All Piss and Wind Page 11
We counted ourselves fortunate that a major part of the refit had involved replacing the tired old donk. ‘Fire up the new iron tops’l, lads, and let’s get going!’ Mr Yanmar’s dependable Japanese engineering should do the rest, and it did.
Conditions were far from pleasant driving into the swell that had built up over the previous few days. When the southerly finally came – building to 25 knots true by 0200 at Norah Head – we hoisted the staysail on the inner forestay to make steering easier and provide a more sea-kindly motion. Things got interesting beyond Catherine Hill Bay as we played dodgems with more than 30 giant bulk carriers all swinging at anchor in the ‘parking lot’ directly on our rhumbline to Nobby’s Head. Avoiding these 100,000-ton obstructions in the dark helped keep us awake at the helm and it was a relief to finally make the flat water of Newcastle harbour by 0500 and follow the huge leads up to the ‘work’ wharf at Noakes. A big hot mug of tea, a couple of sweet biscuits and straight into the rack for a precious few hours of sleep.
Even lying alongside, Fidelis is such a spectacular-looking yacht that passers-by can’t resist stopping to take a closer look. We were soon woken by dockside chatter and engaged in a steady stream of conversation with pre-breakfast joggers and bicyclists who’d paused in their exertions to ask questions about the boat and its history. These enquiries were so constant we began rattling off her vital statistics with practised fluency: built 1964 by Lidgards in New Zealand, Length Overall 61 feet, Length at the Water Line 47'4", Beam 10 feet, Draft 8'6", Displacement 12,200kg. Yes, she’s won a Hobart, and yes, thank you, we agree she really is a very lovely yacht.
But Fidelis was there to do a job, not just be admired. The Noakes boss in Newcastle, Joe De Kok, is a sailor of vast transoceanic racing experience with a rather benevolent management style. When the predicted NE breeze filled to 15 knots he didn’t need much prompting to declare a half-day off for everyone in the yard. The same happy team of craftsmen and women who’d spent months returning Fidelis to such magnificent trim now trooped aboard for their promised ‘thank you’ afternoon under sail.
The weather gods could not have smiled more kindly upon us. We charged back and forth across Stockton Bight under full main and the #3 genoa with only the odd wave over the topsides. There was a procession of beaming faces as our guests each took a trick at the helm and felt the sure-footed power of a big displacement hull bending to her task as she sliced through the chop. It was wonderful to share the sheer thrill of pure sailing with the people who’d contributed so much to the yacht’s rejuvenation.
A wheelbarrow full of ice and beers greeted us as we returned to the dock. Time to celebrate and capture the moment. Joe, Howard, Prue, Tegan, Chris, Ron, Brad and Brett came together on the foredeck for the Fidelis refit ‘class photo’. Every member of the team was rightly proud of the achievement, and has earned the special satisfaction that comes from seeing their skills made real in the elegant details of a truly classic yacht.
Next morning, after the longest and most leisurely onboard breakfast in Australian maritime history, it was time to tidy up and think about the trip back to Sydney. Lynn ‘Vasco’ Anderson, navigator and Fidelis stalwart, had made the slow train trip up from Sydney to join us for the delivery. He arrived with a frown, clutching the latest weather maps that indicated a stiff southerly all the way home. Damn. But science doesn’t always hit the bull’s-eye. Instead of battling the predicted southerly we had one of the most glorious single days of sailing I can remember anywhere in the world. Brilliant sunshine, steady ENE of 18–20 knots, moderate seas, fresh prawns, chilled white wine. Absolutely, utterly dazzling. We reached along at eight knots wishing the day would never end. At one stage – abeam of Barrenjoey, with only 15 miles to go before Sydney – we seriously considered slowing the old girl down just to prolong the pleasure of being at sea.
‘Why don’t we do this more often?’ someone asked. Good question. As we grappled for the right response, the four of us, in our own ways, each tried to express what a joy and privilege it was to sail a boat that carried so much style and history. Perhaps emboldened by this warm flow of positive sentiment, Nigel began sketching out a dream Fidelis racing program for the remainder of the year. Maybe we could do the Hamilton Island regatta in North Queensland? Then the Lord Howe Island BBQ cruise, perhaps even the Sydney–Hobart to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of her famous line-honours win back in 1966? Now there’s an idea.
