All Piss and Wind

by David Salter

  ‘The Amateurs’ is also the only sailing club that can claim the dubious honour of having me as a member. It suits my needs and general approach to the sport of yachting perfectly. Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine sailing on Sydney Harbour without being a part of the SASC. It has a wonderful history, unpretentious and friendly members, strong affection for classic yachts, and a healthy, well-run racing program. But most endearing to me is the underlying philosophy of the club: it’s run by sailors, for sailors, and has no ambitions to be anything else. It seeks no sponsorships, houses no poker machines or dining room, and doesn’t even have a full liquor licence. (That’s not to say you can’t get a drink there after racing – heaven forfend! – but the specific legality by which the directors are empowered to retail the requisite amounts of rum and beer to members at appropriate times remains something of a mystery.)

  Members can work on their boats at the club – a rare privilege these days – and enjoy free access to a workshop and the full range of power tools necessary for basic yacht maintenance. Those without the aptitude or time to do the work themselves can retain the services of the on-site shipwright and apprentice who operate as SASC employees. The entire club exists for the direct benefit of boat-owners and their crews, but members are expected to be resourceful. It’s the kind of place that’s happy to sell rump steaks and sausages after the Friday twilight race, but you have to BBQ them yourself. When the deck timbers needed replacing the members completed the whole job themselves during a two-day working bee.

  The SASC has always set itself gently apart from the snootier ‘Royal’ clubs and squadrons around Sydney Harbour, and the overt commercialism of the Cruising Yacht Club. The underlying spirit of ‘The Amateurs’ is determinedly Corinthian, and has been from the outset. The Club Rules, as published in 1884, put the matter beyond doubt:

  The word amateur shall exclude all fishermen, oystermen, boatbuilders, sailmakers and persons gaining or having gained their living on the water, or any person who is or has been employed in or about yachts, boats or ships as a means of livelihood or any person who has received any monetary consideration for his professional knowledge.

  Clearly, some long-forgotten lawyer on the committee had a hand in drafting that punctilious masterpiece of exclusion and it wasn’t long before the bias against people ‘in trade’ evaporated.

  In fact, if there’s a Sydney yachting club that truly caters for the ordinary bloke, then the SASC is it. Membership is discreetly kept to around 400, and the race entry fees and annual subscriptions remain modest. In 1881 race entry fees increased from threepence to sixpence ‘a foot’, a telling indication not just of inflation but that the Honorary Treasurer was quite happy to exploit one of the oldest axioms in yachting: the bigger the boat, the deeper the owner’s pockets. The early club registers were dominated by the smaller open boats that raced with such exuberance on Sydney Harbour more than a century ago. It’s still, by inclination, a club for wholesome yachts in the 30–40 foot range – partly because the slipway struggles to accommodate anything larger, but mainly as an expression of the members’ collective loyalty to traditional principles of seaworthiness, eye-pleasing design and being able to look after the boat yourself.

  A standard summer race day at ‘The Amateurs’ offers a light sketch of the club’s character. By 0900 a steady procession of sailors are already making their way down the steep steps to the clubhouse. They tote sails, kitbags, freshly varnished hatch covers and all the other clutter of practical yachting. Essential supplies – the obligatory ‘slab’ of beer and bag of ice – are lovingly set down in the shade. In the shed someone is frantically rebuilding a spinnaker pole they mangled in last weekend’s big blow. The volunteers who crew the starting boat sit at their favourite corner table, quietly discussing over a cup of tea which course they might set for the day’s racing.

  We wander into the kitchen to make ourselves a cup of coffee and take it out into the sunshine for the standard yachtie’s breakfast: a scratch, a smoke and a decent look round. Conversation invariably turns to the weather.

  ‘Looks like a fair bit of east in that.’

  ‘Yeah, but I reckon she’ll swing more south later. Bureau’s saying 10 to 15 knots.’

  ‘What’s the tide doing?’

