Part 22
As I scan through the many adventures I’ve experienced during my life, I find it interesting that my mind seems to come back to my times in Namibia more than most other areas.
Apart from making the One Track Mind documentary on the desert itself, we were also commissioned to make a film on the town of Walvis Bay. It’s the only sizable port on the west coast of southern Africa between Cape Town and Luanda in Angola. Its name was originally derived from the numerous whales in the plankton-rich seas around the bay. It has a natural deep-water harbor protected from the often turbulent South Atlantic Ocean by a spit of land. The town has had a troubled political history, being an exclave of South Africa’s Cape Province until Namibia’s independence in 1990.
You may remember that in 1945, American author John Steinbeck wrote a novel called Cannery Row. Set in Monterey on a street lined with sardine canneries, it dealt with the abrupt disappearance of the pilchards that had been caught in great quantities off the California coast until they went AWOL. The thinking is that they were simply overfished to the point where it became unsafe for them to remain in that area. The relevance here is that the pilchards just as unexpectedly appeared about three years later off the coast of South West Africa, now known as Namibia.
This quickly created a huge fishing industry, with five or more fish canning factories processing the pilchards for export all over the world. Pilchards are brown-meat fish, rich in omega oils that inhabit the upper layers of the ocean and provide a cheap staple diet for many undeveloped and struggling countries.
In parallel with the fishing industry, the port of Walvis Bay developed to provide Namibia with its only outlet to the shipping fleets of the world. However, with the arrival of the container industry, the port went into a decline in the 1970s as it didn’t have facilities to unload bulk containers.
This led to our documentary which explored the dilemma of the town at that time. Part of the story was to show how pilchard fishing remained the last hope of the town’s declining economy. We had arranged for our film crew to join one of the trawlers on a five-day trip, as the final sequences to be filmed. Our cameraman had badly miscalculated the amount of film needed for the shoot and had foolishly not told the director (I was writer/producer) that he had very little film left with which to shoot the trawler sequences. The director told me flatly that I would have to solve the problem and get more film to the unit, which was due to leave late the following day.
There are commercial flights to Walvis Bay on most days but nothing on the following day. The nearest supplier of film stock was in Johannesburg some 1,200 miles away. I racked my brains for a solution. I could get the film stock to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia by the following lunchtime which was about 300 miles away, but even if we could get a car to drive the stock to Walvis Bay, it would never arrive before the trawler was due to leave that afternoon. The skipper was not interested in delaying his trip. He would leave at 5:00 p.m., and that was that.
I then made enquiries about small private planes that may possibly be coming to Walvis Bay, but nothing materialized. I was determined that there had to be a way, in effect hoping for a miracle. Suddenly, I received a call from the very helpful person who kept track of private flights. There was a plane leaving for Usakos that was willing to take the film stock. This was still well over 100 miles away from the port, but there was still hope. A farmer in the Usakos district was planning to fly to Walvis Bay to do some shopping and was willing to wait until the film stock arrived on the other plane. Excitedly, I worked out the timing and realized that the earliest the last plane could get to Walvis Bay would be about 4:30 p.m. It would be touch and go!
In any event, the plane arrived at about 4:40 p.m. I was waiting at the airstrip, rushed to the plane, thanked the farmer profusely and sprinted to my car. Fortunately, at the time there was only one traffic cop in Walvis Bay, so I guessed my chances were good that I could get away with speeding. I wasn’t sure I could make it to the docks in twenty minutes, but to get this far with the stock and fail was unthinkable. I screamed to a halt on the jetty only to watch the trawler in the process of casting off. Here goes nothing, I thought, as I grabbed the box containing the stock, raced to the edge of the jetty, and to the encouraging shouts from the film crew, I swung the box as hard as I could and let go. It traversed the ten feet or so of open water and landed safely in the arms of the film’s director, who gave me a weak grin and shouted, “What kept you?”
The film was completed and provided a valuable assessment of the town’s economic situation, leading to government aid and the survival of the townsfolk. Sadly, not long afterwards, the pilchards, once again overfished, took off for parts unknown. Fortunately, anchovies, sardines and other fish still existed and kept the faltering fishing industry alive. The port also adapted to containerization, and today Walvis Bay remains a prosperous little town surrounded by the Namib desert with the processing of up to a million containers a year by 2019.
My point here is simply, “Never, ever give up!” As ExoBrain moves closer and closer to achieving the funding for a massive launch, the barriers and stops inevitably move in to prevent success. The trick is to plough through the barriers and not go into agreement with the stops. Miracles do occur against all odds. ExoBrain is a miracle of breakthrough technology. It is going to happen!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.