That evening, as I dropped my sea-bag under the stairs at home, I did what every other addicted offshore sailor does at the prospect of fresh adventures. I dug out my pocket diary and began to pencil in the dates. Those proposed campaigns on Fidelis might still be a long way off confirmation, but I’d be buggered if anything else was going to get in their way.
Some die of winding winches,
and some of drinking beer.
Gretel II songbook, 1970
THE 1970 AMERICA’S CUP series was the last to be sailed in wooden boats. After that memorable battle between Gretel II and Intrepid the next 12-metres were made upside-down in aluminium. Australia’s challenge in 1970 is also often considered to be the last of our great larrikin campaigns. Today the America’s Cup is raced in high-tech carbon-fibre monsters sailed by grim professionals. Thirty-five years ago the Gretel II crew were all amateurs, drawn from many walks of life. Skippered by helmsman Jim Hardy, they sailed hard and partied even harder.
Newspaper tycoon Sir Frank Packer headed the challenge, paid all the bills and expected his team to represent their country and the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron with all the dignity that befits yachtsmen whose club enjoyed the privileges of royal patronage. But Sir Frank was himself a bit of a buccaneer. He understood that boys away from home will be boys, and tolerated a fair degree of larking about. One of the most distinctively Australian sporting habits the lads brought with them to snooty Newport, Rhode Island was their delight in singing bawdy football songs. In a tradition well-known to most antipodean sporting teams, familiar old melodies had been enlisted to carry new words inspired by the characters and anecdotes of their America’s Cup campaign.
The musicology of those Gretel II songs reflects the knockabout Australian spirit of the whole enterprise. The yacht’s main ‘deck apes’ (grinders) – Chris Freer, a transplanted Pom, and John Freedman, a former Wallaby tight-head prop – were steeped in rugby’s robust tradition of post-match sing-alongs. On a cold winter’s night before the team left for Newport these two ‘rugger buggers’ were enjoying a few grogs together in front of a roaring fire at Freedman’s home on the shores of Sydney Harbour. Inspired by the adventure that lay ahead of them in America they set about writing down the doggerel verses that were already being sung a cappella by the crew. To these they added some new Gretel II words set to the melodies of old rugby favourites. Before the beer and inspiration ran out Freer and ‘Freedie’ had created a complete set of lyrics.
Freedman’s mate Peter Johnson, the legendary Wallaby hooker, chipped in with a collection of cheeky cartoon illustrations. Rhys Jordan, a member of the challenge support team, then co-opted the printing skills of his father Ben, who ran a typesetting business attached to Sir Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph empire. Freedman believes the whole disreputable job most probably went through as a ‘foreign order’, unbeknown to Sir Frank in his huge office upstairs.
The new lyrics were quickly learned by repetition and Gretel II’s unlikely all-male choir of yachties soon became notorious around the waterfront for bursting into these lewd songs at the most inappropriate moments. Copies of the songbook went to America with the crew, and one was even presented to Baron Bich after Gretel II had defeated his France in the elimination series. The most celebrated choral recital by the Australian crew during the 1970 challenge was at a cocktail party given for them at the exclusive Bailey’s Beach Club. What their upper-crust Newport hosts made of these bawdy sailing songs was, regrettably, not recorded.
Thirty-five years later, I was lucky enough to unearth a c
opy of the Gretel II songbook, by now a rare and holy document of Australian yachting history. The outrageous words and illustrations evoke the spirit of that legendary America’s Cup challenge with wonderful hand-made freshness and good humour. And so, without further ado (quoting directly from the cover):
By the same team that produced
PAINT YOUR DRAGON
and
PIDDLER ON THE ROOF
we proudly present
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY
TO THE CHALLENGE
featuring an international cast drawn from
New York, Paris and Balmain
The songbook establishes its, er, tone from the very first ditty, sung to the tune of ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’:
The balls of Jim Hardy, are wrinkled and crinkled,
Curvaceous and spacious
Like the Dome of St Pauls,
The crew they all muster, to gaze at that cluster,
That bloody great pair that’s hanging there,
Jim Hardy’s balls!
