Jack of All Trades. Lessons for Life

An afternoon with Jack Walsh in his Strand apartment is a lot like going to the movies. Love, loss, diamonds and the deep blue sea. His life story unfolds in cinematic splendour with one remarkable scene surmounting the next.

It is therefore no surprise to find him in an apartment overlooking False Bay, the scene of so many of his early adventures, and where he now lives.

Walsh has an impish grin and small nuggety physique that make him look a decade younger than his 79 years. Add to that an affable manner and lively temperament and it is easy to see why he has enjoyed such a rollicking ride across the South African landscape, and seascape, since his boyhood on a farm between Stellenbosch and Somerset West. By his own admission his stories these days may ramble more than they used to. But he has lost none of the passion that has earned him a reputation as a fishing industry pioneer.

He insists on sharing a plate of sumptuous snacks while I quiz him about his life, but he himself is too engrossed in the telling to eat. His mind is quickly caught up in a rip current of anecdote and recollection. After one hour we are still talking about his days as an insurance broker, working in his father’s firm in Somerset West. After two hours I understand why office life was never going to suffice for Jack Walsh.

Obsession with fish

For one thing Walsh has always been obsessed with fish. At first it was bass and kurper in the neighbours’ dams, which were soon off limits to the piscatorial youngster. His love of the sport surfaced at St Andrews College in Grahamstown where he helped start a fishing club during high school. During the holidays he would often venture to the beach and rock pools around Gordon’s Bay and the eastern shore of Table Bay.

“People always asked me if I wanted to become a farmer, and I said no, a fisherman,” Walsh chuckles.  He did however buckle to family pressure and, upon leaving school, joined his father’s insurance company.

“Three grandparents and my father were in insurance. Nobody thought fishing was a relevant occupation.”

Parallel fishing life

The death of his father put added pressure on Walsh Jnr to take over the business reins, and so that is what he did. But through it all he built up a parallel fishing life with a series of boats and like-minded friends. He noticed that his income from his part-time fishing expeditions compared favourably with his office salary.

In this he had the support of his father, who bought him a boat at a liquidation sale – a seaplane tender – whilst he was still at school.

“It was one of the most horrible boats I’d been on but it taught me a great deal,” says Walsh. He bought other boats after his schooling such as a ‘tok-tokkie’ – the precursor to the bigger ‘chukkies’ that still form the backbone of the peninsula inshore fishing fleet. There was also a boat he built with a friend, in which they rowed out from Gordon’s Bay harbour to catch what they could – which was plenty.

Times of plenty

Those were the days before stock collapse, Walsh recalls fondly, when their boat would routinely return packed with Roman, Cob, Geelbeck and Red Stumpnose.

“Of course it has changed now. What has happened to all the fish? Well the simple answer is that we’ve eaten them,” Walsh says. “In this regard South Africa is probably as bad as so many other places in the world.”

For years Walsh lived a double life: insurance broker by day, semi-commercial line fisherman in his spare time. He confides that when the fishing had been particularly good, his father had turned a blind eye – within limits of course.

However his fishing adventures took a quantum leap when he left the insurance game and turned his attention to various commercial ventures that would take him far beyond the rippling surface of False Bay.

Western Province Trawlers

Walsh founded Western Province Trawlers and acquired four trawlers, with which he targeted sardine on the west coast. The venture turned out to be a steep learning curve, and the fleet quickly shrunk to two vessels.

“I knew I was a good fisherman, but there is a huge difference between a semi-professional sportsman and a commercial business,” Walsh recalls. “I didn’t know anything about the (trawling) business, and kept on making wrong decisions.”

To make matters worse one of his remaining two trawlers sunk in St Helena Bay, leaving him with just one and a smaller vessel he bought and skippered himself.

See-sawing fortunes

What followed was a period of see-sawing fortunes during which Walsh nevertheless established himself as a fishing stakeholder on the west coast. There were lean years, to the point where at one stage he even went hungry.

“I battled my arse off. It was the only time in my life when for a couple of days my wife and I went to bed with nothing to eat.”

But he persevered and gradually built up his business, and was ultimately rewarded with an invitation to form part of a historic  pelagic factory ship venture off the coast of then South West Africa.

Purse seining

It was a boom time for fishing, at least initially, and Walsh found himself catapulted into the purse-seining trawling super-league. It was yet another steep learning curve, except this time the stakes were higher.

“I had no idea how to control a net that was full with too much fish – it was my first lesson on working a really heavy load of fish.”

Fisheries management

As much as his adventures as part of the Suiderkruis fleet in South West Africa were financially lucrative for Walsh, they were also an eye-opener in terms of fisheries management.

At the time he warned the fishing authorities of a potential stock collapse due to over-fishing, warnings that he claims went unheeded.

“My employer, to whom I was a contracted skipper in the Suiderkruis fleet, told me I could look for another job if I repeated my efforts in that direction again,” Walsh wrote in a recent article.

No thanks

“Worst of all, from my point of view, was the fact, when four years later I was proved absolutely right, not a single person acknowledged it, or ever thought of apologising to me, even though I was one of the top skippers on the West Coast. Unfortunately, this was far from the only occasion that this happened, which was subsequently repeated many times during my life.”

On this subject Walsh is quickly emotional. Not for the first time there are tears in his eyes as he recalls some of the pain that accompanied his fishing career. One suspects speaking his mind has been a mixed blessing over the years – he concedes as much.

Career change

From Walvis Bay, Walsh returned to Cape Town, having turned down an offer to fish abroad. Not for the first time he surprised everybody with a career change. He bought a furniture factory and converted it into a unitised kitchen manufacturer.

What followed was a series of business ventures, of varying degrees of success, as Jack awakened to the fact that, as much as he was a fisherman, he is also a serial entrepreneur. “I have had garages, factories and brick fields. I am truly a ‘jack of all trades’”, he quips.

Offshore diamonds

He also tried his hand at offshore diamonds and prawns, and served as a fishing consultant for several years. His dealings have brought him into contact with some prominent South Africans, including the likes of Christo Wiese, as well as most of the fishing tycoons. He had a brush with the coup in Liberia, a boat grounded off the Berg River, and even wrote a book.

On the recreational side he was captain of the Western Cape Province Light Tackle Game Angling Team. He was once selected to fish for South Africa – just as the international sports boycott came into effect.

Getting away

Through it all one of his greatest loves has been ‘getting away from it all’ at the Breede River, where he owned land close to the river mouth. He speaks lovingly of Moddergat and Oumeidseklip and other much-loved Breede River locales, in the starry-eyed manner that is the way of all true fishermen.

As our interview draws to a close I am aware of the folly of trying to reduce a 70-year fishing trip into a single feature story.

I walk away with a sense that, for Walsh, ocean fishing was a metaphor for a much deeper life adventure. Both treacherous and beautiful, a life that had to be lived one unexpected scene at a time.