All Piss and Wind (23 page)

But all bad things come to an end. There's a collective sense of achievement and relief as we cross 40° South. It's the start of the notorious ‘Roaring Forties', but that parallel of latitude also runs through the middle of Flinders Island. ‘We're across, fellas! You bloody beauty!' Even though the weather might not abate for another 12 hours or so, we now have land to starboard again and could confidently run for shelter in an emergency. Another day's sail
and we might be there. Time to restore some order below, dry out all the clothes and gear that were soaked during the crossing, and fill our bellies with some solid tucker. This is also the time when we can really start racing again rather than just trying to make safe miles in the right direction and keep the boat in one piece.

‘Reckon we could carry the kite now?'

‘Pretty damn close. Let's give it a shot.'

Spirits really lift as we sight Tasman Island, the point at which the fleet farewells the ocean to make a hard right turn into Storm Bay. ‘Forty miles to go, lads! No sleep till we're over the line.' This, for me, is always the best part of the trip, especially if we're lucky enough to sail it in daylight. The scenery along the northern shore is spectacular – towering cliffs of dolerite (a form of basalt rock), often split into extraordinary vertical columns. Wild, wonderful coastline that reminds you that Tasmania is another country.

Now, where's that opening to the Derwent? ‘Just head for Betsey Island, you can't go wrong.' Soon we're in the river and passing the Iron Pot, a natural sloping rock shelf on the starboard shore that was used as a place to haul out whales, flense their carcasses and boil down the blubber. The guesser issues his annual reminder: ‘Be careful to keep that Garrow Light to port – it's a mark of the course.' And finally, the anxious search for the finishing line off Battery Point. Until very recently, the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania liked to keep their line a secret. The marker buoy was miniscule and the light atop it had the luminance of a glow-worm. Old hands know you just aim for the big cranes behind Constitution Dock. These days the sponsors want their logo to feature in every press photograph and second of TV coverage, so the buoy is now bright yellow – and big.

‘We're over! Well sailed everyone! Let's start the donk and get these bloody sails off.' Handshakes all round, smiles and back-slapping. A runabout comes alongside to guide us to our berth. The traditional welcoming slab of icy-cold local beer is passed aboard.
Hobart crowds are always generous with their applause as each boat motors into the dock, and for that one brief moment we're all heroes. Fenders over the side, lines secured, engine off. We're there.

Contrary to popular belief, the crew do not all immediately swarm ashore, descend on the closest hotel and get outrageously drunk. First, we get drunk on board. For an hour or two nobody wants to break that unique bond with the boat that's been cemented over the long, tough days of the race. There's a special satisfaction about sitting in the cockpit, sipping rum and recounting the passage while it's still so fresh in our memories. Good mates wander over from other boats to share a celebratory drink and swap yarns. One by one we eventually drift off to the showers, returning with the happy glow that's given off by someone who's just washed away four days of grime and weariness.
Then
we descend on our favourite hotel and get outrageously drunk all over again.

‘Coming south next year, mate?'

‘Suppose so. Can't see why not, really.'

T
HERE IS NO SHORTAGE
of great characters in yachting. Some of them are even quite likeable. Decades spent in a sport where success so often depends on luck (and which delights in dishing out physical punishment) tend to breed a certain level of eccentricity in its veterans. Many who continue going to sea beyond their allotted three-score years develop a repertoire of idiosyncrasies that pass into dockside legend. This is not the carefully cultivated veneer of the self-regarding ‘card', but a special kind of warts-and-all directness that's been forged over many thousands of miles of hard sailing.

I am, by both personal inclination and professional interest, attracted to these people. They make life interesting and often provide the spur for those occasional outbursts of prose rumination that have let me fill so many empty pages in the nation's yachting magazines. Character is most clearly delineated by anecdote: the essence of the person can usually be drawn from their reactions to incidents of misadventure or triumph. Offshore sailors have a laconic economy with words that heightens that effect. Their blokey
brand of understatement is the leitmotiv of all great Australian yachting yarns.

