The Coconut Comes in Due Season by David Hurd

Author:David Hurd [David Hurd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-9966-15-899-4
Publisher: Master Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11: Akutendaye Mtende, Mche Asiyekutenda

Hit Back When You Are Harmed, but Be Cautious at all Times

THE FISHING CAMP ON ROBINSON Island where we entertained our first visitors was a cluster of small huts or bandas close to the track we had cut through the bush to the main Malindi-Lamu road. Generously given to me by the Cowan family—friends who often visited me—the camp could carry few passengers. It was a kilometre’s distance from the calm, reef protected water, and when guests began sailing out with me to the nets in the open dhow, they had had enough sun by the time they returned to shore and did not take kindly to a long walk at midday to shade and a cold beer.

Slowly, business increased and the original banda became too small for the growing number of visitors. The time had come to build a bigger one. Instead of merely enlarging the first hut, we constructed a proper Robinson Crusoe restaurant, one closer to the anchorage and on top of the dunes overlooking the bay. Casuarina and mangrove poles supported walls and roofs made of makuti shingles. The exposed positions of the building presented a problem, however. Overnight, strong winds could tunnel under the makuti sides of the building and raise a mound of sand inside. The next morning, tables and chairs would disappear under newborn dunes, and we would all dig frantically to level the floor for our first guests.

To carry extra passengers on the prolonged trip through the bird-filled mangrove creek, I built, to my own design, a flat-bottomed, ten metre long boat. Using the angled roots of the mangrove trees, we fashioned a frame onto which we screwed marine plywood well caulked with a quick drying resin. To regulate steerage and make the punter’s job easier, both the stem and stern were pointed. Even so, it was hard work propelling the laden craft in the strong tide of the twisting channel, and I have had many a plea from the boatman to fit an engine. But the creek was a silent paradise before I arrived, and I shall try my best to keep it that way.

A year after I landed on the island, two former offshore oil rigs were towed out from Italy into Ngwana Bay, three miles seaward from the island, and their legs were jacked down into the seabed. These twentieth century mechanical monstrosities, it seemed, had come to stay.

Because of the situation near the equator, scientists from Aerospace Research Centre in Italy and National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States decided that the bay was an ideal place for trafficking satellites and firing off exploratory rockets into the atmosphere. They situated the station at sea for reasons of security and also to expedite the offloading of heavy equipment, particularly the cumbersome rockets shipped from America.

At a right angle to the island and equidistant to the seabound platform is the project’s base camp at Ngomeni, the southern arm of the bay. With the

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