Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  The burner sputtered then lit, and I held it in my hands, one hand for the pot and one for the burner, while the water heated. As soon as it was warm enough I dropped a teabag in and drank the resulting brew straight from the pot, sighing as the warmth flooded into my body; from head to frigid toes.

  It took me some time to make the step from Askoy’s tilted deck into the water surging around her. The last thing I wanted was another big wave to roll in and wash her over me. Eventually I made the leap and galloped comically through the surf — a Michelin man in sodden sailing gear and squelching seaboots full of water.

  I carried a couple of armfuls of the gear that was floating inside Askoy above the high-water mark, then started looking for a way to get help. The only exit route seemed to be up the steep sandy cliffs that backed the beach and, to this day, I think I was blown, as much as climbed, to their top.

  Away from the exposed beach, I squelched my way through a relatively peaceful pastoral scene; cows were queuing for milking as a watery sun began to shed some light on the day. I dunked my head in a drinking trough to rinse the salt off and trudged eastwards until I’d climbed the last fence and stood on a gravel roadway.

  The racket of a stressed two-stroke motor increased in the distance and a young man on a farm bike scrunched to a halt beside me. ‘G’day,’ I said. ‘I’ve just stranded my boat on the beach — are there any houses around here?’

  ‘D’you want to borrow Dad’s tractor to get it off?’ he replied eagerly, as though storm conditions and stranded boats were a daily occurrence thereabouts.

  He dropped me off at the nearest farmhouse, where people were just pulling on their gumboots and heading out to the milking shed. ‘Shower’s in there,’ they said. ‘Just help yourself. Our daughter’s away — you can have her bedroom.’

  About 12 hours later I was gently shaken awake by the local police constable. ‘We’d better get back down the beach before someone gets down on all your gear,’ he said. There wasn’t much to steal, but a posse of locals had formed and salvaged what they could, then stacked it well above the high-tide mark, awaiting my arrival.

  It was the last leg of what had been a fairly stormy journey. Sarah and I had spotted Askoy in Suva during a stopover en route to Japan in our yacht Elkouba, and had fallen in love with her lovely shape and staunch construction. After an eight-month battle to establish her identity, locate her owners, invalidate a US federal marshal’s arrest warrant for drug smuggling and persuade the Fijian Marine Department to sell her, we’d sailed back to New Zealand in Elkouba and put her on the market to fund Askoy’s refit as a high-latitude charter/cargo vessel. I left Fiji a few days after the so-called Tonga bomb had taken out several yachts on a rally from New Zealand. With an interior consisting of three sheets of plywood — I slept on one, cooked on one and navigated from one — the trip to New Zealand took a stormy 14 days, including several periods lying ahull while I slept.

  After the stranding, some willing and resourceful friends and I made an attempt to salvage Askoy, even just to sell the lead ballast, but we failed and she looked doomed to end her days as a hump of rust on Baylys (Ripiro) Beach. Then, a few months after she’d hit the beach, I had a call in the wee hours from the director of the Belgian National Maritime Museum. He’d read a magazine article I’d written about Askoy, and asked if we’d be prepared to give them salvage rights to her. Going on record as being Askoy’s last owner had ridden heavily with me, and I said I’d be pleased to hand her over to them — provided I could sail in her after she’d been rebuilt.

  All went quiet from the Belgian end for a few years after that — a British salvage company had quoted the maritime museum $750,000 to get my beautiful boat off the beach, so the project was shelved. Meanwhile, a Save Askoy II Foundation, with many influential members, was formed and fund-raising was under way. I put them in touch with Dargaville maritime historian Noel Hilliam. Noel is an inventive Dargaville man who has been responsible for many successful salvages from West Coast beaches and for the wonderful maritime section of the Dargaville Museum. If Askoy was to leave Ripiro Beach, he was the man to do it.

  My next personal contact with the Belgians was in 2005 when two foundation members, Piet and Staf Wittevrongel, visited Askoy and asked to meet Sarah and me. Askoy, they explained, had been designed and built for a famous Belgian architect, Hugo van Kuyck who, among other things, was instrumental in planning the Allied forces’ landing in Normandy during World War Two, using his sailor’s knowledge of the area’s tides and weather. Van Kuyck sold her to Jacques Brel, a Flemish singer/songwriter who is revered by the Belgian people. Many of Brel’s songs are about freedom, the liberty to wander at will as a guest of the wind … and Askoy is the embodiment of those sentiments.

