Kevin Thomas’s Tracker Overboard!

All waters, even inland, should be treated with respect. The following story, which took place in 2006 on Zimbabwe’s Lake Kariba, illustrates why.

Clinging to my tracker James Hlongwane's right arm and waterlogged jacket, whilst I hung over the gunwale of the wildly rocking boat, outboard motor stilled and hull at the mercy of Kariba’s waves, was not how I had intended spending the morning. But, as they say, sh*t happens.

PH Pierre van Wyk was struggling to lift the heavy outboard to free the rope tangled around the propeller, one of the two ropes that minutes before we’d thrown to the tracker who was floundering and swallowing water, drifting quickly away from us in the heavy, lumpy swells, as waves pounded us mercilessly in a howling southeaster. Exhausted, James was imploring me, "Please, ishe*, don't let me drowneds."Then, coughing more water, "Please, ishe, save me."

Wearing so many layers of clothes, plus heavy leather boots, James was so totally waterlogged it would take two of us to get him over the gunwale and back into the boat.  And that was not going to happen until Pierre, bent over the silent motor, once more had the outboard fired up and was in total control of a boat. Right then, still at the mercy of Lake Kariba, we were going nowhere, except possibly onto the far distant Zambian shoreline as flotsam.
 
I’d been contracted to guide a few hunts for HHK Safaris, and had a few days to wait at Sijarira for our group of Saudi clients to arrive from Riyadh. HHK’s Graham Hingeston had asked me to go across to Chete Safari Area in a stopgap position to hunt with Zimbabwe client Brett Roberts until he arrived three days later. Brett, with a bunch of dangerous game under his belt, is probably a more experienced hunter than many licensed pros, but the law dictated that a PH had to accompany him. For my part, it was a pleasure - Brett and I had been at school together, and he used to own Zambezi Hunters, so we had a lot in common; having not having seen each other for years, it would give us a chance to catch up.

Brett wanted a decent buffalo bull, and Graham had asked him to also shoot a buffalo cow for leopard bait because, after Brett's departure, he would be guiding a client who had leopard high on the want list. We set about our hunt in a fairly relaxed manner, but soon became a little concerned at the total lack of buffalo spoor crossing any of the management tracks. Normally in the Chete, like in many Zimbabwe concessions, viable fresh spoor crossing a road or track or at a waterhole was the starting point of the hunt.

Our quest for tracks was not proving too successful, and we even took a drive down to the Ruzi River and walked towards where it flows into Lake Kariba. It was a humid, sultry morning, and the only buffalo tracks were at least a week old. Nothing much was to be seen except crocodile in the river, and a skittish herd of impala that exploded in all directions as soon as they detected our presence.

Not far from the lakeshore, we hit a freshly laid snare line and spent time playing game ranger dismantling the snares. On our walk back to the vehicle we came upon the poachers' tracks.  Seeing how fresh they were prompted James and myself to leg it back to the hunting rig at a fast clip because I’d left my expensive camera in the unlocked cab. The days of leaving unlocked vehicles in Africa’s safari areas are over. Poachers are opportunistic bottom feeders, and if they get the chance to steal while on a poaching foray, they will.

Brett and I continued looking for buff spoor, and then realized why there was little or none: The good rains of the previous months had ensured an abundance of grazing and plentiful surface water.

We eventually picked up tracks of a small herd that had lingered on a management track then moved on. Following them, we soon saw just how much surface water was lying around, so we changed our daily hunt pattern from driving the internal roads looking for spoor, to cross-graining on foot inside the vast blocks of bush, and picking up tracks along the drainage lines.

We started to close with buffalo on a regular basis, but were hesitant to put the bullet into a cow in case there was a good bull lingering in the herds we were making contact with. The bush was exceedingly thick and limited our visibility.

On one occasion, we crept to within 15 paces of two bulls lying on the outskirts of a herd, till a dreaded mid-morning wind swirl carried our scent to them. With a burst of awesome speed and sheer musculature, both of them sprang to their feet and crashed off through the jesse, taking the herd with them.

Later in the day, we followed a big herd that took us on a huge roundabout route.  While we were quietly following their fresh tracks, a group of five cows with three dependent calves suddenly materialized out of the brush, and with a strong wind in our favour, walked straight into us, hardly giving me time to open the sticks for Brett as they filed past us. The lead cow came within 20 paces of us before she realized her folly. As the buffalo reacted, Brett drove 400 grains of .416 Remington Magnum into the last cow, one of two without a calf. The well-placed heart shot had her running blindly straight towards us before swerving away at the last minute, and galloping off about 100 metres before going down. Graham had his leopard bait, and as things later turned out, a productive one.

Next morning, we found a pair of unsuspecting bulls grazing in a small open glade in the mopane, but they were not quite trophy quality. With age still on their side, we sat and observed them, then let them be. By this stage my pleasant three-day sojourn at Chete was coming to an end.  I had to join the other PHs gathering to await the Saudi group's arrival.

