All Piss and Wind Read online

  The race itself is fairly straightforward. Two huge underwater sea mounts – Barcoo and Taupo – lie directly on the rhumbline. Ocean depth over the Mounts rushes up from thousands of fathoms to just a few hundred feet, often causing marked changes in sea-state and the pattern of currents. The major tactical decision facing skippers and navigators racing to Lord Howe is whether to go north or south of those mounts. If the wind is directly contrary (which is rare at that time of year), the choice becomes moot: everyone just has to knuckle down to an uncomfortable 400-mile slog to windward.

  Yachts arriving at the island in darkness face two difficulties. The finishing line is notoriously hard to find, and once they’ve crossed they must wait out the rest of that night at sea. The entries to the lagoon are just too narrow and dangerous to navigate without the advantages of daylight, and a pilot. Many a fine stew and bottle of rum has been consumed by celebrating crew as their yacht gently reaches back and forth ‘outside’ after finishing. Everyone is impatient for the first rays of sun to peep over Old Settlement Beach. Someone from the Wilson family on shore will already be up at dawn and keeping an ear on VHF Channel 12 for overnight arrivals. Within minutes of sun-up a ‘tinnie’ scoots out across the reef to guide boats to their assigned mooring.

  First-time visitors to the island are always surprised when they catch the mooring float and start hauling it up to discover that there’s no heavy-duty rope running down to the chain – just some light line between the float and the first link. The Lord Howe system is that everyone has to get the first few metres of chain on deck and then rig their own mooring lines directly to it. That ritual unambiguously puts the onus on skippers to ensure that they’ve secured their boat properly. (Prudent crews rig two separate lines through the chain so there’s a back-up if chafing rubs through the rope that is bearing the main load.)

  And at last, we’re there.

  ‘Finished with engines?’

  ‘Yep, knock ’er off!’

  After days of racing we drink in the sudden silence, then recognise the distant swish of waves washing gently ashore on the lagoon beach. Above are the majestic Wagnerian cliffs of Mount Lidgbird and Mount Gower, soaring to three times the height of anything on the mainland coast – so high they make their own weather and are usually crowned with fluffy clouds. Lower, the rich green of tropical rainforest vegetation and the familiar shape of the island’s unique Kentia palms. Pairs of spotless, pure white terns twist and swoop around the masthead. The water of the lagoon is impossibly blue and clear. Not many newcomers can resist saying out loud what we’re all thinking: ‘What an incredibly beautiful place this is.’

  Before long someone spots the tender punt chugging out to take us ashore. The rubbish is already on deck in large plastic bags, sorted under the strict disposal and recycling rules that help keep Lord Howe so litter-free. A last-minute rush below to check we’ve all packed everything we’ll need for the days ashore. The skipper makes yet another nervous trip to the bow to assure himself the mooring lines will hold. ‘Everyone off? Hatches closed? Water and electrics off? OK, let’s go!’

  The tender crunches softly onto the sand and we trudge up the beach to the minibus waiting to transfer us to our guest-house.

  ‘G’day, Peter! Good to see you again.’

  ‘Likewise, mate. Have a good trip? Welcome to the island, everyone. Hop in!’

  There’s no point picking up your key from front reception – there is no front reception, and nobody locks their rooms on Lord Howe anyway.

  ‘Righto, fellas. Let’s give it an hour for everyone to get settled in, phone home and have a shower. See you all down the Bowlos around eleven?’

  ‘Too bloody right! I can taste that first beer already.’

  Under normal circumstances a group of people who’d just been forced to share the same cramped space for three days might reasonably be expected to scatter and seek other company. Yet after a long ocean race, exactly the opposite happens: we all unearth a fresh crew T-shirt, regroup and go straight out drinking together. There’s only one ‘public’ bar on Lord Howe, and that belongs to the Bowling Club. The ‘Bowlos’ – a classic, NSW country-style small licensed club – serves as the unofficial race HQ every year (in fact the Race Director uses a tiny office upstairs during the week).