  ‘You must have thought it was Christmas when you found the boat of Jacques Brel in Fiji,’ they said.

  ‘Jacques who?’ I replied. ‘She was just too good a boat to be left there to sink and waste away.’ But it was reassuring to find that I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen under the spell of Askoy’s shapely hull form and top-quality construction.

  Brel, his mistress and his 18-year-old daughter had sailed the boat to French Polynesia. Brel subsequently died of lung cancer and is buried in the Marquesas. He’d sold Askoy to an American, Kathy Cleveland, who sailed to New Zealand where the boat sat in the Whangarei River for some years. Ownership then passed to a Hawaiian, Harlow Dougherty, who had Askoy refitted, added a cargo hold and used her to distribute windsurfers around the Pacific. He sold Askoy to a German, the story then went, for a briefcase full of gold Krugerrands — and I was her next and, I’d thought, final owner.

  We went to visit Askoy. Her staunch steel construction had defied the ravages of storms and time, the hull which was showing above the sand was still largely 6 millimetres thick — salvage was still a reality. We left the beach as the first wave of the incoming tide washed over the wreck, and Piet wrote ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (Don’t leave me) — the title of a famous Brel song — in the sand.

  The Save Askoy II Foundation kept in touch with Noel Hilliam, and he decreed that 18 December 2007 would be the best day, tide-and weather-wise, to attempt the salvage. Staf Wittevrongel and Tjerk Pillwell, the foundation’s main metalworker, returned to Ripiro Beach where Noel, who had completed the reams of paperwork and permits needed for the salvage, had mustered an armada of bulldozers, earthmoving machinery and a host of local helpers.

  First, working with Ripiro Beach kaitiaki (guardian) Jim Te Tuhi, we removed thousands of toheroa spat which had taken up residence around Askoy’s hull, then excavated around her almost down to keel level. After more than 13 years under the sand, Askoy was amazingly intact. The main bulkhead had been punched out by the sea and most of her decks were gone, but her 18-metre-long by 6.2-metre-wide steel hull was holding its shape and the staunch, riveted steel construction which had first attracted me in Fiji, then saved my life during the storm, was readily obvious.

  The three bulldozers buried themselves in sand and hooked their winches to a 100-tonne-breaking-strain steel-wire rope. Coordinator Tom Newlove gave the signal, and three big diesels began to take the strain. One by one the bulldozers were dragged back into the sand; then, with a loud crack, the 100-tonne cable snapped. Throttles were eased and an audible sigh escaped from the crowd of about 200 onlookers.

  The diggers and ‘dozers pushed a sand breakwater up between Askoy and the sea to prevent her from being reburied in the sand, and we retired to our tents for a barbecue meal, freshly speared flounder and a tipple of locally produced port wine.

  A tide came and went, and the next day Askoy was re-excavated and a replacement cable woven around her keel. Once again the bulldozers buckled down to the task — and this time a 100-tonne-breaking-strain shackle split, its constituent parts disappearing into the soft sand never to be seen again. The two Belgians, Staf and Tjerk, trudged back down the beach with slumped shoulders, to pass the news to the Save Askoy II Foundation members eager
ly waiting in their homeland.

  ‘What do you reckon that thing weighs?’ Tom asked later. ‘We pull 100-tonne kauri stumps out of the swamps all the time … no problem.’

  ‘Well … she’s about 40 tonne in sailing trim and the wet sand in her could weigh anything up to about 60 tonnes — then there’s the suction from the sand.’

  The next morning was crunch time. Askoy would have to either come out of the sand or stay buried forever. After a tide had been and gone, she was partially reburied — but there was a new atmosphere of determination in the camp. A truck had been dispatched to Whangarei to borrow, from a local boat yard, heavy ship anchor chains to use around her stern. ‘What do you want them for?’ the boat-yard storeman had asked. ‘We’re salvaging a boat on Ripiro Beach,’ the truckie answered. ‘Askoy?’ the storeman said. ‘If it’s for Askoy, you just take whatever you need, mate.’

