Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Next, we hauled her out of the water at a local boat yard. All the sea-cocks and quite a lot of the plumbing were replaced, with new stainless-steel double-hose clamps to replace the rusty, or non-existent, old ones. We made wooden bungs and tied one to each sea-cock, ready for use. We used the yard’s workshop tools to cut new plywood gussets, fibreglassed them in and refastened the lower shroud chainplates. Loose keel-bolts were tightened. The lower rudder gudgeon was almost completely flogged out, so we had a nylon spacer made for it. The batteries, which wouldn’t hold charge, were replaced. Then, for no other reason then that she was out of the water, we gave her a fresh coat of antifouling.

  ‘What the hell are you doing over there?’ the owner asked tersely over the phone. I patiently explained that Digby and I were taking a small yacht across the Tasman in the middle of winter, our lives were on the line, and we wouldn’t be leaving until we were happy with her seaworthiness. ‘Nothing wrong with it,’ he countered grumpily, ‘I did a race on it the weekend before I left Sydney.’

  We spent a day sailing on Sydney Harbour, tried all the sails out and dropped in on a local racing fleet to see how we matched up. ‘What d’you reckon?’ I asked Digby. ‘Fit for purpose,’ he smiled.

  The next day was a Thursday. With a promising long-term Tasman forecast obtained from the local coastguard, we filled the fuel and water tanks and jerry cans, then motored down the harbour to clear customs. ‘Sorry, fellas,’ the customs officer shook his head, ‘we can’t let you leave the country till we get an export permit from the boat’s owner.’

  So we motored back up the harbour, rang the owner, got his fax number and faxed him a copy of the blank Australian Customs Export Permit form. By about mid-afternoon he had faxed the filled copy back, and we motored back to the customs office. ‘Well … you’ve left it a bit late in the day for us to issue a permit.’ The officer shook his head doubtfully, like we’d just asked him to re-write the Bible before tea time. ‘Come back in the morning and we’ll see what we can do.’

  Friday is a bad day to depart on an ocean voyage. It’s an old superstition among seafarers but, like throwing plastic overboard, it’s best just not to do anything that might rile the sea-god Tangaroa, if you’re heading out into the Tasman. So we cooled our heels in Sydney for one more day, pottering around improving the boat, plotting and re-plotting courses across the Tasman and calculating likely ETAs. A good run to Auckland would have been eight days; we could expect 10 to 12 days under normal conditions, and 14 days would still be tolerable. Anything over that and we might as well be walking.

  The permit was issued and customs cleared Friday afternoon, so we anchored down near the heads and snoozed until midnight Saturday before making sail and heading for New Zealand. The huge anticyclone that had made a Thursday departure so favourable was still there, but had tracked south a little to give us about 10 knots of south-easterly. We didn’t mind; she was a windward boat and soared over the low ocean swells while we lolled in the cockpit, yarning. By morning, Australia had disappeared astern and we had made steady progress eastwards on a dying breeze.

  For a few more days we nursed the boat eastwards in light airs, and then the barometer plummeted. The sky turned the colour of bruised liver and a tangible feeling of menace chilled down around us. ‘Whew, man … I’d say we’re in for a hiding,’ Digby said nervously. We took the two spinnaker halyards and fastened them to the forward mooring cleats for extra support for the mast, did the same aft with the mainsail halyard and topping lift, and dropped the mainsail in a steadily building south-easterly wind. We lashed the mainsail tightly to the boom and then lashed it on deck, and double-checked everything inside the boat to make sure it wasn’t likely to come adrift. We stuffed rags in the deck vents, then made a big pot of stew to keep us going through the blow.

  By now it was blowing quite fresh, close to gale force, and we reached off to the north-east under a storm jib. All night the wind steadily rose until it shrieked through the rigging and sent fusillades of salt spray scything across the deck. We took turns steering and attempting to sleep. At around 2 o’clock in the morning, I engaged the autopilot and shot below to fix our position on the chart. Just as I finished, there was an ominous lull and then an oncoming-freight-train roar. The boat was picked up, smashed down on her side and flick-rolled through 360 degrees — by the time my overtired brain had caught on that we were upside down, we were upright again. I staggered up to where Digby had been sleeping on a squab on the saloon floor.

