BY 11.15pm we were beginning to get worried about Ted and discussed the possibility of having to call out two search parties. We decided to give him another half-hour and brewed some more tea.
He arrived just after 11.30, having found no sign of the missing boat.
From somewhere, he produced a pencil and paper and we worked out our requirements over yet another cup of tea.
Petrol was an essential, plus two-stroke oil to add to it for the boat. Ted’s boat engine was still in Orapa and would have to be brought out and a second boat and crew would certainly be useful. Food was also needed.
The two ancient tins of baked beans in our locker at the boat club were not going to stretch very far, considering that we had not eaten since lunchtime and would be ravenous by tomorrow.
To add to the problems, Ted had a dog and a cat and I had three dogs, all of which had been left in Orapa and needed feeding. And, of course, we needed a tin of dog food for Rex. Ted went to the radio room to send the message.
Gavin was hopping mad when he was paged at 12.15, but not because of being dragged out of bed. He thought there must be a problem on the plant and, when Ted’s name was mentioned, he assumed that some idiot had called out the divisional engineer first, even though call-outs were supposed to be made in reverse order of seniority.
It was a long and complicated list which Ted gave Gavin on the radio and I was quite sure that it would take the rest of the night to assemble all the items.
I took the back seats out of the Land Rover, put them on the clubhouse floor and tried to sleep. We also found a folding mattress and Ted settled himself into an armchair for a snooze. It was bitterly cold and the heater was worse than useless, because the fan worked and the element didn’t.
We managed to convince ourselves that our missing persons would, by now, be sleeping beside a big camp fire, but none of us managed more than a fitful doze.
(Meanwhile, back in the boat, they had wedged themselves into a thick bed of reeds, in the hope that these would keep some of the wind off them. The nearest thing the children had to warm clothing was their life-jackets. Byron was wearing a T-shirt, but Corrie was stripped to the waist. They all cuddled up together for warmth and tried to sleep, but by now the boat was shipping water and had to be baled out quite frequently.)
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