That evening Pierre, who also managed Sijarira and Chete Safari Areas for HHK, radioed to say he would collect me at about 9.00 a.m. next morning, and that a boat would have a skipper to take Brett fishing. However, Pierre arrived at about 6.00 a.m. When I joined him and Brett at the campfire for coffee, Pierre looked decidedly drenched and cold. He had removed his boots and his jacket and was attempting to dry them by the fire. He remarked that aside from it being freezing cold out on the water, the lake was rough and could certainly worsen before we got back to Sijarira.

Coffee finished, we did not waste further time and moved down to the harbour to load my gear. Brett came down with us and set about readying himself to get in a spot of angling, and he and the Batonka skipper left ahead of us.

My tracker, James Hlongwane, helped me place my rifles and gear in the lockers under the boat seats. What I didn’t notice at the time was that, for some unknown reason, James had not put my daypack inside one of the lockers. Inside it were my GPS, .458 Win ammo in my cartridge belt, wallet with my ID -  Zim PH licence, credit cards, driver's licence, petrol cards, etc., plus my boots and binoculars.

Pulling out of the harbour, we swung west and slowly pottered along through the gorge so that I could get in some photography.  But as we approached open water, the wind-driven spray picked up and began to saturate us, so I put my camera inside the locker under my seat. Pierre was standing at the helm and I was sitting immediately in front of his steering consol, with James sitting to my front.

Pierre gunned the powerful outboard.  As we headed out into the rough water, away from the shelter of the gorge, we were soon drenched in icy spray, with choppy waves periodically breaking across the decking. The Zimbabwe shoreline and Chete Island, lying inside Zambia, began to recede behind us. There was, however, no let-up in the rough water. If anything, it seemed to be building in tempo.

Without raingear, I was starting to feel the cold through my thin clothing. I was trying to turn away from the constant spray to face the stern when I felt the boat swing sharply to port and the bow dig into a wave as the stern lifted, causing the hull to yaw. At the same time I was thrown completely off-balance, and with water cascading over me, fell against the starboard gunwale and the seat James had been sitting on. He was hit with the full force of the wave and flung overboard. As he went into the lake I tried to grab him with one hand while holding on with my other, so that I, too, did not end up overboard.  But I could not get purchase on his smooth nylon jacket. Pierre, meantime, was fighting to steady the boat in a howling wind, the swells foam-flecked with whitecaps. James popped up about five metres away in the metre-high troughs off our starboard side.  Just his head was visible and he was holding it tilted back, hollering blue murder to be rescued.
 
With Pierre attempting to swing the boat around, I threw a rope out to James, but it landed short in the unrelenting wind. Pierre also tried to throw a stern rope to him, but it, too, fell short.  On my next attempt, the rope landed directly on James's head, allowing him to grab it.
 
Pierre came forward and helped me pull James to the side of the boat.  But as we attempted to get him into the boat, the outboard cut out, and once more the boat was at the mercy of the rough waves. Pierre struggled to lift the heavy outboard to free the rope tangled around the propeller.

While I hung over the gunwale clutching James by his jacket collar, I couldn’t understand why he was holding the rope only with his right hand. Telling him to give me his left hand, I was surprised see him struggling to lift his left arm from beneath the green water - I even thought at one stage that he might have injured himself. Then I saw the cause of his difficulty:  He was holding onto my daypack, which was truly amazing.  It, too, had become waterlogged, and being a British army type, it was bigger than your normal civilian day-tripper pack. Only then did I realize that he’d been sitting with it on his lap when the wave struck. Exhausted, in shock, and at great risk of drowning, he had held onto it throughout his ordeal – a true measure of the character of some of our African trackers. They are, indeed, 'Amadoda!'**

As soon as Pierre had brought our wayward boat under a semblance of control and faced it into the waves, he again came forward, and between us we hauled a soggy, but relieved, tracker back onboard. When I asked James why he hadn’t let go of my daypack, he replied, "Because it was my job to look after it." I told him that had I found myself in his position, even if the daypack belonged to the Queen of England, it would have gone to the bottom of the lake.

Our ordeal was not quite over.  We still had to limp across an angry stretch of water and take shelter in an island inlet where we changed fuel tanks. From there we took a bumpy wet ride directly south into the howling wind.  Only when we were in against the southern shore did the water quieten, allowing us to hug the shoreline back to Sijarira.

Throughout this stage of the exercise James remained in a state of delayed shock and kept clutching at the life jacket that he now wore. We were lucky. James could well have drowned.  And in Zimbabwe, where the rule of law is now open to the interpretation of individual policemen, the death by drowning of a black man commuting on a boat with two white men could easily have led to wild accusations, or even a spell in custody until it was all cleared up.

The moral of the story, quite simply, is to ensure that everyone onboard is wearing a life jacket. The jackets were there, but we never used them. Pierre and I were both at fault for not checking that we all donned one. There are no excuses.

There is nothing wrong with the boat design, known as a Pelican. It is one of the safest hulls on the lake, and most certainly will not capsize or sink.  But once an individual is in the water, that is a completely different story.

* Ishe: A respectful term in Shona for a ‘superior.’

** Amadoda: A respectful term in Shona meaning a ‘man.’