‘That she’ll really go, downwind,’ said Chippy.
‘Yeah, like a seabird,’ said Wes. ‘Like an albatross or a mollyhawk with jet engines strapped on. Crossing the Indian Ocean she made runs of two hundred miles a day plus. The blokes who sailed her over were ecstatic. She might even do three hundred in Southern Ocean conditions. Look at the masts. See the way the horizontal profile is fat at the front, curving back to a thick sort of almond shape. They’re what we call a free-standing biplane rig, do you get it?’
‘No,’ said Chippy.
‘Well, see, no wonder you don’t. Because the idea is original. You won’t have come across it before, young fella. Not even Brian Papasidero has. It’s all through my way of thinking, and your mother, just to mention her again, she’s going to like this a lot. The sails have a double surface that inflates using natural air pressure to form a highly efficient airfoil. Call it breathing in the planet’s lungs and breathing them out, doing no damage. There’s no sort of engine, just a modest outboard for getting in and out of berths. Your mother will like that, considering once that an engine didn’t help when it should have, so if you don’t have one it can’t cause trouble. Have a look down below, go down that bamboo ladder. It’s chaos down there but don’t worry. You’ll have your own cabin set-up next time you’re on board. She’ll sleep fifteen comfortably for something I have in mind for the future – island hopping, cargo, passenger and trading, expedition work, charter or as a dive boat. Anyway, a family platform live-aboard no less and a floating lab. Like Te Ata only in the temperate and tropic zones. Witness for the idiots on land who never observed a power of nature under threat.’
‘How will you get Mum on?’ said Chippy.
‘There’ll be an art to that,’ mused Wes. ‘I won’t leave Fremantle till I know she’s on the water. Keep all this in the back of your mind, but we’ll rendezvous. I’ll make it happen, I swear. If there comes a moment she needs me I’ll close in.’
‘Dad, you’re dreaming,’ said Chippy with a little guffaw. But he was spellbound by the vision Wes wove. Them both going around the world together but apart until on one boat he’d join them.
In that expensive crook of Middle Harbour near Ken and Dijana’s house, where the marine engineers’ works were squeezed in at the bottom of a steep driveway, an actress had been killed by a shark years ago, and the ambulance could not get down there to stop her bleeding to death. People still talked about it. The story stuck with Judy as an expression of life. Here, then gone, and feasting all the while on its own creations.
She rented a shed near where it happened and had the reputation of being able to do anything around boats. She had cleaned them, painted them, repaired them, and when she found the local mechanics disagreed with her assessments, which mostly they did, mostly on principle, because what did she know, as a bolshie woman, then lo and behold she did the repair jobs on engines herself, sometimes helped by her father. It was all in the name of building up to bringing down from the Central Coast the more than half-completed hull and fittings of a yacht to call her own.
Before going in an offshore race Judy was asked to prove she could navigate offshore, which amazed her, considering her endorsements. But she held her tongue and sailed to Lord Howe Island and back on her own, in a borrowed sloop, after which she and Tina sailed to New Plymouth for the start of the single-handed race to Mooloolaba. Time was running out for what Judy wanted to do but physically, mentally, she needed to make herself ready.
Tina was sick the whole way across to New Plymouth and humbled to admit she was lost for words when it came to writing about the sea as an actual experience. The swell came at them from three directions at once and they sat on top of it, and spun around, so it was torture.
Judy came home positioned in the middle of the fleet in the single-handed race. It would take her a lifetime, now, she decided, to unravel all the conflicting joys she felt out on the ocean on her own. One of her discoveries was that she was not actually a very good sailor, not in an ocean race sense of always tweaking main halyard, outhaul, seeking for the slit the way dinghy racers did, blokes did that all the way, every inch of the way, from New Plymouth to Mooloolaba. Not her.
