All Piss and Wind Read online

  ‘Is that a real shirt from the 12-metre?’ I blurted out.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the lady with a smile. ‘My husband was on the foredeck.’

  Mum intervened. ‘This is Mrs York, David. She lives down by the water. I think they’ve got a boat of some kind.’

  My mind raced. Her husband must be Mick York, the legendary offshore yachtsman who’d sailed ‘No. 1’ for Jock Sturrock in the 1962 America’s Cup challenge. I was standing a yard away from the wife of a hero!

  Now, nobody has ever accused me of not grabbing an opportunity when it presents itself. ‘Doesn’t need any crew, does he, Mrs York?’

  Before long, phone numbers had been exchanged, one thing led to another, and Mick rang to invite me for a sail that weekend.

  My excitement was so intense I just couldn’t wait to have a look at the boat. Next day I spent my lunchtime crawling around the Drummoyne foreshore until I found the yacht hauled up on Mick’s private slipway. It was a steel Tasman Seabird called Tui Manu (‘Storm Bird’). I drank in her wholesome lines and sturdy rig. It was difficult to believe that I now had a faint chance of securing a berth on 37 feet of Alan Payne design genius – and with one of the best sailors in Australia as my skipper.

  That Saturday in 1964 we raced with the Cruising Yacht Club offshore fleet from the Harbour to a mark in Botany Bay and return. It blew from the south-west and we had a thrilling spinnaker ride past the southern beaches, then gybed for home around South Head. The only other thing I can still remember about that day was the way it ended. ‘Well, mate. Want to sail with us again next week?’

  Did I ever! And that’s when my lifelong love affair with sailing and the sea really began …

  The wonder is always new that any sane man

  can be a sailor.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, 1865

  THE PLAIN TRUTH of it is that I’m not a particularly good sailor. Keen, for sure, but of barely average talent. No row of gleaming trophies lines the family mantelpiece. When crews are being assembled for a new racing campaign my name is never at the top of the list, yet somehow I always manage to get a ride. Maybe mundane dependability is my strong suit: I always turn up, no matter what the weather, and after more than 40 years of sailing there are few jobs on a boat that defeat me entirely. I can fill most roles – from helmsman to cook – but with unspectacular competence. None dare call it flair. A kind of genteel underachievement that could be confused with plain mediocrity seems to be my distinguishing characteristic. But still I continue to derive boundless, undiminished enjoyment from yachts and yachting. For me, it’s difficult to imagine life without the glorious expectation of that next sail. And the most wonderful prospect of all is the anticipation of an ocean passage – the heart-lifting knowledge that in just a few days’ time we’ll be going to sea again. Offshore. Real sailing.

  Offshore yachting is not for everyone. In fact, the vast majority of sailors are flat-water people. Even when they have boats quite capable of making ocean passages they rarely poke their bow into open waters for a taste of life on the ocean wave. The sheer weight of the sea’s ancient reputation for danger and discomfort defeats them. It’s that same aura of grim adversity that fascinates people with no real knowledge of seafaring. Their ignorance, quite understandably, provokes bizarre questions, of which ‘Where do you stop at night?’ is my long-standing favourite. ‘Well, we usually just tie up to a nearby island and book a room at the local hotel,’ is the standard reply. This is usually greeted by serious, understanding nods all round. Next comes ‘How do you top up the petrol …?’

  To be fair, ocean racing is a minority sport and the processes and routines required to spend days – sometimes weeks – sailing a yacht offshore are not immediately obvious. Nor, at first blush, does the experience itself seem particularly attractive when described to outsiders. Set down in words, the task of keeping a yacht pointed more or less in the right direction and driving it as hard as possible appears more like punishment than pleasure. It’s not quite a ‘joy-through-pain’ pastime, but damn close.