For many years I penned a light-hearted monthly column of reminiscences that was published under the profoundly unoriginal title of
Tell Tales
. (A real ‘telltale' is a short length of wool attached to the sails or stays to indicate the direction of air-flow. Great pun.) Anyway, as a convenient device for lumping my memories of various eccentric owner/skippers into one person I invented a mythic character called ‘The Mighty Helmsman' (also known as ‘The Bloke Up the Back Who Pays the Bills'). As often happens, this rather lame literary device soon took on a life of its own. Considerable waterfront debate ensued as to the true identity of TMH, speculation that I worked hard to deflect or diffuse because many of my recollections had bordered on the defamatory.

Let me now confess that ‘The Mighty Helmsman' was loosely – but certainly not wholly – based on one of the greatest characters in the Sydney yachting community, my good friend V. H. O'Neill. Hughie has done countless offshore passages, including 25 Sydney–Hobart races, and is best known for the two decades he spent campaigning his tough Sparkman & Stephens 39-footer
Mark Twain
in just about every event on the ocean-racing calendar. Like so many Sydney yachtsmen he began sailing as a teenager in VJ dinghies, then graduated to larger centreboard boats. After establishing a successful business career Hugh returned to the water with serious intent. He bought
Rebecca
, a small Duncanson-designed sloop, and headed south the very next Boxing Day. Years later he told me that he had to become an owner because ‘I realised no other bastard would give me a ride, so the only way I'd get to race to Hobart was in my own boat'. That directness is typical of the O'Neill style: blunt, self-deprecating, yet quietly proud of his seafaring achievements.

Mark Twain
is not an easy boat to sail and its fit-out below is far from comfortable. Racing her over long distances is always a character-building experience, but the trade-off is extraordinary
seaworthiness. The crew of
Mark Twain
will break long before the boat. She may be wet and uncomfortable on deck, but even in extreme weather and waves you never feel unsafe. Hughie has trained scores of crew over the years by the traditional ‘give 'em a decent go and see how they work out' method. As these sailors inevitably left
Twain
and spread out through the offshore community their memories of Hugh's enthusiastic, no-nonsense captaincy became the basis for much of the folklore I've plundered so shamelessly for ‘The Mighty Helmsman'.

Most of my
Tell Tales
stories are told from a genuine first-person perspective. Many of the incidents and words are classic V. H. O'Neill Esq. (as best I can remember them), but not everything is a direct Hugh O'Neill experience. A few are slight embellishments, in the great tradition of yarn-spinning. Others are amalgams of moments from other boats and times, written into his character. What is impossible to reproduce here are his mischievous Irish grin and the infectious cascades of laughter that always announce Hugh's presence on watch. I've never sailed with anyone who enjoys a laugh more. He's very generous to his friends and it's always a delight to sign on for another passage with him. Let's hope that our many happy years as shipmates will help forgive some of the harmless journalistic fun I've had at his expense. So, by way of tribute (if not homage), herewith a few excerpts from the Gospels According to The Mighty Helmsman.

ON MATTERS MEDICINAL …

These days, TMH always seems able to stay out of physical trouble (mainly because not much grief can befall you in the leeward quarter berth). This has not, however, prevented him from developing a peculiar aversion to anyone using the First Aid kit.

A few Southport races back, some of us foolishly scoffed a chicken curry that had seen better days. A certain looseness of the
bowels ensued, which in turn prompted a stampede in the general direction of the Lomotil and Imodium tablets. From his bunk TMH noticed us ripping the top off the First Aid box. ‘Hey, you blokes. Don't go opening that!'

As the senior member of the afflicted group it fell to me to enter our plea in mitigation. ‘But we're all as crook as Rookwood, skipper. Anyway, that's what medicine's
for
, isn't it?'