But what she was good at was what was needed on the ocean in a good strong yacht demanding stamina. Call it reporting in to raw nature for whatever the twenty-four hour routine required of her, and doing it day after day. Chippy flew back on the red-eye from his stay with Wes, reporting that the Nautilus was going to take Wes more time.
Chippy was a weekly boarder at Kanimbla Clifftop College. He loved the mud brick dongas scattered through the bush. They had windows like castle arrow slits. They had bikes. Chippy, nimble, rock climbed. Beth took him in at weekends and Judy became a visitor in the life of her son while she worked on the uncompleted hull of the seaworthy design, a Roberts 34. It was hers, or would be when everything was paid off. She had plenty of help.
It was women’s turn on the waterfront and criticism on the matter of who was bred to hold a hammer died out. Kay Cottee had done it, getting ready for solo travelling eastwards. No woman had sailed, had been mad enough to sail, upwind the opposite way round the world – that was Judy’s choice. Quite possibly she was Australia’s most intriguing candidate for any sort of tilt at a sailing record, if you read what Tina Stones wrote about her. ‘Some set off, were forced back, and it is said by a few commentators to be beyond a woman to go around the world non-stop the wrong way without assistance. We shall see.’ Tina had in fact reached a limit to what she knew about Judy or rather understood.
There was no way the truck bringing the hull down from the Central Coast could manage the steep, narrow drop to the water, so the hull was floated in and craned out, not next to Judy’s work shed either but close by onto the lawn of a neighbour of Ken and Dijana’s, whose yard came right down to the water.
Soon Judy was hard at work doing the impossible in short time. When she had trouble she phoned Wes and he talked her through a crisis. Here they were as back when they’d started and she phoned him at Cockatoo Island and a clanging bell rang up in the rafters, summoning him. Her brain, her memory was no help, but as soon as her hands met a problem the solution came back to her in Wes’s voice. His patience in explaining suspended time. When she got down to something refinedly demanding involving planing some boards, she almost jumped, feeling Wes looking over her shoulder. The other adviser she had was Don Fawkner. A ghostly one of persistence beyond the lonely grave. Sometimes when she needed to calm down further it was Warwick Mickless. His teenage hovering capacity and helicopter mustering instincts were given to rescues at sea now. He spoke a maritime language, the sea rescues he did demanded it, when they met for coffee, a meeting that went off without an accelerated heartbeat. Who was it, Don or Wes, who said when tensing a hull be sure it has suppressed energy within to give back to the sea.
When she said this to Ken, leached of metaphor, he said, ‘I’ll do the maths on that ticklish question for you.’
Judy was always good at pulling other people in, Ken said, having been pulled in numero uno by her tears at a teacher’s desk. Either that or her passivity being stuck fortuitously gave them leg room. No point in analysing it too much but it was interesting. Considering if anyone actually understood her without her explaining anything about how her heart lurched at the enterprise did not occur to her. Wes did and that was enough. That this was, Rev. Bannister said, a spiritual life the more it was about hard facts was something she understood.
Blokes from Tomlinson’s Marine could not help telling Judy she was hopeless, so she made use of them. Or else, once impressed, they automatically went the other way and assumed she knew a lot more than what she did, and she asked them questions making them feel good about themselves, and they told her what she needed to know without them realising that she had even asked for it.
Ken’s garage at street level up at the house became a dumping ground for carriers bringing parts and materials that someone or other said
she ought to have and gave to her. As a result she got a first-class set of winches, a bilge pump, a stove and some timber for lockers and a Don Fawkner Memorial anchor made by Anchor Right according to plans Don left. It was likely to be too heavy for her purposes, and anchoring anywhere on a non-stop circumnavigation attempt would cut her out of it, although some ultimate need might await. As a result the makers did her one in alloy, half the weight but just as effective. Ken moved lighter items for her round the winding road and down the track to the jetty on a trolley. The activity kept him fit. Dijana asked Judy how long she thought she was going to be. ‘We took ages getting this place right with the original architect, who’s an artist in his own way. You’re taking it back to how it looked, a perfect mess when we came here,’ she said, casting her eyes around at a streetscape resembling a dump in this refined bush setting absolutely perfect for an artist like her to guide discerning visitors, state gallery curators and private collectors down the steep, narrow side path under the angophoras to her studio.
