Just before leaving, one of our crew suggested that I might want to try to catch something to eat for the other starving syndicate members. A few minutes later, another three plump blacktail had ended their crustacean-crunching lives.
As we were leaving the beach at the base of the cliffs, we saw another group of our colleagues, four or five of them from one of the other syndicates, at the closed end of the beach, where they had chanced upon a fairly large snake. In the classroom, our survival lecturers had impressed upon us the palatability of catching and cooking suitably sized herpetological creatures.
The one being targeted by this group of intrepid hunters, all of whom had large stones in their hands, measured at least a metre in length and had some good meat on it. We were positioned about 50 metres from them, so our little group had a clear view of events as the hunters approached the snake.
The group was completely focused and intent on shepherding the snake into a corner with the intention of killing, skinning, cooking and eating it. Now, a metre-long snake, weighing a maximum of 1.5 kilograms, poisonous or not, should not have been a contest for five starving pupil pilots armed with human-head-sized boulders.
And no contest it proved to be.
At the last possible moment, the serpent realised that it was cornered and heading for disaster. The next moment the snake suddenly turned, reared up, hissed once and moved, quite quickly I admit, towards the group of brave marauding hunters.
Shrieks and screams, the volume and shrillness of which I could never have imagined, rent the air. In the blink of an eye the well-organised hunters were fleeing headlong down the rock-strewn beach, weapons and poise discarded, pursued, but for only a short while, by the pissed-off serpent before it spotted a gap in the thick coastal bush and slithered quickly away to safety.
‘I wasn’t really that flipping hungry!’ I heard one guy say, and his mates all nodded sagely in agreement.
After that undoubted highlight of the first, full Kranshoek day, the five of us trudged slowly up the steep path and back to our survivors’ campsite. On the way, we happened to pass a middle-aged civilian couple who had just finished enjoying a late afternoon braai at the Kranshoek picnic site at the top of the cliffs.
Acting like malnourished vagrants, which we probably resembled, three of our group launched themselves into a bush after we saw one of the picnickers throw a well-chewed lamb cutlet bone into it.
‘Bliksem, vrou,’ said the middle-aged man to his rotund wife, ‘wie is die donders wat so bleddie honger voorkom?’ (Good gracious, dear, who are these hooligans that look so hungry?)
‘We were dropped here a few weeks ago just in our overalls and told to survive!’ exclaimed Colin Brits, who could always feign a sincere expression when required. ‘We are Air Force student pilots abandoned here and we don’t know when or if they are coming to fetch us!’ he wailed.
‘It’s bullshit that they are treating our boys so badly!’ said the Oom. ‘I have a son who is doing his national service, and although he gets a lot of kak, they never tried to starve him! Wait here. We will be back soon.’
He and his wife then drove off, returning an hour or so later with ten loaves of fresh bread and five large cans of apricot jam, which they gave to us. Vowing to return the next weekend to check up on our welfare, they drove off to their home in Klein Brak River.
Armed with this bounty, we walked back into our syndicate’s camp.
‘Come and look what we got!’ we crowed.
The only response to our exciting news was a two-minute chorus of belching, burping and farting, and then finally one of our mates said, ‘We’re full’, before resuming an ultra-relaxed pose in his hammock.
It seems that while we were out for our day at the beach, the three syndicate members who had spent the night in Plett had returned from their shopping spree with a veritable truckload of assorted food, drink and delicacies, more than enough to keep us well fed and happy for the entire week and beyond. They’d hidden the bounty in a nearby cave, to be consumed at leisure. So nice was the cave, in fact, that three of them slept there as well.
By the next morning, the three fish I’d caught the previous day were still completely untouched, but it had also become apparent that news of my angling prowess had reached the ears of the DSs, and a couple of them soon arrived at our site in a Land Rover to query the information.
‘Where did you get the fishing tackle?’
‘Found it in the rocks!’
‘Where did you catch those fish?’
‘In the sea.’
‘We have a helicopter to take us fishing anywhere we want on this stretch of coastline and we haven’t caught anything like that yet!’
‘He actually caught nine blacktail yesterday and he only fished for about an hour! That’s why we are all so well fed,’ gloated a teammate.
‘Those are just the smaller ones,’ said another.
‘Fucking jammy pupe!’ said the DS and they sped off in the Landy to look for better fishing spots.
One of the syndicate members suggested that I carry the three fish around with me wherever I went to give any extra-syndicate observers the impression that we were ‘eating so well because I was catching so well’, to use an adaptation of the famous Farmer Brown chicken advertisement. This I did until the smell became so dire a few days later that I discarded the fish down a deep ravine, in the process probably destroying four or five species of critically endangered fauna and flora. (Kranshoek and its surrounds is, after all, a highly ecologically sensitive environment.)
During this period, each time a member of the DS saw me, I waved the three fish in the air and told them that I’d just caught them and pointed vaguely in the direction of a different spot on the rugged coastline below. A short while later, a gang of DSs would scramble down the precipitous paths to the position I’d indicated and flog the water with their sophisticated fishing gear for the next few hours, becoming increasingly frustrated as cast after cast produced little, if anything, in the way of edible fish.
These tiny victories made the time pass a little quicker and made life that much more palatable under the circumstances. Before long, the final morning on survival dawned and late in the morning we were all summoned to the DSs’ camp, where a sumptuous feast of steaks and beer awaited.
With the three-week Christmas break looming, spirits were high indeed. Added to this was an achievement by 1/77 which, to the best of my knowledge, no Pupe’s Course prior to ours, nor subsequently, had/has ever accomplished.
It is generally accepted that the ‘wash rate’, which quantifies the percentage of pupes who are unceremoniously booted off the Pupe’s Course for failing to achieve the minimum academic, physical or flying standards, was about 50 per cent after FTS Langebaanweg’s ground school phase. This embodies the reality that not everyone is destined to become a qualified SAAF pilot. In the case of Pupil Pilot’s Course 1/77, our wash rate was less than 15 per cent at the close of the ground school phase at Langebaan and would reach only 17 per cent by the time the survivors received their pilot’s wings!