  This time, the rusty hull was totally cleared from the sand. As before, all the water was pumped out from around her, and I had to look away while a digger ripped the foredeck off and began to shovel tonnes of wet sand from her interior. Familiar bits of Askoy, fuel tanks and my old EPIRB began to collect on the beach.

  When all three bulldozers had taken the strain on the cable, a digger operator moved his machine closer and rested the bucket against the main-mast tabernacle. Black smoke poured from the bulldozer exhausts while the digger wriggled the boat from side to side to break the suction. About 150 people stood at a safe distance and watched as the bulldozers dug deep into the sand, their combined pull striking small sparks where the chain bit into her keel.

  Slowly, centimetre by centimetre, Askoy began to rise out of her sandy tomb. Waves from the incoming tide sluiced around the seaward bulldozer’s tracks as — slowly, inexorably — the big hull responded to the herds of horsepower pulling at the wire rope and crept out of its hole to begin the trip back to Belgium, and the home of her birth.

  I was jubilant at no longer being Askoy’s last owner; and one of her new owners, Staf, grabbed me in an exuberant bear-hug. ‘Askoy is alive once more,’ he yelled above the bulldozer exhausts.

  Postscript: Askoy spent a few more months on the beach while most of the sand and some of the heavier equipment (including the Gardner engine) were removed from her interior. She was craned onto a low-loader and trucked to Tauranga, where she was lashed into a specially built cradle and shipped back to Belgium. Progress on her refit has been slow — but then, so was getting her to that stage.

  GETTING THE DRIFT OF THE PADDLING GAME

  Paddling kayaks is just a little bit like smoking cannabis — inasmuch as the people who do it, always want you to try it. ‘Give it a go,’ they say, ‘it’s so cool and it makes you feel really good.’

  ‘Come for a paddle,’ the seasoned kayakers say, and nimbly skip into their boat, then sit there smirking while you squeeze your nether regions into some waterborne wedge of plastic that was originally designed to fit someone about half the size of an average contemporary New Zealander.

  When you’re finally in the thing, sitting in the shallows wobbling like a stick insect on a plate of jelly, your kayaking mentor digs a paddle into the water and skims away towards the horizon (that’s pretty close when you’re only 40 centimetres off the water). ‘See … it’s easy,’ they call back over their shoulder. Meanwhile, you’re stuck fast in the muddy river shallows, trying to lever your way into deep water without the aid of levitation or a tugboat.

  It’s a basic law of physics that if you move weight from one side of a narrow floating object to the other side, that object will want to turn over. Kayaks are narrow floating objects. As the top half of your body does the paddling part, the bottom half is forced by your sense of balance, to do a sort of jerky, sitting-down hula dance to compensate. So it goes: paddle … wobble … paddle … wobble…, and so forth.

  By now your paddling-mate is a speck on the horizon, the rhythmic flash of the sun on their paddle blades a galling reminder of the way this sport should be played.

  After a few deep breaths, and a shot of bravado, you get on top of the wobbling problem; next challenge is the flick of the wrist. Some wily Eskimo, way back before the advent of outboard motors and snow scooters, figured out that the scalloped bit on one end of the paddle would work better fixed at 90 degrees to the one on the other end. Perhaps wrist twisting was an ancient Eskimo rite of passage, sort of like circumcision is to the Jews or playing prop for the First XV is for us. Either way, it takes a bit of getting used to, but after a while it too falls into place — you pivot your body from the waist up like the trim, leotarded ladies in the television aerobics programmes do. A warm feeling floods through your body, flowing from your head down to the tips of your toes at the front end of the boat — this is all-over exercise.

  Finally it all falls together: stroke … stroke … and the kayak forges ahead, without feeling like you’re about to turn turtle with every stroke, or go round in circles. If you put a bit of pressure on one cheek of your bum the boat will slowly turn that way, or an extra bit of grunt on one side of the paddle has the same effect. Hey, this is cool. The mortal dread of making an absolute idiot out of oneself, that lurks in all of us, begins to dissipate as the kayak starts doing sort of what you want it to.

  The spot on the horizon gets closer until you can pick out someone leaning on their paddle and drifting in the sun.

