Jack Walsh
“Something of a fishing freak”
Jack Wreford Walsh was born in November 1937. His parents aptly named him Jack, which must have been short for “Jack of all trades”. If only they had known! He was schooled at Wet Pups,(Western Province Preparatory School) and St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown.
Three generations (On both sides of the family!) of insurance industry executives determined unequivocally his future. However even that could not keep him from the sea, as he was always fishing mad. Still wet behind the ears, he inherited one of the first true country insurance brokerages, with the instilled principle to the extreme of “honesty is the best policy”. The business flourished, leading, he says, to his first big mistake when he sold an excellent business, for which he was never paid, to concentrate on the sea.
Fifty two years later, with an Associateship of the Chartered Insurance Institute having specialised in Marine Insurance Law, a management diploma, a foreign going fishing masters ticket, a pilot’s licence, a flirtation with politics, a rocky personal history, thirty or so companies (two of which he took to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange) in some fifteen or so different industries and vocations, and last, but certainly not least, four wonderful and successful children, he has now finally retired! May be?
Living and working in Somerset West in the Western Cape enabled him to have the best of both worlds when, as a semi-commercial line fisherman, his part time income was only exceeded by his monthly pay cheque in the seventh year of his working life. When circumstances availed him the opportunity to enter the West Coast fishing industry on a full-time basis in 1961, he soon qualified as a skipper, mainly concentrating on the Purse Seine netting of small pelagics, as well as various other Marine resources. With his interest fired up by a natural sciences academic, who was to become his closest friend, he became an avid layman researcher in the field of Marine resources and their management.
All in all his adventures and experiences on or connected with the African and South African oceans, are extremely entertaining, exciting, and at times comical. In their telling, they are always very insightful in the fields of commercial fishing and sea diamond recovery, about both of which very little has been written. Through all his experiences in life, his passion for the sea and his hobby of recreational fishing are coloured by his ardent wish for the sustainability and conservation of our valuable Marine resources for all time.