  Sleep is the main problem, or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Five hundred years of naval history have taught us that the only reliable way to keep a ship functioning safely is to divide its crew into watches and make them alternate their work and rest periods in much shorter bursts than the standard diurnal rhythms of life on dry land. The maximum efficient watch duration – particularly at night – is four hours. Performance levels of sailors asked to stand duty for longer periods drop rapidly, often with serious consequences. The downside of the watch system is that it is perniciously unnatural. It’s no fun being shaken out of your bunk at the precise moment when you’ve finally managed to get comfortable, warm, dry, and have dropped into the delicious abyss of deep sleep. Richard Dana, serving on a square-rigger in the early nineteenth century, described this unique misery with wonderful first-hand sympathy:

  Then, feeling of all our clothes, we picked out those which were the least wet, and put them on, so as to be ready for a call, and turned-in, covered ourselves up with blankets, and slept until three knocks on the scuttle and the dismal sound of ‘All starbowlines ahoy! Eight bells, there below! Do you hear the news?’ drawled out from on deck, and the sulky answer of ‘Aye, aye!’ from below, sent us up again.

  Two Years Before the Mast, 1840

  It would be tolerable if the new watch could then just crawl out of the rack, rub the sleep from their eyes, grab a biscuit and head up the companionway to relieve their shipmates. However, in any but the most benign conditions (and always at night), coming on watch entails getting appropriately dressed for whatever the next three or four hours on deck might bring. This can be a long, difficult and even dangerous procedure, particularly if the seas are high or the boat is bashing to windward on a severe angle of heel (i.e. mostly).

  The basic routine of ‘kitting up’ runs roughly along these lines: first, curse whoever has come below to wake the off-watch; swing your legs out of the bunk while grabbing a handrail as you attempt to stand up; discover that the cabin sole on your side of the boat is two inches under water so your last pair of dry socks are now instantly soaked; pull on another layer of thermals if you can find them; start looking for your wet-weather gear (which is rarely where you last left it); wedge your weary body against a bulkhead and start wriggling into the pants; clip in the shoulder straps and then realise you’ve got them crossed over and will have to begin the whole process all over again; struggle into your heavy waterproof jacket, checking that nobody has nicked the torch, knife, position-indicating radio beacon or half-eaten chocolate bar you’d been saving; begin a grid-pattern search of the cabin for your sea boots, which by now have acquired an internal lining of foul-smelling gunk peculiar to ocean racing; slip into your PFD (Personal Flotation Device – a combined inflatable lifejacket and harness), buckle up and shout ‘Who the f—k swiped my beanie?’ while stealing the closest piece of warm headgear to cram onto your noggin; dig some dry gloves out from the bottom of a locker and set off up the companionway.

  That’s the basic routine. Now, imagine five people going through that same pantomime simultaneously, in a dark unventilated space not much larger than a garden shed, six times every day. Meanwhile, the other five people are already crowding into the cabin, keen to strip off their gear and crawl into your bunk before it loses its warmth. In the galley (which is rarely a separate area), someone is trying to cook and serve a hot meal because this is usually the only opportunity to feed the whole crew at one sitting. Bowls of steaming stew are being passed around and eaten wherever people can find a relatively stable spot to perch. ‘Bung the kettle on, mate, the lads could do with a cuppa.’

  Welcome to a change of watch. And it’s one of the immutable laws of ocean racing that the moment you’ve finally established yourself on deck and attached your safety tether to the jackstay and settled in for the next few hours, you have that burning, urgent, uncontrollable impulse to empty your bladder. But nature
’s little release valve now lies buried beneath five layers of clothing. It’s just too bloody hard. Ocean racers soon learn to hold their water for quite remarkable periods. All piss and wind indeed.

  It would, however, be unfair to give the impression that ocean racing is just a short notch up from finding yourself on the wrong side of the Spanish Inquisition. The discomforts are many, but so are the pleasures. Sometimes we enjoy ourselves for whole minutes on end. Much of that fun comes from the company of like-minded people joined in common cause – what Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness called ‘the bond of the sea’. But beyond those comforts there’s the genuine challenge of applying our collective skills, strength, knowledge and experience to the complex task of sailing a highly complicated piece of machinery for hundreds of nonstop miles as swiftly as possible. In other words, the sport of ocean racing.

