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

by Nancy Knudsen

  I call out, ‘It’s okay. I saw him. He fell in clean, he’s not hurt, it’s only water.’

  The voice again. ‘Does he do that often?’

  ‘Er, no, actually, it’s the first time – it’s normally me. He’s fine though, just wet. I think he thought the finger wharf was longer than it really is.’ I can’t help giggling. ‘He hasn’t even had a drink . . .’

  Now Ted’s halfway up, clambering and scrambling like a wet crab on the side of the timber wharf.

  The voice again, almost a whisper, but insistent, ‘Normally you? You fall in often?’

  A saturated Ted butts into this conversation he’s unaware of. He says: ‘f&%@&%@!!!’ He’s ignoring all the people enquiring if he’s okay. Ted says ‘Piffle f&%@ cough f&%@ shower f&%@!’ and heads off into the darkness to Blackwattle, leaving a trail of dirty marina water behind.

  ‘You fall in often, do you?’ It’s old silver ponytail again.

  People are gradually trickling away now – taxi drivers to wait for jobs by their taxis, security guards to their posts, yachties back to their beers. They all have something new to chat about for the evening.

  Maybe the shock of seeing Ted in free fall has freed my tongue. ‘Sure, in Marigot Bay, in St Lucia, in the Galapagos – well, in Marigot Bay it was intentional: I had to jump in to retrieve a buoy we had lost.’

  ‘You lost a buoy? What kind of buoy?’

  ‘The one the boat was tied to.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He shakes his head. ‘How long have you been sailing?’

  ‘Five years – we’re almost home.’

  ‘Ah, you’re cruisers!’ He smiles. ‘Most cruisers don’t know much about how to sail, but usually they know to stay on the boat. Where have you been sailing?’

  ‘We’ve almost finished a circumnavigation.’

  ‘Of Fiji?’

  ‘No, of the world.’

  ‘Then you’re not cruising, you’re just circumnavigators. You betcha.’

  ‘We’re what? We’re not cruising?’

  ‘No, you see it goes like this. There are sea gypsies, cruisers, circumnavigators and boat deliverers.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘Now the sea gypsy, he’s the one you’ve got to watch for. He started out as a cruiser, then runs out of money, and can’t get himself back on land. Can’t sell the boat and can’t afford to fix it up. You betcha. So ya gotta watch him because he’ll rob you blind. Fixes his boat with the things he steals.’

  He’s warming to the topic now. ‘The cruiser – he’s real easy to recognise. He’s the one who says he doesn’t know where he’s going next. He’s just cruising around waiting for inspiration. He figures his lifestyle is better than he would have at home, so why not stay cruising?’

  ‘And what about the circumnavigator?’

  ‘Well, they know where they’re going – on a set itinerary. Like yourselves. Unless . . . Where have you sailed this season?’

  ‘We started out in Turkey in July last year.’

  ‘And just kept sailing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Turkey to here without stopping a season somewhere?’

  ‘Er, yes . . .’

  ‘Then you’re not even circumnavigators – you’re on a delivery trip! You’re just delivering your boat somewhere. You can’t see much travelling as fast as that.’

  I’m smiling now – we’re just on a delivery trip, are we? ‘And what are you?’

  ‘Me? Oooh, I don’t know – I’m the Old Man of the Sea.’

  He grins as he sees Ted approaching looking buoyant (no pun) in a new set of clothes, and walks away. I haven’t seen him since. Ted’s smelling fresh and soapy as we go back to our friends’ boat for cocktails, and gets a round of applause as he appears in his clean clothes.

  So now we know our station in life – we’re ‘boat deliverers’.

  25. South Pacific Dreaming

  Vanuatu

  By the time we reach Vanuatu I am waking every morning with a hint of dread in my heart. Before succumbing to the day, I lie ruminating in our bunk, Ted’s deep regular breathing a calming influence beside me. Five years. Five years. It’s coming to an end, life as we have known it for five years. The images jumble in my head, the people, the colours, the smells. For five years we have roamed from country to country, culture to culture, mostly Third World – that pejorative term which implies inferiority. But now we know that in lots of ways, they are really the more fortunate ones.

