On the question of the hull Beth experimented with antifoul in her Dr Darke persona, not taking the manufacturers’ specifications for granted for a moment, as marine barnacles and weeds had a rapid evolving power to be watched when it came to overcoming paint poisons – and how poisonous were they anyway? Very, she said after tipping out mixtures from her laboratory desktop whizzer. Next to radioactivity they had rather a lot of poison potential you would have to say. SANT would portmanteau them into their next campaign and hold manufacturers to account. Beth had a plan for Judy to take water samples every step of her way.
Tony Watson had the Blindale Watsons driven down from the high country by Bill Rathbone with boxes of sliced, dehydrated apples and pears from Tony’s wired-in, bird-proof orchard, and paper bags of dried muscatels from the last harvest of table grapes from Blindale ever hand-stripped by Pop. Bill Rathbone gave Judy a set of lambswool sleeping bag undercovers shorn, cut, stitched and made supple by his own tanning, and guaranteed, he said, to go easy on saltwater boils.
‘What shearers like me and sailors like you have in common is boils, Judy. Keeping dry helps.’
‘Appreciated,’ said Judy. ‘Can I have two pairs?’
‘Sure. Same size?’ Bill narrowed his eyes.
‘No, make the other lot, oh, I don’t know, round Wes’s will do.’
‘Gotcha,’ was all he said to that.
‘Hey, Tina, what are you doing tonight?’ Bill leaned against the shed door.
‘Nothing much,’ said Tina, though Judy knew she was run ragged.
While Bill and Tina talked, the Blindale Watsons sat in the sun waiting to be taken back to their quarters in the cold country. They gaped at Judy thinking, oh Brave New World of grown-out humans that has such creatures in it, but perhaps not for long. Die early at sea and duck penalties was Mum’s taut philosophy around what Judy risked. Old age was tougher than anyone could imagine.
Dick Durkheim and Monica Neale arrived from New Zealand. Through them Judy learned the power of triviality as an attraction for the serious-minded, its innate wisdom as a flytrap. That Judy had declared herself up for a world record was all many people, if not all, could get their minds around when it came to accommodating what Judy thought of as the bigger things she had done in her life, such as year after year counting bird numbers in appalling hardship with Don and Jinx. Judy had expected Dick and Monica to be different. She almost wanted them to snarl at her. ‘Judy, you are amazing,’ Dick said. ‘How’s Wes taking it?’ he winked.
People, Judy reflected. Anything for a quiet life fishing for Maori wrasse in a coral lagoon, the frying pan red-hot ready, when this was over, and Wes and Chips with their heads together tying fishing knots.
At last it was time for sliding the Roberts 34 into the water from the cradle it sat on, fitting the standing rigging, getting the mast up, bending on the sails and sorting the running rigging out. Judy cried as she chalked up the words Raymond Compton on the stern and waited to be told by a list of sponsors as long as her arm that she would have to rub it out and call it something more prosaic.
She thought she was over her old habit of tears. Ice experience toughened off their propensity. Her father smashed the champagne bottle Ken handed him. Ken played ‘South Australia’, the windjammer song, on his wheezy accordion and sang the words of that seagoing anthem in his doctrinaire, leftover-socialist monotone as the hull slid into the water. Chippy gave Judy flowers Dijana had helped him pick and arrange from suburban roadsides. It was their boat together, their very own, she could see that in Chippy’s trusting eyes.
It was a while before Judy learned from Margaret and Harold Wells that the Raymond Compton Work Range was to be the name for oilskin ponchos, half-overcoats and long, ankle-sweeping oilskin garments and that Raymond had agreed to the line out of a total misunderstanding. He’d thought they were a single set being made for him, which he bemusedly accepted as a gift when he had long-since left behind the image, if he ever had it truly, of a landed man. Now he was being asked to pose for a catalogue photo, showing his bone-sharp map of Australia profile. Matching the range, if Judy would give her blessing, would be the Judy Compton Gore-Tex Seagoing Ensemble of wet weather gear jackets and trousers in Senior and Junior ranges.
No, I am not bought, Judy decided, looking over her account books with Gerry Tubman and finding them in the black. I am not bought because I am carrying off a deception but to the extent that I am bought I will hand some of this money over to charity. When she chose her charity, guided by Ken and Dijana to homeless youth, she found she had room for her boat’s name to be painted on the hull, fitted in between all the rest. Too many competing sponsors balanced out and so she got her way. As a result, from the distance and all the way in the closer you came the Raymond Compton looked like a floating collage with sponsors’ decals positioned. But from farther back she coalesced into the apparition of a grey swan bobbing on the water.