  To my mind, no other recreational endeavour combines so many diverse demands – physical, mental, even emotional. Offshore racing has it all. One minute you’re at the absolute limit of your strength heaving a wet headsail along the foredeck, the next you might be squeezed into the navigation station trying to untangle the knotty tactical problems posed by a sudden windshift or change in current. There’s a dodgy battery connection to investigate somewhere beneath the cabin sole, a spinnaker still to pack and the mob up top could all do with a cool drink from the icebox. Meanwhile, the port side primary winch has jammed and needs an immediate repair. ‘Anybody remember where we put those bloody spare pall springs?’ And all the time there’s the constant, unrelenting task of changing, reefing and un-reefing sails to suit variations in wind strength. ‘Old Huey’, the weather god, rarely sends us a truly constant breeze, so serious racing boats can never adopt a set-and-forget policy. Everyone strives to deliver precise, watchful sail trim designed to yield maximum boat-speed. Sailing a boat ‘uphill’ – to windward – is the real hard yakka of yachting. It isn’t called a ‘work’ for nothing, and windward legs can often predominate.

  Yet there are thousands of sailors, myself included, who love all this with such a passion that they keep going back to sea even after the most miserable races. For years now I’ve returned home from every Sydney–Hobart, thrown my kitbag under the stairs and declared, ‘Well, that’s it for me. No more Hobarts. That was the last.’ My precious, infinitely patient and understanding wife just smiles. She knows I already can’t wait until next Boxing Day.

  Do we keep signing on because we enjoy the racing, or through some powerful attachment to the sea itself? In my case it’s predominantly the latter: the sheer thrill of sailing and the aesthetic riches of seafaring offer me far more treasured memories than any passing triumph over old rivals. A pleasant hour spent reaching towards the sunset at nine knots under a shy spinnaker with dolphins frolicking at the bow will wash away months of land-bound stress and aggravation. There’s a profound contentment that flows from completing a passage by sailing a boat safely, and to its full potential. Ocean racing is a team sport, but the rewards can be intensely personal. The miles slip away, the finish draws nearer, you can taste that first bitterly cold ale at the club bar. Why would you want to be anywhere else?

  If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose

  a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better

  than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful,

  it is seductive and full of strange promise and the

  hint of trouble.

  E. B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows, 1977

  THERE’S NO FEELING quite like racing a boat you’ve built yourself. It’s a pleasure denied to most young sailors these days because the majority of centreboard craft are now constructed of exotic materials, and by such high-tech methods that the task is usually well beyond the resources of even a gifted amateur tradesman. That is a tremendous pity. It pushes up the acquisition cost of quite modest boats; it robs the sport of a wonderful extra dimension; it reduces the general level of practical skills among sailors; and it means that fewer young people will have a reliable grasp of the fundamentals of boat design and construction because they never had the chance to experience those processes first hand.

  None of these factors crossed our minds in the 1960s. Back then the sailing cycle was simple: race your boat through the summer, sell it at the end of the season, use that money to build another boat through the winter, race your new boat through the summer, sell it at the end of the season, and so on. It was a terrific way of staying connected to the sport for 52 weeks of the year, and of preserving the freedom to try out new design ideas. But best of all, it connected the craft of boat-building directly to the sport. Few of my mates were real magicians with wood (certainly not me), but we knew enough carpentry to build a decent little skiff or dinghy together. What we learned during those winter nights and weekends has stayed with us. Today, when circumstances conspire to have me crawling around the innards of a yacht, I usually have a fair idea of how that boat was put together, where the problem might be and what needs to be done to fix it. There’s no doubt I owe much of that basic knowledge to the large stretches of time we all used to spend with wood planes and chisels in our hands. The boat that still lingers strongest in my memory from that period is a 14-foot ‘Skate’ classer I built in suburban Sydney with my skipper and good friend, Steve Murphy. The story of its construction mirrors a thousand similar projects that were underway that year in garages across Australia. It’s worth telling here in some detail.