  By now your upper body is beginning to ache, but there’s not far to go. Each stroke of the paddle sends another volt of agony coursing through your shoulder muscles. You feel like you’re on fire from the midriff up. Sweat drools out from under your hatband and the world beyond your sunglasses begins to blur. Each lunge of the paddle is an ordeal. The kayak you thought was skipping across the water like a water boatman seems to be reacting to your paddle strokes with all the alacrity of a sodden log.

  The water feels like fast-setting cement as you wrench one paddle out, then dip the other back in. Water drivels down the paddles and soaks your T-shirt, but slowly the other kayak gets bigger and bigger. You can pick out details now; the bright-red flotation vest, then the black handle of the paddles, the dinky little hatches and the face under the broad sunhat, the sticker on the side which says something like ‘Cruiser’ or ‘EzyRider’.

  About 20 metres away now. Control your breathing … re-laaax; nice regular strokes on the paddles now … coast the last few metres … work hard on nonchalant approach despite throbbing arms and pulsing head, and a numbness in your bum from the form-fit (somebody else’s form) fibreglass seat. Resist the impulse to lie on your back and kick your legs in the air. Coast to a halt, just a metre or so off the other kayak with cool nonchalance.

  ‘See,’ the other paddler says, ‘you’ve got the hang of it now — follow me’ — and suddenly you can. The other kayak doesn’t disappear over the horizon now; you cruise side by side, paddle for paddle, and your arms don’t feel like they’ll drop off at the shoulders and float away, held to the paddle by white-knuckled fists.

  You relax and enjoy the scenery, the birds that stop foraging to watch you glide past. The light that sparkles on the gently rippling water and trees that high-rise along the riverbanks. The kayak coasts effortlessly through the water and you feel that you’d like to stop and hug yourself.

  You should give it a go some time — it’s so cool and it makes you feel really good.

  TIAMA

  The weather forecast for sea area Puysegur, at the south-west tip of New Zealand, predicted south-west 70 knots and ‘phenomenal’ seas.

  A few miles further east, Tiama was reaching hard under double-reefed main and storm jib; eastwards through Foveaux Strait heading for the Bounty Islands, before 50 knots of wind and 4-to 6-metre seas. But that’s not phenomenal at all for the purposeful 15-metre steel cutter, or the waters she regularly operates in. It’s just part of the job.

  Almost every summer for the last three years, owner/skipper Henk Haazen and Tiama have been under charter to the Department of Co
nservation, servicing scientific and conservation teams working on the subantarctic islands south of New Zealand. Time after time, the nuggety red yacht sails southwards out of Bluff Harbour bound for the Auckland Islands, Campbell Islands, Antipodes or Bounty Islands, carrying cargoes of people and equipment.

  And that’s almost exactly what Waiheke Island resident, Haazen, had in mind when he began building the boat at an abandoned factory in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn.

  ‘I’d spent time in Antarctica with Greenpeace,’ he explains, ‘and realized that the best way to do a lot of expedition work and research in those areas was by using a small self-contained sailing boat that made minimal impact on the environment — not a great, expensive, fuel-guzzling ship.’

  Over a 10-year period, Haazen researched other yachts that worked as high-latitude charter vessels, and corresponded with Jerome Poncet who, with wife Sally, pioneered many ice-sailing techniques in his schooner Damien. He also did a trip to the Antarctic Peninsula in the expedition yacht Pelagic, skippered by American Skip Novak; all the while compiling a file of features he wanted incorporated into his own high-latitude expedition yacht.

  Back in New Zealand, Haazen began visiting yacht designers and spoke to several before commissioning Alan Mummery to draw the plans for his high-latitude workhorse. ‘The other designers all wanted to sell me a stock boat that they’d already designed and adapt it to suit, but Alan actually listened to my ideas and designed the boat that I wanted,’ he said. ‘I looked at some of the other yachts he’d designed too — and they were all good, successful boats.’

  During Tiama’s seven-year building process, Mummery became firm friends with Haazen, his partner Bunny McDiarmid and daughter Ruby. The word ‘friends’ crops up often as Haazen describes those years: friends dropped into the suburban factory for periods ranging from a few hours to several weeks to donate their time, energy, ideas and skills at welding, cabinetry, painting and engineering to Tiama. Many of these friends sail south in Tiama; people like Tony Whiting from Whiting Power Systems who loaned workshop facilities and advice during Tiama’s construction.