The Tide Table I Kept Long After the Boats Were Gone

The harbour still wakes me before the alarm does

I am sixty-eight, and my body has kept the habit of the sea even though the sea has quietly let me go. I wake at twenty to five most mornings, before the light, the way I did for close to forty years. For a long time that meant pulling on a fleece in the dark, driving down to the small craft basin at Durban harbour, and standing on the wooden walkway with a mug of coffee while the diesel warmed and the gulls complained about nothing.

These days the drive is shorter, because there is nowhere to drive to. I walk to the end of my road in Glenwood instead, where if the wind is right you can smell the port before you can see anything of it. Salt, and tar, and that faint low note of fish and engine oil that I have never been able to describe to anyone who did not grow up near a working harbour. My wife, Ellen, says I smell the sea the way other men listen for rain. She is not wrong.

I ran charter boats out of Durban for most of my life. Deep sea, mainly. Tourists who wanted marlin and got seasick, local men who knew exactly what they were after, the odd film crew, a great many bachelor parties I would rather forget. I had two boats at the best of it and five people on the books. I knew the shelf off the coast better than I know my own garden.

The year everything finally went right

Twenty years is a long time to be bad at something before you are good at it, and I was bad at the business side for most of them. I could read weather and water and I could keep a nervous client calm in a four metre swell, but invoices and fuel contracts and the taxman defeated me for the better part of two decades.

Then came 2007. I do not fully know why that season turned the way it did. The fish ran well, the rand behaved itself for once, a lodge up the coast started sending me their guests, and for the first time in my life I ended a financial year with money that was genuinely mine and not already promised to somebody else. Ellen and I paid off the bond on the house. We put something aside for the children. And I did a foolish, happy thing that I had quietly wanted to do since I was a deckhand earning almost nothing.

I bought myself a watch. A good one, the kind with a name everybody knows, the kind that is built to go underwater far deeper than I ever intended to take it. I did not buy it to impress anyone. I bought it because a man who had spent his whole working life watching tides and timing runs and counting the minutes of daylight he had left wanted, just once, to own a proper instrument for keeping time. It felt like proof. Not of money. Of the fact that I had not drowned, in any of the ways a small coastal business can drown you.

How a business winds down without you noticing

Nobody tells you that a business can end the way a tide goes out, so slowly that you are standing in wet sand before you understand the water has left. The bigger operators came. Fuel climbed and never really came back down. The lodge changed hands. My knees stopped agreeing to the pounding of a planing hull in a chop. One boat was sold to a younger man from Richards Bay, the other sat on its trailer until selling it was simply the sensible thing.

I did not have a grand final day. I had a Tuesday, a few years ago, when I realised I had not taken a booking in three months and was not going to. I still keep a tide table on the fridge. Ellen has stopped asking why. The honest answer is that reading it makes me feel like a man who still has somewhere to be at first light.

The grandchild who listened differently

We have a granddaughter, Sinethemba, who is nineteen and the only person in three generations of my family who loves the sea the way I do without wanting to make a living catching things out of it. She wants to understand it. Marine biology. She used to sit in the bow when she was small, not screaming like the tourists but watching, asking me why the water changed colour over the shelf, why the birds knew before we did where the fish were.

This year she was offered a place to study overseas. A real one, at a university with research boats and cold northern water and names on the staff list that she reads out to me like other girls read out pop stars. The fees, converted into our money, are the kind of number that makes you put the letter down and go and stand in the garden for a while.

Her parents are doing what they can. We are doing what we can. And one evening, sitting with the tide table on the fridge behind me, I understood exactly what the most useful thing I owned actually was, and that it was not doing anybody any good sitting in a drawer wrapped in a sock.

Letting the watch go

I had not worn the watch in years. My wrist had got thinner, the clasp had got looser, and somewhere along the way it had stopped being a thing I put on and become a thing I owned. So I did some reading, quietly, the way you do when you are not quite ready to say a thing out loud. I learned that there are proper Rolex Watch Buyers here in South Africa who handle this sort of transaction the way my old insurance broker handled a claim, without drama.

I did not want a pawnshop and I did not want to haggle on a pavement. I wanted to understand what the thing was genuinely worth before I let anyone near it, so I spent an evening working out how you actually go about it when you decide to Sell My Rolex, what papers they ask for, how the price is reached, how long the money takes to land in an account. It was not as cold or as complicated as I had feared.

When the time came, the choice to Sell Rolex for Cash felt less like losing something and more like finally spending it on the thing it had quietly been saved for all along. The money went where Sinethemba's fees were short. She does not fully know where it came from, and I would rather she learned about ocean currents than about her grandfather's sentimentality.

I still wake at twenty to five. I still read the tide table. But now, when I stand at the end of the road and the harbour smell comes up on the wind, I think about a girl in cold water on the other side of the world, learning the sea properly, and I find I do not miss the weight on my wrist at all. Time, it turns out, was never the thing I was keeping. She was.