Terry's 30th birthday on August 4th, 2000 was going to be a big celebration. We'd booked out the entire restaurant at Café Flo in Greenside, and the next day we were flying to Mauritius for a week at a beachside house we'd rented with Pete Becker and his girlfriend Meg.
Looking back, I ask myself: why the hell was I throwing money at extravagant holidays when I should have been focused on the business? The answer is painfully simple. Terry was fitting into Johannesburg's upper crust society, and after everything we'd been through, I thought keeping her in the manner to which she'd become accustomed might somehow keep her happy. Keep us together.
The birthday party was such a success we nearly missed our flight the next morning. This time, we brought all three kids to Mauritius. The beach house was beautiful, but one incident wasn't very pleasant.
After an evening of too much alcohol and too little sleep, Terry announced it was time for a morning run on the beach. We'd been running regularly around Parkview, and I thought it sounded like a good idea. But this was Mauritius---even in winter, it's hot.
We ran and ran. Terry was really gunning it, and I refused to be left behind. I pushed past the point where my body was screaming at me to stop. When we got back to the villa, a massive tingling spread over my entire body. I walked into the sea to cool down, then realized I needed to get out fast. I collapsed on the beach.
I couldn't move a limb. Complete paralysis.
"This is it," I thought. "Heart attack. Stroke. Something."
I called out, and Pete heard me. "Look, dude, I'm totally fucked. I think I'm dying," I told him. "Please make sure Terry and the kids are taken care of. My will's in the safe."
The strange thing? I wasn't scared. I was almost relieved. Here I was---beautiful wife, three lovely kids, a business on the rise, on holiday in paradise. But I was so deeply unhappy because the love I desperately wanted just wasn't there.
The Mauritian paramedics arrived and rushed me to hospital, where they pumped me full of electrolytes. The diagnosis: severe dehydration and electrolyte depletion. Too much alcohol, too little sleep, too long a run in tropical heat. My nerves literally couldn't communicate with my brain. Epic stupidity.
But I didn't die. And Pete and I were determined to salvage something from the trip.
I'd mentioned in a previous chapter that we'd been on a marlin fishing boat during our first Mauritius a couple of years earlier, when everyone got seasick. This time, Pete and I decided there was no way we were taking the girls with us. not that they wanted to come anyway.
We found the same sport fishing outfit operating out of Grand Bay---a chap called Benoit d'Univille, one of the French Mauritian descendants who had a boat-building business there. These were incredibly well-built ocean-going marlin fishing boats, and Pete and I hired one for the day. Flipping expensive, but I wanted to give Mikey the experience of deep-sea fishing at its finest.
We went out and trolled, catching some mahi-mahi and bonito and quite a few other fish on the lures, but no marlin. Eventually, I said to the skipper, "Look, I really want to give my son the experience of catching something big in the deep sea. Can we not fish for shark?"
"Okay," he said, and put one of the bonito on a down rigger---basically a torpedo-shaped piece of lead that takes your bait down fifteen or twenty meters. We proceeded on a slow troll.
All of a sudden, the line just went. It was pretty apparent pretty quickly it wasn't a shark---it was something massive.
They strapped me into the fighting chair with this huge Penn Senator reel, and it was a black marlin. It jumped once or twice, then swam straight towards the boat. They were trying to pick up the slack by maneuvering the boat away, but this fish was swimming straight at us, then turned and did a 180 in the other direction.
There was just a massive kinetic collision---boat going in one direction, line going in the other. The line didn't just snap; the actual steel trace snapped because we had steel wire on, thinking we were going for shark. I still have that grounched piece of wire. It was the closest I've ever gotten to catching a marlin---probably eight or nine hundred pounds.
Mikey made me so proud. He was seasick but stoic as hell, never complained once. We got back to the girls with some delicious mahi mahi that we made sushi from. It was the one real success of the holiday.
While we'd been attempting to enjoy our holiday, Clinton had been hard at work back home, courting investors.