‘Yeah, but if you use anything from the kit then we have to replace it for the next safety inspection!'

Compassion has never been a strong suit of The Bloke Up the Back Who Pays the Bills. (As a consequence of this ‘no use' policy the bulk of our medical supplies usually exceed their use-by date long before they get the chance to save a single life or even ease discomfort.)

The skipper does, however, have one particular bodily, er, soft spot. Sailors usually call this affliction ‘itchy date'. After a few days' racing even TMH cannot avoid the combined posterior side-effects of hasty ablutions and saltwater. We've learned to forestall his whining by always leaving a new tube of skin-care cream somewhere in the head.

But, as you might expect, The Mighty Helmsman is a hard man to satisfy. Comes the voice from the smallest cabin: ‘Hey, you blokes, where's that skin cream?'

‘Right beside you in the fiddle, skip. Yellow tube.'

Pause. ‘No, that's not the right stuff!'

Eyeballs roll, groans all round. ‘It's skin cream, skipper. They're all the bloody same.'

‘No they're
not!
I want that cream with Aloe Vera!'

Forty miles off the coast, another two days of hard sailing to go and he's demanding a particular herbal additive in his bum wipe. The navigator looks up from his chart. ‘No problem, skipper. We should just about lay Port Macquarie on the reciprocal. The supermarket there might stock the brand you want. Shouldn't cost us more than 10 hours or so.'

The silence was good enough to eat.

ON THE WONDERS OF NATURE …

It goes without saying that The Mighty Helmsman isn't too impressed with vegetarians. He's strictly a meat-and-three-veg sort of bloke for whom animals should either be shot or eaten (preferably both, in that order). What faint streaks of sentimentality may still colour his character are never wasted on God's creatures of the air, land or sea.

For TMH the stirring sight of a whale breaching just a few metres off our bow invariably only prompts a hectoring lecture about how dangerous the world's most magnificent mammal is for sailors. He always chooses that insipid greeny/white shade of antifoul in the quaint belief that any other colour might encourage passing cetaceans to mistake our boat for a member of the opposite gender and initiate immediate sexual congress. (It's a measure of the skipper's unwavering chauvinism that he assumes all passing whales to be male – and randy.)

Likewise, he never pauses to marvel at the wave-skimming swoop or effortless soar of the albatross. Instead, we get muttered curses about how unfair it is that a mere bird can do 20 knots dead into the breeze without so much as flapping a wing while we're still slogging away close-hauled against truckloads of set and lucky to average a Velocity Made Good of four knots. Nature's little ironies don't amuse him one bit.

Late on the first afternoon of a Sydney–Gold Coast race a tired and rather sodden pigeon crash-landed in our cockpit. We'd had 25 knots from the SW all day and the poor thing was obviously blown offshore and had then worn itself out trying to regain the coast. By sunset our deck must have looked awfully like a fair substitute for dry land. Fortunately, The Mighty Helmsman was below when this exhausted pigeon joined the crew.

The bird was gently lifted into the most protected spot inside our companionway dodger and stayed with us all night. At each change
of watch the blokes coming up checked he was safe and warm. At dawn we fed the pigeon scraps of bread and set out a small dish of water. The low sun dried his waterlogged feathers and he seemed to be slowly regaining some strength.

But the morning light also revealed our avian stowaway to TMH. ‘What the hell is
that?
'

We explained that the international code of the sea clearly required us to care for any soul in peril or distress.

‘All right then, but don't you bastards let that bloody bird shit on
my
boat!' St Francis of Assisi, eat your heart out.

ON RESERVING THE BEST EQUIPMENT FOR SPECIAL OCCASIONS …

The Mighty Helmsman's fixation with saving his best party frocks for the big occasions can reach ridiculous extremes. On our boat (please don't laugh) we have a ‘normal' boom cover and a special ‘racing' cover, which spends 362 days of each year neatly packed away below. In response, the veterans of the crew have turned this ‘two-cover policy' into a favourite leg-pull, much like the famous practical joke of film editors sending their new assistant down to the Technical Services Department for a box of sprocket holes.

