Six Stories from Struisbaai

1. There are lots of fishermen (women) at Struisbaai. They set up their lines and fish from the beach, but there’s not much to catch. Often they hook only sand sharks. Often they don’t bother to chuck them back. Round a braai, last night, I herad that the
sharks are just left to die slowly  on the beach. Nobody eats sand sharks, I think. Here’s a dead fish I saw on my walk this morning. There is something eerie about a dead fish. It seems to be smiling at one.

2. Still with the braai, I told a man last night he was a ‘very good cook’. He looked offended and I thought perhaps there was an error in translation – he was Afrikaans (‘cook’ / ‘koek’). No, no, he said, he didn’t cook; he ‘braaied’.

3. On the beach yesterday afternoon I saw a man in lateish middle-age, portly around the middle, in a cowboy hat and a peach shirt (plus shorts – can’t remember the color), hit his partner, a fatter man dressed entirely in black, rather hard, with two slip slops. ‘That must have hurt,’ I said. The one in the peach shirt flashed me a grin. ‘I like to abuse him.’  I had a sense they were probably the neighbors.

4. We passed a tractor fair on our way back from the OK Bazaars yesterday. I thought of getting out and having a look around. I even imagined that we had one which was getting a bit rusty. But then it was too hot and the queues at the OK had gone all the way to the back of the shop right to the bakery.

5. A guy died yesterday in Porterville, I head last night. He’d traveled there from Israel to go paragliding. But it’s dangerous to paraglide at Porterville because you use the thermals, which is what birds do as well. This means you can shoot up very fast into the air, at something like  55 km / hour, and of course that makes it very unpredictable. The Israeli websites were already reporting the man’s death, though not yet in South Africa.

6. The water was so warm that the youngest child became delirious with delight. He danced and marched and went running into the waves, despite that fact that he can’t swim. Okay that wasn’t  a story really, more of an observation. So it doesn’t actually count.