  ‘Still on the ebb, mate. Next high water’s not till after four o’clock.’

  And so on, until the cuppa is drained and it’s time to hail the club tender for the short ride out to your boat. If an owner is obviously short of crew there’s often a spontaneous dockside reallocation of labour to ensure that everyone has enough bodies to sail with safety and still be competitive.

  Racing with ‘The Amateurs’ is not the intense, gunnel-to-gunnel, ego-driven exercise we associate with the more prominent fleets. Everyone sails hard, but serious incidents are rare. I can’t remember the last time a race was decided by the protest committee. Everyone is out on the water to enjoy themselves first, and compete second. Once we’ve all battled to the windward mark, set spinnakers and settled in for a comfortable run, the customary cry goes up: ‘How’s the time? Must be past beer o’clock, surely!’ and the requisite number of tinnies is soon handed up from the icebox. Sure we’re racing, but a man’s not a camel. That drink is always finished before we arrive at the bottom turning buoy, so everyone is free to apply themselves fully to the gybe, spinnaker drop or whatever other task the course demands.

  After decades of refinement, the race committee has settled on a range of courses that all feature a finishing line close to Mosman Bay so that no boat needs waste much time getting back to their mooring. The enticing aroma of sausages already sizzling on the club barbecue wafts across the bay. The tender wends its way between the returning yachts to collect crew. Within half an hour everyone is back at the club earnestly attending to issues of mutual rehydration. A rumbo or two later the Commodore announces the divisional results and hands out the prizes – usually an SASC mug or wine glass for the place-getters and a bottle of claret for today’s winner. The regulation banter and chiacking about ‘burglar’s handicaps’ and sandbagging for next week round out the afternoon. Before dark we all trudge back up the hill to drive home before our blood alcohol levels become too tempting a target for the local constabulary. That’s racing at ‘The Amateurs’, and there can’t be many more pleasurable ways for a sailor to spend their Saturday.

  The club has endured so successfully because it harbours no great ambitions to expand its assets, services, events program or membership. Sustaining a comfortable clubhouse and the varied program of day racing across a wide range of boats is sufficient challenge. There’s enough regular revenue from well-established sources to more than cover outgoings. The longest race on the annual program is to Lion Island and return, a trip that normally takes no more than eight hours. Commercial sponsorship of the club or any of its activities is, by mutual agreement, unwanted. It’s also unnecessary because the directors never embark on projects that are beyond their means.

  But to me the most precious quality of the club is its strong foundations of mateship. The SASC is small enough for most of the active sailors to know each other by their first names. There’s a genuine spirit of mutual support in which members share their skills, experience and even equipment without prompting.

  Donk giving a bit of trouble? Chuck the keys to Mick and he’ll pop out to your boat sometime during the week and flush the injectors. Radio not working? Charles is a whiz with anything electronic – get the boat alongside an hour early next week and he’ll sort it out. If you’ve broken a valuable old genoa car, just slip it into Bob’s kitbag and he’ll have it back next week all welded up and good as new. Mangled the pulpit? Unbolt the wreck from the foredeck and deliver it around to Mike’s factory tomorrow. He’s a magician with metal. When the black arts of marine plumbing set you an impossible riddle, Trevor can always sort it out – he spent half his life as a ship’s engineer. If you’ve shredded your last spinnaker and aren’t exactly flush with f
unds right now, someone from a similar-sized boat will lend you one of theirs. Mandated safety gear is swapped from boat to boat to share the growing financial burden of racing offshore.

  There’s a touching, old-fashioned egalitarianism and tradition of mutual dependence about ‘The Amateurs’ that’s distinctively Australian. Many prominent Sydney yachtsmen who are members of much loftier clubs also join the SASC. I suspect they’re the ones whose sailing soul demands they retain a spiritual connection with the wellsprings of the sport.

