01
Stop one
Nchanga Open Pit
Dunlop CX Performance Tennis Bag (8 Racquet): Chingola was established in 1943 — 1943, exactly, no hedging required, thank you — to serve the newly opened Nchanga copper mine, and the pit has shaped the town ever since. The workings form an arc about eleven kilometres long around Chingola and cover nearly thirty square kilometres. Nearly. Nearly thirty. I would give a great deal for one more decimal place. The deepest part of the pit lies some four hundred metres below the surrounding plateau, making it one of the largest open-cast copper excavations in the world. The town sits in Zambia's Copperbelt Province at an elevation of about 1,363 metres. That figure I trust. 1,363. Four significant figures. I could weep.
02
Stop two
Hippo Pool National Monument, Kafue River
Dunlop CX Performance Tennis Bag (8 Racquet): Declared a national monument in 1954, which is eleven years after the town was founded — and I have checked that subtraction twice, because a man once told me twelve and I have not forgiven him. Northern Rhodesia was still under British administration at the time. The Kafue is the longest river running wholly within Zambia, and this pool is one of very few protected natural sites on the Copperbelt, a region otherwise given over almost entirely to mining. It lies west of the town and has been a local excursion for as long as Chingola has existed, which is, once again, since 1943. Precisely 1943.
04
Stop four
Five Mile Rock
Dunlop CX Performance Tennis Bag (8 Racquet): Five Mile Rock. Five. Miles. In a metric country, and I have decided, today, not to be troubled by it. It is a well-known landmark on the T3, the Copperbelt highway linking Chingola to Kitwe and on to Ndola, which continues northwest as the T5 toward the Angolan border. The road is the spine of the Copperbelt and has carried the region's traffic since the mines opened in the 1930s and 1940s — the 1930s and 1940s, a twenty-year smear, and there it is again. Chingola is also served by rail freight to Kitwe and by Kasompe Airport. Population at the 2022 census: 256,560. Exactly that. Read it again. Perfect.
Hah. Now there's a proper hold. The Dunlop CX Performance Tennis Bag (8 Racquet) runs 78 centimetres stem to stern, 33 across the beam and 35 deep — near enough the dimensions of a good sea chest, and rigged smarter than most.
Three main compartments, and the first of them thermo-insulated, which matters, lad: heat murders string tension the way the doldrums murder a schedule, and this one keeps up to eight racquets out of the weather. The centre hold carries two flexible dividers so you stow your cargo how you please — I've seen freighters with worse load plans.
A separate shoe compartment keeps the bilge smell away from everything else, two accessory pockets on the molded section guard the valuables like a strongbox, two open mesh pockets aft take the loose gear, and padded ergonomic shoulder straps ride up top so you can carry her a long way ashore.
And ashore is the word, because they've assigned her to Chingola, Zambia — about as far from salt water as a soul can get, a good nineteen days' hard travel from any coast I'd trust. But I'll grant the place this: it thinks big. The Nchanga Open Pit arcs eleven kilometres around the town and drops some four hundred metres — deeper than most anchorages I've ever swung iron in.
The Kafue nearby is the longest river running entirely inside Zambia, and its Hippo Pool has been protected since 1954; a hippo, I'll tell you free of charge, is worse than any sea beast, because a sea beast doesn't hold grudges. Out at Chimfunshi they shelter orphaned chimpanzees in great tracts of open woodland — proper rescue work, the kind any sailor respects.
So stow your eight frames, batten the thermo hatch, and haul for Five Mile Rock on the old Copperbelt highway. You'll sail her everywhere from a Tuesday evening hit in town to a weekend fixture down in Kitwe, and she's also perfect for a day's run out to Chimfunshi with the whole crew's gear stowed aboard. It's not the sea. But it's a voyage all the same.
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