Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas

by Nancy Knudsen

  The quotation from Tim Winton on p. 270 is from his novel Breath (Penguin Australia, 2009).

  The quotation from Lonely Planet on pp. 189–90 is from the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe (Duncan Garwood, Lonely Planet, 2007).

  First published in 2011

  Copyright © Nancy Knudsen 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Arena Books, an imprint of

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 665 3

  Internal design by Darian Causby

  Map by Guy Holt

  Set in 12/18 pt Goudy by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  Dedicated to the countless people we met in Third World countries, for their warmth and generosity, for their wisdom and grace, and for teaching me so much about what matters in the world.

  One night when I was ten years old, I sat on a dark beach with my mother, waiting for the moon to appear out of the sea.

  ‘Watch carefully,’ she said. ‘If you see a shooting star, you can make a wish; but if you then see a flying fish, your wish is sure to come true.’

  CONTENTS

  Map: blackwattle’s route

  Prologue

  1. The dream begins

  Before the departure

  2. Sailing in circles and sinking by the bow

  Sydney to Darwin

  3. Shooting stars and flying fish

  Ashmore Reef, Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling to the Maldives

  4. The lessons we learn

  Addu Atoll

  5. The magic of Kochi

  The Maldives to India

  6. Through Pirate Alley with the Spanish navy

  Oman to Eritrea

  7. Wild, wild desert and flying sand

  Eritrea to the Sudan

  8. Angel Gabriel and a sting in the tail

  Egypt and the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean

  9. Away in a manger

  Israel to Turkey

  10. Turkish seduction

  Istanbul

  11. The lesser-known Med

  The Greek Islands, Crete and Malta to Tunisia

  12. Land of volcanoes

  Gibraltar to Graciosa Island

  13. Skippers are from hell

  The Canary Islands to the mid-Atlantic

  14. How strangers meet

  Mid-Atlantic to St Lucia

  15. The green silk nightie

  The Windward Islands

  16. Kings, carnivals and AK-47s

  Trinidad and Venezuela to Colombia

  17. The vanishing island

  The San Blas

  18. Wilting military cities and howling monkeys

  The Panama Canal

  19. The home ocean

  Into the Pacific

  20. The demise of Fantasy1

  The Galapagos

  21. Heaven, hell and too many bananas

  The Galapagos to the Marquesas

  22. Floating coconuts

  French Polynesia

  23. The story of Taia

  The Cook Islands

  24. The Old Man of the Sea

  Tonga to Fiji

  25. South Pacific dreaming

  Vanuatu

  26. Arriving home

  Vanuatu to Bundaberg

  27. Discovering my Australia

  To Sydney

  28. Through the looking glass

  The awakening

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Cracking, banging, crunching sounds slip into my dreams and I’m instantly awake. I’ve become used to waking at the slightest unusual sound but this is different, worse, like nothing I have heard before.

  Ted and I catapult out of bed and up on the deck into the wind and darkness.

  There’s more loud, regular crunching. Fleeting thought: Is that the dinghy hitting the side? No, we’ve hit something . . . stab of pain in the stomach . . . The reef! We’re on the reef.

  I realise it’s my voice coming from somewhere.

  The noise is now deafening. There’s a large swell and our yacht is hitting the bottom of each trough with a crashing noise that vibrates through the whole boat. Ted rushes for the engine and it roars into life; we’re up and away. The crunching has stopped; we’re free. I start to breathe. Now, quickly get the anchor up . . .

  But then the engine stops again. Ted starts it. It catches, runs, then fails. The boat is bucking and swaying in the swell, and I realise we’re drifting backwards again. No! Stop it somehow. Stop it!

  Ted keeps starting the engine but fails each time.

  Then we’re at it again; ugly, fracturing grinding.

  ‘My God, we’re going to lose the boat!’ Ted shouts as the milliseconds stretch into slow motion and his words echo round and round in my head. We’re barely eight months into our voyage around the world. This can’t be happening . . . we’ve only reached the Maldives!

  1. The Dream Begins

  Before the departure

  One leisurely weekend in January 1996, Ted and I were sheltering from the heat in our small sailing boat in one of our favourite shadowed anchorages in Broken Bay, just north of Sydney. It must have been the middle of the day because the silence was broken only by the shrill of cicadas. I still remember tiny details: ochre leaves floating, insects flitting, two kites soaring high above us, hills rising steeply in the background, and no other boats in sight.