He'd caught the attention of Rudolph Pretorius, an Afrikaans businessman who'd made a fortune at First National Bank before forming his own venture fund, Treacle Venture Partners. This was 2000---peak dot-com boom---and everyone was scrambling for tech investments. Rudolph's philosophy was simple: find companies that had discovered the "sweet spot" in their industry. Hence the name Treacle.
We were manufacturers, but the Fly of the Month Club depended on the internet for promotion and subscriptions. Rudolph had done his homework. He'd calculated there were 15,000 fly fishermen in South Africa, and we'd captured about a thousand---roughly seven percent of the entire market. In America, there were six million fly fishermen. The math was intoxicating.
The negotiations culminated in Treacle Venture Partners buying into Fishy Pete's for 1.5 million rand.
But I made a crucial mistake: I gave up controlling voting rights. Clinton and I ended up with 50% between us, while Treacle held the other 50%. I was effectively diluted down to 25%. What did I know? I was wet behind the ears, and frankly, I didn't have the temperament to be a ruthless businessman. I was creative, loved the fishing business, adored my fly-tiers---and I left the business side to Clinton.
The day we received the big check I called the Big Check Weekend. I threw a massive prawn braai in Parkview, and there are photos somewhere of us grinning like idiots. On the surface, life was sweet. We had the capital to upscale everything, with our sights set on launching the Fly of the Month Club in America.
So many dreams coming to fruition. My God, I was miserable.
Around this time, Terry pointed out that my mother, living alone at Merrowdown, probably couldn't manage much longer. Her solution? Build a granny flat at the back of our Parkview house. With Niels and Briony's agreement, my mother would sell her Merrowdown property and use the proceeds to fund the construction.
We hired an architect and drew up plans for a two-story structure. The ground floor would be my mother's apartment with kitchenette and living room. Upstairs would house servants' quarters for our maid Martine and her family, plus an office for me. Halfway through construction, our builder went bust. I ended up taking over the project with his foreman, a lovely man named Titus, and together we finished the job. It was stunning.
We moved my mother in toward the end of 2000. On paper, everything was going swimmingly.
We scaled up the factory, moving from ad hoc premises in Lydenburg to a proper facility outside town. We bought a color laser printer for the Fly of the Month Club cards and a professional laminating machine. We hired more fly-tiers and had our best craftspeople train them. We moved our server from William Stuckey's flood-prone office to a proper server farm at MWeb.
All of this while I commuted back and forth---down on Monday, back Friday, four hours each way. I'd stay with Dave Hinton or at a motel outside Lydenburg, building toward our American launch.
Meanwhile, Terry had made new friends. One couple stood out: Sue Greenhalgh and Neil Hellman, who lived in a mansion---and I mean mansion---in Sandhurst, Johannesburg's most expensive suburb.
We were invited to a dinner party there. Neil was managing director of his father's company, CHC Chemicals. During the evening, one of the guests, Margie Langschmidt---deeply involved in charity work---mentioned she'd helped get a deaf man employed as an accountant at CHC.
Neil started mocking the man's speech patterns to get a rise out of Margie. It was cruel and mean-spirited. On the way home, I told Terry, "I really don't like that guy."
A few weekends later, Terry had them over to our house. During conversation, Neil mentioned he was a mining engineer from Wits---my alma mater. When I said I was an aeronautical engineer, he looked me straight in the eye and called bullshit.
"There's no way."
Now, the difference between mining and aeronautical engineering is orders of magnitude in difficulty. My mature self would have laughed it off. But the insecure me at thirty-three rushed to my study, grabbed my framed degree, and brought it back to prove him wrong.
The desperation of that moment still embarrasses me and as it turns it would have a big impact on my life a few years later.
As 2000 progressed, Clinton and I took a trip to America. Through his shooting contacts, he'd recruited Bill Rogers---former managing director of Bell Equipment---to run our U.S. operations at $8,000 per month. I was appalled by the salary, but Clinton and Rudolph insisted we needed competence.
We flew around different fly-fishing areas, recruiting well-known local fishermen to submit patterns to the Fly of the Month Club for fees. We decided to base our server in Savannah---partly because that's where Bill lived, partly because we were making it up as we went along.
It was a whirlwind.