Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  ‘We sail for fun,’ he said, quoting Rogue Wave’s designer, Dick Newick, ‘and nobody can convince me that it’s more fun to go slow than it is to go fast.’ And he related some distances that he and Rogue Wave had covered in 24 hours. Phil pumped up the Primus and we had a coffee while I bombarded him with more questions. To my mind, the slim multihull didn’t have the internal volume to be a good cruising boat or the hardiness to withstand the hammering that long-term cruisers can be subjected to, but I was excited by the performance and all of my preconceived qualms about multihull seaworthiness had been well and truly put to bed. I determined to spend more time on them and learn how they worked.

  Months later, when we arrived in Bristol, England, on our yacht Elkouba, I looked up Tony Bullimore, who’d been having some success racing his 60-foot (18.3-metre) trimaran Apricot, and knocked on his door. Bullimore invited me in and, over a cup of tea, explained that he was about to leave on a transatlantic race but — noticing my keenness — would I be interested in crewing for the delivery trip back to Bristol?

  I thanked him profusely, pumped his hand like it was a bilge pump handle on a flooding boat, and skipped back to Elkouba. Apricot, however, ran into the foot of a cliff off Brittany not long after the race start and my multihull racing career was thus quashed before it got off the ground. By then I’d found work and we’d decided to sail north, so my multihull plans were put on the back shelf for the time being.

  But Dick Newick’s saucy little trimarans were never far from my thoughts and, when I began shopping for a boat to win the 2007 Solo Tasman Yacht Race, I was delighted to find Loose Goose, a well-proven Val class trimaran, on the market in Auckland. She seemed like the boat to do the job, and teach me how to sail a multihull in the process. I wasn’t along to participate in the race — I wanted to win, and Loose Goose felt like the boat to do it. The Solo Tasman race is sailed every four years over what can be a very rough course: 1290 nautical miles between New Plymouth in New Zealand and Mooloolaba in Queensland, Australia. It was started in 1970, backed by legendary single-handed sailor Sir Francis Chichester, using rules adopted from the original OSTAR.

  During the test sail, in 30 knots of nor’easter on Auckland Harbour, Loose Goose put on an exhilarating performance, whipping past the Sunday-afternoon armada of inbound Gulf cruisers like they were sailing backwards. She showed the effects of long months of neglect on a mooring, though, and also proved very difficult to tack. Even so, she ploughed her leeward hull into the water and boogied back upwind like the spirited colt she was.

  Loose Goose was the boat I wanted for tackling the Tasman race, and possibly even looking at the six days eight hours record for the 1250 nautical mile course, set by Australian Ian Johnstone in his trimaran Bullfrog Sunblock in 1986. I checked with Loose Goose’s builder and was satisfied with her plywood, epoxy and carbon-fibre construction. I bought the boat and, over the next six months, hauled her out at Okahu Bay in Auckland, replaced the standing rigging, removed and re-built the rudder and steering gear, re-wired the interior and completed a myriad of small fitting-out jobs.

  The more I got to know the boat’s construction, the more my confidence grew; and I began keeping an eye on weather patterns for the right window to sail Loose Goose on the 520-mile coastal passage around North Cape to New Plymouth. Finally, in early January, the time looked opportune. The weather forecast predicted a few days of sou’westerlies veering nor’easterly. The southerlies would power me up the north-east coast of North Island and, hopefully, the northerlies would kick in for the trip down the west coast to New Plymouth.

  Loose Goose’s previous owner had had difficulty tacking, but I soon found that with the centreboard down, I could easily tack her by slowly bringing her into the wind, dumping the mainsheet, tacking the jib and re-sheeting the mainsail once she was sailing full and bye on the new tack. The Raytheon tiller-pilot’s tacking function did it automatically through 100 degrees, and what had been a chore became quite fun.

  I was starting to understand that although Loose Goose was lightly built, she was also perfectly engineered to cope with the stresses which the sea put on her three fine and easily driven hull forms. I crawled around, shining a torch into the wing decks and checking the chainplates and bulkheads, probing for signs of movement or breakage while she sailed. Several of the accounts I’d read about multihull races had described how crews often had to ease off due to damaged fairing on the leading edge of their wing decks, and I began to see why. The fine ends of the amas (outriggers) slid into the seas until the buoyancy from the wing deck took over and popped them to the surface to do it all again. The buoyant fairing pieces on the wing decks bore the brunt of most of the stresses involved in this behaviour and also that from errant waves which slapped into their underbellies.

