All Piss and Wind Read online

  One task remained: what to name our magnificent new racer? The previous boat was called Etaks (‘Skate’ spelled backwards – such wit!), but we’d grown bored with explaining this lame joke at regattas so Etaks II was definitely out. During the long hours of joinery and sanding, we’d amused ourselves listening to old episodes of the Goon Show and an obscure LP record I’d found of Spike Milligan reading his own and other people’s nonsense verse. One of our favourites from that selection was a hilariously pointless farmyard allegory by John Antrobus in which nothing rhymed or made much sense. One of the key characters in that story was a dog named Big Time Fred. Now, it so happened that the then President of the Australian Skate Association was a certain Fred Walpole of the Gosford Sailing Club. Fred wasn’t a bad bloke, but he took himself rather seriously and used to strut about at the National Championships like some tin-pot Napoleon. The coincidence was just too good to pass up. Big Time Fred it was, then, and I sealed our cheeky choice of name in large, stick-on lettering around the transom.

  As luck would have it, the opening interclub regatta of the new season was hosted by the Gosford club. Before the first race, while we all rigged up on their spacious lawn beside Brisbane Water, the aforementioned Fred moved imperiously between competitors, checking out the latest designs for possible infringements of the class rules. Inevitably, the president paused to admire our elegant new boat. He squatted at the bow to take a closer look at the lines.

  ‘Sure she measures in, boys?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Walpole. No problems. Got the certificate of registration last week – and she’s right on minimum weight.’

  Then, ever so slowly, he walked to the stern and read the name. Here it comes, Steve …

  ‘You boys wouldn’t be having a lend of me, would you?’

  ‘Oh, no, Mr Walpole, not at all! It’s a very famous seafaring character from European literature – translated from the Bulgarian, I think – actually spelt with a “Ph”, not an “F”.’

  The president marched off to terrorise some other poor crew. Did we get away with it? Who knows.

  For the past few years I’ve served on the Race Committee of the Lord Howe Island Yacht Race, an event that’s organised by the same Gosford Sailing Club. As I climb their stairs each month to attend committee meetings, I have to pass beneath a large honour board on which ‘F. Walpole’ is inscribed many times. I never fail to seek out old Fred’s name and have a quiet chuckle. Surely he’s forgiven us by now.

  There were gentlemen and there were seamen

  in the navy of Charles the Second.

  But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the

  gentlemen were not seamen.

  Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England, 1855

  ONE OF THE MOST persistent and defamatory myths about yachting is that it’s an elite sport. Not elite in its primary meaning of ‘the best’, but elite as in ‘a select group or class’. No journalist seems able to resist prefacing the word ‘yachtsman’ with ‘millionaire’. Any general description of a substantial keelboat must include gratuitous references to toffs swilling gin on the fantail, exclusive membership of ‘royal’ yacht clubs, mentions of faintly connected rich celebrities and endless gawking paragraphs about the ‘money is no object’ excesses of yacht ownership.

  Here’s the truth of it: boats can certainly cost a lot of money, but you usually get the sailors gratis. That’s the way the sport works, at least in the mainstream. There’s a bloke up the back who owns the yacht, pays the bills and must certainly have a healthy bank account (or line of credit) to keep campaigning his expensive toy. In return for this largesse he gets to steer the boat for some of the time. But the other eight or nine people on board – the crew who actually sail the yacht and derive just as much enjoyment from the exercise as the owner – will usually come from far more modest backgrounds. They’re tradesmen, teachers, bank clerks, bus drivers, public servants and even the odd journalist. If you were to average the total annual earnings of a standard Australian offshore crew you’d arrive at a figure much closer to the basic wage than six figures. Genuine silvertails are a tiny minority. The stream of ribald sarcasm and cheek that traditionally flows from the foredeck towards the afterguard is a distinguishing feature of local yachting – proof of its stubbornly egalitarian foundations.