  We were reading in the cockpit – or at least we were meant to be reading. I was actually watching the way the kites flew, wafting in an unseen breeze as they hunted for prey. A moment came when I glanced across at Ted, my husband and best buddy, and was surprised by what I saw: his face unlined, brow clear, eyes less pinched than usual. He wasn’t smiling, but his mouth was relaxed. I kept watching him, warmed by the thought that he seemed, for now, serene and happy. Slowly, he turned a page. I could tell by the heading that he was beginning a new chapter.

  Something happened to me with the turning of that page. Ted’s expression of peace as he started the new chapter shifted something within me. I turned back to my own book, but I couldn’t concentrate.

  ‘We could
stay on the boat,’ I said softly into the silence.

  Ted looked up. ‘What? Did you say something?’

  I laughed. ‘You never listen. I said that we could live on the boat. We don’t have to live in a house.’

  ‘Which boat?’

  ‘The one we’d be living on.’

  ‘Live on a boat? You’ve got to be kidding. Boats are tough things to live on. For a start, where would you put all your business suits?’

  Rush of blood to the head. ‘You’re laughing at me. You like boats better than houses; I like boats better than houses.’ Defensive. ‘Who says we have to live in a house?’

  ‘You couldn’t live on a boat.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course I could live on a boat. I’d love it.’

  ‘You work twelve bloody hours a day, six and often seven days a week. You’d never see it in daylight.’

  ‘Well I’d enjoy coming home to a boat at night. And what about the weekends?’

  He stared at me for a second and then grinned. ‘Right. If you want to come sailing you have to take time off from the company and come cruising with me. For a whole year.’

  ‘Cruising? You’re a racing sailor. You don’t know anything about cruising.’

  ‘Sure I do. You just put down an anchor every now and then.’

  ‘Ted, the first time we went for a picnic cruise together we had to keep sailing all day because you couldn’t even find the anchor,’ I said scathingly.

  This mischievous denigration of each other had always been a feature of our relationship, a relationship distinguished by laughter. What neither of us noticed at the time was that we had started to argue about whether we were capable of sailing away from our daily life, not whether we would go at all. Maybe I didn’t think then that I really would take time off from my company, didn’t think that life as I knew it would even let me do that. But a tiny seed had been sown.

  Little were we to know that this small dream would assume a life of its own and take over our lives. I had no concept of the challenges, the fear, the enormity of it all. And if I had known, even a little, of what lay ahead, I would have been terrified.

  But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

  Several years before that conversation in Broken Bay, a friend had invited me sailing one weekend when my children were off visiting their dad. It was instant love. On the water, out on the ocean, I felt like a child of the universe. I revelled in the sea’s vastness, its power, the adrenaline rush I got from the onslaught of wild waves, the hurl of the salt spray, the glow of phosphorus across the water at night. From then on, whenever time allowed, I entered every sailing race I could.

  As a divorced mother of two beautiful kids, this wasn’t always easy. I started out with evening twilight races that could be sandwiched between work and dinner, and after a while I graduated to day races. Initially I served in the lowliest of crew positions, slowly learning more about techniques by watching others carefully, and always making myself available to fill in for a missing crew member. I never cared who won. I was ready to toil for months and years at the office if I could enjoy just a few euphoric moments at sea. Graduating to ocean racing was as natural as breathing.

  When I started racing, my life was completely dominated by building my business with the aim of giving my children – Kassandra and Simon – a decent start in life. I’d committed myself to giving them a private-school education and spread myself between ‘being there’ for them and working hard to keep us solvent. It left little time for anything else. Sailing became my occasional personal escape.

  By the time I met Ted at a dinner party with sailing friends, I had become a reasonably competent sailor by Sydney standards. My enthusiasm still outstripped my ability, and my strength – or lack of it – was a hindrance to serious racing. Meeting Ted, I was impressed by his experience in the sport I’d come to love so well, but he was far too experienced and sought after on fast yachts for us ever to share crewing. Ted had sailed since childhood and his endless love of adventure balanced his commitment to his chosen field of architecture. He had participated in an Admiral’s Cup, a Fastnet, a race around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, ten Sydney to Hobarts and innumerable other ocean races. I was attracted to him immediately. Unlike many of the Sydney men that I knew, he never seemed to feel the need to prove himself, and that took confidence of a very real kind. Compared to the competitive blue suits or the self-applauding sailing jackets that I was used to, his lack of macho bravado was stunning. Even though we rarely sailed together, and never in a race, our lives merged with an ease that was extraordinary, and our relationship was warm, easy and funny. He was also unconcerned and unthreatened by my business exploits, joking that sometimes he had to ‘walk a couple of paces behind’. What kind of confidence was that! He understood my need to concentrate on business to keep my small family, and that most of my spare time was devoted to my children. He even seemed genuinely thrilled by any success I had.