  Here in the Pacific, we see these ‘poor’ people, in their simple huts with million-dollar views, surrounded by frangipani, hibiscus, tropical crotons and coconut palms, kids rambling freely through grassy clearings, old men sitting watching the sunset over the water. I think of the chaperoned children of Sydney and wonder. I think of the grandfathers in retirement villages and old people’s homes, and I wonder.

  As I drift in that hazy state between waking and sleeping, I hear again the strange languages and different accents, see the smiles, feel the warmth, see again the small gifts, shyly offered. So many cultures. So much to regret losing – roosters crowing across the hills in the morning, sandy streets, small coloured fish around the boat, the sunrises and sunsets, ours alone across the whole bowl of the sky.

  And I see myself again, sailing across forever waters, sometimes boisterous, rough or kindly, swaying with the boat, my friend, who nurses me along like a mother. Commonplace are the flying fish, the phosphorescence, the shooting stars, the rainbows. And then the squalls, creeping up at night, bursting at us as we scurry along with shortened sails. From every anchorage, there’s always the romance of the enticing gap out to the ocean – always another sea calling to be sailed. I am accustomed to watching it beckoning through the heads, with promises of a new dawning, a different sea, a new culture.

  From Vanuatu we are to commence the last leg of our circumnavigation. The desire to see family and friends is a strong lure, making us impatient to be gone. Like us, most of the cruisers have joined the Port2Port Rally to Bundaberg on the Queensland coast, a casual event organised by the Bundaberg Cruising Yacht Club, specially created to run the rally.

  As we prepare Blackwattle for the last leg of her circumnavigation and socialise with cruising buddies Bauvier, Mary Constance, Chatti and many others, a miracle happens. An email alerts us to the fact that Fantasy1, which was forced to sail back to Ecuador from the Galapagos so many months ago, is now fully repaired and has sailed in a direct route across the Pacific, covering the world’s largest ocean in forty-two days of continuous sailing. We gladly prepare to meet Sandy and Karl, with whom we have shared so many experiences, with hundreds of balloons. The first contact is made, as usual, by VHF radio, and we travel in a small flotilla of dinghies with all our balloons, catching them around Fantasy1’s lifelines so that she arrives into the anchorage amid a bobbing waterfall of colours. What hugs, what a reception! There is hardly a dry eye between us all. Fantasy1 will have crossed the Pacific this season after all. On a sadder note, we learn that the speed of Fantasy1’s crossing was due to Sandy’s mother falling ill back in Australia.

  In Fantasy1 and Chatti and other Australian boats which are finishing their circumnavigations, the excitement builds. Before we arrive in Bundaberg, we will cross our outbound path, thereby completing our circumnavigation. We won’t be home – our journey will not be complete until we have sailed past the white lighthouse on Barrenjoey Headland into Blackwattle’s home, Pittwater in Sydney – but we will have swapped our ever-changing lifestyle for familiar shores. No more new and unusual customs, no more lazy markets full of strange and wonderful vegetables or artefacts, no new tales, no more old wisdom from young lips.

  Eat few eggs. An egg feeds only one person. If you allow the egg to hatch, one day it will feed four people. I read that in Australia we throw out thirty per cent of the food we
purchase, and that already ninety per cent of the world’s fish stocks are gone. We need more Taias in this world.

  Late in the morning, walking the streets of Port Vila, loving the tropical warmth, the jagged footpaths, dusty edges, throngs of Melanesian inhabitants in their rich colourful clothes, I remain sad, conscious of the enormity of losing this naturalness.

  I laugh to see that the ‘Mary’ dress – that bright flowing one-size-fits-all garment the missionaries forced on the scantily clad locals – is still very popular with the women in the markets. Now it’s the tourists here who are scantily clad.

  My sense of loss is profound. My eyes are filling as I walk through the market on this most ordinary of mornings. But it’s not ordinary to me. I love you, I think, out of the blue. I love your naturalness, your utter lack of self-consciousness, your lack of competitiveness. I love your simple smiles, without agenda, your proud kindness when I speak to you. I will miss you and all the others from all the countries we have visited, from whom I have learned so much.

