Sticking to the rules

Saturday, 16 August 2008

I have seen a few weird things during the journey thus far, but the other day’s sighting just seems to let most faze out into a mere haze in comparison.

We were nearing the end of a really long beach day, coming over the dune ridge we heard voices. We trundled up to see what the source was, the only form of companionship we had come across over the last 45km was a run in with a group of not so friendly abalone poachers. Reaching the crest of the dune the scene unfolded.

There were four guys with a fully loaded small Venter trailer, but not a vehicle in sight. Looking not too perturbed that there was no 4×4 in to tow the trailer, they were just chilling on the beach, the one guy with his gran’s tea cosy on head, another had a bundle of about eight massive fishing rods over his shoulder. The rest milling around looking for, I don’t know what. I could not work this out, where was their vehicle? All we could see was kilometres of nothing.

I walked over to them and asked if their vehicle had broken or, I didn’t really know what! The situation was just weird. The reply was quite prompt. They were off on a fishing weekend – seemed fine to me, but the fully loaded trailer in the sand and no way to get it to the fishing spot. Still puzzling.

Then the rest unfolded as I saw the one guy’s hand slip into a box on the trailer and hall out a well used bottle of Muscadel, twisting off the sand grating cork he took a big swig as he moistened his throat. “You see,” he said. “There is a blanket ban on driving any vehicle on the beach”. So they now have to drag and push their trailer down the beach to the fishing spot, as they have lots of gear for the weekend (you can imagine) they needed the trailer. They had managed to push and pull the trailer about 3km, but were not sure how far the spot still was, but the one guy was on his mobile phone to his mom who he said knew where the spot was.

The wheel wrench was tied to the front of the trailer so that two could pull and the other two could push. It was slowly getting dark and the wind was picking up. With the weather turning and darkness on the way, where were they going to sleep, I enquired, no sleep was the answer, we fish through the night.

Braam and I then decided we had better help them for a bit on their beach road to nowhere, but with a good stock of liquid warmth and fire in the belly I don’t think they really cared if they overshot the mark – I still wonder once the barrel was empty and they awoke the next morning and had to repeat the journey back how it went, or maybe if you find a Venter trailer on the beach you will have the answer.