Free Shorelines by Chris Marais Page B

After a week-long absence, their wives went to look for them. The fishermen were found in a cave, having ‘secured’ the casks of hearty Portuguese red. They were reportedly in a sorry, sorry state.
    “Now,” René said the next morning. “Would you like to try some bokkoms ?”
    Jules and I had had a dodgy virgin experience with fish biltong back at Doring Bay, but we were hardy troupers on the road and willing to try again. So off we marched to bokkoms Lane, centre of the West Coast dried fish industry.
    All along the river banks, there were piles of silver harders left to dry on poles after a good soaking in brine. Paul Marais, one of the last bokkoms barons of the river, said the money in his business was lousy. Not like in the past, when everyone on the farms ate bokkoms as part of their rations. Somewhere in the sheds, they were also packing snoek heads, which someone in this world regarded as a delicacy. Thank God no one asked me to snack on a snoek head.
    “OK, are we going to do this bokkoms thing?” Jules nudged me in the car. We were driving towards a speciality shop near the harbour. I wasn’t keen at first, but once we’d bought a bag of the stuff and parked where no one could smell us, I tucked in. Unlike the tough little fish from Doring Bay, this lot were fleshy and yielding to a middle-aged tooth.
    So there we sat within sight of the sea, eating bokkoms in the correct way by nibbling the flesh from the bone.
    In fact, that evening I sat on the porch chatting to René, gamely chomping clumps of bokkoms and washing them down with gulps of Jack Daniels as the cormorants swooped over the boats on their winding way home upriver. Bliss by the water. Then my cellphone called and it was fellow writer, drinking partner and co-conspirator Pat Hopkins, on the line from a disreputable watering-hole in the south of Jo’burg. I told him about the Teazers SMS (just in case he had a moment to rush out and catch the early show) and he told me to go to Paternoster.
    “Where you must visit the Panty Bar.”
    I promised him that we would waste no time in getting there the next day …

Chapter 8: Velddrif to Cape Town

Going Coastal
    I’m sitting on a jetty overlooking the Berg River at Velddrif waiting for the sun and feeling a tad peckish. Last night’s supper of bokkoms and bourbon is but a careless burp in the wind. I would really like Mrs Hildagonda Duckitt to appear live from the pages of Cape history and serve me breakfast. Boy, did this auntie know how to cook.
    She was the Martha Stewart of the late Victorian era in the Cape, the lifestyle guru everyone listened to. And you always wanted to travel with her, because Mrs Duckitt came well stocked. For instance, when she visited a farm on the Berg River (recounted in the rarely found Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper ), her picnic hamper contained: “bread, butter, hard boiled eggs, corned breast or ribs of mutton; frikkadel s, that is minced mutton, with bread-crumbs, spices, etc, made into little balls and fried – they are excellent for travelling”.
    In the midst of this cosy pre-dawn cuisine dream, I watch the fishermen chug in and cheerfully begin unloading the night’s catch of harders, hotnotsvis and yellowtail. Is that a snoek before me, down in the hold? The fishermen are laughing and mocking one another and competing and singing softly while they work. A truly beautiful sight, and I’m getting ready for that sunrise so I can take postcard pictures of this lot and march off with my iconic images of the typical Cape fishermen bringing home the bounty from the sea.
    In Fishermen of the Cape , Frank Robb says:
    “The Cape Coloured fisherman is … a small man with a hardbitten face deep-etched by sea and sun and too often further ravaged by shoreside dissipations, with a mordant wit admirably expressed in the vivid ‘Capey’ dialect, and with a fish-wife who is a bold, flaunting harridan-witch with a gift for invective enabling her to hold