  Beyond the market, out there on the water, misty in the distance of a rainy morning, are fifty boats or more, all heading out in the next few days. We’ve explored Port Vila and further, circumnavigating the island by truck, and now we’re provisioning, ready for our last great sail.

  I dry my tears, blow my nose, put a smile on my face – so that it can work its way in – and go back to Blackwattle and the world of tomorrow.

  We have discussed it interminably. We have both found that Less is More, so simple to say, so difficult an idea to attain. This discovery does not sit well with any consumer-driven Western society. We think of our small treasured flat in Istanbul and the caring people of Turkey; but I so wish to share my children’s lives in a small way, and they are in Sydney, that place of plate glass and shining towers, stimulating, aggressive, overcrowded. Maybe we’ll just keep on sailing . . . Our conversations haven’t been able to get past our arrival home.

  ‘Let’s not worry about it now,’ says Ted, equally uncertain at the end of each dreaming and wondering conversation. ‘We’ll work it out somehow.’

  We have each other, and that has become our strength. Everything else is hazy, obscure.

  26. Arriving Home

  Vanuatu to Bundaberg

  With fifty-four other boats we set off for Australia. I try not to think What then? What then? during the seven-day sail. We never change a sail or do less than 150 nautical miles a day, excellent for this heavily laden Peterson 46. A full moon dominates our night hours, and as the route passes many reefs and atolls we are continually surrounded by hunting sea birds.

  However, the journey – this last voyage – is not without its sadnesses. One of the Australian boats in the rally, Aquantique, sailing through a pass during the night, collides with Cook Reef to the north of New Caledonia and south of the Atoll Pelotas. Luckily there is another rally boat nearby – Adagio, with South Australian couple Mary and Dimitri on board. Aquantique is both dismasted and holed, and cannot be saved. With the seas running, it is too dangerous for Adagio to get close, so a mayday is called. The skipper, Bill Morton, at the end of his own five-year circumnavigation, is airlifted to safety.

  The rally is sobered, the high spirits which normally percolate through each radio ‘sched’ dampened. Every yacht crew is distraught for Bill, whether they know him or not. We are all also conscious that ‘it could have been us.’

  As with many other happenings on board Blackwattle (crossing the equator, being mobbed by fishing boats, seeing a whale) Ted Nobbs is asleep when, at precisely 4.57 am one memorable morning, Blackwattle crosses her outbound path and completes her circumnavigation. Surprisingly, nothing happens. No fireworks, no roaring crowds, no champagne (we run dry at sea anyway), and I can’t even find a sea bird to talk to. Blackwattle is oblivious, happy as a lark in the pleasant seas. So I give myself a bit of a hug, and I can feel the grin on my face as I wake the skipper a couple of hours later.

  ‘We’ve done it.’

  ‘What? What have we done?’ says a sleepy Ted.

  ‘We’ve crossed our outbound path, and completed our circumnavigation,’ I say primly, relishing repeating the words.

  ‘I knew that.’

  And now, for Australia.

  Excited as we are on sighting the coastline, we can’t help observing that it is a bland low-level thing, hardly disturbing the line of the horizon, not at all in keeping with our sense of excitement. ‘Oh, is that all?’

  We thread our way up Bundaberg’s Burnett River and dock at the Customs wharf. We call Kassandra, Simon and friends to say ‘hello’ on the sat phone and I am on an adrenaline high, laughing at things that are not very funny, hugging Ted about once every five minutes and scurrying around cleaning things I had cleaned only ten minutes before, while we wait for customs and immigration officers to arrive.

  We’re used to this procedure. Country after country, port after port, fat customs men in smart uniforms, tiny customs women with soft voices, gruff ones who ask for baksheesh or a beer, those who just want coffee, those who want to act as tour guide once we’ve checked in, those who strut around filling Blackwattle’s saloon with their Importance vibes.

  Yes, we’ve seen them all, but when the customs man arrives into the cockpit this time, says ‘Good morning’ and I start to answer with some welcoming words, I feel my chest and throat getting that stupid flowing filled-up feeling, and tears spill over my lower eyelashes. Luckily I have sunglasses on, and just stop speaking in the middle of a sentence. This leaves a sudden silence in the cockpit, which I fill by streaking down into my cabin.

