Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  I was pretty angry, mostly at myself for allowing myself to be bullied into sailing. I was about to erupt when John Travers, a long-serving Wellington pilot-boat skipper and old friend, turned up. John immediately assessed the situation. ‘Get in the car,’ he ordered, and drove me around town for some time while I raged, then took me home for a hot bath and a meal.

  Later, when he dropped me back off at Braveheart, people were working in the wheelhouse using floodlighting from the wharf. ‘Here, mate,’ he handed me an envelope, ‘I’ve got something for you — open it when you get on board.’ I followed his directions, slit the envelope open and found a neatly printed invoice: Counselling, it said, $200. Hot bath $15, Glass of wine $8, Hot meal… etc. It was the first laugh I’d had all day, and I sat in my cabin, with people hammering and screwing things together in the chart room above me, and roared with laughter.

  Braveheart was back together within four days and once more we sailed for Cape Horn. Once more Nigel saw his ship sail, but this time in more benign conditions. Even so, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling some trepidation as she crossed the spot where the wave had dealt to us just a few days earlier.

  The Southern Ocean passage was stereotypical. Meteoric plummets in barometric pressure followed by screaming storm-force westerlies and the 15-metre swooping seas found at those latitudes. The waves reared up astern, the top 5 metres of wind-blown sea crumpling in an ugly mass of broken water which disappeared under Braveheart’s broad, buoyant stern. Many nights we watchkeepers huddled over an electric fan heater in the wheelhouse as temperatures plummeted while Braveheart plunged ever eastwards.

  On a ship like Braveheart, everybody pulls their weight to make it easier for the ship. Like everyone else, I took a turn at cooking and cleaning, maintaining an engine-room watch and writing up the log or gauge readings down there. It helps pass the time on a long passage, and there’s a special satisfaction to be had in tending to the ship that’s keeping one’s bum out of the ocean.

  But the second mate on this trip was an Auckland charter-boat skipper who argued that he’d been hired as a wheelhouse watchkeeper — not as cook, cleaner or engineer. This man’s horizon ended at Great Barrier Island, but he’d harboured a dream of rounding Cape Horn and talked the owner into a berth on board — I suspect for minimal wages. That’s about what he was worth. Prowling around the ship early one morning, I climbed the stairs to the wheelhouse and found every light blazing while the second mate slouched back in the helm seat, picking at a guitar with his feet on the dashboard. I snapped the lights off, barely in control of my anger.

  ‘Hoi,’ he protested, ‘I was playing my guitar.’ ‘You’re on watch,’ I replied coldly, ‘not on a bloody concert stage. You’ve got zilch visibility with those lights on — leave them off and look after the ship.’ ‘It’s the middle of the Southern Ocean,’ he grumbled, ‘there’s nobody else out here.’

  In actual fact, due to the expense and time penalties involved in transiting the Panama Canal, many express container ships travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean via Cape Horn. A friend, who’s a mate on a container ship, passes Cape Horn two or three times a year. Factory trawlers target orange roughy on the Southern Ocean sea-mounts, and longliners travel the southern regions looking for Patagonian toothfish.

  A week or so later I walked around to the yacht pier in Ushuaia to talk with the sailors. ‘Did you see a yacht anywhere in your travels?’ several of the cruising folk asked. ‘They left Auckland two months ago and haven’t been heard from since.’ I thought of Braveheart racing through the night with the wheelhouse lights on and the watchkeeper’s eyes focused on his guitar … all I could do was mumble a negative and hope, sincerely hope, that we hadn’t.

  About 18 days later, a bit lighter in the water, Braveheart was pooped by a big sea in the wee hours of the morning, just west of Cape Horn, and a 200-litre drum of aviation fuel was washed from its lashings on the afterdeck. I took the hand-held remote control for the autopilot and stood in the aft windows of the wheelhouse. As each huge sea reared up high over her port quarter, I twisted the course-control knob towards starboard and kicked her broad, buoyant stern to port so that she rode square to the waves. Towering walls of water rushed by either side of the wheelhouse, and then I would return to the normal course until the next huge wave reared out of the dark.

  A few hours later, in daylight, Braveheart was on the Cape Horn Plateau and the seas had subsided to a one-metre wind chop. The craggy southern outcrop of the American continent held us spellbound; we were steaming over the graves of hundreds of sailing ships and the brave sailors who manned them.