  I found it all wonderfully relaxing, and agreeing to marry Ted Nobbs was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. (I had picked up the habit of calling him by his full name, particularly when I was making fun of him. He frequently sailed in a crew with no less than three members called Ted, and his close friends tended to call him Ted Nobbs to distinguish which Ted they meant.)

  The shrill sound came from a distance, drilling into my sleep, louder and louder. I groaned, switched off the alarm and heaved myself out of bed, eyes still shut, getting caught in a tangle of sheets as I went. Damn. It was 5.51 am. A grey light from Sydney Harbour outside the window penetrated the room. I could hear the sirens of police cars crossing the Anzac Bridge against the hum of traffic as I dragged on my tracksuit pants.

  ‘Get up, Ted,’ I said, yanking the bedclothes off him without pity. ‘Teagon’ll be here any minute!’

  Our trainer, Teagon, arrived at exactly 6 am. We had to be out there, ready and waiting. There was a grumbling from Ted, followed by a soft patter on the terrace signalling Teagon’s arrival. Before she knocked I slid open the glass door.

  Ted appeared soon after, and out in the cold Teagon put us through some of her hellish exercises, accompanied us on a run to the park and back, and was gone by seven. Now the weekday work routine started. It was the same every day. Shower, power drink, carrot juice, tea and toast.

  ‘Bye, darling!’ I said, kissing Ted, who’d recently sold his share in his corporate architectural practice and was loving working and drawing at home.

  As I left for work the 7.45 am ABC news theme chased me out the door.

  Home keys, garage keys, car keys and office keys jangled as I clacked down the hallway of our apartment block to the garage and the Audi. To anyone seeing me, I was the epitome of a smart city slicker: suit, silk shirt, black briefcase. I was already tense as I prepared to meet the challenges of a day in my aviation and tourism business: negotiating, dealing, deciding strategy or tactics, playing tough or soft as the occasion demanded, a hundred roles a day. I swung into the rush of cars at the end of the street. A horn blew. Get lost.

  Applying my make-up at traffic lights, I fumed and calculated my way through Sydney’s suburbs, cutting across town through dismal terrace-lined back streets. Graffiti snarled across walls, and dark-clothed pedestrians hunched forward into a cold wind. The locked windows of my car cut the noise and smells, and Classic FM drowned out most external sounds. I was apart, air-conditioned, secure.

  I stopped at an intersection. A girl in a black miniskirt and ridiculous heels ran along the footpath to a stationary bus, balancing a cup of coffee, her shoulder bag slipping. Just as she arrived, the bus’s automatic doors closed. She peered through the glass, waving at the driver, but the bus just sat there for a moment and then pulled away. Five metres along it stopped at a light. She raced forward again and knocked on the door with her free hand. The light turned green and the bus left her standing
.

  I still remember the pleading face, the black miniskirt, the precariously balanced coffee. What is curious to me now, all these years later, is that I didn’t wonder at the driver’s lack of kindness. It was normal. That was just what bus drivers did every day in Sydney.

  At the office I could hear my heels do a rat-a-tat-tat on the hard floor of the white-walled glass building as I greeted people – ‘Good morning’, ‘Good morning’, all the way to my office. The day, like all my days, went fast: meetings, short interviews, decisions, figures, answering emails. When I looked up in the early evening, my staff were streaming past my door and waving goodnight. I looked at the work still piled on my desk. The sound of their departures faded with the light outside, leaving me exposed in my lit office. Around 7.15 pm I grabbed my bag and sped out the door.

  I was tired, always tired. I never thought of how I used to be a dreamer and had wanted to write or act or both. I had produced poems and plays and my notebooks were littered with scatterings of half-finished efforts. My first play had been produced onstage when I was seventeen. In my twenties I had earned my living as a television presenter and an actor. But that young woman was long gone. Now there was just the businesswoman, strong enough not to go broke but certainly not a millionaire. I had won various awards, had a place and a reputation in the Sydney business community, and saw myself as a responsible, if mediocre, provider.

  I reached the underground car park of our building at 8 pm. Inside our apartment Ted was in his office on the phone. Around him, sketches and architectural drawings covered every centimetre of space. I kissed his forehead, flung down my bag and headed for the kitchen. Shall we walk up the street for dinner? I wondered, but then decided to make a stir-fry instead.

  This was my favourite part of the day. Glass of red wine to hand, I pulled ingredients out of the refrigerator, grated ginger, crushed garlic, put on rice to cook. Soon I would put on some music, light candles, and Ted and I would eat and share stories of our day.