  By dusk on the third day, Cape Reinga was well astern and Loose Goose was soaring southwards down the west coast of the North Island. It was blowing a good 25 knots from the north-east and the Goose was in full flight, averaging 12 to 15 knots under double-reefed main and storm jib. The automatic pilot was struggling to helm the little trimaran as she soared down the wave fronts and skipped across the tumbling seas, so I took the helm and kept her going hard, steering through the night, singing at the top of my voice to keep myself awake. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Simon & Garfunkel (it’s an age thing) all got a fair old hammering as we roared through the night, sprinting across wave faces and skipping over the tumbled water that was left when they crumpled. This was ocean sailing at its best, ongoing exhilaration aboard a 9-metre surfboard.

  I’m fairly gregarious and not a single-hander by nature; I missed the company of someone to share the thrills, the radiant sunrise and concluding sunsets, the beauty of the tumbling white and green seas. It’s surely the best of sensations: physically feeling the omnipotent shove of a wave from astern, then the rush of the boat on its crest, hurtling through the black night at what seems like breakneck speed. Stars spangle the sky overhead and, if you’re lucky, a moon leaves silver trails across the sea. Spiritually you’re totally autonomous and totally self-reliant … senses attuned to the boat, the wind and the weather. A change in any one of them preoccupies your mind until it’s remedied or explained to your satisfaction. Sometimes on such nights I could (and do) hug myself and wish I could sail forever.

  Daylight, slowly creeping over New Zealand somewhere away to the east, brought no easing in the conditions, so I dropped the mainsail and lashed it to the boom. With the little storm jib drawing away on the inner forestay, the Goose was left loafing along at a comfortable 5 or 6 knots, so I slipped the tiller-pilot back on and went below to cook bacon and eggs for breakfast and lie down for a snooze.

  A few hours later, lying asleep in my wet-weather gear, I was woken by a loud crack. ‘Bugger,’ I grumbled, ‘the wind must have changed and the jib’s gybed.’ I swung my seabooted feet out of the bunk and uttered the ultimate expletive as the knee-deep water in the cabin began to fill the boots. I waded across the cabin sole and swung the hatch open, leapt into a cockpit also awash with water, and from there to the deck. I still wasn’t sure what I’d hit — a shipping container maybe? Another vessel?

  Loose Goose wallowed slowly onwards, the sails drawing hard to drag the waterlogged hull through the water, the odd aggressive wave sweeping the decks at about 30 centimetres high. Lying with his massive head at right-angles to the Goose’s starboard hull was a big bull humpback whale, the wart-like knobs on his head just clear of the water. Straight away I knew what had caused the sudden ingress of water, and the thought that maybe he’d come back to finish me off flashed through my head.

  I took a few steps, grabbed hold of the starboard aft rigging wire and stood staring down at the huge head, while waves lapped across it and short, gentle breaths whooshed from his blowhole. For a trance-like few seconds, or maybe minutes, the whale and I were immobile. I thought I heard a rattle of staccato clicks from him, but can’t be sure. I do remember fighting back an insane urge to rea
ch out and squeeze one of the bumps on his head. Somehow I knew that he didn’t mean to hurt me or the boat, and I was overwhelmed by an overall, almost eerie, sensation of goodwill. Anthropomorphizing, I felt that he was trying to say sorry and that he hadn’t meant to hurt the Goose.

  My brain was frantically scrabbling for grip. The boat was holed — could be sinking under me as I stood there, staring — but I couldn’t tear myself away from the whale. Eventually, with a last ‘chouff’ from his blowhole, he slowly sank and rolled on his starboard side. Without seeming to move a muscle, he finned under the bow, a few centimetres away from the metre-wide hole I later found in the port bow. I became aware of more shapes in the rough water around me; and other whales, a whole family, came surging in from downwind and did the same — swam slowly under the bows as if to check the damage. They swam around the boat for maybe 15 minutes, then mustered about 20 metres off as though they were discussing the next move. Having reached a decision they turned as one; their broad backs, the leisurely lift of their tails and feathery wind-blown spume of their breathing slowly merging into the sea.