  Braveheart picked her way through the Beagle Channel to Ushuaia, a delightful waterfront town ringed by steep, snow-mitred mountains. We berthed at the big concrete commercial wharf among cruise liners and factory trawlers, and I dusted off my Spanish to clear customs. The helicopter was re-commissioned, more stores loaded and the ship prepared for her next leg among the ice floes of the Antarctic Peninsula.

  Nigel Jolly flew in to supervise and, early on in the piece, took me aside. ‘Lindsay,’ he said without a trace of irony, ‘I’ve had a good look into what happened when you left Wellington and spoken to Maritime New Zealand. It was none of your fault — you were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  BRAVEHEART TURNS TUGBOAT

  You’ve got to love a ship called Braveheart. The Tauranga-based research vessel isn’t exactly a tugboat — more of an oceangoing odd-jobster — but Braveheart lives up to her name.

  Built as Genkai, a Japanese government water-sampling vessel, Braveheart was renamed by Palmerston North businessman Nigel Jolly when he bought her from Japan. Since then the 117-tonne (displacement) ship has visited most of the world’s wildest and remotest places — Antarctica, Pitcairn Island, South Shetland, the Kerguelens, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, to name a few. Braveheart can handle the elements like few other vessels. So when the call came to tow a 47-metre-long, 100-tonne steel catamaran from Suva to Nelson, Braveheart buckled down and did the job.

  The first change for her new role was to remove the small trawl winch situated amidships on her afterdeck. This was replaced by a 600-millimetre-diameter steel bollard with I-beam strengtheners reaching out to either stern quarter and another transferring load to the helipad above it. The bollard and beams arrived the day before we were due to sail and were assembled like a giant Lego set.

  ‘The plan is to have two 25-metre bridles, made from 50-millimetre wire rope, from either hull of the catamaran,’ Jolly explained. ‘They’ll be shackled to 200 metres of 100-mil polypropylene rope. That will be shackled to 14 links of ship’s anchor chain — and another 200 metres of polypropylene rope will go to the bollard onboard Braveheart.

  ‘Some people have said that she’s not up to the job — it’s up to you to prove them wrong.’

  The Tauranga to Fiji trip was ocean cruising. Two big mahimahi fell for our lures and were quickly consumed as sashimi, fried fish and chowder. The Niigata main engine throbbed contentedly in its amidships engine room, and the Swedish-style rolling watchkeeping regime allowed plenty of rest for all. All five crew held master’s certificates — three offshore masters, one foreign-going master and an inshore launchmaster — and by the time the Suva harbour pilot came alongside five days later, we were a close-knit working team.

  Four 200-kilogram watertight doors that we’d brought from New Zealand were craned off onto a local tugboat to be welded onto our tow and, after we’d cleared customs, we piled into the Naiad RIB to check out the vessel that would be following us back to Nelson.

  It was not impressive. The catamaran had been built from an Australian kitset 10 years before but her owners had run out of funds and energy, as had subsequent owners. The vessel had languished in a Suva shipyard for years, slowly rusting away in the sultry tropical climate, while anything of any value or use had been stripped from it. One owner had called her Spirit of Fiji—but we called her ‘
the barge’.

  New Zealand entrepreneurs had bought the barge for conversion to tourist charter vessel, primarily for Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. We paced the rust-pocked decks and shook our heads in amazement; surely, they’d done their dough. Either way, one had to admire their energy and vision.

  The deck area, 44 metres by about 18 metres, was huge, but pitted with rust; and a box-section sponson welded around the outside had rusted through in places. Rainwater pooled in the dips and hollows on deck. With a draught of about 1 metre, she moved easily, though, and a gang of welders soon had substantial towing eyes welded to the two stems at the waterline and the watertight doors we’d brought from New Zealand fitted in place.

  Two new 300-horsepower Kelvin engines had been installed years before, but never used. Their engine rooms were made watertight. An alarm system was fitted to flash a strobe light on the barge’s forward mast if water began accumulating in the bilge, and a position-indicating beacon was fastened on deck so we could keep track of the barge in the event of tow-line failure. After three days, Braveheart and the barge were ready to sail.