  Ted, abandoned to deal with customs alone, follows me after a few moments. ‘Where on earth have you gone?’ he whispers.

  ‘Don’t leave him alone, talk to him,’ I whisper back.

  ‘No, he’s okay at the moment, he’s reading through our documents. What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s the Australian accent.’ I sniffle, doing a little deep breathing, blowing my nose and patting my face with a few tissues.

  ‘The Australian accent?’

  ‘Yes, the customs man speaks with an Australian accent.’

  ‘What’s wrong with his Australian accent?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just – Australian.’

  There’s a short pause. I’m not looking at him but I can hear him taking a big breath. ‘Ye-es, that’s right, Nance, we’re in Australia.’

  ‘Well I’m not used to customs men with Australian accents.’

  He takes another breath, but doesn’t reply. Then he gives me one last sort-of-despairing look and disappears back to the saloon.

  Before I left Australia, five years ago, I couldn’t remember when I had last cried. To make one’s way in a stress-filled environment one had to be made of sterner stuff. The last five years have changed me in ways that I don’t fully understand.

  I sniff a couple of times, big breath, plaster smile on face, and follow Ted.

  We’re waiting for the quarantine man to arrive a few minutes later, and the Norwegian boat next door is getting instructions from the marina officer, a big hefty sunburned fellow, as to where to berth their boat permanently.

  ‘Yezkin gwava ta namba noin naiow ifyez loik.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Norwegians have very correct, beautifully pronounced English.

  He speaks a bit louder: ‘Oized yezkin gwavata namba noin naiow ifyez loik.’

  Skipper Ted thinks some assistance may be needed: ‘He’s allocated you berth number nine, and you can go there now if you would like,’ says Ted.

  ‘Yup,’ smiles Big Hefty. ‘Tenks mate, okey dokey, oil kamun givyez a hend ifyez loik. Seeyez aova there ina tik.’ He marches off with a grin.

  Ted waits until he’s a few metres away. ‘He’s going to berth number nine to take your lines.’

  We alight from the boat onto an A
ustralian wharf, and step onto Australian soil. Our old friend Keith Laker, who sang ‘Now is the Hour’ in Pittwater just five years ago, is waiting, arms open, to hug us both. Ted wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but even he is misty-eyed by now.

  27. Discovering My Australia

  To Sydney

  Australia.

  I’d forgotten how wide Australian streets are. I’d forgotten how flat Australia is. I’d forgotten how ordered Australia is. How the letterboxes line up like soldiers at attention. And the rubbish bins, legions of them, like sentries along the road.

  Fresh from the unruly rainforests of the South Pacific, wild roosters and their hens wandering free all over, this is a strangely regulated and underpopulated world. Nature is well disciplined. Mile after mile of wide grass verges seem to have been mowed just yesterday, trees are planted all in lines, and there are no people – they’re all in cars, of course, zooming around like speeding bullets.

  In the centre of Bundaberg is the same order. Dulux must make a fortune here. Everything stationary is painted, every parking space is surrounded by a white line on the bitumen, the trees are trimmed so as not to interfere with the traffic. She is a pert town, in her Sunday best, fingernails perfect, perfume on, shoes polished. Everything is paved – an alien couldn’t be blamed for thinking the planet is made of bitumen and concrete. Even in the pleasant central parks there is military precision in the way the benches and trees line up with each other, and the grass is so perfect it looks artificial.

  The locals all seem to have wide-open hearts, of course, and vowels to match. It’s so long since we’ve heard broad Aussie accents en masse that we are as fascinated as the foreigners in the beginning.

  ‘Okay laove, jest aover thaire – nao praoblem laove – thaireyagao – see yez lighter.’

  On arrival we are thrust into days and days of partying as all the fifty-five boats in our rally arrive and are entertained by the Bundaberg Cruising Yacht Club – which is actually a bunch of dedicated and generous women of Bundaberg. Good friends fly up to welcome us and we must slip the boat for an anti-foul treatment. Busyness keeps me from wondering what is next.