  One of the many unique features of the LHI race is the largescale chart of the course pinned to a downstairs wall at the ‘Bowlos’. The position of every yacht is meticulously plotted twice a day as they call in their lat/long during each radio sked of the race. That map provides a fascinating account of the simultaneously unfolding fortunes of the whole fleet – a complete tactical picture that would have been very difficult for any one yacht to grasp while still racing. The first beer is usually consumed with the crew all crowding around that map, following our yacht’s track with their fingers and reliving the race.

  ‘Polaris had a blinder early, but see here – we must have rolled ’em just past the Mounts.’

  ‘Jeez, look how far north the Azzurro mob went on the second night!’

  ‘Yeah, arsey buggers. Here’s where we were when that breeze went east. Totally stuffed.’

  ‘Could have been worse. Delta Wing’s way down here – almost off the bloody chart – and they’re still out there, poor buggers! Be surprised if they get in by sunset tomorrow. Ain’t that a shame.’

  ‘OK, who’s getting the next round? This is bloody thirsty work.’

  And so it goes. The bar slowly fills with other crews and we swap increasingly exaggerated war stories, round after round, usually until dinner and beyond. Half the fun of offshore racing is telling lies about it afterwards. The only people possibly qualified to contradict your tallest stories are other members of the same crew. But they’re highly unlikely to insist on the absolute truth as most of them are also busy embroidering recent history for their own self-aggrandisement.

  ‘Having another?’

  ‘Shouldn’t really, but what the hell, why not? It’s not as if we’ve got a train to catch.’

  Wednesday morning is reserved for nursing hangovers; Wednesday afternoon for the traditional cricket match against the locals. Aficionados of willow-wielding will search Wisden in vain for accounts of these annual ‘Yachties v. Islanders’ encounters. They are not classified as ‘First Class Fixtures’, indeed most of the matches would resist classification of any kind. We only know it’s cricket because the participants arm themselves from a pile of recognisable batting equipment that’s kept in a wheelbarrow in the greenkeeper’s shed at the ‘Bowlos’.

  Assembling twelve yachties willing to defend the cricketing honour of the Gosford Sailing Club can often be a problem. The same sailors who thought nothing of working on a heaving foredeck during the 1979 Fastnet storm or 1998 Sydney–Hobart disaster tend to shrink in horror from the prospect of facing fast bowling with a hard ball. In fact, the only notable injuries to have been sustained during these annual Test matches were all suffered by the visitors while fielding – and all were self-inflicted. Perhaps for that reason a certain amount of anaesthetic pre-hydration before the toss is considered a sporting necessity by both sides (the ground is conveniently situated directly outside the ‘Bowlos’). Things invariably tend to deteriorate from that point. The Island XI have yet to suffer a defeat at the hands of the visitors, although they were once forced to concede a forfeit when their demon opening bowler needed to finish the guttering of the power-station roof and Lord Howe’s finest batsman couldn’t find anyone else to take a party of well-heeled tourists scuba-diving on the reef. Stumps are invariably drawn around 1600 to allow sufficient time to celebrate the ‘Man of the Match’ award at the ‘Bowlos’ bar (where else?).

  Around 1730 we finish our drinks and troop off on the 25-minute hike to the other end of the island for the Official Presentation Ceremony that’s held, weather permitting, on the lawn of the ‘Milky Way’ guest house. (If it rains, everyone just stays at the ‘Bowlos’ and the presentation comes to us.) The most no
table feature of the night is the splendid fish-fry dinner served after the trophy formalities have concluded. It’s quite a trick dishing up freshly caught kingfish, chips and salad for 200 starving yachties, but ‘Milky Way’ pulls it off with style every year. And their homemade apple pie and lemon meringue tart are the stuff of legend.

  Inevitably, mellowed by the steady intake of fermented and spirituous liquors, sailors’ minds turn to home. The most sought-after document on the island now becomes the detailed four-day weather map and forecasts available gratis from the excellent weather station at the island’s airport.

  ‘When you blokes heading off? That northerly change looks like it’ll come through late tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re thinking about it. Wouldn’t mind fitting in a round of golf before we go, though.’