  I suddenly felt alone, on an awash boat, about 100 miles off the west coast of New Zealand. A plastic tarpaulin floated out of the hole in the bow and I struggled to lash it in place to fother the hole (an ancient technique to patch a holed vessel at sea), but it became obvious that wave action inside the hull and the size of the hole would prevent that from working. An hour or so later I stood up to take stock. At almost every point of the compass around the boat, I could see a whale spout in the distance.

  Part of the argument which I’d used to sell my wife, Sarah, on the idea of my doing the Solo Tasman yacht race was that a trimaran is, theoretically, unsinkable. I had read, though, that if one of the amas (pontoons) is broached, they can turn on their sides. The boat seemed to be stable, however, and I thought about hardening up into the wind and sailing her the 120-odd nautical miles to the beach and putting her ashore. That would mean more violent wave action, though, and I didn’t want her breaking up under me — a very strong possibility. Besides, I had no charts, no electronics, most of my food was submerged or saturated, and I had no way of cooking it anyway. My clothes and bedding were all underwater, and the ones I had on were soaked.

  Either way, the Goose wasn’t going anywhere. I reached through the hatch, grabbed the brand-new 406-mega-Hertz EPIRB and flicked the switch to ‘ON’. A light blinked and the beacon beeped reassuringly, so I stuck it in the furled main, away from the waves sweeping the deck, and waded into the chest-deep water inside the boat to access the 121.5-mega-Hertz EPIRB from its bracket on a forward bulkhead. With both EPIRBs beeping away in the mainsail, I made other incursions to the cabin to salvage what personal gear I could, then settled down, beside the inflated dinghy, to eat the last of my chocolate and muesli bars and wait for rescue.

  Staff at the National Rescue Coordination Centre later told Sarah that I’d activated the EPIRB at 1250 hours, they’d picked it up at 1300 and rang her at 1310. Around about half past five a fixed-wing aircraft, piloted by legendary helicopter rescue pilot John Funnell, flew past and dipped his wings. I fired off a parachute flare and for several minutes enjoyed the heat flowing from the handle through my body. My teeth chattered and the hand shook uncontrollably.

  At about 6 p.m., the Northland Electricity Trust Rescue Helicopter whop-whopped over the horizon to hover above the Goose. A light line with a weight suspended from it was dropped on deck and I hauled the person hanging from the helicopter aboard, where she slipped a harness over my head. ‘Can I take my bag?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied curtly, ‘we’re out of here.’ And seconds later the Goose, with her cockpit awash, wallowed forlornly 50 metres below my dripping seaboots. She represented a couple of years of hard work, had treated me to some exhilarating sailing and I was just starting to get the hang of how she liked to be sailed … I would miss her badly.

  Buckled into my seat on board the chopper, I peered intently at the sea around Loose Goose and much of the way back to Auckland. It wouldn’t have surprised me to have seen a huge pectoral fin raised in farewell, but there wasn’t a whale in sight.

  A few months later, Japanese whalers announced that they would be adding a quota of humpbacks to their ‘research’ killings in the Southern Ocean. It gave me weeks of sleepless nights — how could anyone kill such a creature for money? I imagined harpoons ripping into the soft flesh and blubber of these gentle giants; the tortured underwater pinging of the injured animals. The huge carcasses winched up a stern ramp and mechanically peeled of blubber. Surely there’s no more conclusive evidence that mankind has lost the plot completely?

  Postscript: A Nelson yacht, Cruisaway, reported spotting Loose Goose about 85 miles north-west of Port Taranaki a week after I’d abandoned her, and on 6 January 2007 a chase boat for the seismic survey vessel Pacific Titan located the trimaran, rigged a frying pan (as radar reflector) and flashing light and towed her out of the seismic survey area. A recreational fishermen towed her to Raglan on 16 January. She was bought by a multihull sailor/builder from Thames who cut her in three with a chainsaw and trucked her back across the North Island, where he is totally rebuilding her. Loose Goose lives.