  But the same does not hold true for the UK, continental Europe and the US, and it never has. There, the tradition has been that while the wealthy owners of large racing yachts would not dream of competing for anything other than the honour, they are quite happy to pay professional crews to do the sailing for them. The great J-boats that battled for the America’s Cup between the Wars may have occasionally had a wing-collared Vanderbilt or Lipton on board, but the sheets were always pulled by an anonymous ship’s company of tough men who picked up their paychecks at the end of the day’s sailing. In Australia, where the gap between social classes has never been so extreme, yachting managed to preserve an essentially Corinthian ethic. A successful surgeon might be able to comfortably afford running a stout little 35-footer, but he’d draw his crew from ordinary blokes who’d learned their sailing in the robust, low-cost school of open skiffs. Today there are plenty of skilled, highly trained people who earn their livelihoods from sailing and boat-related business activity, but the majority of our crews are still genuine amateurs who sail for love, not money.

  And despite the millions of dollars it now costs owners to compete at the highest levels of yachting, not one local event – at least to my knowledge – offers prize money. A recent two-day regatta on Sydney Harbour sponsored by a German automotive manufacturer provided one of its new saloons to the overall winner, an unseemly development many thoughtful sailors deplored. It is the doggedly amateur ethos of the sport that helps give our antipodean brand of sailing, especially offshore racing, so much of its special larrikin flavour. We don’t need the lure of prize money to get out on the water and compete. The sailing itself, and the companionship it offers, are sufficient pleasure and reward. (And in any case, how do you divide one car between ten crewmembers?)

  Nevertheless, it would be foolish to deny that campaigning a yacht in the Grand Prix fleets is now beyond the financial reach of all but the seriously rich. It’s no longer a cheap sport for owners, even of mid-range boats. So, what are the real dollars involved, and where is this flood of new money into yachting likely to lead us?

  Design and construction of a state-of-the-art hull will cost no less than $450,000. Fitting out with winches, steering gear, deck hardware, ropes and electronic instruments takes care of another $150,000 at least. Decent-sized engines start at around $10,000. A competitive carbon rig – mast, shrouds, boom and two spinnaker poles (or bowsprit/prodder) – adds at least $90,000. A life raft, radios and the full complement of safety gear will total a minimum of $20,000. Lastly, a full suit of sails – main, five jibs, four spinnakers and two storm sails – should consume your last $120,000.

  Now add the cost of keeping the yacht at a convenient marina, regular antifouling, race entry fees, breakages, maintenance, fuel and return delivery charges. Within twelve months your first one million dollars has swiftly disappeared down that lovely hole in the water you proudly call your boat. And that’s only for a mid-range racer. Bob Oatley reportedly spent more than eight million dollars creating Wild Oats XI for its 2005 Sydney–Hobart win, and then didn’t even have the thrill of being aboard for the victory. By the time he’d made enough money to afford his 100-foot rocket ship, he was too old to sail on it during a long race. For most of us that would be unthinkable, but it’s also a distressing pointer to how the big money is now beginning to distort our sport from the top down.

  At the front of the fleet – the intense maxi-yacht competition that dockside wags call ‘the arms race’ – fully professional crews have become almost de rigueur. It makes perfect sense to the owners. If they’ve already been prepared to fork out a few lazy million to get a competitive new boat to the starting line, what’s anothe
r $50,000 or so to secure the services of the best young racing sailors, a navigator and two helmsmen for a fortnight or so to maximise their chances of a win? Those who aren’t being paid directly to sail on these monsters are often employees of the boat-builder, rigger and sailmakers who helped create the yacht. Their specialist contributions are provided to owners as a sophisticated form of after-sales service (and have presumably been factored into the original purchase price).

  What hope do gifted amateurs have of keeping pace with these rock stars of sailing? Buckley’s and none, I’m afraid. Syd Fischer of Ragamuffin fame, himself a notoriously hard-nosed offshore competitor for more than 30 years, makes the excellent point that professionalism is contrary to the spirit of the sport because it doesn’t give these ‘ordinary’ crews a chance. Worse, it must inevitably deny some beginners the opportunity to secure a regular place within the ocean-racing fraternity. It seems sadly counterproductive that one of the longer-term outcomes of this cash-charged hunger for ugly silver trophies might be a diminution of the talent pool that has served Australian yachting so well, and for so long.

