Oliver was born on the 20th of January 1998, once again delivered by Graham Naylor at the Sandton Clinic in Johannesburg. That was an incredibly joyful experience. We were now five of us in my little family, and I loved them all more than words could say.
On the downside, my mom—living alone at Merrowdown Country Club—had suffered a kind of seizure and was admitted to Morningside Clinic. They ran all sorts of scans but couldn’t find anything conclusive. She kind of recovered, but in hindsight, that episode marked the beginning of a long degenerative process.
Back in Lydenburg, my routine involved spending a couple of hours each morning at the Clip-Lok factory, going through the books. Niels was frantically designing, prototyping, and patenting his amazing fruit bin concept—he really is a genius when it comes to engineering. He was talking to big names like Safmarine (he knew the chairman, Buddy Horton) who were promising investment, all while Clip-Lok was rapidly heading toward bankruptcy.
It wasn’t once or twice that I warned Niels—it was many times. But he was taking counsel from John Bredenkamp, who kept telling him to hold out, promising that if it all failed, he’d lend him the money. You can imagine what I thought of that scenario.
Meanwhile, another situation was gathering on the horizon. Pete Immelman, who had solemnly promised he wouldn’t become “Harley Pete,” had done exactly that. Every other weekend was a Harley rally, and then he bought a second Harley-Davidson for good measure. It was starting to piss me off big time.
He also had a girlfriend called Estie, a graphic designer. One day he came to me and said, “Look, I’ve got this idea for a book—Fly-Fishing Venues of Mpumalanga. We’ll get advertising for it. Estie and I will do the work, but we need your help with the desktop publishing.”
By then, I had installed a network at Fishy Pete’s and at Clip-Lok. I was quite adept with PageMaker, having published the first few issues of The Complete Fly Fisherman.
So I said, “Sure, Pete. But if this is going to be a commercial enterprise, you’re a partner and drawing a salary from Fishy Pete’s. This has to belong to the business.”
“Ja, ja, definitely. No problem.”
Over the next few months, the book started looking better and better. They managed to sign on a bunch of advertisers. But the more successful it looked like it would become, the more Pete referred to it as “my book” or “our book,” meaning him and Estie—not Fishy Pete’s book. That, as they say, was me "gatvol"—a wonderful Afrikaans word that essentially means ‘totally fed up.’
I called a meeting with Niels, Pete, and myself—the three equal partners in Fishy Pete’s—and we held it up at the Clip-Lok factory.
I said, “Look, Pete, it’s pretty obvious you’re not really interested in this business anymore.” I knew he owed the bank 20 to. “I’ll buy your shares in the business for 20,000 Rand, and you and Esty can take the book.” I knew he personally owed the bank 20 grand and they were chasing him for it.
He looked at me and said in his thick Afrikaans accent, “Why would I ever do that?”
“Because you don’t contribute to the business,” I replied. “And I don’t see why we should keep funding a non-contributing partner.”
“Well, Niels doesn’t contribute either,” he shot back.
“That’s true,” I said. “But he’s also not a drain on the business. You are.”
He looked at me and said, “It would be like selling shares in Coke.”
On one hand, that was a vote of confidence in what I was building. On the other, a big ‘fuck you.’
So now I was thinking, “Okay. Fuck you too.” And I started devising a plan to make him sell.
I soon came up with a plan and set about executing it.
At the time, Fishy Pete’s had a network of four computers. One was used by Tiny—a lovely Afrikaans lady oin her late fifties. She ran all the admin of the company but unfortunately had a heart condition, I didn't realise how serious until some time later. Another was for Arno, Pete’s protégé and, a young man in his early twenties, he was charge of the fly tiers and often come up with new fly patterns. The third was for Pete and Esty, where they worked on the book. The fourth was my docking station for my Dell laptop.
One day, I quietly downloaded the entire book from their hard drive to mine. I then undocked my laptop, went up to Clip-Lok, copied the contents onto an external hard drive, and locked it in the safe. After that, I deleted the entire book from my laptop.
That evening, around 9:30 p.m., I dialed into the Fishy Pete’s network from home and remotely crashed all the system files on every machine. Pete and Estie usually rocked up at 9:00 a.m. The next morning instead of heading into work early as usual, I took a long bath.
I said to Terry, “The phone is going to ring at about 09:45.”
Sure enough within minutes of that exact hour—ring ring.
It was Estie. “There’s something really wrong with the computers… everything’s crashed!”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said.
Now, I had a mate in Dullstroom called Steve Adams—an IT whiz and programmer. He ran a company called Dullstroom Reservations and had written his own booking software. He was fully in on the sting.
I walked into Fishy Pete’s looking innocent. All the machines were dead—as planned.
“Looks like a virus,” I said.
Pete looked at me suspiciously. “You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“What are you accusing me of?” I replied, offended.
“Well,” they asked, “what do we do now?”
“I suggest we remove the hard drives and take them to Steve Adams—he’s brilliant with this stuff.”
So they did. Steve plugged them in and declared, “They’re badly trashed. But I know a guy in Joburg who might be able to recover some data.”
A few days later, on my instructions, Steve phoned them: “My guy found some directories—do these names mean anything?”
He read out a few that I knew would trigger excitement.
“Yes! Yes! That’s it!”
“Okay,” Steve said. “But the recovery is going to require specialised equipment—it’ll cost about 40,000 rand.”
“Can he guarantee it?” they asked.
“Pretty much.”
I knew they couldn’t afford 40K, the only money Pete had access to was my offer 20 K but I thought starting out of their reach would aid the overall plan.
So, another few days passed. On my instructions Steve called them again. “My mate can do some after-hours freelancing—he’ll do it for 20K. But that’s final.”
The next call I got was from Pete: “I’ll accept your offer.”
I happily handed over 20,000 rand in cash after Pete signed the relevant documents. Pete drove to Dullstroom and gave it to Steve.
That evening, Steve gave me back the 20,000 Rand.
I gave him the hard drive from the safe.
The next day, Pete got his book back.
I had his shares.
It cost me the square root of nothing.
The book went on to be a success—good for them. I never intended to destroy it. And dear reader, you can call me sneaky if you like, but I have zero moral qualms about what I did. I gave Pete every chance to do the right thing—contribute to the business he was drawing a salary from, or take my fair offer.
When he refused, I played him like a fish.
And that’s how I became the majority shareholder of Fishy Pete’s.
A funny aside to all this: around that time, a computer virus called the Chernobyl Virus hit South Africa. Pete and Esty, having lost their book, pinned the blame squarely on it. I remember seeing a photo in the local newspaper of the two of them looking utterly devastated. The headline? Something like: “Couple Lose Life’s Work to Chernobyl Virus.”
That still makes me laugh, because of course it had absolutely nothing to do with a virus.
And Pete—if you ever read this—I’m not sorry. What I am sorry about is that you didn’t want to roll up your sleeves and build it with me. You were the best fisherman I’d ever met.