  The one great disadvantage of a club being so informal, tolerant and welcoming is that its members tend to treat the premises as an extension of their own garages and sheds. Adjoining the shipwright’s workshop there’s a large area set aside where members can store their dinghies, work on benches, paint odd bits and pieces and generally attend to the endless little jobs that go with owning and maintaining a boat. But what the members bringeth down to the boatshed, they rarely taketh away. (It’s a punishing haul lugging a dead 12-volt battery up those 70 steep steps to the closest road.) Club premises are the responsibility of the Vice-Commodore, and keeping the place reasonably tidy is that Flag Officer’s most irksome chore. A sign posted on the shed door in the early 1960s encapsulated those frustrations with admirable style:

  This is our FINAL REMINDER about the heterogeneous mass of seeming junk that litters the boatshed from floor to rafters. All items not clearly labelled with owner’s name and boat number will be sold or burnt within a week.

  Firm, fair, but enlivened by a touch of affectionate humour – just like The Amateurs itself.

  What would the world be, once bereft

  Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

  Oh let them be left, wildness and wet!

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid

  YOU CAN’T SAIL any real distance at sea without getting wet. It just doesn’t happen. At the least opportune moment the helmsman will lose concentration for a second and allow the combined motion of the boat and the next wave to dump half a ton of sea in the cockpit.

  ‘Sorry, fellas. Never mind, it’s only water!’ is the customary lame attempt at mollification.

  ‘Sure, mate. Care to empty my boots?’

  Worse is the effect of steady rain. Despite the most careful raising of your hood, the deluge will inevitably find some way of depositing an annoying little trickle of cold water down your neck. Gradually, over a three-hour watch, this steady stream will completely soak your thermals and underwear. Old hands like to wrap a towel around their necks, but that eventually becomes saturated as well. As you finally go below the options are clear: either sleep in wet clothes, or spend an exhausting half hour slowly stripping off your sodden garments while you try to find some dry replacements at the bottom of your sea-bag. Nice choice.

  But let me be the first to acknowledge that there have been huge advances in the science of protecting sailors against the elements. It’s interesting to follow the development of wet-weather clothing and the way it has been influenced by changes in the sport of ocean racing. When the crusty Norwegian sea captain Helly Juell Hansen swallowed the anchor back in 1877 he turned his hand to making oiled canvas jackets for the thousands of square-rigger crews whose courage kept the wheels of world trade turning. These heavy, stiff ‘oilies’ made Captain Hansen a fortune, and were the first recognised clothing designed and sold specifically for use in wet weather at sea.

  The generic nickname ‘oilie’ stuck. Before my first Sydney– Hobart forty years ago the skipper quite sensibly told me he wasn’t interested in taking any crew south who didn’t have their own wet-weather gear. Dale Munro, a member of the crew on Russell Slade’s famous Janzoon II, sewed me a bespoke jacket and pants at his dusty upstairs workroom in the inner-city suburb of Chippendale. I can remember Dale carefully taking my measurements like a Savile Row tailor and then transferring those dimensions onto a graded set of cardboard patterns. Each component of the jacket and pants was then marked out on the bright orange rubberised cloth that he eventually cut and stitched together to make my oilies. That gear weighed a ton, but it did me proud for the next ten years – until the metal press-studs and buckles all slowly rusted holes through the bib and straps. Back then the offshore community in Sydney was so small it could be serviced by one or two small manufacturers. Today, many thousands of sets of wet-weather clobber are sold each year in Australia, and they’re no longer called ‘oilies’, or even ‘wet-weather gear’. The distributors will settle for nothing less than calling them ‘technical clothing’.

  Those of us with grey hair (if any at all) remember a simple test we used a generation ago to determine whether a boat was doing serious offshore work. All anyone needed to do was open a hatch and take a deep whiff. If you were greeted by that unmistakably pungent odour of stale sweat mixed with ripening mould then you could be sure the yacht had been ocean racing. That test no longer works. Modern high-tech gear doesn’t retain perspiration or saltwater, and rarely gives off the distinctive pong of old-time bluewater sailing. But it’s taken a generation of development in cloth and design to achieve that level of efficiency, and the progress has come at a price. What we outlay these days for a good-quality jacket, pants and thermals might otherwise buy most yachties a decent second-hand car.

