Kowie’s one-man sea rescuer
Hero risked own life to save more than 40 others
Ronnie Samuel was a third generation Samuel of the Kowie. His grandfather Johannes Heinerich [sic] Samuel (a sailor, born 1856 in Altona, near Hamburg in Germany) had apparently jumped ship at Port Alfred and stayed here, married and had 15 children. The 15th child was Ronnie’s father Manning Altona Samuel, known as Mannie, who had a ship chandler’s business at the riverside in Van der Riet Street, Port Alfred, and he owned fishing boats. He taught the local boys, including Ronnie, to box in Campbell Street in what was later the Goodwill Centre from 1934 to 1948, and was involved in sea rescues for many years.
Like his father before him, Ronnie Samuel loved the river and spent many hours fishing in it as a boy. As he grew up, he went to sea in his father’s fishing boats, and grew to love the sea in all its moods. Leaving school early, he started to train as a welder but never finished because the fish were biting.
His welding knowledge stood him in good stead, however. He built his own boats from plywood, first the Bluefin, then the Yellowfin, powered by a Seagull 4hp engine then a Johnson 7,5h.p. Many returns to harbour were hazardous, the sea could change within an hour and the boats made no more than five knots. The waves, treacherously angled at 15 knots, always threatened to hurl them against the pier.
But Ronnie could “read” the treacherous bar at the river mouth as if it were a main road and he seemed to know no fear, though he had many close shaves. On more than one occasion he was swept overboard, and once, in 1961, he and 13 men on the 40-foot Mary Anne went missing for 32 hours in a gale and were eventually discovered 50 miles off-course by a search aircraft.
Ronnie’s fame as a sea rescuer grew. He once dived in to pluck a child from the bottom of the Buffalo River in East London. On another occasion he saved
two men in trouble in a boat off Kowie
one of them was paralysed but he got to shore, wheelchair and all. By 1965, at the age of 30, this burly, immensely strong young fisherman had made at least 30 rescues. In fact, a 1965 EP Herald article described Ronnie as “almost as famous as the 144 year old town in which he lives and works… responsible for more dramatic rescues and escapes from the seas than anyone else in the area”.
In 1956, he owned two boats entirely manned by coloured crews. One day, in a strong westerly wind, one of the boats failed to return. Ronnie went to the pier and anxiously scanned the sea. When the boat finally drew near, it began to drift out to sea again. It had run out of fuel. Ronnie rounded up his cousin, Pixie John, (Henry Samuel John) a fisherman and beachcomber, who couldn’t swim, to help him. Then in his other boat he braved the troubled waters, taking out a supply of petrol.
He swam with a line between the boats and extricated the stricken craft from the danger of nearby rocks. When he, too, ran out of fuel, he lashed the two boats together and drifted 150km eastwards, miraculously clearing Riet Point. They were rescued the next morning. [This adventure is covered in a separate NN article, to follow].
There were newsworthy rescues in 1958 and again in 1960. “Father of
four, 25, braves 20ft waves,” ran the headline in the Daily Dispatch, though his wife’s comment was: “I wasn’t worried about Ronnie. He knows how to get out of difficulties he is so calm and always cool in a crisis.”
In 1965 came his most famous exploit. A 73-ton Irvin and Johnson fishing trawler, the Cape St Blaize, ran aground on a sandbank 12km west of Port Alfred off Glendower Beacon at 10.30pm on June 22. There were 12 men on board. The police immediately called Ronnie. Heavy seas were running, spray dashed over the stern and the early morning was cold.
“I knew a rope would have to be used”, Ronnie said. “Unless the men on board were strong swimmers, they would not have made the swim to the beach. The current wouldn’t have taken them to the shore but along the coast.”
Ronnie waded in and shouted to the crew to have a line ready. The crew tied the line to an oil drum and put it over the side as Ronnie made the hugely difficult swim out. Holding firmly on to the drum, he began to swim back towards the boat but the current swept him 90m down the beach.
As each breaker rolled over him, he dived to avoid being hit by the drum. Once he was too slow and the drum slammed down on his head. His friend
Albert Marais waded out to help.
The line was secured and the lucky dozen were plucked from danger. Later, the whole town turned out, on foot, in beach buggies, on bikes, even on a tractor and waggon, to watch a salvage company’s cutting the Cape St Blaize in half in an attempt to tow the two bits back to Cape Town for salvage. The half left behind can still be seen at certain tides.
This 1965 rescue was acknowledged with a telegram from Bill Deacon, MPC: “Congratulations on a fine job”. Then in 1968 Ronnie was awarded the Wolraad Woltemade medal * for bravery in 1966; a silver medal from the EP Life Savers Association and in 1968 an SA Life Saving Society’s Award.
Ronnie’s private life was somewhat colourful, (he eventually had 17 children), but he didn’t smoke and seldom drank and was well-spoken, capable and intelligent; and Louis L’Amour’s cowboy books he read avidly. He knew his birds, and the stars, and would collect specimens for the Rhodes ichthyologist JLB ‘Fishy’ Smith and his wife Margaret, or would report to them when he came across sightings of interest.
Locally, Mrs Betty Gemmill of Richmond House would call in Ronnie
to maintain the tall mast of the Ocean Queen on her lawn until “it finally blew down in a gale”.
But it was a hard life. In 1963, he lost two boats within two weeks, the St Peter and Sea Hawk, both lost trying to enter the Kowie River in heavy seas. Crews tended to be unreliable, so he often took on members of his growing family as crew. In 1990, aged 55, he wrote to a family member: “I fish with my wife and one son and friend now. I have no crew anymore. There are so many boats fishing here from other places it makes it hard for the locals.
“We survive on relatively small catches, but the price of fish is good and our expenses are low…. I have many grandchildren now.” Eventually, the hard life of fishing got to him, and he died from heart failure in 1997 aged 61. By the time of his death, he had saved more than 40 lives.
Often his catches were small he fished by handline and times could be tough, but when he had a fair catch of kob, redfish, silvers, geelbek, or hake, he would say with his characteristic wry smile: “Ah, the sun always shines on the righteous.”
*The Woltemade Decoration for Bravery, silver, was instituted in 1970, in memory of Woltemade, an elderly servant of the Dutch East India Company, who gave his life while rescuing shipwrecked sailors in Table Bay on June 1 1773. Woltemade rode his horse into the sea seven times and brought surviving sailors ashore each time, but on the eighth excursion Woltemade and his exhausted horse were overladen by panic-stricken sailors and drowned. SOURCES:
From a newspaper article found in the Kowie Museum;
Samuel Family in Port Alfred. Privately published
Personal scrapbooks
Photo donated to Kowie Museum. Gordon, S. Cock Tales on the Kowie, page 133, 2020.