  A harbour tug towed the barge out of Suva, and a heaving line was snaked across for us to hook up Braveheart. The first 200 metres of tow rope and the wire bridles whipped off from where we’d flaked them on the barge’s deck; then, as the weight came on, the 700 kilograms of anchor chain rattled through Braveheart’s stern door, followed by the second 200 metres of rope. A truck-tyre drogue was deployed off the back of the barge before the tug crew departed, with a rousing Fijian farewell. The drogue was to keep the barge tracking behind Braveheart and stop it overriding the tow rope (or Braveheart) in big following seas. The anchor chain was designed to provide a catenary — Braveheart would tow the chain, and the barge would follow it without applying any direct strain on the tow line.

  Braveheart had the tow. Her engine note deepened and the little ship buckled down for the first few miles of the 1260-mile chore ahead of her. We doubled up the watch, with someone sitting on the aft deck with fire-axe and machete at hand, to cut the tow line at the first sign of the barge sinking.

  About 30 knots of wind on the nose cut our speed back to 5.5 to 6 knots for the tow to Kadavu, but gave us a good idea of what the barge would behave like. One worry was that in heavy following seas, the barge would try to overtake us — hence the truck-tyre drogue to prevent it — but in the event we had headwinds, ranging from 5 to 50 knots, for the whole 10-day trip to Nelson. Watch on, watch off, we kept an eye on the tow line and applied heavy grease to any possible chafe points, tended the engine room and maintained a navigational watch.

  One night, on watch in the wheelhouse, I was making the regular patrol between radar screen and bridge windows when the steady throb of Braveheart’s main engine suddenly faltered and died. My heart must have missed a few beats, too, as I rushed down to the engine room to try to locate the cause. Matthew Jolly, the owner’s son, was already down there hurriedly opening valves for the compressed-air engine starting system, so I rushed on deck to see where the barge was. The danger was that, with Braveheart dead in the water, the barge would keep on coming, catch us up and collide with Braveheart. Close along the starboard side I could see the black shadow of our tow, and I shot back down to the engine room just as Matthew completed opening the valves which would let compressed air through to start the engine. He nodded, and I spun the handle of the start valve; the big Niigata shug-shugged back into life and we ran for the wheelhouse. I asked Matthew to take a radio aft to check the location of the tow line — entangling it in the propeller would have been a disaster — and engaged the clutch, slowly applying pitch to the propeller until the engine note deepened and Braveheart had charge of the tow again.

  Matthew and I relaxed in the wheelhouse with coffee for a debrief. ‘Ah … I think it was me,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I was cleaning the switchboard in the engine room and I think I nudged the main shutdown switch by mistake.’

  Finally, Mount Taranaki’s white cone pierced the horizon; then the Stephens Island lighthouse beamed its luminous welcome. We’d arranged to pass the tow to a tug at Nelson Harbour entrance, and steam back to Tauranga where Braveheart would be restored to her normal trim for a 6000-nautical-mile Pitcairn Island supply trip and hosting of a team of bird-watchers around the southern Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia.

  But instead of a tug, the Nelson pilot vessel came alongside — crowded with customs officers who swarmed over the rail and onto Braveheart’s deck. Having cleared customs at various ports around the world, I’m always grateful to deal with the Kiwi officers. Firm, polite and efficient, they searched every square centimetre of Braveheart’s accommodation, but without the guns and menace this can involve in the United States and other countries.

  The drug dog burst aboard and followed his nose below, but ended up rolling on his back while we scratched his belly. His handler explained that all incoming vessels from Fiji were suspect because it was known as a major drug trans-shipment location.

  A large methamphetamine drug-exporting operation had recently been busted in Suva and, I suppose, our operation did look a bit suspicious. After a dash from Tauranga and a four-day stay in Suva, we’d suddenly popped up back in New Zealand with a rusty old dunger of a barge in tow.

  After two hours or so the customs team left — and we’d missed slack water at French Pass. But Braveheart doesn’t sit still for long, and within minutes of the last drug-squad member stepping ashore, the pilot boarded and Braveheart steamed out the harbour cut, heading for sea. Destination Tauranga for a week or so … then the wide Pacific and her role as supply ship for Pitcairn Island.

  TRIAL BY TASMAN

  The boat’s in great shape,’ the owner assured me, ‘we’ve raced it every weekend for the last 10 years.’

