So now it was 1993. South Africa was inching toward democracy. The previous March, F.W. de Klerk—under serious pressure to prove he had a mandate from white voters—called a referendum. It would be the last white-only referendum in our history. The question was essentially, “Do you support the state president’s efforts to negotiate a new constitution for South Africa?” Yes or no.
I voted “yes.” Proudly. And 68% of white South Africans did the same. So by 1993, the negotiations at CODESA were bearing fruit, and it looked like elections would be held the following year. It was a thrilling time to be South African. You could feel change in the air—real, irreversible change.
Meanwhile, I had my aeronautical engineering degree but I’d decided to go full-time into a fly-fishing export business. My setup? A cutting-edge IBM 486 clone with a whopping 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. State-of-the-art back then. I loved technology. I even had a 1200 baud dial-up modem—hooked up to CompuServe via the CSIR—and was posting on fly-fishing bulletin boards, sending samples from Pete Immelman’s shop in Lydenburg to potential clients in the States and getting valuable feedback.
Eventually, I settled on a guy named Jerome Ficken to act as my US agent. All our communication was via CompuServe, mailing the internal email system, and he seemed sharp enough. He recommended I use blister packs—cardboard backing with clear plastic—to package the flies. So I bought CorelDRAW, designed the backing cards myself, and ordered a print run. God knows what those cards looked like in hindsight, but back then, I was thrilled. They looked professional to me.
Jerome also said we’d need to have a booth at the Denver Fly-Fishing Show in September—the big annual fly-fishing event. He booked it and I wired him the moeny to pay for it. I also found out that you could send a CorelDRAW file via modem to a US print bureau and have it turned into a huge poster—something like six feet by three. It took the entire night to upload the 1.5MB file over a 1200-baud modem, but I got it done and wired Jerome the money to get it printed. We would pick it up in Denver.
Terry and I left Mikey with my mum and flew off to America full of hope. First stop: New York. The plan was to stay with my mum’s sister, Val, in Greenwich Village. Mum had warned us: “There’s no way Val has space in that flat.” But Val had insisted it was fine.
It wasn’t.
Her place was essentially a storage unit with plumbing. One room, kitchen in a cupboard, loo in another cupboard, and the rest filled with junk. No chance of staying even one night, so we checked into a hotel—already a few dollars down, having been ripped off by a limo driver at JFK.
One of the first things I did was head to an electronics shop and buy a Compaq laptop—running Windows 3.1. That was huge. It felt like I’d bought the future.
Then we flew to Denver and met Jerome and his fried Paul, who had come along for the ride, in person. My heart sank the moment I laid eyes on him. Online, he’d sounded perfectly articulate. In person? He looked like a homeless person, no disrespect to homeless people but you expect your local representative to look the part. What could I do at that point except give him the benefit of the doubt and see how the show unfolded.
Paul had hired a Lincoln Town Car for the show. Within minutes, Terry had managed to slam her finger in the door. Off we went to emergency, where they drilled through her nail to relieve the pressure and drain the blood from under the nail. Luckily, it wasn’t broken. I don’t think I was nearly sympathetic enough. My head was full of banners and booths and blister packs.
We picked up the booth banner the next day, and I was amazed. The file I’d sent had actually worked—and it looked brilliant.
We set up our stand and hung up all the flies on pegboards under that shiny new banner: Fishy Pete’s. The name, incidentally, came from Carey. Whenever I phoned to speak to Niels (he and Carey were now living in Lydenburg), she would call him and he's ask, “Fishy Pete or Brother Pete?” The nickname stuck and Pete Immelman had even renamed his Lydenburg shop “Fishy Pete’s,” so we went with that branding.
The show got underway. People were polite. A few compliments. But no orders. This wasn´t a retail show, we wanted bulk orders from fly shops.
Next to us was a guy named Fred Claghorn—early 30s, suited, clean-cut, selling carbon fibre rods under the brand Versitex. We got along well. I tested one of his rods on the casting pond and was genuinely impressed. Over the next couple of days, we became friendly.
Then, on the second-to-last day, Fred turned to me and said, gently:
“I hate to say it, but in the US, blister packs are associated with cheap, mass-produced flies. Kmart. Walmart. No serious retailer here is going to buy flies in that packaging.”
It was like being hit with a sandbag. After the show closed we opened every single blister pack, disgorging hundreds of flies. The next morning, we laid them out loose on trays. It helped a little, but the damage was done. We didn’t get a single order from the entire show.
As I mentioned I had had my doubts about Jerome's suitability ever since I first laid eyes on him but this was the final straw. The blister pack expense had been his recommendation. I asked Fred if he would be our agent in the USA to which he agreed. I told Jerome —politely but firmly—that he wasn’t going to be our US rep anymore. He was upset and first but frankly seeing how poorly our sales had gone I think he might have been a bit relieved. I gave him the rest of the stock, reimbursed him for expenses, and we parted ways permanently.
Back in South Africa, the first thing I did was import a batch of Versitex rods and sell them through the two Fishy Pete’s outlets: Lydenburg and a tiny fly-fishing corner inside a Dullstroom convenience store called The Tonteldoos. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. And I walked a little taller, feeling—foolishly, perhaps—that I was now in the import/export game.
I’d learned a few lessons the hard way: packaging matters, perception matters even more, and picking the right people is everything. Also—never judge a man’s professional capacity solely on his modem manners.