Shall we go on? When Martin Visser (notorious for his frequent visits to the crouch house) finally got the nod as back-up helmsman, the Aussie minstrels promptly serenaded his appointment to the melody of the old carol ‘O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree’:
The sailing class can kiss my arse,
I’ve got the helmsman’s job at last,
All those on deck can bend and kiss,
My fundamental orifice,
I’m down the back
I won’t come back
I’ve got the job
So **** you, Jack!
In the grand antipodean tradition of industrial-strength piss-taking, any personal weakness, embarrassment or eccentricity was fair game in the Gretel II choral repertoire.
No member of the team was spared in these songs, from the yacht’s venerable designer Alan Payne to the keen young headsail trimmer John ‘Aero’ Bertrand, fresh from his lofty academic thesis on the aerodynamics of sails (and long before his eventual triumph steering Australia II to victory 13 years later). Like ‘deck apes’ the world over, the 12-metre’s grinders also endured a good-natured shellacking. Everyone’s travails were robustly chronicled in an extended lyric sung to the tune of ‘Men of Harlech’. Some representative verses:
Life presents a dismal picture
Dark and dreary as the womb,
Alan has an anal stricture
Gretel has a fallen boom.
Even now young Aero’s started
Having academic fits,
If he sees the tell-tales parted
You can bet he’s got the shits.
Freer and Freedie fiercely flaying,
Grinding hard with groans and grunts,
Strength is waning, Jim is praying,
‘Come on, wind, you hopeless *****!’
Even technical problems were satirised in song. During training, Alan Payne felt the crew was putting too much strain on Gretel II’s boom in their attempts to extract better windward performance. Fearful that his bespoke aluminium spar would break under these loads, he devised a crude warning system. Payne fixed special, cast-iron ‘go-fast’ tangs at a key stress point on the boom. If anyone cranked the vang on too hard, these fail-safes would break with an explosive ‘bang’. A replacement tang then had to be immediately fitted by the crew. Inevitably, this rather bizarre solution inspired a vocal response, sung loudly to the chorus of ‘Rule Britannia’:
Rule Australia,
Pass another can,
Five go-fast fittings up your arsehole,
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!
The boom, of course, never broke. It’s on the boat still. Out on the water the Gretel II team, including their support crew on the tender Offsider, did Australia proud in the challenge series of races. They may even have had the faster boat, and certainly pushed defending skipper Bill Ficker and Intrepid to the limit in an exciting series that was much closer than its final 4–1 scoreline.
This was also the challenge that established Australia’s wellfounded suspicion that the New York Yacht Club was prepared to do just about anything to retain the America’s Cup. Cynical rule-bending by the home-town measurer had allowed illegal underwater modifications to Intrepid. Australian outrage was then compounded by the notorious start-line protest by Ficker that robbed Gretel II of her dramatic, come-from-behind win in the second race. (The NYYC protest committee unsurprisingly upheld the protest lodged by their own yacht.)
Officially, Sir Frank Packer’s team tended to maintain a sporting silence on these matters. But stung by such a blatant injustice, Packer declared that ‘complaining to the New York Yacht Club is like complaining to your mother-in-law about your wife’. And at Christie’s Bar and other favourite Newport watering holes the crew exacted their revenge in the following shanty, sung to the tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’:
Some die of winding winches, and some of drinking beer,
Some die of constipation, and some of diarrhoea,
But of all the world’s diseases
There’s none that can compare
With the drip, drip, drip
Of a syphilitic *****,
And the Newport Gonorrhea!
If that didn’t get right up the noses of the New York Yacht Club snobs, then nothing would. More than a generation after these lampoon songs first rang out over the waters of Rhode Island Sound they retain a larrikin bite that marks them as characteristically Australian. Rough-hewn, politically incorrect, irreverent, lusty, scatological – and funny.
They also form an important part of the historical record. Sir Frank Packer’s two full-blooded tilts at the America’s Cup in 1962 and 1970 were the bedrock of the success that finally came for Alan Bond and the Australia II team. Maybe the trustees of the National Maritime Museum should round up the surviving veterans of the 1970 Gretel II campaign and record them singing these songs together just one more time. It would be a night to remember.