Two questions to be settled before Judy could get going: Upon what navigational formula based on the mathematics of race planning might she and Wes keep an eye out for each other? The world was their race course together, the Southern Ocean in opposite directions. And how could she possibly leave Chippy behind? As she must, having put herself into the spotlight as a single-hander.
When she thought about it, over almost the entire period of final-fitting out the 34, she’d had Chippy in mind. It was a blunt, insuperable contradiction to the extent of puzzling people by her never being able to give a straight answer as to why she had made some of the modifications she had. For example, where the 34 had a gear locker she had taken it out and carpentered in a tiny monk’s cell kind of cabaña with a study desk. She called it a chart nook but she already had one. Chippy went around humming, almost cross-eyed with satisfaction as he worked out where the pegs would fit for his hammock. He had done the same on Wes’s Nautilus, she believed. She also believed he liked Nautilus better but did not want to hurt or offend her. He was a clever boy in two languages; he could split his mind so why not split his heart? Judy said nothing to anyone else, but Beth argued the dilemma aloud to herself and told Chippy he was to stay with them when his mother was gone.
Tina went to interview Rana Price, the British lone sailor who ruined her round-the-world-wrong-way chances by calling in to Sydney with smashed gear. She asked her if she was ever afraid.
‘Naturally I’m nervous,’ Price said, ‘when I think of the dire things that could happen. But then standing there at the wheel and watching Minoa weave down the waves, I think to myself, surely a boat is like a cork and as long as she’s got strong sides and lots of air in the middle surely she’ll float, even if she’s turned upside down.’
Judy’s food was stored, her charts sorted, water tanks filled, fuel likewise and extra cans lashed aboard. The sails were cut, shaped, sewn, fitted and tested by Graeme Sawtell the sailmaker, with Margaret Wells at his elbow. Tina wrote chummily to the public in what had become a daily report in the Herald, that the Raymond Compton had a habit of turning spectators into helpers.
The Sheaf at Double Bay was the pub where everyone gathered at Judy’s direction for celebrations on her last night ashore. The Sheaf was where Judy used to come with her old school friends, her boarding school friends, who were called in this area young matrons now, and had shops they liked locally and spent money on clothes and shoes in. Ken had left the calls on those shops to Margaret Wells when they started nudging over into fashion with their lines. Now they had a sales staff to do it. If Ken ever found he had to drive through Double Bay he took a detour. He hated the Sheaf. As a Rose Bay boy it was where the lairs and bar jockeys from private schools boasted their conquests and shot their feet out to trip a government high school high-achiever carrying drinks to his pretty fiancée, who had become his first wife and Georgy’s mother.
Ken wandered in looking hostile and found the whole public bar, lounge bar and beer garden crowd pressed in against each other and Judy standing up on the bar while the who
le lot of them numbering in their hundreds, in one voice, sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’, making this a nationalistic push what Judy was doing, as the publican gave out free beers.
Rana Price, the Englishwoman, made a speech. It got a few boos, but in good spirits, when she said, ‘Women aren’t better sailors than men per se, but some are. Women are better at mental preparation than men. Their challenge is to do the voyage as women versus men’s put-downs. This bundles personal ambition with solidarity among women. Families play a part. Is a man more likely to regard the voyage as a triumph of the individual self? I think so. But he too recognises the family is what makes it happen. Last week when I met Jude I took one look at her and I had one question.’
‘Yair what?’ someone yelled as the bar went quiet.
‘Have you had your appendix out? And she has.’
Price warned Judy she would cry all night before departure and she did. Chippy slept aboard, purring like a cat. Judy had no idea how she was to tell him in the morning he was not coming. If she couldn’t manage it she wouldn’t go, or she would go and take Chippy with her and disqualify herself from the record attempt, leaving the edge to Rana Price to start again. Although it was going to be a big day, she got up early and made bacon, eggs, toast and coffee for her parents who arrived with Ken and Dijana in Ken’s dinghy off the Jack London, and they all crowded in to the cockpit. Tina arrived in a double kayak with Bill, and they passed coffee down to them as Bill had no idea how to extract himself up onto a yacht without falling in. Tony, as ever, kept himself scarce in person but mentioned her on air every five minutes. Tina handed up something she had been working on until the last minute. It was wrapped in a sheepskin bag Bill had sewed. It was a revised version of their old secret code for intimate revelations copied into a notebook. The Reverend Charlie Bannister from over on the deck of Ken’s yacht semaphored a blessing. Very few people knew what those arm movements meant, but Judy did.
