All Piss and Wind

by David Salter

  A few years back we were making steady progress up the eastern shore after the start, holding our right-of-way on starboard tack. I was sitting to leeward, keeping a lookout for the skipper. ‘Bloke coming up below you on port tack!’ I cried.

  ‘Tell him to bugger off.’

  ‘Starboard!’ I bellowed, expecting the onrushing lightweight yacht to obey the rules and either tack away or change course to avoid us. But their helmsman didn’t alter his heading by a single degree. ‘STARBOARD!’ I yelled again, a collision now imminent. ‘He’s trying to bluff you, skipper. Cut the bastard in half!’ (I could suggest this with some confidence as we displaced 13 tons, more than twice the weight of the other yacht.)

  ‘No, we’ll duck his stern. Stand by! Dump the main, ease the genoa, bearing away …’ and we did a time-consuming scallop behind the offending yacht, all shaking our fists at their crew and turning the air blue with profanity.

  I questioned the skipper. ‘Rather meek and mild of you, boss?’

  He cracked a rueful grin. ‘Mate, we haven’t come all this way to get involved in a prang five minutes after the gun and be forced to retire.’

  I was still trembling with anger. ‘Well, at least we ought to protest!’

  ‘Nah, couldn’t be bothered.’

  And he was right. The prospect of having our red protest flag flapping from the backstay for the next 628 nautical miles was too dreary to contemplate. (But there is such a thing as ocean-racing karma. That offending yacht was soon forced to retire with a ripped mainsail and pulled into Twofold Bay.)

  After the battle to the Heads, it’s a joy to claim some genuine sea room and knuckle down to the days of hard sailing ahead. We’re all now anxious for the navigator to calculate what’s happening with the current. Normally in summer the ‘set’ down the east coast can provide up to two knots of bonus speed. Using data from the instruments and the GPS navigational computer, it doesn’t take long to confirm the difference between our raw boatspeed (speed through the water) and actual SOG (speed over the ground). The guesser soon makes his declaration: ‘1.3 knots up our clacker, lads. Go you good thing!’

  A curious ritual of the first Sydney–Hobart day is the competition between spectator craft to be the last boat to turn back to Sydney. Some of them accompany the fleet well beyond Botany Bay before heading home. I’ve always been intrigued by what drives these wannabe wayfarers. Are they trying to prove that they, too, can sail with the best of us? Are they frustrated competitors who don’t have the will or resources to enter the race but like to pretend they’re part of the event, if only for a few hours? Or were they having a nice day offshore anyway, and just happened to be overtaken by the Sydney–Hobart fleet? Whatever the reasons, they can become a real nuisance as they finally weave their haphazard way north in low sunshine through 50 big yachts all charging in the opposite direction with spinnakers flying.

  The Sydney–Hobart is actually four races in one: the dash down the harbour and out the Heads, the sprint south along the NSW coast, the long passage across Bass Strait and down the Tasmanian east coast, and the final stanza from Tasman Island up to the finish in the Derwent River. It’s the variety of challenges presented by those four different legs that makes the race unique. Fortunately, the first decent stretch – the sail from South Head to the bottom of Australia’s mainland – is usually the easiest. More often than not it’s a spinnaker run, or at least a two-sail reach with sheets eased. We reel off the miles down the rhumbline with the comforting sight of the coast not far off our starboard beam. All too easy.

  By early on the second day the Sydney–Hobart ‘virgins’ among the crew start mocking the veterans. ‘What’s all this rubbish you blokes keep going on with about “the toughest race in the world”? It’s a piece of piss!’

  Ah, the arrogance of inexperience. ‘Don’t count your chickens, boys. We’re not even a third of the way. It’s a lot longer than you think. Plenty of time yet for us to get caught in a shit-fight.’ But life on board is good. Everyone’s getting plenty of sleep and food. Before long we’re approaching a familiar milestone: 38° south.

