Jessica Gray in the Uniformed Pool Stroke

End Of School in the 70's

End Of School during the mid 70's

Gary Gray seated on the small diving board, can you recognise any others?

The tradition still survives during recent years!

Thanks to Gary Gray for the contributions!

I learned to swim at this pool at the tender young age of 6. My mother paid a lady called Moira to teach me. I recall that she placed a rubber ring around my waist and shoved me off the small diving board.

The big diving board is no longer there. Somewhere along the line when CDM became "loss control" crazy, they deemed it unsafe.

Man! What a loss that was. We would bomb 7 in a row of that board. We played touched around that board and when we grew older, we would scale the walls at night and go skinny dipping!

These days the pool wall has barbed wire on it.

Gary Gray has submitted a few pool photo's from that golden era when we finished standard 5 and rushed off to the town pool to take the plunge and leap into that pool , clothes and all.

How many of us lost our watches on that strange day.

You will notice on those pictures of yesteryear all the tall fir trees that offered shade from the burning Namib sun. Those tree's where removed in the mid eighties and the pool was closed down for about 6 months while artisans repaired the leaks in the pool.

I was claimed that these leaks were caused by the roots of the fir tree's.

The pool took on a slightly smaller size and that channel that ran around the pool was removed in favour of a more dangerous metal hand rail .

Thatched umbrella's where also put up, but these did'nt fare to well, due to some narrow minded individuals pulling the straw out of them.

There is currently only one tree left in the swimming pool grounds and that is a double barrel Christmas tree which is situated in the corner by the library.

Many of you old Oranjemunders will remember the enterance to the pool that was situated on the side by the bank. This enterance was bricked over and the space converted into an office.

The walls also have a checkpoint affect to them with rows of spikes running along them. How many of you where ever caught skinny dipping there?

We would often spend hours playing all kinds off games in that pool, doing things like "Scoot" , "Stingers", "Touchies" and building 5 tier human pyramids on the shallow end.

I liked it when the pool malfunctioned and the water turned green, you could sneak up on somebody underwater and they would they would'nt even see you coming for a mile.

I always remember how the "macho" guys would put there mouth's half in and half out the water and shake their heads from side to side while shouting, making that roaring noise. It always reminded me of a mating call.

You often wondered how many kids where to lazy to get outta the pool and go to the toilets for a piss.

Another thing thsy always tickled me pink, was the fact that this swimming pool, in the middle of the desert, was a heated pool.

This nice feature, enabled us to have the town pool opening till 21h00 during the summer months.

During the winter months, one could see the steam rising from the surface off the pool.

One image that always remains with me though, is that off being able to stand on top of the high diving board and being able to see the rolling sands of the namib desert stretching out to the North East of the town and then glancing down to the crowded, tropical scene of that awesome attraction that will forever be the town pool!