  INDIAN SUMMER

  The assignment was to deliver Granny Apple across the Tasman to Sydney to have a crack at the Aussies in their own waters. Granny Apple was designed by Bruce Farr and lightly built in double diagonal kahikatea (white pine) by Granny Wall in Lyttelton; hence the name. She had been successfully campaigned by a group of Wellington yachtsmen under skipper Geoff Stagg and chosen to represent New Zealand South in the 1979 Southern Cross Cup regatta in Sydney and the 1979/80 Sydney to Hobart race.

  This was a time before the convenience of satellite navigation or GPS receivers. Navigation was by sextant sights of the sun or stars, with an almanac and tables to obtain an approximation of one’s whereabouts. The Tasman is often overcast, and we’d go for days without reliable position fixes; charging into the dark night relying on ‘dead-reckoning’ — an estimation of position based on boat speed and direction. The navigator was almost always an amateur — often whoever stuck his hand up for the job — who had completed a navigation course or done the job before somewhere. Positions relayed over the radio were generally quoted in degrees and minutes of latitude or longitude; now, they’re read off a GPS receiver in degrees, minutes and two, three or four decimal points.

  Some navigators were reluctant to share their knowledge in the arcane art of finding one’s whereabouts from the heavens, but others were quite open to teaching their shipmates and sharing the sense of accomplishment which comes from locating your position on the planet in relation to the sun and stars. Navigation by committee would often result, and filled days with good-(and bad)-natured speculation.

  Sail changes involved deciding which sail to change up/down to. Then dragging the requisite sail through the boat and up to the foredeck, dropping the sail already being used and unhanking (unclipping) it — often working waist-deep-wet on a foredeck awash with water — then hanking the new sail on, hoisting it, and bundling the old sail up, bagging it and dragging it back through the boat to the forepeak. These days, that whole operation is often completed in seconds by easing or pulling the furler line for the roller-furler.

  Someone on the Granny Apple trans-Tasman crew had a contact in the marketing division of the New Zealand Dairy Board, and several packets of New Zealand’s — and, I believe, the world’s — first trial UHT (Ultra Heat Treated) long-life milk were delivered on board, along with assessment sheets for us crew to record our experiences and impressions of the new product. Refrigeration was almost unheard of in yachts at the time, certainly in lightweight racing craft like Granny.

  The problem with many deliveries are the omnipresent deadlines. That’s what drove us out of Wellington Harbour and into a fresh north-westerly in the western approaches to Cook Strait. Granny Apple had three laminated frames in her entire 36-foot (10.9-metre) length. They w
ere closely spaced, just aft of her sole 25-millimetre-thick bulkhead, where they also served as engine bearers and spread the loading from her mast and rigging. As we hammered the light hull westwards into the Tasman, there was a sharp cracking noise from up forward. A hurried investigation showed that the bulkhead had cracked right through at the doorway to the forepeak.

  This revelation was followed by a council of war in the cockpit where, to a man, we decided to plug on towards Sydney but to ‘take it easy on the boat’. With the lateral stiffening of her hull severely compromised, Granny Apple beat on; although every time she ploughed her nose into a wave, the forward hatch would crack open slightly and admit a vigorous spurt of water.

  Later on in the trip, I was changing a headsail on the foredeck when Granny Apple did a squirrelly pirouette over a wave top and I found myself floating away from the boat into the dark night. Luckily, I still had a firm grasp on a handful of headsail (safety harnesses weren’t widely used back then), and a wave or two later washed me back aboard. I completed the sail change and clambered back to the cockpit where my watch-mate was clinging to the tiller with a face as white as a hospital bed-sheet. ‘I thought you were a goner there for a while,’ he said.

  We raised Sydney’s tall buildings while still a distance out at sea and, rising early in the morning for my watch, I used the last of our UHT milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes and a green pepper to make a huge omelette for all the crew. It was all a bit premature, however — we had made our landfall in light air and were swept south by the East Australian Current. We were almost completely out of food, and low on fuel, by the time we finally motored into Sydney and tied up at a buoy for customs clearance a couple of days later.