  Since the 1998 tragedy, a rule in the Sailing Instructions requires each yacht to radio in to the relay vessel within an hour of passing Green Cape, the ‘corner’ of the south coast near the NSW/Victoria border that’s the accepted departure point for crossing Bass Strait. The skipper must declare that everyone in the crew is fit and happy to continue racing, and that the yacht itself is up to that task. It’s difficult to understand quite what this observance is meant to achieve for the organising authority other than maybe helping to mitigate any damages they might face in the event of a compensation claim. But it does serve to concentrate everyone’s minds on board.

  ‘You blokes OK to keep going?’

  ‘Sure, skipper. No worries.’

  Yet deep inside, we’re all thinking the same thing: ‘This is the serious part now. This is where boats get into real strife. Time to take a bit more care.’

  Bass Strait is daunting because it often combines the two elements that make offshore yachting so tough: contrary winds and steep seas. Anyone who bothers to monitor the prevailing weather systems for Australia’s lower south-east corner will know that we receive most of those conditions from Antarctica. That means frequent strong winds from the south – blowing in precisely the opposite direction to the ideal course for the Sydney–Hobart fleet.

  Compounding this misery is the fact that Bass Strait is a very shallow stretch of water (hardly remarkable when you remember that Tasmania was once joined to the main Australian land mass). Wind over shallow water makes waves. Big bastards. Not the long, slow swells of the open ocean but short, steep waves that can pound many small craft to a standstill. But there’s no turning back now. The time to chicken out was half a day ago when we passed the last truly protected good anchorage at Eden.

  The change in sea-state as boats venture out into ‘The Paddock’ is often immediate. Nature is letting everyone on board know that this is where sailing stops and seamanship begins. There aren’t many Bass Strait crossings that pass without incident. It’s where things, and people, get broken – where you find out how truly resilient you are, and what stuff your mates are made of. The physical effort of repeated sail changes in rough weather soon begins to sap your reserves of energy. Within a few hours you’re down to raw stamina and little else. The boat is inevitably ‘on its ear’, heeled hard over by the force of the wind. Life below becomes awkward, uncomfortable and often dangerous. (Many if not most injuries at sea happen below decks when the cabin sole gets slippery, the boat lurches off a wave and someone misses their handhold. It can be a long way to fall.) Cooking is difficult. The crew may have to endure 30 hours of hard sailing without a hot meal. Many of my Bass Strait crossings have been downright miserable. There are only two I can remember – 1983 and 2002 – that might be described as reasonably pleasant.

  But all bad things come to an end. There’s a collective sense of achievement and relief as we cross 40° South. It’s the start of the notorious ‘Roaring Forties’, but that parallel of latitude also runs through the middle of Flinders Island. ‘We’re across, fellas! You bloody beauty!’ Even though the weather might not abate for another 12 hours or so, we now have land to starboard again and could confidently run for shelter in an emergency. Another day’s sail and we might be there. Time to restore some order below, dry out all the clothes and gear that were soaked during the crossing, and fill our bellies with some solid tucker. This is also the time when we can really start racing again rather than just trying to make safe miles in the right direction and keep the boat in one piece.

  ‘Reckon we could carry the kite now?’

  ‘Pretty damn close. Let’s give it a shot.’

  Spirits really lift as we sight Tasman Island, the point at which the fleet farewells the ocean to make a hard right turn into Storm Bay. ‘Forty miles to go, lads! No sleep till we’re over the line.’ This, for me, is always the best part of
the trip, especially if we’re lucky enough to sail it in daylight. The scenery along the northern shore is spectacular – towering cliffs of dolerite (a form of basalt rock), often split into extraordinary vertical columns. Wild, wonderful coastline that reminds you that Tasmania is another country.

  Now, where’s that opening to the Derwent? ‘Just head for Betsey Island, you can’t go wrong.’ Soon we’re in the river and passing the Iron Pot, a natural sloping rock shelf on the starboard shore that was used as a place to haul out whales, flense their carcasses and boil down the blubber. The guesser issues his annual reminder: ‘Be careful to keep that Garrow Light to port – it’s a mark of the course.’ And finally, the anxious search for the finishing line off Battery Point. Until very recently, the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania liked to keep their line a secret. The marker buoy was miniscule and the light atop it had the luminance of a glow-worm. Old hands know you just aim for the big cranes behind Constitution Dock. These days the sponsors want their logo to feature in every press photograph and second of TV coverage, so the buoy is now bright yellow – and big.