  The Skate was a development class. Certain dimensions were limited – including overall length, maximum beam, depth and girth of the hull at specified stations – but beyond those basic parameters the designer/builder was free to create a unique shape and deck layout. Like all mad-keen centreboard sailors, Steve and I had developed firm ideas about how to squeeze the maximum speed potential from the measured limits. We also believed there was a better approach to deck layout that might make these very tippy speedsters a little easier to sail. Before selling the old boat, we ripped off its deck from the mast back, and built our quick prototype version of the full-length ‘through cockpits’ that are now standard on all centreboard boats (and most modern racing yachts). Armed with the knowledge gained through that exercise, we started planning our new boat.

  I’d already moved out of home and was living in a small flat on the water at Seaforth. Our first problem was that Steve’s dad couldn’t let us take over his garage for three months. He ran a racquet-stringing and picture-framing business from home, and needed unimpeded access to his workbench. Fair enough. We’d have to build our own temporary boat shed, then construct the new Skate inside it. Off we drove to a local second-hand building materials yard and bought big lengths of old hardwood and a pile of rusting corrugated-iron sheets. Steve, trained as an architect, drew a quick plan of how we’d construct an extension to the back of his father’s garage. We dug the postholes after work on a Friday and by late Sunday afternoon we had our shed. The whole thing was held together with four-inch bolts and roofing nails, but thirty years later it was still standing, converted into a pleasant greenhouse full of ferns and orchids.

  From the outset we were determined that the boat itself would be built from the very best materials. As ever with racing boats, this involved resolving the constant trade-offs between strength, durability and weight. It’s reasonable to assume that the basic ‘prestressed box’ structure of a small centreboarder will give it inherent structural integrity, but poor choices of wood for the frames and stringers can easily compromise that advantage. Skates carry quite a large rig for their tiny beam and the boat is kept upright by both crew swinging out hard on hiking planks. The forces exerted on the gunnels and fin-case are considerable. We proudly assembled our selections of seasoned cedar, pacific maple and sapele-veneered marine plywood. (Sapele is a beautiful reddish-brown timber from tropical Africa.) Wherever possible we’d use the newfangled two-part glue called Araldite – much lighter than the traditional fixing method of resin-based glue
seized with brass screws. Araldite wasn’t readily available on a retail basis back then, but through Steve’s architecture connections we were able to buy tins of it from the importers. (Later, the same glue was used to fix the tiles to the Sydney Opera House roof.)

  And now the fun part. Lofting the boat around prefabricated ‘mould’ frames; spending countless hours squinting down the curved lines of the keel, chines and gunnels until we were completely happy with the hull shape; cladding that skeleton with ply; turning the boat – always a wonderful moment – to remove the temporary moulds. Fitting the permanent frames, keel plank and stringers, building and fitting the fin-case, fixing the chain-plates and installing the mast step assembly. As we waited for glue to harden we’d sneak around into the garage and work on the laminated centreboard and rudder. Then things became truly exciting as the deck and cockpit went on and the whole structure was closed. In the middle of winter nights – with our makeshift boat shed open on three sides – this was often cold work. Steve’s mum would always materialise around 9.30 bearing a tray of refreshments. Her menu never varied: two small glasses of Golden Circle pineapple juice and bowl of Savoury Shape biscuits. We’d both have killed for a big steaming mug of coffee with a dash of brandy, but you just can’t ask mums for stuff like that.

  A new suit of Dacron sails was ordered from Jack Herrick’s loft in Balmain and when they arrived we set about shaping a set of full-length cane battens for the main. Unseasoned cane can be a difficult material to work, and we needed to stop and re-sharpen the blade of the Stanley plane after only 20 minutes’ work. The aluminium mast and boom came from the old Miller & Whitworth chandlery at Cremorne. It was a long drive from Concord West to that shop, but they’d lend us a swaging tool free of charge so we could make up the rigging ourselves. Finally, the climax. After four coats of gleaming Estapol gloss varnish, the magical moment when we screwed down all the deck fittings and could rig up the boat for the first time. She’s a little beauty!