Rule Australia,
Pass another can!
L. Robertson was disqualified for shifting ballast
during a race. He admitted being short-handed and
having tied two bags of sand on the floor, but between
the Heads one had broken and run into the bilge, thus
the second one had to be moved to trim the boat.
Race Committee Report, Sydney Amateur Sailing Club, March 1922
IT’S DIFFICULT NOT TO love a sailing club that was founded by a mob of weekend fishermen who liked to race their boats home after a pleasant Saturday spent pulling bream and snapper out of Sydney Harbour. Even better, the meeting that created the Sydney Amateur Sailing Club was held in a city pub (Tom Keary’s, on the corner of William and Brougham Streets), and the next two General Meetings were also conducted in friendly shicker-shops – the Oxford in King Street, and the famous Aarons Exchange Hotel. It’s hard to go wrong with origins like that.
‘The Amateurs’ has officially been around since 1872, but the men whose colonial spirit formed it had already been sailing together (and against each other) for years. In the 1860s the best fishing spot in Sydney was a deep trench at the foot of a rock face near the northern end of today’s Spit Bridge in Middle Harbour. That place was unofficially called ‘Blackwall’ and the men who sailed their yachts up there from the main part of Port Jackson every Saturday to dangle a line and sink a few ales were called ‘The Blackwall Boys’.
As is the way with sporting gents, the skippers soon took to racing their yachts home, and placing bets on the outcome. These were simple, straight-line contests from Blackwall to some nominated point in the harbour – Clark Island, Bradleys Head or Pinchgut (now Fort Denison). There was even a rough system of handicapping for the slower boats. Eventually, on 1 October 1872, some of the owners and crew decided to formalise their Saturday-arvo fun into an official organisation, the Sydney Amateur Sailing Club. It began with just four boats and twelve members. One hundred and thirty-four years later t
he register lists 210 boats and there are around 400 members. The club’s oldest active sailor, Cliff ‘Southerly’ Gale, has raced with the club for 60 years. Cliff’s boat Ranger (handed down to him by his father) has the honour of holding sail number ‘A1’. He still competes every weekend and continues the SASC tradition of also using his yacht for a spot of fishing.
The first SASC club-house and boatshed was completed in 1883, built on a plot of land granted to the club at Bennelong Point, facing Circular Quay. But its spectacular site was resumed soon after by the NSW government who erected an ornate and profoundly ugly brick tram shed. That, in turn, was then demolished to make way for the Opera House that now commands the point. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the Committee of ‘The Amateurs’ began negotiations for the purchase of the premises of the Cremorne Club Ltd and Clover Equipment Pty Ltd which adjoined on the western shore of Mosman Bay. The Cremorne Club was a gentlemen’s social establishment (cards and billiards) that had fallen on hard times; Clover Equipment was a declining marine business with a precious harbour slipway permit. Amalgamating the two properties made an ideal premises for ‘The Amateurs’, with the priceless advantage of good deep water right outside the back door, and plentiful mooring space in Mosman Bay.
The two buildings were finally acquired in 1962 and the club has been there ever since. Somehow the original weatherboard structures survive, and the whole place exudes a resolutely conservative feeling. A row of old-fashioned mooring piles allows yachties who know how to handle their boats to tie up ‘stern to’ in the traditional manner. There’s a broad, solid deck that projects over the water, with a sturdy pontoon jutting into the bay. A simple, hand-cranked mast crane is available to members wishing to lift the rig out of their boats.
Inside, observant visitors will note the six small reinforced squares of flooring that once supported the massive legs of a billiard table, and the pair of curious octagonal tables in the main area that were formerly used for high-stakes games of gin rummy and whist. There’s no boardroom or sailing office, but members can use a large, well-equipped kitchen. The walls are covered with atmospheric black-and-white photographs of old club yachts and scores of hand-lettered timber honour boards listing every Patron, Commodore and Divisional winner since 1872. Just the names of those yachts evoke the unhurried, elegant flavour of sailing generations ago: Monsoon, Mischief, Snowdrop, Hotspur, Eventide, Varuna, Thurloo, Mirrabooka. The twenty-first century is yet to seriously impinge on No. 1 Green Street, Cremorne.