  A no-nonsense little local manufacturer named Marlin released the first Australian line of ‘off the rack’ wet-weather gear for serious offshore sailing back in the 1960s, followed soon after by Taft. (The clothing from Taft tended to be lighter in construction, mainly bright yellow spray jackets that were popular with centreboard sailors.) Those early Marlin jackets were more durable, but the price we paid for heavier construction was that they were absolute sweat-boxes. They kept the water off fairly well, but retained almost as much inside.

  For ocean-racing crew, perspiration is as much the enemy as wind, waves and rain. When a body is working hard and constantly, it loses moisture at a rate of up to one litre per hour. The early generations of wet-weather gear were made from PVC and unlined. The cloth didn’t ‘breathe’. After 20 minutes of intense physical work on deck or packing a spinnaker below it felt as if you’d been wrapped in a plastic bag. Skin often chafed raw around the most common pressure points at the elbows and knees (let alone the unmentionable agonies of the dreaded ‘gunnel bum’). The other great disadvantage of PVC was that as the air and water temperature dropped, it would stiffen. By the time we’d reached Tasman Island in the Sydney–Hobart, our Marlin trousers were so rigid they’d just about stand up by themselves.

  The first real technical breakthrough in off-the-rack gear came in the late 1970s when Line 7, a New Zealand company, entered the market with what it described as ‘high-performance offshore wear’. The cloth was bullet-proof, the jacket zipper truly heavy-duty, and there were robust Velcro closures at the ankles and wrists. A customer could order this snazzy new Line 7 gear in any colour they liked, as long as it was white.

  The first range was unlined, but the Kiwis then blitzed their competition by adding a nylon/taffeta inner skin to the jackets and pants. This distinctive blue lining reduced the perspiration problem significantly, but there was one small difficulty: the colour ran. The manufacturers and retailers had to cope with hundreds of angry yachties who’d seen their best white crew T-shirts ruined by deep blue stains around the armpits. Responding to this shortcoming, Line 7 advised everyone to just chuck their gear into the tide for a while, claiming the saltwater would seal in the dye.

  Another problem emerged after the New Zealand oilies had been stored away in lockers during the first off-season. The cloth was supposed to have been specially treated against mould, but if you left your Line 7s anywhere near damp the inside surface of the fabric would soon be covered in nasty black splotches. I still have my old white Line 7 jacket from 1982. The zipper seized with saltwater corrosion years ago, the hood has some mould spots and the lining still runs. But the cloth itself doesn’t look like wearing out. It was amazingly tough gear.

  T
he next evolutionary step in ‘oilie’ development was prompted by specialist demands from within the sport. The rise of professional trans-oceanic racing undoubtedly supercharged the development of more durable and user-friendly clothing to match the athleticism of the crews and the terrible punishment they took. Hundreds of sailors were now racing through the extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean every year. Their exploits were regularly featured in the international media and those marketing opportunities were too good to miss.

  Henri Lloyd created a range of special gear for the Whitbread Round-the-World teams that featured a new system of coated nylon fabrics with linings. These were much tougher and more flexible than standard wear, but very expensive. During this period a loophole in the law allowed foreign-made wet-weather gear to be imported into Australia as ‘rainwear’, a category that didn’t attract sales tax. But the import duty was still substantial. Any yachtie going overseas was sure to be asked by his mates to bring back a set of Henri Lloyd gear, duty free. A new Australian firm, Burke, spotted this retail niche and soon established a strong foothold at the budget end of the market with locally manufactured clothing. (They continue to offer a good range of wet-weather gear that tends to be more popular with day-sailers and coastal cruisers than among the offshore community.)