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 twenty-five, 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 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'd best be getting rid of her."
I replied, "No. Piss off. 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.
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 Johannesburg. It was a fun, well-attended event with prizes for things like heaviest bag, largest fish, and so on.
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 back Mike Hutchinson from Natal—yes, that Mike who'd had a farewell the year before—to be the face of the Dullstroom Epic. Mike was a good-looking (too good-looking, as it would turn out), 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 Johannesburg. 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.
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.
It was around this time that Clinton Shahim entered the picture. Clinton had been at Wits with Terry, and I'd first met him shortly after we started dating. I found him brash and overconfident—frankly, I didn't like him much.
One day, out of the blue, he called to say he was passing through Dullstroom and wanted to chat. Turns out he'd been watching Fishy Pete's progress from afar and was fascinated by our export business and the Fly of the Month Club model. Although technically a lawyer, he'd gone straight into property development after university and had done very well for himself. Bottom line: he wanted to buy a share in Fishy Pete's.
I politely declined. Apart from the fact that I didn't particularly like him on a personal level, we had no cashflow problems. The business had never been stronger, and I'd just managed something even better—subdivision permission for our property.
The original plot was 20,000 square meters. We partitioned it so our house sat on 5,000, with the rest divided into 1,500-square-meter plots. I had absolutely no problem selling these off at R60,000 each.
Remember me overhearing someone at the Duck and Trout say, "Those are the idiots who bought Daubney's place" the day we made our offer? Well, we'd paid R150,000 for the whole lot in 1995. Three years later, I got R900,000 for the plots and still had our beautiful house on its 5,000-square-meter estate.
That's how dramatically Dullstroom had boomed in those few short years. Turns out we weren't such idiots after all.
Clinton as it turns out will be back to play a major role in this memoir.
Meanwhile, Wood Creations kept bleeding money. Niels was scrambling to raise funds, 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 now living 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."
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 yourself, hold it. Otherwise, you're just feeding a bottomless hole."
Then there was that one awful Friday.
Leon de Jager (the general manager) 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 First National Bank HQ in Johannesburg 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 Rap-Tail order 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 also 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, but I'm not sure.
Clip-Lok 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'd 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.