  For a start, I automatically mistrust anyone who calls a boat ‘it’. Using the impersonal general-usage pronoun means that this person views their vessel as a mere chattel. It means that they’ve missed the preternatural link between boats and people; the spiritual aspect of boat husbandry that has been part of human contact with the oceans since primordial times.

  Of all of humanity’s creations, boats have changed least. Ever since the second wave of seafarers discovered that a pointed log moved through the water better than a blunt log, the basic shape has remained unchanged: sharp at the leading edge. So, too, has the affection real sailors feel for the vessel that’s keeping them alive in the completely alien environment that covers 75 per cent of our planet. People who experience the spiritual bond that forms between seafarers, their boats and the sea have a different attitude towards their vessels. They buy the best gear, not the cheapest. They take pleasure in caring for their boats themselves — and getting to know every centimetre of them.

  To weekend racing yachties, a boat is just another piece of gym equipment. They throw their gear aboard, hoist sail and thrash the boat around the course, motor back to the marina, have a few beers, and go home. Equipment is replaced as it breaks, proactive maintenance is generally zilch and, when the boat is worn out, it’s replaced by a newer model.

  This owner had relocated to Auckland after several years doing business in Sydney, and wanted his Yamaha 33 delivered across the Tasman. I knew the marque; the Yamahas are production-built in Japan out of fibreglass to a Dick Carter design, and are capable little boats in the right hands. I quoted a price, bearing in mind that it was midwinter and the boat was small; and the owner readily agreed, which straight away made me think I should have doubled it.

  Next I rang an old mate, Grant (Digby) Folley, to see if he’d like to come along. He’s the sort of bloke you want to be with on a tough trip at sea. He knows boats, as a boat-builder, fisherman and sailor, is tough and imperturbable and good company. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘sounds like a bit of fun … I’ll be into that.’ Midwinter in the Tasman can be pretty rugged, and at least 30 to 40 per cent of the 1300-nautical-mile passage would probably be sailed in gale or storm conditions; but t
he prevailing winds are from the west and we’d be heading east, so we could look forward to a fast passage.

  The owner, in business suit and tie, met us in Auckland and gave us money for expenses. ‘Best thing I ever did, coming back to New Zealand,’ he enthused. ‘This would have cost me twice as much in Sydney,’ and he slapped the dashboard of his Japanese-import Mercedes Benz.

  A few hours later, we were standing on a marina pier in Sydney looking down at the boat. She didn’t look too bad from the outside; the topsides (between waterline and deck) were a bit chalky, but that’s just cosmetic and the deck gear was all good quality and worked okay. We rummaged around in a cockpit locker for the key and let ourselves inside, sat down and quietly appraised the boat’s condition.

  The lower shroud chainplates were affixed to plywood gussets below the deck. Water had run down the rigging and rotted the plywood — they’d have to be replaced. The 12-horsepower Yanmar engine, under the V-berth forward, was rusty and didn’t look like it had been maintained for years — it would need a full service, new fuel filters and clean fuel tanks. The batteries were dead flat. The sea-cocks were bronze gate-valves, seized either open or closed and covered in verdigris. They would have to be replaced.

  We opened all the hatches, and the little yacht seemed to give a sigh of relief as the air and light flowed through her. Next, we dragged the bagged sails on deck and down to the adjacent car park. There was a fair selection, as you’d expect in a race boat, but they were all well used and some would need to be treated very gently. Like a lot of yachts that only go from marina to marina, there was a shortage of spare rope and cordage, and just a few rusty tools in a box below the galley sink.

  ‘Where do we start?’ Digby laughed.

  Over the next few days we overhauled all the winches, freed and lubricated blocks and sheaves in the rigging, checked the rig out completely and applied chafe gear to the spreaders, drained and cleaned the fuel tank, cleaned and greased the propeller-shaft bearings, serviced the engine and gearbox, changed the oil and fuel filters, scrubbed and aired the boat out and thoroughly checked her structural integrity. On the third day the owner rang. ‘Have you left yet?’ he demanded. ‘What the hell are you doing? — I thought you’d be well on your way by now.’ I patiently detailed what we were doing. ‘It was in perfect order when I left it,’ he blustered.