After Tiny’s passing, I had to find a new secretary—office admin, PA, whatever the label. I can’t quite remember how I found her, but I ended up hiring a young Afrikaans girl named Yolandi. She was probably around 25, and an absolute smoke show. I mean, seriously easy on the eye.
And yeah, I was in love with my wife—it wasn’t going to be a problem. That is, until a few weeks after she started.
Terry and I were having lunch one weekend in Dullstroom, at the Coterie—a sort of collection of shops and restaurants about three or four kilometres out on the Lydenburg Road. As it happened, Yolandi and her husband were there too. I greeted her warmly, as I naturally do, and straight after she walked away, Terry turned to me and said, “Who the hell is that?”
I said, “That’s my new secretary.”
She looked me dead in the eye and said, “Oh no it isn’t. You best be getting rid of her.”
I replied, “No. Fuck you. I’m not firing her just because she’s good-looking.”
Terry: “Well, you better.”
Of course, I wasn’t going to. But as luck would have it, later that same week, Yolandi came to me and said, very apologetically, that her husband—who was a policeman—had been transferred, and they were leaving Lydenburg. She wouldn’t be able to keep the job. Very sorry. Hoped she hadn’t disappointed me.
I said, “Absolutely no problem,” and wished her well.
Crisis averted. And I made damn sure my next hire was ugly enough to pass Terry’s vetting.
Anyway, that was a light-hearted note on Tiny’s replacement.
Around that same time—mid to late 1998—Steve Adams came to me with an idea. There was an event that took place every year called the Dullstroom Epic, sponsored by Bell’s Whisky. Basically, all the participating trout waters in the area opened their waters to the public for a day, attracting a flood of fly fishermen from Joburg. It was a fun, well-attended event with prizes for things like heaviest bag, and it had nothing to do with us.
Steve’s suggestion was to turn that concept into something ongoing. Instead of a one-day event, what if we created a syndicate—a club called The Dullstroom Epic? Members would pay an annual fee and, in return, get access to all the participating waters any weekend of the year. I can’t recall the exact fee we landed on, but it was something like R2,000 per year—not outrageous.
We prepped for the launch and brought in this young bloke called Mike Hutchinson to be the face of the Dullstroom Epic. Steve knew him from somewhere—Natal, I think—and Mike was a good-looking, pleasant young guy.
I remember immediately getting that little alarm bell in the back of my head. I’d seen how things had gone before with Terry and handsome young fly fishermen. But things seemed calm—Terry was happy again, nursing Ollie. So I pushed those thoughts aside.
We launched it using the Fly of the Month Club mailing list. The very next morning, I got a deposit slip from a guy named Mark Leipzig, a dentist from Joburg. It had come in so quickly that I thought, “Bloody hell, this is going to take off.”
It didn’t.
Lesson learned: price points matter. R150 a year for the Fly of the Month Club? Easy sell. R2,000 a year for the Dullstroom Epic? Not so much. It was a complete flop. We ended up refunding Mark Leipzig.
Now we had Mike on payroll and no business model.
As luck would have it again, Trevor—who’d been running my Dullstroom shop—had decided to leave the country with his wife, Pippa, and their kids. They were off to England. That left a vacancy, so Mike took over the Dullstroom shop, which was part of Critchley Common—a charming cluster of shops just on the outskirts of Dullstroom on the Lydenburg Road. Gorgeous shop. All done out in cedar by the same cabinetmaker who’d built our kitchen.
Mike will come up again later, unfortunately not in such a flattering light.
Meanwhile, Wood Creations kept bleeding money. Niels was scrambling to raise funds. He was courting John Bredenkamp, trying desperately to get Safmarine to invest in his fruit bin concept. He’d even patented the designs in his own name. John kept advising him to “hold out.”
It got so bad that at one point, we knew we weren’t going to make wages. I reached out to Niels’ longtime friend in the UK, Robert Simpson, and explained the situation. Robbie asked, “How much does he need?” I said, “Half a million rand to cover wages.”
Now, in hindsight, the loyalty Robbie had to Niels was astounding. I’d known Robbie growing up—we’d fished together at Three Falls many times—and I liked him and his wife, Sally, enormously.
To his credit, Robbie wired the money within three days, and we made payroll.
But things were beyond critical. I wrote Niels a letter saying that even if John’s money came through, it would be too late. I told him, “If you do take it, don’t put it into the business. Take it in your own name, or have Carey hold it. Otherwise, you’re just feeding a bottomless hole.”
Then there was that one awful Friday.
Leon Diaga and I had been to the bank—again—begging for money. They said no. Payday came, and the staff went down to the bank. I knew there’d be nothing for them.
I called Niels—he was in White River.
“What do I do?” I asked.
“Just get the hell out of there,” he said.
It was just Leon and me left in the factory. Even the security guards had gone.
Leon said, “That’s easy for you to say—you live in Dullstroom. I live in town.”
I couldn’t leave him. So we sat there, silent. And then we heard it: a mob, coming back from town, probably half a kilometre away. Angry, no doubt.
And then—this is absolutely true—a summer thunderstorm burst over Lydenburg. Thunder, lightning, hail. It was like divine intervention. The crowd dispersed.
On Monday, an emergency loan request we’d filed with Standard Bank HQ came through. Wages were paid.
Shortly after that, Clip-Lok went into liquidation. That was the end of 1998.
As for Terry and me, we were doing all right. Fishy Pete’s was holding its own, and I’d just landed a million-Rand order for Reptile from Rapala. We had a holiday booked for January—Club Med in Mauritius. Briony was dating an English guy called Peter Curle, a few years older than her, and thought it’d be a great idea for all of us to go.
And yes, I know. Niels probably saw our beach holiday while his company was collapsing as insensitive. But it’s not like I hadn’t warned him. I’d gone around town and personally paid off all his outstanding local accounts—bottle store, hardware shop, that sort of thing. About R30,000, if I remember right.
The money from John did eventually arrive—but not into the business. I think it went directly to Niels or Carey. His personal exposure was astronomical by that point.
Wood Creations didn’t die, though—not entirely. It was eventually bought out of liquidation by E.L. Bateman. Yes, those Batemans—of Sam Bateman, who I dated back in the day. Anthony Fletcher was married to Ginny Bateman, and Niels knew them too. The Bateman group secured a massive R80 million loan from the Development Bank of South Africa to ramp up production. Niels got royalties on his patents.
That’s a story for another chapter.