‘I don’t know, not long, I think.’ But Dijana reminded her, and as she recalled, work on boats took longer than anyone thought. ‘Yes, I’m sorry Dijana. I’ve been too long getting to this point, I’d better get on with it then.’
Judy in her rented shed had a calendar with scribbles, lines and numbers, that looked like an Egyptian pyramid builder’s work plan. They were the dates of Wes’s possible arrivals off the major southern capes over four to seven months once he slipped away from his reefside boatshed.
Tina, bless her, ignorant of their teamwork, did the rounds of possible donors, largely around food and alcohol, bringing suppliers down to the lawn in batches, interrupting Judy at work so they could meet her in person. Gin, vodka, whisky, the higher the proof alcohol content the more efficient in ballast Judy said to the PR man from United Distillers. And if she pulled it off Tina suggested UD could label any of their stiffer lines celebrating spirit in spirits.
The word sponsorship made Judy feel reduced to being less than a crate of muesli bars, a handful of vitamin pills and a pair of fingerless gloves. A three- or four-word statement of purpose was needed to put things in perspective.
‘You had better hurry up with that statement; the word is out that there’s another woman coming at you from the other side of the world, look,’ said Tina.
She showed Judy a yachting magazine supplement with reports from an Englishwoman coming down the east coast of Brazil who would have, by now, gone south of Patagonia into the reputed storm zone known to sort sailors out into lesser and greater categories.
‘Yes, I know all about her,’ said Judy.
‘Well, let’s go fully public,’ said Tina.
As a result Judy found herself famous for being someone who hadn’t done anything yet. Not in this category of loner she hid behind.
One of Dijana’s sitters for her Archibald Prize entry that year was a psychiatrist who twisted his ankle on some gear lying across the side steps of the house, and curious what it was for, asked if Judy would come and be tested. But after a while talking to her he said, ‘No, I can see what you are, distressingly normal.’
‘Should that be something to worry about?’
‘Let me look at you again if you come back,’ he said.
Dijana opened a bottle of wine and leaned on the veranda rail of the upper storey of the house, slapping at mosquitoes while the sun went down.
‘It’s fantastic the way you’ve got yourself taken seriously,’ said Dijana. ‘Now look at this.’
She unrolled a canvas quite different from her other work. What it showed to Judy was Dijana making an effort like the one she had made herself, to follow through in a way that she had made into a slogan she could trust. Put simply, it was not understanding what she was doing in order to have it make sense when she got it done.
‘What do you think of it?’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Judy.
‘Can you tell me why?’
Judy could not tell her why, because it was ugly, but the interesting thing was how Dijana had turned to her, asked, listened and looked thoughtful and reacted as if she had, in fact, been given an insight.
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to show anyone what you are doing when you are halfway through making something, or even to tell them,’ Judy said. ‘You don’t know if a job is finished until it is finished, do you?’
‘You want that to apply to me but not you?’
‘No, it applies to me.’
‘I don’t get how it does, Jude. Your plans are all over the papers.’
‘So they are,’ Judy acknowledged, bringing the conversation to an end.
Ken did the same when Dijana went inside to oversee their cook, who came twice a week, more often if there were parties, making the schnitzel Dijana loved or the roast chicken done with paprika and lard the secret ingredient. He lifted his red wine to the evening light, enjoying the purple effects.
‘I have never done anything original,’ he said.
‘What?’ said Judy, a bit startled. ‘What about your PhD? And that’s only just for starters. Christ, Ken, your brilliant teaching, your success stories, the college!’
‘Yes, a PhD is supposed to be original or you don’t get one,’ agreed Ken. ‘However it was in mathematics.’