  ‘Fuucckkk,’ he said, ‘what happened?’ Small geysers of sea water were springing from holes in the mast, letting out the water which had filled the mast while she was upside down. The 20-litre jerry cans of fresh water and fuel which we had stowed under a bunk had come out and bombarded Digby where he lay on the cabin sole, and several litres of water which had come in through the hatch were sloshing around in the boat’s flat bilges.

  As we stood, stunned, looking at the debris, there was another ominous lull and another freight-train roar. ‘Hang on!’ I yelled, as tens of tonnes of raging seawater smashed into our starboard side, flung the boat bodily sideways and rolled her through another 360 degrees.

  ‘Fuck this,’ Digby yelled, ‘we’d better run off.’ I jumped into the cockpit, fighting through the flattened canvas dodger, and flicked the autopilot off. Everything seemed to be okay — the mast still weaved crazily at the black sky, among the roiling clouds — and I pulled the tiller to ease her off the wind, easing out the storm-jib sheets as she settled to her new course. Big black seas tumbled and crashed around us, but the brave little boat bobbed among them like a resting seabird.

  I saw a kerosene lamp flare into life below-decks, the hatch slid back and Digby’s head appeared. ‘Doesn’t look too bad down here … doesn’t seem to be any water coming in,’ he said, drily. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’

  Within a few hours we’d sponged the bilges out and got the boat back to normal, if a little soggy. The only victim seemed to be the HF radio, which hadn’t worked that well anyway; and most importantly, the hull, rig and steering seemed to be okay. For another 48 hours we ran with it, in exactly the opposite direction to where we wanted to go, but alive and, eventually, exhilarated by the wild conditions.

  Two weeks of easterly wind in the Tasman, in midwinter, is almost unheard of — but we had ‘em: from storm force to gentle zephyr. We considered alternative landfalls to suit the wind direction — Nelson, Wellington, New Plymouth, Manukau. We burned most of our fuel supplies in the still weather, leaving a small reserve to motor up Auckland Harbour or through any coastal calms.

  Eventually the main boom broke in half due to metal fatigue; caused, I suspect, by years of overzealous weekend sailors grunting on the vang tackle. We rigged a bridle for the mainsheet and flew the sail loose-footed, where it seemed to be more effective, off the wind anyway.

  Finally, 14 days out of Sydney and 136 miles north of New Zealand, we decided to tack and head for the stable door. Our new direction should have taken us west of Cape Reinga, but as we progressed southwards the wind freed us until the brave wee sailboat forged past North Cape on a broad reach with a bone in her mouth. We whooped and slapped her flanks, urging her on like cowboys whipping their horses. Further south we hoisted a spinnaker and settled back in the cockpit, drinking the last of the duty-free wine and counting off the coastal lighthouses as they passed in the dark. Moonlight sparkled across the water and we told sea stories, joked and laughed as the ocean-passage tensions eased out of our bodies. We carried the spinnaker shy almost to Bean Rock, then peeled down to a genoa for the beat up the harbour just as the day’s first sunlight swamped the scene.

  I called Auckland harbour control on the VHF radio to arrange customs clearance. ‘Aahh — there’s a few people here who’ll be pleased to see you,’ the operator said. ‘You were posted as missing a few days ago.’

  New Zealand’s cheerful and efficient customs people met us at Admiralty Steps in the harbour and, formalities completed,
we motored over to the allocated berth at Westhaven marina, tied the boat up and packed our bags. Then we sat in the cockpit, basking in the sun and soaking up the blessed quietude that comes with the end of an ocean passage. Nothing moves, there’s nothing to be done, no watches to keep — the job is over. There’s also a reluctance to leave the boat you’ve come to know and respect — every boat’s a good boat at the end of the trip. It’s like the final leavetaking from an old friend you’ve shared many adventures with.

  A car scrunched into the gravel car park and the boat’s owner bustled down the wharf, harassed and sweating. He stopped beside the boat and ran his finger round the inside of his shirt collar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve broken its boom.’

