ENTRY NO. 001 — WALVIS BAY, NAMIBIA
Welcome Aboard
There's a particular kind of quiet on the Walvis Bay waterfront just before the tugs go out — fog still sitting low over the lagoon, the harbour cranes lit up like something out of an old engineering plate, and somewhere out past the breakwater, a bulk carrier waiting on her berth. I've spent a long time watching that quiet. Harry's Hook is where I've started writing it down.
My name's Harry — Handy Harry, if you're asking around the harbour. Four decades in telecommunications and electronics taught me to take things apart to understand them, and years around Walvis Bay's port taught me the rest: how a harbour actually runs, what a vessel's movements tell you, why the old machinery is often worth more attention than the new. I hold a MarineTraffic Station Master accreditation for this stretch of coast, which is a fancy way of saying I keep a close eye on who's coming and going.
This publication runs on the same principle as everything else I build: no unnecessary parts. Plain HTML, no frameworks, no tracking, no clutter between you and the page. What you read here has been checked, not just typed — that's the "Researched" in the tagline, and I don't take it lightly.
What you'll find in this logbook: dispatches from the harbour and the shipping lanes, the history buried in old wrecks and old machinery, technical drawings and the odd bit of engineering I've puzzled through, notes from time spent in Damaraland and the Kaokoveld chasing wildlife with a camera, days on the water with a rod in hand, and the long roads out to camp under a sky with no city light in it. Photography runs through most of it — square format, black and white, the way I've always preferred to see this country.
Entry by entry, this is the record. Glad to have you reading over my shoulder.
— Harry