OCEAN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

November 18-22, Monday-Friday: This week, we received the "official" surfcrawler sketch from California thanks to Erik Stephansen and Dave Ross; we planned &/or ordered waterpipes, caissons, cranes mounted on skids or cats, saw a demo of Glover's portable jigging plant, designed a remote control anchor for the Suction Pipe Carriage (SPC) had Fry sign dozens of orders, tested the Tourneau crane of boss Mitchell - whom we first met as an ardent sailer - , wrote letters to Dr. Murray and progress reports to Dave and ETS Brown, received, checked and numbered our pipes, and -so-on. In short, it looked like the entire Workshop was working on "our" Hi-Lo project! In a meeting with Shand, Walker, Stocken, Fry, Venske we decided to buy 3 trailers at 750 rand each; I got in a discussion about the "best" grade for evaluation, carats/m² or carats/m³.
We also taught some SCUBA classes, swam in the rough ocean , played squash and chess, and Fry gave me name and telephone number of a Denise Cristie I was to invite to a party.
I "invented" a cantilevered crane, only to find out that they already had built one, which reminded me of a story of a mad uncle, who first "invented" a steam-engine, a week later "the" diesel, and a month later caused a mushroom-shaped explosion . . .
On another personal level, I was surprised to find out that "Hoog-Nederlandsch" (High Dutch) had been taught and had served as the official S.A. language here as late as the 1920's !

November 23, Saturday: A doomsday-day: On the 08:00 news, Venske came to tell us, it was reported that President Kennedy had been murdered! At 09:00, mail via Capetown brought a letter from my wife Rose in Maui that she was pregnant and wanted a divorce.... Our baby was due in March , as she had known since October (so our Dutch "family" doctor had been wrong assuring us that she was not pregnant as he did in July!). I was as sad as could be and wrote her a long letter that afternoon.

That evening, we went to the "bioskoop" (movies) and saw "The Manchurian Candidate", which gave us goose pimples because of the eerie timing.