  TASMAN TRIP ON EDGE

  Judging by her dimensions, the catamaran should have gone like a freshly emasculated former tomcat leaving a vet’s surgery. Length overall 22 metres, beam 12.2 metres and draught 1.3 metres (2.2 with the dagger-boards down). The mast reached a giddy 30.5 metres off the deck and sported a generously roached full-battened mainsail. At first sight she was pretty impressive. Resting among plodding monohulls and lesser vessels at the Airlie Beach Marina in Queensland, On The Edge looked like a space shuttle on the launching pad — a boat covering a patch of water slightly larger than half a tennis court, gaudy in Coke-can red-and-white graphics and surmounted by a towering rig with more kinks than Michael Jackson.

  Fresh from Auckland and wilting somewhat in the high 30s heat, we, the delivery crew, set straight to work to make this day-boat seaworthy for her trip east-bound, across the Tasman, to a new role as a charter boat in the Bay of Islands in the upper North Island of New Zealand.

  Designed by Lock Crowther as a reaching machine, On The Edge had spent six years in the Great Barrier Reef charter trade, running 50 passengers at a time from Airlie Beach to the Whitsunday Islands. Dubbed Australia’s fastest surveyed sailing catamaran, she’d been clocked at 30 knots and among the charter-boat crews at the marina she was famous for fast trips and awestruck punters. ‘Going to Kiwi?’ one skipper drawled. ‘You’re in for a bloody wet and wild trip, mate.’

  After a week’s hard work preparing the big catamaran for sea, On The Edge was ready to strut her stuff — 89 miles down the Whitsunday Passage to the customs clearance port of Mackay. For the whole week, a brisk breeze had blown from the north and we set out with a high-wind warning crackling from the VHF radio. The log was soon hovering in the high teens, then 20 knots. When it hit 25.5 knots, On the Edge quietly slid the forward third of her lee hull under the choppy seas. Five hearts stopped beating as one, and we clawed what must be the fastest reef out of a mainsail in sailing history.

  As keelboat sailors we were used to gauging a boat’s performance by her angle of heel, but multihulls don’t heel — they just go faster. Lesson one learned; but we’d covered the distance in seven hours — almost 13 knots average speed. Rhumb-line distance Mackay to Auckland is 1774 miles; divided by 13, this equals about six days … we talked about setting a trans-Tasman speed record, our names emblazoned in lights throughout the yachting media. Move over Peter Blake — On the Edge is coming.

  The trip from Airlie Beach had exposed a few shortcomings in the steering department which were remedied with a new hydraulic pump, flushed hoses and re-built rams. While this was going on, the wind swung back to its prevailing south-easterly direction, and stuck there.

  We cleared out of Mackay for the City of Sails, spent a night tacking south to clear the southern-most coral stragglers of the Great Barrier Reef, then hardened up on starboard tack, steering a course for New Caledonia. Lesson number two: On the Edge just does not do windward. Slamming over the lumpy seas, the best that the big cat could manage was 65 degrees off the wind, with an angle of leeway that would make a barge skipper blanch.

  After 15 hours of negligible headway we tacked and headed back to Hervey Bay and an anchorage behind Fraser Island, to lick our wounds and make some repairs and improvements. Whale families played around us while we worked, but the twin pressures of every delivery crew — wind and time — were against us, so after 30 hours we hoisted sail and left. For days we clawed southwards down the Australian coast until a slight lift, in about the latitude of Brisbane, enabled us to lay a course offshore and we started to head south-eastwards, joking about a trip to Auckland via Bluff.

  Skipper Rob Obren, a keen big-game fishing fan, managed to infect us all with a bit of his piscatorial bug when two marlin in turn took his lures east of Brisbane and danced spectacularly behind the boat. On the Edge also infected us with brief, exhilarating bursts of high-speed sailing with twin rooster tails fanning out from her rudders. Nursing the big cat to windward was generally slow work, though, and we press-ganged some of the on-board livestock to provide a bit of entertainment with the On The Edge Tasman Sea Cockroach Derby. Track: firm; weather: fine — resounding win to Cockey out of Galley. A subsequent kangaroo court found that the winning cocky had been doped with sugar, though, and the win was disallowed.

  About this time, one of the two cooking-gas bottles on board ran out. With some help from the Edge’s two 50-horsepower Volvo diesels, we could lay Lord Howe Island where Clive, the harbourmaster, talked us in through the reef using a hand-held radio from his ute parked on the coast road opposite the pass.