  ‘We’re over! Well sailed everyone! Let’s start the donk and get these bloody sails off.’ Handshakes all round, smiles and back-slapping. A runabout comes alongside to guide us to our berth. The traditional welcoming slab of icy-cold local beer is passed aboard. Hobart crowds are always generous with their applause as each boat motors into the dock, and for that one brief moment we’re all heroes. Fenders over the side, lines secured, engine off. We’re there.

  Contrary to popular belief, the crew do not all immediately swarm ashore, descend on the closest hotel and get outrageously drunk. First, we get drunk on board. For an hour or two nobody wants to break that unique bond with the boat that’s been cemented over the long, tough days of the race. There’s a special satisfaction about sitting in the cockpit, sipping rum and recounting the passage while it’s still so fresh in our memories. Good mates wander over from other boats to share a celebratory drink and swap yarns. One by one we eventually drift off to the showers, returning with the happy glow that’s given off by someone who’s just washed away four days of grime and weariness. Then we descend on our favourite hotel and get outrageously drunk all over again.

  ‘Coming south next year, mate?’

  ‘Suppose so. Can’t see why not, really.’

  He told me he had the sea in his blood,

  and believe me you can see where it gets in.

  Spike Milligan, letter to Harry Secombe

  THERE IS NO SHORTAGE of great characters in yachting. Some of them are even quite likeable. Decades spent in a sport where success so often depends on luck (and which delights in dishing out physical punishment) tend to breed a certain level of eccentricity in its veterans. Many who continue going to sea beyond their allotted three-score years develop a repertoire of idiosyncrasies that pass into dockside legend. This is not the carefully cultivated veneer of the self-regarding ‘card’, but a special kind of warts-and-all directness that’s been forged over many thousands of miles of hard sailing.

  I am, by both personal inclination and professional interest, attracted to these people. They make life interesting and often provide the spur for those occasional outbursts of prose rumination that have let me fill so many empty pages in the nation’s yachting magazines. Character is most clearly delineated by anecdote: the essence of the person can usually be drawn from their reactions to incidents of misadventure or triumph. Offshore sailors have a laconic economy with words that heightens that effect. Their blokey brand of understatement is the leitmotiv of all great Australian yachting yarns.

  For many years I penned a light-hearted monthly column of reminiscences that was published under the profoundly unoriginal title of Tell Tales. (A real ‘telltale’ is a short length of wool attached to the sails or stays to indicate the direction of air-flow. Great pun.) Anyway, as a convenient device for lumping my memories of various eccentric owner/skippers into one person I invented a mythic character called ‘The Mighty Helmsman’ (also known as ‘The Bloke Up the Back Who Pays the Bills’). As often happens, this rather lame literary device soon took on a life of its own. Considerable waterfront debate ensued as to the true identity of TMH, speculation that I worked hard to deflect or diffuse because many of my recollections had bordered on the defamatory.

  Let me now confess that ‘The Mighty Helmsman’ was loosely – but certainly not wholly – based on one of the greatest characters in the Sydney yachting community, my good friend V. H. O’Neill. Hughie has done countless offshore passages, including 25 Sydney–Hobart races, and is best known for the two decades he spent campaigning his tough Sparkman & Stephens 39-footer Mark Twain in just about every event on the ocean-racing calendar. Like so many Sydney yachtsmen he began sailing as a teenager in VJ dinghies, then graduated to larger centreboard boats. After establishing a successful business career Hugh returned to the water with serious intent. He bought Rebecca, a small Duncanson-designed sloop, and headed south the very next Boxing Day. Years later he told me that he had to become an owner because ‘I realised no other bastard would give me a ride, so the only way I’d get to race to Hobart was in my own boat’. That directness is typical of the O’Neill style: blunt, self-deprecating, yet quietly proud of his seafaring achievements.