‘Brilliant. I’ve heard maths referred to as the beautiful art in science.’
‘Beautiful but dismal – you never find out anything in maths that’s not in addition or subtraction, plus algebra, calculus. I’ve never heard of a formula, except maybe in physics, that comes close to understanding life the way biology does. I understand your mother is on to seaweeds.’
‘Thanks to Raymond growing oysters and them living near the sea, kelp’s her next step on from plants that grow on the ground. Now it’s plants that grow in the sea and the whelks and things that feed on them.’
‘Chippy did a project, dog whelks and cart-rut shells. It’s winner of Kanimbla College’s junior scientist award, did he tell you?’
‘Chippy takes himself for granted,’ said Judy with pride and annoyance at being the last to know something as a parent.
The work gained its own momentum in a stop-motion animation of parts flying together. Renovations went ahead with Judy relegated almost to project management function rather than execution role, there was so much help coming at her. The only ones who did not come down to the boat to help were the Darkes. Self-importantly they sent out announcements ahead of themselves clearing the way. When they came they arrived in a deputation with a selection of old compasses, brass lamps, pairs of dividers and a planispheric astrolabe that Chippy sat over, moving his fingers across it, entranced.
Charlie Bannister put together boxes of weather-related forecasting, recording and communication equipment going back to morse code senders long since out of use. There was far too much in his boxes and nearly all outdated as Charlie sat down, loosened his clerical collar and remembered what he could from national service, admitting he had some catching up to do around not just weather faxes but single-sideband radio, ThinkPad computers, Inmarsat-E EPIRBs. By the time Judy was ready for her electronics he would see her right with help, but he’d better hurry. In the attic of the Bannister’s church-owned terrace house in Surry Hills, Charlie wired sending and receiving units, tried them out and got back a sender: Georgy Redlynch, who had done his exams in the UK as a supertanker wireless and navigation operations officer. As long as the oceans were vulnerable to fossil fuel spillages and other observable dumps, Georgy had sworn to stand guard from a high, moving platform. Last heard from it was the Edgcumbe Bay or ACT 8, ship number 8 of Associated Container Transportation, a Blue Star Line company. It circled the world between the UK and Sydney every eighty days.
Meantime Edith Bannister helped Margaret Wells, sewing cushions and squabs, Harold thrust his broad industrial arts arse in the air crawling around the decks of the as-yet-unnamed craft, attaching standing rigging bottle screws to high-tensile steel wire.
Ray was on engine installation. It was exacting and took weeks. Father and daughter disagreed. Judy wanted extra horsepower way above what a Roberts 34 used, an insistence based on the sound of Rattler’s whining diesel when Wes took her into Parengapenga Harbour and the prop spun in a recurring nightmare howl she could still hear. The standard engine was upped from eighteen to twenty-five horsepower, an additional weight but low-down centred in the body of the hull.
When Ken was finished with his slide rule calculator and charts on graph paper, involving a hull’s potential suppressed energy to give back to the sea, Raymond was able to determine that his daughter’s emotional wish was a benefit to ocean-going stability. Their father–daughter love had always been about feeling. Each knew the other’s heart. Now that feeling had a shape and a hull, and a motor deep down weighting her steadier. Judy was very sure now the name of the boat should be his: the Raymond Compton. What he had given up for her was not clear. Possibly a lot, possibly nothing more than moving on to his next feverish enthusiasm. The land halfway to Bourke from Nyngan was gone, sold for a song, livestock and equipment dispersed in a clearing sale, and there was no more talk of a vegetable run to feed Raymond’s compassion for people. But wait. Everything now was oysters. What he couldn’t sell he gave away. He and Beth were happy on the Central Coast within sight of the sea. On the hill on the next farm, radio aerials webbed into the sky, where the bustly, pink-cheeked, tea, jam and scones radio hams lived who saved lives at sea.
A Sea-Chase Page 23