  It’s always hard to leave Lord Howe. Many crew fly back to the mainland because they can’t risk not being at work by Monday. The lucky ones have time to wash their sailing clothes, collect some extra fuel, water and supplies and start ferrying it out to their boats. Most will wait for a high tide to make leaving the lagoon easier, although it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion they’re just using that as an excuse to stay for a few more hours.

  ‘Time to go, lads. Let’s have the donk.’ We motor out past Rabbit Island, through the passage, a quick ‘thank you’ on the VHF radio to the Wilsons for all their patient pilotage, sails up, engine off, and away we go. Few of us can sail those first few miles without constantly looking back over our shoulders to savour the beauty of the island, trying to hold it in our mind’s eye until it emerges over the horizon again next year. There is no sweeter landfall.

  There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and

  in the mere sight of a ship.

  R. H. Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 1840

  FEW YACHTS ON THE east coast of Australia turn more heads than the elegant wooden 61-foot sloop Fidelis. With her impressive length, extreme low freeboard and narrow beam she looks like a classic 30-square-metre classer blown up to double size. This isn’t so surprising when you learn her provenance. The lines of Fidelis were derived from a design by Knud Reimers, the legendary Swedish creator of the Tumlaren class and a string of world-beating metre boats.

  Lofted directly from a half-model in the traditional method, Fidelis was built at the old Lidgard yard in Auckland more than forty years ago. She has the sleek profile of a flat-water day boat, yet boasts an impressive offshore record. Her bulkhead skite plaques attest to hard-won ocean-racing honours throughout the South Pacific. Fidelis was Sydney–Hobart line-honours winner in 1966, beating her closest rival home by such a whopping margin that the gap remained a record for the next 16 years. Three decades after her launching, Fidelis returned to win the classic division of the fiftieth Sydney–Hobart, and bettered her 1966 time by eight hours. Since then she’s been regularly campaigned offshore, has done many swift passages to Lord Howe Island and remains surprisingly competitive ‘around the cans’ on Sydney Harbour. The lady is not for slowing.

  Her current owner is Sydney businessman Nigel Stoke, who flew to New Zealand in 1993 to charter the boat for the fiftieth Hobart and ended up buying her. Stoke is an active yachtsman, not one of those fussy, fanatical purists who treat their wooden boats like antique furniture and rarely leave the dock. Nevertheless, he embraces the underlying tradition of classic yacht ownership: you don’t really own one of these works of art, you merely hold them in trust. ‘It’s a privilege to look after it for a while, and to preserve the yacht for another generation,’ says Stoke. ‘Some of that work you should do by just sailing the boat and maintaining it properly, but eventually you’ve got to stop and do the big things.’

  Big indeed. The last major refit of Fidelis was begun in 1986 and, although the yacht still presented beautifully, regular offshore passages and weekly harbour racing inevitably take their toll. Stoke decided in early 2005 that his celebrity classic had now earned a major makeover. But undertaking any serious refit of a large classic yacht demands an enormous commitment of both time and money. Time from the shipwrights; money from the PBO – Poor Bloody Owner. The massive job went to the Newcastle branch of Sean Langman’s boatyard business, Noakes. Only 60 sea miles north of Sydney, it was one of the few places where a fixed workforce with the necessary spread of craft skills could be assigned to the task for the entire four-month project, and where the boat would be set up as the sole occupant of a secure, modern shed. (As it happened, when they first lifted Fidelis out of the water at Newcastle they discovered she was too long for their shed, but eventually just managed to squeeze her in on the diagonal.)

  My first impression on visiting the refit-in-progress was of the yacht’s powerful underwater sections – eight feet six inches of sweetly curved timber and lead draft. The trailing edge of the keel slopes forward where the original half-elliptical rudder hung, replaced long ago by a balanced spade further aft, designed by Warwick Hood. Her long ‘shoe’ means Fidelis can’t be dropped into a conventional keel pit. Instead, the blokes at Noakes built a temporary stairway and gantry to provide deck-level access to their first-floor workshop, and for the thousands of up-and-down trips required to complete the job.