  In my view, any sensible response to these problems of professionalism must first resist the regulator’s reflex resort to some coercive winding back of the clock. There is no practical way to keep big money out of the sport, and no sense in trying. Rather, the object of any new regime should be to moderate – to construct a fair competitive environment in which like races against like, outstanding sailing is properly rewarded, and the crude laying on of dollars does not axiomatically buy success. A start has been made in the currently fashionable Farr 40 One Design class, where the owners must also drive their boat. The intent of that rule is admirable, but it is also relatively simple to circumvent. All an ambitious owner needs to do is pay a crack tactician to stand beside him throughout the race and call every shot. Any dummy can turn the wheel on command.

  If this problem is to be resolved at all, then the solution is more likely to be found in a ‘gentlemen v. players’ division of the fleets. Yachts carrying professional crews might race among themselves for a new set of prizes, while the traditional amateur crews would continue competing for the established trophies. No doubt the big-money boys would soon attract all the sponsorship and media attention, but I’ll wager the Corinthian lads will have a lot more fun.

  There’s a final, more philosophical aspect of all this that goes to the very heart of Australian mythology. Our libraries are crammed with books that unquestioningly ascribe the forging of national identity to the dual anvils of the outback and the bush. Every school child is taught how the country was ‘opened up’ through the heroics of the great explorers and the stoic rural toil of the early settlers. Our self-image of the Australian character is still defined by the sentimental verses of Banjo Paterson, a horse-loving city solicitor who glorified the bush and its people in romantic melodramas that epitomised the triumph of hardiness and willpower over a hostile environment.

  But who really established Australia? Sailors. Not just the great early navigators such as Cook and Flinders, but the thousands of brave and resourceful seamen who followed in their wake. It took immeasurably more courage and skill to bring an unwieldy, over-laden brig through a treacherous and uncharted new coastal entry than to endure a drought on the Western Plains. It was sailors who risked their lives establishing the hundreds of small ports that eventually became our towns and cities. It was sailors who repeatedly braved the hazardous 20,000-mile round trips to Europe and the New World to bring out our population and establish the great export trades of wheat and wool that underwrote Australia’s wealth. It was sailors who for more than a century guaranteed commerce and communications by crewing the thousands of small packet boats and coastal traders that linked the colony, long before interstate roads and railways.

  And where is the wealth of folklore and literature commemorating those true nation-builders? It hardly exists. Instead we deify homicidal bushrangers, suicidal swagmen, drunken gold-diggers and a clique of privileged squatters who sought to make quick fortunes on appropriated land they often then rendered unsuitable for cultivation or grazing.

  Sailors the world over have been an anonymous, itinerant and underpaid lot. In other words, an underclass. To the land-bound mythmakers their exploits were unseen and therefore uncommemorated. They appear in our folklore only as they seemed once they came ashore – a loud, argumentative rabble, impatient to quench their thirsts and sundry other appetites after long months at sea. Yet these commonly despised men were the class to whom the nation owes its existence. For me, there’s a bitter irony behind today’s reflex assumption that sailing is an activity reserved for ‘the elite’.

  We throw’d over board our guns, Iron and stone

  ballast Casks, Hoops staves oyl Jars, decay’d

  stores &c … 40 or 50 Tun weight.

  Log of HM Barque Endeavour

  THE NEVER-ENDING STRUGGLE against gravity is one of sailing’s defining inner conflicts.

  When Lieutenant James Cook frantically threw some of his precious cannon and stores overboard in June 1770 it was the last desperate gesture of a captain attempting to wriggle his ship free of the shoals that had trapped her on the Great Barrier Reef. Cook’s extraordinary seamanship managed to save the Endeavour, and Cooktown on the Endeavor River in far north Queensland still marks the location of that remarkable feat of salvage and the six-week repair that followed.