  Mark Twain is not an easy boat to sail and its fit-out below is far from comfortable. Racing her over long distances is always a character-building experience, but the trade-off is extraordinary seaworthiness. The crew of Mark Twain will break long before the boat. She may be wet and uncomfortable on deck, but even in extreme weather and waves you never feel unsafe. Hughie has trained scores of crew over the years by the traditional ‘give ’em a decent go and see how they work out’ method. As these sailors inevitably left Twain and spread out through the offshore community their memories of Hugh’s enthusiastic, no-nonsense captaincy became the basis for much of the folklore I’ve plundered so shamelessly for ‘The Mighty Helmsman’.

  Most of my Tell Tales stories are told from a genuine first-person perspective. Many of the incidents and words are classic V. H. O’Neill Esq. (as best I can remember them), but not everything is a direct Hugh O’Neill experience. A few are slight embellishments, in the great tradition of yarn-spinning. Others are amalgams of moments from other boats and times, written into his character. What is impossible to reproduce here are his mischievous Irish grin and the infectious cascades of laughter that always announce Hugh’s presence on watch. I’ve never sailed with anyone who enjoys a laugh more. He’s very generous to his friends and it’s always a delight to sign on for another passage with him. Let’s hope that our many happy years as shipmates will help forgive some of the harmless journalistic fun I’ve had at his expense. So, by way of tribute (if not homage), herewith a few excerpts from the Gospels According to The Mighty Helmsman.

  ON MATTERS MEDICINAL …

  These days, TMH always seems able to stay out of physical trouble (mainly because not much grief can befall you in the leeward quarter berth). This has not, however, prevented him from developing a peculiar aversion to anyone using the First Aid kit.

  A few Southport races back, some of us foolishly scoffed a chicken curry that had seen better days. A certain looseness of the bowels ensued, which in turn prompted a stampede in the general direction of the Lomotil and Imodium tablets. From his bunk TMH noticed us ripping the top off the First Aid box. ‘Hey, you blokes. Don’t go opening that!’

  As the senior member of the afflicted group it fell to me to enter our plea in mitigation. ‘But we’re all as crook as Rookwood, skipper. Anyway, that’s what medicine’s for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but if you use anything from the kit then we have to replace it for the next safety inspection!’

  Compassion has never been a strong suit of The Bloke Up the Back Who Pays the Bills. (As a consequence of this ‘no use’ policy the bulk of our medical supplies usually exceed their use-by date long before they get the chance to save a single l
ife or even ease discomfort.)

  The skipper does, however, have one particular bodily, er, soft spot. Sailors usually call this affliction ‘itchy date’. After a few days’ racing even TMH cannot avoid the combined posterior side-effects of hasty ablutions and saltwater. We’ve learned to forestall his whining by always leaving a new tube of skin-care cream somewhere in the head.

  But, as you might expect, The Mighty Helmsman is a hard man to satisfy. Comes the voice from the smallest cabin: ‘Hey, you blokes, where’s that skin cream?’

  ‘Right beside you in the fiddle, skip. Yellow tube.’

  Pause. ‘No, that’s not the right stuff!’

  Eyeballs roll, groans all round. ‘It’s skin cream, skipper. They’re all the bloody same.’

  ‘No they’re not! I want that cream with Aloe Vera!’

  Forty miles off the coast, another two days of hard sailing to go and he’s demanding a particular herbal additive in his bum wipe. The navigator looks up from his chart. ‘No problem, skipper. We should just about lay Port Macquarie on the reciprocal. The supermarket there might stock the brand you want. Shouldn’t cost us more than 10 hours or so.’

  The silence was good enough to eat.

  ON THE WONDERS OF NATURE …

  It goes without saying that The Mighty Helmsman isn’t too impressed with vegetarians. He’s strictly a meat-and-three-veg sort of bloke for whom animals should either be shot or eaten (preferably both, in that order). What faint streaks of sentimentality may still colour his character are never wasted on God’s creatures of the air, land or sea.

  For TMH the stirring sight of a whale breaching just a few metres off our bow invariably only prompts a hectoring lecture about how dangerous the world’s most magnificent mammal is for sailors. He always chooses that insipid greeny/white shade of antifoul in the quaint belief that any other colour might encourage passing cetaceans to mistake our boat for a member of the opposite gender and initiate immediate sexual congress. (It’s a measure of the skipper’s unwavering chauvinism that he assumes all passing whales to be male – and randy.)