66) Lake Alexandra

One of the things we liked to do at weekends was to go to the sailing club at Lake Alexandra. During the year Jonathan and Dominic had been invited by the Arnolds to go with them to sailing school at Lake MacIlwain. The boys had bought a Dabchick sailing boat to take to sailing school and now they enjoyed taking it out to the lake to sail it. The Dabchick looks rather like a door with a sail on it. It is almost completely flat but I believe it is a good boat for young people to learn to sail on. When they got the boat is was not in a very good state of repair and they did quite a bit of work on it before taking it to sailing school. It was an old boat made of timber and much heavier than the more modern boats that they were sailing against so they did not do very well in the races but they learnt a lot and had a great time. Their friend from school, Simon went with them to sailing school. He had a larger boat; I think it had been his fathers. Simon’s Mom leant him her Land Rover to go with and they towed his boat with the Dabchick inside it and the three boys in the car, with all their camping equipment. Dominic who was sitting in the back seat did not have a lot of space to sit. You would have thought that they were going for a month rather than a week when you saw how much stuff they took with them.

The Sailing Club at Lake Alexandra

Lake Alexandra was about 30 minutes drive from Umtali, set in lovely hilly country. The hills were planted pine forests and the timber was continually being harvested. I remember the older sailors there said it was a very hard lake to sail. One of the reasons being that when the timber was cut on one section of the surrounding hillside it changed the wind conditions and they had to change their tactics when they raced. No sooner had they got used to those conditions and another section of the lakeside forests would be cut and the winds would change again. We used to go out there just about every Sunday, the boys would join in the racing or fish or swim and we would have a barbeque with the other club members. There were not many other children of Jonathan and Dominic’s age group at the club so they usually sailed with the adults I think they were given some sort of handicap. There would be one race in the morning and another in the afternoon and they would take it in turns to compete in them.

One Sunday when Dominic was racing he had a very bad race and kept capsizing the boat. He would manage to right it again and sail for a little longer and over he went again. I think he capsized about six or seven times during the race. The men all teased him that he had done twice the mileage he needed to because he had gone round and round so much. They said he had sailed like a corkscrew. But it was all in good fun and they gave him a bit of praise for not giving up but continuing and finishing the race even though he was having such a hard time.

One weekend the whole club went away for a regatta somewhere and Jonny and I decided to borrow Ian’s caravan and go and spend the weekend there. We took the dogs with us and it was so lovely and peaceful having the whole place to ourselves. I remember waking one morning and looking out over the misty lake just as the sun was coming up. I saw a crop of toadstools under the trees near the caravan and was sure that there must be pixies living under them. I have never seen toadstools like that except in illustrations in children’s books. They were red with white spots and a lovely cone shape, just like the roof of a pixie’s house. I went to get our camera to take a photo of them but something distracted me, I think it was Rocky chasing something and so by the time I got back to the toadstools the sun had been on them for a little while and they had dried a bit and flattened out into the more usual shape and were not so pretty. I took a photo of them anyway but was very disappointed that I had not got one earlier.

A weekend camping at Lake Alexandra

Once when the kids and I went out to the lake on our own I could not start the car. The men all tried to help by pushing the car. They pushed it up and down the rather muddy road but it just would not start. When they were fed up of pushing one of them asked “I suppose you do have petrol in the tank?” I said I thought I had but by now they were sure that this was the problem. One of them went and got some petrol that was meant for the clubs lawnmower and put it into my tank. And surprise, surprise, the car started straight away. I waved goodbye to them and shouted, “I’m so sorry” as I shot off up the hill and off home. They were all very good about it and just teased me about it for weeks.

All of my men folk very keen on fishing at that time and Jonny would often enter fishing competitions. One such competition that he entered he could not attend as something important came up on the same day but it was decided that Jonathan should go with one of Jonny’s friends in his place. I don’t think they did very well in the competition but Jonathan came home with three fair-sized barbel. I think barbel is a particularly Rhodesian name for a fish that most other countries seem to call either catfish or dogfish. They are very ugly with long black whiskers just like a cat. They are not very good to eat as they have too many bones so a lot of people just throw them back but Jonathan was very proud of his catch and brought them home to show us and he said he wanted to save and salt the skin. I think he wanted it to make a band to go around a hat. When he got home from the day’s fishing he was dirty, tired hungry but very pleased with himself. He said he was going to have a quick shower before supper that I was in the middle of preparing and off he went. I had not noticed that he had put his fish into the kitchen sink and took one of the saucepans off the stove and with the pan in one hand and the colander in the other I quickly stepped over to the sink tossed the cooked vegetables into the colander letting the boiling water run into the sink. It went onto the three barbel that he had put there and they objected and flapped around noisily. I got such a fright I screamed and the family all came running to see what was the matter. I was almost hysterical and told Jonathan to get them out of there as soon as possible, if not before. He was amazed as he had caught them at least three hours before and he had thought that they were dead. I refused to continue making supper until they were removed. He put them into a bucket while I finished cooking, and then we had our meal. After supper, but before I started to do the dishes, Jonathan went to clean the offending fish so that he could skin them. First to make sure that they were dead he cut the heads off all three of them and placed the heads on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. He then took the rest of the corpses outside to work on so that I could get on with the dishes. I went into the kitchen and there on the windowsill were three very ugly fish heads placed in a row watching me, and believe it or not their gills and their long whiskers were still moving. That was just too much for me, I refused to do the dishes and would not go back into the kitchen that night. I had heard before that that barbel took a long time to die but to have been caught with a hook, been out of the water for about three hours, had boiling water poured over them and had their heads chopped off and still be able to wave their whiskers at me was just scary. I was never very fond of fishing before but that was the final straw. I have never fished since.