The walk to town is long, even after one has left the dock area—and it is even longer coming back with supplies. And the wind! Here is one place where it blows—and rarely, it seems, in a direction to give the tired pedestrian a needed boost. One afternoon I was coming back from town, leaning against the wind at every step, with my eyes slitted to protect them from the grit that stung my face. Arriving at the club, I understandably felt the need of a rest and nourishment before attempting the trip by dinghy to my ship. The anemometer on the clubhouse wall was registering 60 knots, but no one seemed to be paying it any particular attention.
“Is your wind gauge accurate?” I asked a member.
He smiled sheepishly. “As a matter of fact, I’m awfully afraid it’s not. Underregisters a bit, you know—five or six knots, actually. Must have it fixed!”
In a wind such as this, just getting out to the Phoenix became high adventure. The method was to drag Flatty around the harbor until well upwind of the Phoenix, then get in and take a sleighride down to the boat, making very certain not to miss! The approved method of rounding up into the wind and coming up alongside would have got one nowhere—except into the most remote corner of Duncan Dock at the other end of the harbor.
Cape Town, we were happy to find, was more relaxed than Durban. The Royal Cape Yacht Club extended a welcome to our whole party and gave us the freedom of their facilities, while the press also played up the interracial composition of our group and ran a story that resulted in bringing us many rewarding contacts we would not otherwise have had.
Among these visitors were three representatives of the African magazine Drum, who came down to judge for themselves an intercultural relationship that would be impossible in South Africa. Two of them were “Colored,” one Indian, and they stayed for several hours.
“How many of us can you squeeze in your sail locker?” one of them joked, with a serious undercurrent that was pathetic. “You could drop us off anywhere—Brazil—the United States—even Mississippi!”
“You wouldn’t like Mississippi,” I said, speaking with some knowledge, since I had spent much of my youth there.
“Man, just try me and see!” exclaimed one, a big Cape Colored. “I’d trade places with any Negro in any part of your ‘Solid South’! At least there I’d know my children and grandchildren would have a future.”
At last, with obvious reluctance, the Indian reminded them that they had a deadline to meet.