  The work checklist was huge, covering many pages of detailed notes. Stoke concedes that he’d ‘had some issues’ with the boat for the past few years and that it ‘now made sense to do it all in one go’. (Whether it also made sense to his bank manager is another matter entirely. Craftsmanship of this complexity and magnitude doesn’t come cheap.) The boat was almost entirely gutted, including the removal of the engine and all tanks. Most of the internal furniture and fittings came out to gain access to the inner skin of the hull’s triple-diagonal kauri planking. The deck was stripped of its thinning teak and was totally glassed before the new seasoned timbers could be laid. A for’d anchor locker was sealed over while the original, clunky lazaret entry was neatly replaced by a flush modern hatchway. Inside, a daunting amount of restorative joinery needed to be done where fresh water and condensation had begun to rot along the deck/coach-house join. A brand new Yanmar 75 replaced the old 61-horsepower marinised Mercedes diesel. Fortunately, both engines have virtually the same footprint, but the new power plant is much more compact and allowed space for improved soundproofing.

  Classic yachts were built to last, and Fidelis is no exception. The refit was often challenged by the sheer substance of her original scantlings. To ensure an unhindered work space around the deck and its supporting beams, shipwrights removed the boat’s massive chain-plates – and the 18 tough through-bolts on each side that seize them to the hull. Below the waterline, it took two days swinging a sledgehammer to open up even a tiny gap between the keel lead and the deadwood. This revealed a rather eccentric path in the line of keel bolts (which Langman advised should be replaced with a more conventional pattern). The stubborn reluctance of the keel lead to be separated from its bolts was finally explained when the owner tracked down a veteran of the yacht’s original build in New Zealand. ‘Oh, you might have a bit of trouble shifting them,’ the old-timer remarked. ‘We cast that keel around the bolts. They’re sort of welded in.’ Useful information.

  Much of the work done on Fidelis constituted small but significant changes to its ‘classic’ credentials. But, as Nigel Stoke is quick to point out, his yacht has already been gradually transformed over its 40 years. The traditional stretched-canvas deck surface is long gone, as are the cotton sails, rustic galley, rackety one-speed winches and fractional rig. ‘This is a refit, not a restoration. If it makes the boat go well and look nice, then that’s OK. You can use modern materials in a sensible way without changing the integrity of the original design. For example, we had one of the original bulkheads give way during the last trip to Lord Howe. The new one will be fibreglassed in. I don’t suppose that’s “authentic” but it’s the right thing to do.’

  Stoke is, however, passionate about the yacht’s history and has spent a decade assembling
a history of the boat and a collection of Fidelis photographs. Among these is a comprehensive sequence of snapshots taken during the 1986 refit, images that were an invaluable source of practical information for the Noakes project team. ‘What’s important to me,’ he says, ‘is that overall the boat looks consistent with the way it looked originally. A refit like this makes her safer. She’ll last longer and sail faster. If you don’t spend that money then you end up with something very sad just rotting away on the mooring. Eventually it ends up worthless.’

  As a semi-regular member of the Fidelis crew, I kept an interested eye on the project. Like anything to do with timber boats, the refit was fascinating – but it also took almost twice as long as expected. When the difficult and expensive job was finally done, work and sailing commitments conspired to prevent Nigel from immediately organising some proper recognition for the thousands of hours of loving craftsmanship the shipwrights had lavished on his triple-planked treasure.

  A window of opportunity finally opened a few months later, and I was delighted to join Fidelis for its three-day ‘thank you’ cruise. Our plan was simple enough: sail the yacht from Sydney to Newcastle after work on Thursday night; take the blokes from Noakes (and the ladies) out for a sail on the Friday; have a few celebratory sherbets together; sail home on the Saturday. Nothing to it, except that by the time the crew of Nigel, Rhod Cook and myself were ready to leave from the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron pontoon it was blowing 35 black knots from the north, with a southerly change of equal strength predicted for later that night. Nice!