  Almost everyone on the island turned up to check out the great spidery catamaran swinging from a mooring in the lagoon, but after taking on gas and topping up provisions we were off within 12 hours, motoring out the north channel and shaping a course for … Cook Strait.

  Built as a day-boat, On the Edge’s domestic arrangements were a bit spartan for this line of work. Cooking was done by barbecue in the port hull. The starboard hull had two toilets, side by side, with a changing room just aft of them. Two futons laid on the cabin sole of the starboard hull where we ‘hot bunked’ — two crew on watch and two below — were the only accommodation.

  ‘You’ll get a northerly tomorrow,’ Clive confidently predicted from the wharf as we ferried the last load of provisions out from Lord Howe. But after two tomorrows, the wind was still steadfastly south-east. Then Russell Radio in New Zealand reported a cold front approaching from the south. We double-reefed the main in preparation as black storm-clouds gathered on the horizon towards dusk and started bearing down on us.

  The front hit, bringing 40 knots of wind from the south-west and for 12 glorious hours On the Edge did what she was designed to do. Galloping wildly through the night with the GPS speed readout hovering in the low to mid 20-knot range, she overtook waves, splashing through the crests and soaring down the fronts. We whooped and danced on deck while Led Zeppelin boomed above the roar of wind and waves from the surround-sound stereo system. At last we’d got a taste of the bungy-jump exhilaration we’d expected the whole trip to be like.

  By the morning the wonderful interlude was over, and we were back hard on the wind in light air. The wind followed us round North Cape and we sailed down the north-east coast of the North Island close-hauled in light breeze. We crew, Rob Obren, Lindsay Wright (navigator), Nick Phipps and Bill Thomas, privately and publicly invoked various assorted deities for a wind change. Wind chants and dances were performed on deck, but all the wind and radio forecasts predicted that it would stay on the nose. We talked about painting out the ‘Edge’ from the boat’s colourful hull graphics and putting ‘Nose’ in its place.

  Finally, we motorsailed up Auckland Harbour with 2500 miles on the log, 14 days out of Mackay at an average speed of 6.7 knots for the trip. ‘G’day men, welcome home,’ the affable and efficient customs officer said as he stepped aboard at the clearance berth. ‘Whew, she’s some machine,’ he said looking around, ‘what took you so long?’

  WHALE TAIL ENDS SAIL

  Boston Harbour was grey and autumnal. The sky was low and leaden, the buildings were grey and the water was like a pewter sheet. Signs around the water’s edge warned people not to swim because of radiation danger, and sleek grey warships mano
euvred in the distance. Armed guards waved us away from USS Constitution (‘Old Ironsides’) and refused permission to tie the dinghy up while we bought tickets and had a look aboard. ‘Hah,’ I thought glumly, ‘it’s going to take more than tossing a few boxes of tea over the side to fix what ails America these days.’

  But a perky white boat moored on the outside pontoon of the inner harbour marina, with a small, white-haired man pottering around in the cockpit, caught my eye and I motored over to say ‘G’day.’ The name on the side of the boat said it all: Rogue Wave, and the man had to be Phil Weld who had sailed her in the Observer Singlehanded TransAtlantic Race (OSTAR). ‘Come aboard, son,’ he said, and held out a hand to take the dinghy painter.

  Multihull yacht designs have been at the bitter end of a slur campaign ever since Nathanael Herreshoff built a revolutionary 24-foot (7.31-metre) catamaran in 1876 and began severely embarassing much larger yachts racing in Long Island Sound. Like many other keelboat sailors, I was suspicious. What stopped them from digging the bow of the leeward hull into a wave and turning turtle? How did they cope with the stress and strains of multiple waves impacting on various parts of the vessel simultaneously? Didn’t they have a sharp, jerky motion at sea?

  Phil Weld smiled at my questions and slowly walked me around his 40-foot (12.2-metre) trimaran, explaining the design features as we went, and how she reacted in various wind and wave combinations. Some of the older boats had turned turtle, he admitted, but modern designs had overcome that difficulty. ‘And,’ he pointed out, ‘if you hit something and put a hole in your boat, a keelboat will sink like a lump of lead — but a multihull will float and give you a survival platform.’