely there was a place for some small deviation?
According to the look he was giving me now though, the answer was an emphatic ‘No’!
“Hey. You’re pissed off,” I point out. “No need for str
esses with us. We’re good.” There’s a long pregnant silence. I change the subject. “You haven’t been on the Base for a while. It’s more than raising eyebrows.”
It’s been nearly a week since he reported for duty at our naval base, and—lax and in a backwater of the military machine as we might be—it’s becoming impossible to cover for him.
“Fuck them,” he dismisses. “I’ve got work to do. If they want me, they should pay me properly.”
“You could transfer to a base that has board and lodging,” I challenge sarcastically, knowing that suggestion will focus his peeved mood on the government’s policy of conscripting us for two years against our will.
It works.
He raves on about how the whole apartheid state that we’re being dragooned to save in its dying days can “go take a shit.”
“The Master is pissed… He says if you’re not in tomorrow, it’s AWOL and the MPs will be looking for you.”
“Those idiots couldn’t find wood in a forest,” he laughs.
The Master at Arms is the one non-commissioned officer on the base you don’t want to piss off. In army terms, he’s the RSM, the Regimental Sergeant Major. He is charged by the military with keeping discipline on the Base. He can lock you up for three months on a whim without paperwork—or so I’m told.
I don’t test those boundaries, but Jacques has been charged several times already and has somehow escaped sanction under pressure by way of his silver tongue. He can talk his way out of any trouble.
I know this for a fact. I’ve been hauled before the Master right alongside this lunatic before.
Both myself and Koenie—an Afrikaner who used to have the narrowest of patriotic squints to do his part for the Fatherland before Jacques bent his mind—were convinced by this scoundrel as to what a monumental waste of time the whole enterprise was.
“You…!” The Master, a horrid little man with a nose like a red bulbous bow, glowered.
Some claimed that they could deliver a tot of pure alcohol if they gave that nose a good squeeze. Fortunately for us, the alcohol had made this once formidable man a shell of his former self, put out to pasture in this obscure little base.
The Praying Nun (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 1) Page 4