50 Years of Umko 1966 - 2016 1966 - 2016 | Page 72

©Jon Ivins

official Angus Sinclair.
His Hewlett Packard 85
machine had exciting
possibilities:
It
could
punch out the results
within a half-hour of the
cut-off time! Perhaps. At
first, though, the “bubblesort” procedure was rather
slow and the manual timekeepers raced the HP85,
beating it handily - just as
the chessmasters used to
beat Big Blue. After several
program amendments the HP started to get the hang of things.

Overnight Kit

Nowadays paddlers keep their own overnight kit, but in the first four
decades you had to hand your kit to the organisers for them to take it to the
overnight stop for you. Ernie Alder tells us how one year heavy rain forced
the organisers to leave the paddlers’ kit in the valley on Green’s farm on
the North bank at St Elmo’s (down the original old “Voortrekker” road to
Cunningham’s Drift).
Before they left they reversed the two kit trucks back-to-back with the
doors against each other so they could not be opened. They left the hired

UMKO 50 Years

security guards there and drove out. Later, Farmer Green went in on
horseback to give food to the guards.
At the finish some paddlers were desperate: “I have air tickets to Aussie
and my passport in my bag!” “I have a special key to open a bank vault in
my bag!”
A week later farmer Green phoned to say “You can come now”.
Ernie, Charlie and Roy Swingewood drove down into the valley to
fetch the trucks. Roy (with a truck licence) and Charles (without) drove the
trucks to the clubhouse at Blue Lagoon. The sopping wet kit was locked
up, with only Ernie and Durban’s Oldest Teenager Bill Barron having
keys. All paddlers were instructed to mark their kit clearly. And of course,
they did just that, making Ernie’s life easy. Ja, right! Can you hear Ernie
laughing weakly? NOT! KCC helpers (like Pete Zietsman who needed hi s
bag urgently so came in and helped) sorted out the marked kit (a few bags),
then went through the mountainous pile of unmarked bags, opening and
searching for identification such as credit cards in wallets and then labelling
bags and sorting them into piles judging on addresses found. One wallet
had R7000 in it. The kit - spread on the lawn to help the search - was starting
to smell a bit ripe.
The “Transvaal” pile - now smelling worse - got shipped to Dabulamanzi
Club in JHB thanks to Daphne Hawarden’s courier connections. Ernie and
Colin Mercer left Durban at 11pm and drove to Jo’burg to be at
Dabulamanzi early the next morning. Paddlers had been notified to fetch
their kit at Dabs Club from 8am. Paddlers came in, searched, found their kit,
signed for it and left. One bag had expensive camera equipment in it, and
was fetched by the relieved owner. Another worried-looking owner claimed

72