Civil Engineering May 2022 | Vol 30 No 4

Civil Engineering May 2022 21 gave her a copy of his recipe for “Walvis Bay Mustard”. Appropriate perhaps. He had done a great deal of work on the sulphur eruptions in Walvis Bay that are biological, not tectonic. In 1977 he was awarded an honorary membership of the Challenger Society. Along Cannery Row in Walvis Bay, in the heyday of the pelagic fishery and during a sulphur eruption, the bay was peppered with blobs of bottom sludge, buoyed up on bubbles of hydrogen sulphide, plopping upwards like upside down cow pats. All sorts of fish would swim along on the surface, gasping for air. Copie once gave me a copy of a paper on a floating island of compacted sludge around 100 m long with a freeboard of about 3 m that popped up off Pelican Point. Sometimes, driving back from Swakpomund in the afternoon, with the sun westering across the bay, the whole sea would turn silver like a sheet of beaten metal. It was the free sulphur in the water left after the H 2 S was oxidised at the surface. One morning in Walvis Bay we got a ride on the pilot launch to Pelican Point. It was one of those days when the air was crystal clear, after the morning fog had burned off, without dust or sulphur. Everything was bright and fresh and new, and the sea sparkled its very best azure blue as our launch bounced through the swells on its way across the bay. When we landed, our two little girls scampered up the boardwalk to the lighthouse like Dorothy along the yellow brick road. We found a door to the lighthouse that opened into a long room with an equally long table. A row of lighthouse keepers sat on each side with the head lighthouse keeper at the end. In front of him was an enormous enamel teapot. He looked up and said, “Do come in, we’ve been expecting you.” And so it was, we had tea with the lighthouse keepers that would have been fit for Alice! Shortly after I started working with the sea I attended a talk by the late Michael Daws on marine corrosion. He chose for his theme, “The sea is not some inert substance; it is a living thing”. You cannot take a bottle of seawater back to your lab for corrosion experiments. It dies when you take it away from the sea; it is no longer the same water you took from the sea. Michael was commenting on all the microorganisms that live in sea water and affect its chemistry. But the sea is a living thing of itself, on all scales. The waters of the sea are constantly heaving and surging with the passing of the swells, sometimes placid, sometimes storm wracked, always smashing into the shore according to its mood. Where the shores are mobile sand, these too come alive under the urging of the sea; so too are the beaches always changing their disposition. The earliest attempt I know of to define the excursion of the sea onto land was published in the Institutes of Justinian in 533 AD as: “ Est autem litus maris, quatenus hibernus fluctus maximus excurrit .” I have translated this as: “The seashore, however, is as far as the greatest run-up of the winter waves.” A sequence of British judges and profes- sors who have attempted to translate this passage have all ended up with useless garble. Whoever that old Roman jurist was who wrote this must have been a friend of the sea to get it so right. What I love about the original Latin is the word excurrit. How beautifully it captures the cheeky scurrying of the swash as it dashes to the terminal of the run-up. Alas, the living sea does not deign to be so easily corralled. Each and every swash chooses its own terminal and together these prescribe a fuzzy zone. Nowhere can one stand with certainty with one foot always below the terminal uprush and one that is always above. The living sea will not permit it! Instead, it gives us that magical place between the sea and the land, the seashore, that is always changing from one to the other: sometimes wet, sometimes dry. It is the habitat of life forms adapted to both. It is a great driver of evolution for any life that cares to tarry there. The great triumph of the human mind is its ability to think in terms of mechanical systems and Euclidean geom- etry. Thinking this way and using only the simplest of tools and instruments, we have been able to contemplate and then create the incredible accuracy of the Pyramids of Giza, of ancient aqueducts, and the glory of the great gothic cathe- drals of France. The great tragedy of our relationship with the sea is our persistent attempt to impose this simplistic geo- metrical and mechanistic thinking on the seashore. And the sea won’t have it. There is great joy in working with the sea, yet greater still when these works amplify the blue mind, the blue health that the sea and the works can, together, induce in us. Victor Weisskopf wrote of the privilege of being a physicist. The privilege of being a marine engineer, of working with the sea, of experiencing the blue mind in our daily work, of helping to bring it to people all over the world, is even greater and a responsibility that cannot be gainsaid. For me, it has been a life well lived. NOTES 1 Men’s lanoline hair dressing, de rigueur, in the RAF in those days. 2 Words change, times don’t. It was the direct equivalent of “cool” today. I only knew of it on the Atlantic seaboard in the early 1940s. 3 Crayfish – Jasus Lalandii – rock lobster. 4 This is general South African usage. American usage would be “pier”. The British seem to be ambivalent in this regard. All text and photos copyright K. P. Mackie Off to tea at Pelican Point Contrails in the evening