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sail, and I manage somehow to sink it.” I wasn't sure, but I could have sworn I heard a
suppressed snort from Paul. I just bit down on my tongue and looked hurriedly away.
“Here, grab this line, Jon. Tie it up before it completely sinks,” I took the line as Gavin
bid and made it fast around the bow on my dinghy. Meanwhile Paul, who had practically
been born in a boat was fishing around under the back of the hulls and pulled his hand out
brandishing the culprit: a little rubber bung tied to the end of a piece of string. “Voilà!”
“This should be inside the hole, not trailing behind; you would go a lot further if it was,”
laughed Paul.
“Oh Jesus, Gavin!” I added. Gavin was good-natured enough to realize the comedy of the
situation and joined sheepishly in the bellowing laughter we could no longer suppress.
We ended up towing the waterlogged cat back to Déjà vu and tied up its bow onto the
out-hauled boom of Déjà vu. Soon the last of the water gurgled out, and the bungs were
screwed into the holes. For the rest of the day we all took turns in sailing Gavin's new cat
around the moorings. It was fast and fun and the sinking incident provided a hilarious di-
version for quite some time. Poor Gavin, he too was learning some valuable water lessons.
He did master the art of sailing and ended up selling the little cat and buying a twenty-four-
foot, plywood ,hard chine sailing boat with a nice cabin. Omaruru was a sweet boat that
served him very well while we all were learning about things nautical on the Vaal Dam. He
too eventually trucked his boat down to the Cape and moored her at the same club as Déjà
vu, The False Bay Yacht Club, in fact, but I digress.
It was inevitable that the Vaal would become a little small for Déjà vu and her owners. We
had long dreamed of cruising the deep, blue seas, and I was getting antsy to move along.
As luck would have it, we met a man who had a profound effect on our futures, and here
I would like to point out that I am a great believer in destiny. As I write these memoirs
some thirty years on, I retrace our path back to those early youthful days, where the future
seemed so bright yet unchartered. We fatalistically allowed it to unfold before us.
One day, about the time that things were falling apart for me at my work place, we
happened to meet a man from Cape Town. It was totally by chance that Mr. Timberhorne
happened to be there on some business. He came up to our boat one day and introduced
himself to us. He may well have come up to get a better view of my wife. She made one
pretty picture in her tiny, denim shorts, blonde hair, and long, brown legs.
Well, Mr. Timberhorne clambered aboard for whatever reason, and we talked about boats
and clubs and such. It turned out that he was the vice commodore of the False Bay Yacht
Club in the Cape, and he was willing to propose us as members to the club.
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