Wes’s Nautilus had left Fremantle and rounded Cape Leeuwin, sailing east. As Judy battled her way westward they were likely to pass each other going in opposite directions more than once. Wes’s quiet estimation was that if she got into trouble there was a good chance he could pack on speed and get to her, abandoning his own attempt. But if things went well they’d both have their own records, and that would be that. They would have their beginning.
There were a lot of boats out and starting to get in the way. When everybody went back to Ken’s yacht Chippy was still aboard with Judy. He ran around the decks, shouting to other boats to keep clear. A sailing breeze came up and Judy raised main and genoa. It was important to look good and to feel the vessel alive under her. They approached the Heads with quite possibly a hundred boats trailing beside and behind them like a giant raft moving along in one piece. Whisker Martin came powering in between the yacht and the Jack London, driving a huge inflatable twin-outboard dinghy holding a dozen boys and girls from Kanimbla College. They matched speed as if hovering. Chippy took one look at them, climbed up over the side rail and, when arms reached out for him like the tendrils of waving sea creatures, he jumped in and went off with them.
Author’s Note
Thanks to Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, A World of My Own, and Kay Cottee AO, First Lady, for permission to quote from their record-breaking circumnavigation accounts at the head of this novel.
Thanks to the books of Gerry Clark, Adrian Hayter, Naomi James, David Lewis, Roger Taylor and Philip Weld for extended inspiration, and to my New Zealand brother, Don, who has always been the sailor in the family. We did a psychic swap when Don started writing and I took up sailing, but his sails to the Bounty Islands with Gerry Clark and circumnavigating the South Island with Gavin Griffith-Jones in some of the worst summer weather in decades vastly exceeded what I was prepared to take on except in imagination.
Thanks to friends and family who unwittingly or willingly offered experience and understanding, atmospherics, inspiration and time on small boats that ended up logged into these pages. Some of you read drafts with insight when most needed, and gave out editorial and sailing wisdom which, if I’ve failed to heed it, I take entire responsibility: Robert Ayliffe, Lorraine Cairnes, Bill Caldicott, Ben Collins, Robert Crombie, Meredith Curnow, Rob Fenwick, Steve Fisher, Val Griffith-Jones, Robin Kenyon, Denis La Touche, John McCormack, Stella McDonald, Peter Moffitt, Rob Morton, Allen Palmer, Louise Pether, Bruce Radke, Trevor Shearston, Brandon VanOver, and Rob Nicholson, a veritable lighthouse of inspiration. Above all thanks to my wife, Sue Fisher, with love, for being my heartfelt companion in a dinghy, a trailer-sailer, and a sloop just big enough for two. The feeling of that closeness spills over into these pages in ways I find words inadequate to express.
About the Author
Roger McDonald was born at Young, New South Wales, and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His writing has been awarded the Adelaide Festival Book of the Year, the New South Wales, South Australian and Victorian Premiers’ Prizes, and the Miles Franklin Award. A Sea-Chase is his tenth novel.
Also by Roger McDonald:
Fiction
1915
Slipstream
Rough Wallaby
Water Man
The Slap
Mr Darwin’s Shooter
The Ballad of Desmond Kale
When Colts Ran
The Following
Non-Fiction
Shearers’ Motel
The Tree In Changing Light
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
A SEA-CHASE
ePub ISBN – 9780143786993
First published by Vintage Australia in 2017
Copyright © Roger McDonald, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage Australia book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Addresses for the Penguin Random House group of companies can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com/offices.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
McDonald, Roger, 1941– author
A sea-chase / Roger McDonald
ISBN 978 0 14378 699 3 (ebook)
Families – Fiction
Interpersonal relations – Fiction
Shipwreck survival – Fiction
Cover image: Getty Images/ Charles Briscoe-Knight
Cover design: Nada Backovic
Ebook by Firstsource
A Sea-Chase Page 24