They say when things go wrong they can set off a chain reaction of bad things, and it doesn’t rain but it pours.
But the strangeness and deviation from the norm by a series of accidents all in one week were referred to by many as Murphy’s law.
The accidents were perhaps not funny to the victims at the time, but all lumped together and seen objectively have caused some amusement and much speculation for St Francis Bay’s residents.
First offm the big word ‘Fail’ was posted on FB under a photo of a car on main beach on a Sunday morning. How it got there caused all sorts of theories, such as ‘flying’. It turns out that the driver did not know the beach area too well and drove straight over the edge of the car park, where there are no barriers, and landed on the rocks and beach below. As it was high tide the tow company had to wait till 9 am to tow the car away at low tide. Fortunately the driver was unharmed, the car insured and no public property was damaged.
A day later, a bakkie was spotted floating in the canals by a resident out on a leisurely cruise. Upon closer investigation he found a man had been pulling his boat out the water. The man stopped on the slipway, then got into the boat to prepare it for towing and trim the engine up. As he did so the bakkie started running backwards down the slipway since the handbrake was not fully on.
He leapt out the boat and tried to open the passenger door of the bakkie to get to the handbrake but that door was locked. By then the boat had jack-knifed off the side of the slipway and pulled the bakkie sideways off the slipway. The bystander phoned another resident in the town who came along in his little red jeep and managed to pull both the bakkie and the car out.
And if that is not enough, that evening a pedestrian was flipped over when a pub patron reversed out of his parking space to go home. No one has been forthcoming of the identity of the driver or the fate of the pedestrian. All the witness was prepared to say was: “Fortunately the resident was not badly injured so the matter was scuttled.”
And then a cow went awol and was also knocked over on its way to Cape St Francis when it walked in front of a car. The car was damaged and could go no further and the cow was lying comatose in the road. The driver thumbed a lift home.
When the police came to the scene not too long afterwards, the cow had disappeared. Observers are still wondering how, and how many people had managed to remove the cow so quickly.
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