After a Saturday race, once we've carefully flaked the main, made up all the lines and drained a quiet beer or two on the motor back to the club, someone will casually turn to the latest new chum in our ship's company. ‘Mate, could you just pop down and bring us up the boom cover?' And as sure as God made little black wind shifts, the novice will then emerge brandishing the hallowed ‘racing' cover and begin unrolling it along the boom.

‘No! Not
that
one!' bellows TMH as the old hands are already staggering about the cockpit stifling guffaws as we anticipate the next inevitable exchange in this well-worn pantomime.

‘You mean there are
two
boom covers?' asks the incredulous novice.

‘Of course! Take that one back below – that's the
good
cover. Bring us up that other old thing covered in seagull poop.'

‘OK, skipper. But just so that I know for next time, when do we actually
use
the good cover?'

And before The Mighty Helmsman can respond we all chime in with our invariable chorus: ‘Goin' south, mate. It only comes out for the Sydney-to-bloody-Hobart!' And that's the absolute truth. Our high-performance racing boom cover gets its annual outing for a few hours on Boxing Day morning, and again once we've crossed the finishing line off Battery Point. But it makes us the fastest-looking boat in Constitution Dock.

ON THE WISDOM OF AVOIDING HEROICS …

The scene is familiar to us all. The standard three-slips-and-a-gully are on the rail, pointing like loons to the windward mark and asking the afterguard what they want to do. ‘Waddya reckon, guys, go for the spinnaker?' asks the foredeckie, with that unmistakable tone of macho challenge in his voice.

The response from the cockpit is a play for time. ‘Jeez, I dunno. Looks awful tight.'

The all-care-but-no-responsibility blokes on the rail raise the stakes. ‘Nah, it's a reach, almost a three-quarter. No probs.'

The Mighty Helmsman decides it's time to intervene and exert his authority. ‘The bearing to the next mark puts the apparent wind bang on our beam,' he says. ‘We'd just go sideways.'

But the boys from the pointy end will not be so easily deterred. ‘We're gonna have to do something to catch those other buggers. How about the chicken chute?'

The skipper makes the inevitable call. ‘All right, I really don't like this, but let's give it a go. Use the smallest kite we've got. Keep the genoa well up the track, and
absolutely no bloody stuff-ups
, OK?'

You know the rest. The 2.2-ounce storm spinnaker is made and
we hurtle down the course hollering with delight, passing old enemies. They give us that wistful sideways glance of the safe-but-sorry brigade. But then, with the inevitability of an Australian middle-order batting collapse, the breeze begins to head us and the kite becomes a major liability. The Mighty Helmsman's face contorts with panic as he does his best Incredible Hulk impersonation just trying to counter the crushing weather helm. We're hopelessly overpowered. ‘Get it off! Get it
off
!'

The less said about the drop the better. Vital calls are lost beneath the deafening flog of the chute. There's an override on the windward brace. Someone smokes the halyard too soon and we've now got ourselves a 600-square-foot sea anchor. The boats we overhauled just minutes ago now sweep past smugly on their comfortable, two-sail reach. Their crews hail us with the ancient insult reserved for exactly this situation: ‘Stopped for a bit of prawn fishing have we, lads?' The skipper fumes silently at the savage ribbing he knows awaits him back at the club bar. What really hurts, though, is that the foredeck rabble tricked him into a rash decision by challenging his sailing courage. Some day they'll pay for that.

And if revenge is a dish best served cold, then what better time and place to exact retribution than 0400 in driving rain, halfway across Bass Strait? The boat is hard on the breeze, just coping with one reef and the #3 genoa. Snug in his lee quarter-berth, The Mighty Helmsman waits until the off-watch have all climbed out of their oilies, gulped down a mug of hot chocolate and wearily crawled into the rack.