  Between the two World Wars, the ultra-competitive – and far from scrupulous – 18-footer skippers on Sydney Harbour sometimes made their heaviest crew jump overboard at the last windward mark so that the final spinnaker run home might be that much quicker. (Officials eventually altered the rules to prohibit this outrageous trick.)

  These days it’s common, if unseamanlike, practice in long-haul ocean racing to take on just enough fuel, water and food to last the distance. Any expendable excess is often jettisoned once the finishing line is less than 12 hours away. If the wind then dies, everyone goes hungry and thirsty. Too bad. Weight equals displacement, and even one unwanted milligram of displacement above the designed minimum is deemed to be slow, and must therefore be avoided.

  Grand Prix yacht designers and their millionaire clients search for the lightest possible construction materials for both hull and rig in their tireless quest for power-to-weight-ratio advantages. Decks are constructed from foam-core sandwich material that a child could break over their knee. Masts fabricated from carbon fibre weigh not much more than the rigging that keeps them up. We should therefore not be surprised when America’s Cup yachts snap in two and sink within seconds, or Volvo 70 around-the-world racers come apart mid-Atlantic and have to be abandoned. Less weight equals more speed, and damn the consequences.

  I witnessed a revealing little tableau of ‘weight aversion’ while spending a quiet Saturday with mates preparing a yacht for new antifouling at a commercial boatyard. As we rubbed down the hull and scraped off any accumulated weed or coral, the team working on a nearby yacht – a modern 60-footer – seemed to be disembowelling their boat with the urgency of Egyptian tomb robbers. Everything was being hauled out and hurled onto the hardstand below: anchors, chain, sails, bunks, the saloon table, ropes, spare water and fuel, floorboards, clothing, food, even the emergency tiller.

  What on earth was going on? ‘You blokes having a bit of a spring clean? Getting her ready for painting?’

  The paid hand gave me one of those patronising looks the hot-shot racing fraternity reserves for people who prefer to sail more wholesome boats. ‘No, we’re being weighed this afternoon.’

  I joined the dots. Under the current handicapping system the lower your all-up weight, the better the time correction factor is likely to be. These people were quite prepared to give the measurer a patently understated version of their actual displacement to shave a few minutes off the boat’s handicap.

  This pathological aversion to extra weight seems to afflict all serious racing sailors from a tender age, and I was
n’t immune from the disease myself. After a season of being mercilessly flogged every Saturday in our battered old VJ, my crewmate and I (both aged 13) decided to spend the off-season ‘getting some of that bloody weight out of the boat’. Good plan. We peeled off the deck and set to work boring so many holes through the frames that the innards of that poor little dinghy soon looked like Swiss cheese. After a fortnight of this passionate labour we anxiously assembled and weighed all the timber we’d so enthusiastically cut out of the boat. It was time to tally the massive savings. Nearly two whole pounds! Winning the next club championship now seemed a mere formality.

  But weight, there’s more. After the first few races of the new season we noticed the boat was becoming, well, heavier. An old-timer soon pinpointed the problem. We’d neglected to paint the inner surfaces of all those new holes. All plywood boats leak, so the exposed internal timbers of our VJ were now happily soaking up every drop of seawater they could find. Water is significantly heavier than wood. Worth remembering.

  More than 40 years later, the enduring weight obsessions of sailors remain a dependable source of amusement. My most frequent skipper of recent years has never found the drudgery of preparing a boat for long races quite his style. ‘Work-averse’ is the phrase that springs to mind. He’s very good at insisting on what needs to be done; very bad at doing any of it himself. He’d clamber aboard off a Zodiac just before the 10-minute gun if that didn’t look so utterly lazy – and pretentious. But this fine disregard for the contributions of others toward his enjoyment never inhibits him from passing swift judgement on issues of avoirdupois.