All Piss and Wind (8 page)

Yet it is precisely this unique combination of physical challenge and responding to the natural elements that makes the sport so
appealing. The other side of that coin would seem to be that the only practical protection for owner/skippers and organising clubs is to buy insurance – and lots of it. The law should not be used as a sword of vengeance for the aggrieved, or as a bludgeon wielded by zealous rule-makers. It is a shield to protect us all from unreasonable loss or damage.

M
OST FORMS OF SAILING
, and yachting in particular, are pretty selfish human pursuits. To develop real expertise and confidence demands a huge investment in time. The skills are subtle and can't be mastered in an intensive short course; the bank of experience required takes years to accumulate. Sweethearts, partners and children don't always appreciate these long stretches spent away from home. Keen tennis players only need to be absent for a few hours to exhaust their weekly quest for the perfect topspin lob. Even golfers have to set aside no more than half a day (plus an hour or so at the nineteenth hole to replenish their precious bodily fluids). But the offshore sailor will be gone for days on end – even weeks. Some
never
return, so entranced do they become by the special joys of seafaring. Bernard Moitessier, who was leading the first solo around-the-world race in 1969, sailed right past the finishing line and just kept going – he couldn't bear to break the mystic spell that had built up between himself, his boat and the sea. But he was a Frenchman.

Your ordinary, average weekend sailor rarely succumbs to that level of existential excess, yet there's still an alarming degree of self-centredness implicit in a hobby that routinely requires leaving home
straight after breakfast and rarely returning before nightfall. There's half the weekend gone in one bite, and sailors are usually so tired by the time they
do
eventually get home that their remaining usefulness to man, woman or beast is distinctly limited until the following morning. And that's just on racing days. Owners and committed crew often spend as much time on maintenance and training as they do chasing trophies. There can't be many things that put a happy relationship under more stress than one partner sheepishly announcing that they won't be able to mow the lawn tomorrow because the boat urgently needs antifouling. Good marriages have foundered on less.

In mitigation, m'lud, I must plead that, for most of us, this apparently uncaring selfishness isn't a deliberately antisocial stance. It's an entirely natural approach to life because that's the way we grew up. Whole weekends spent messing about in dinghies in childhood became whole weekends spent racing in regattas as teenagers. It's a small step from there to whole weeks consumed by ocean racing. The common dockside epithets of ‘sailing junkie' and ‘boat tart' have substantial basis in fact. Sailing is addictive and, like all addicts, our obsession can sometimes make us indifferent to reality and reasonable standards of interpersonal behaviour. We often don't realise just how close to the wind we're sailing.

My own honeymoon is a rather unfortunate case in point. After four years of happy courtship, the beloved and I finally tied the knot at the NSW Registrar General's office in Sydney one Saturday in late November 1968. (I'd fortunately managed to find a substitute for'd hand to take my place in a vital club championship heat being sailed on the wedding day, otherwise the nuptials would have had to be postponed.) Both my bride and I had jobs that required us to work until mid-December, so the honeymoon would need to be delayed until then. It so happened, at the same time, that my skipper was running dangerously late with his graduation assignment in final year Architecture and wouldn't be free to race the boat through the
summer holidays. Would I care to take the helm of our jointly owned 14-foot Skate classer for the coming national titles?
Pas de problem
, Steve!

But there
was
one small problem. The regatta for the Australian Championships that year was to be sailed at Nedlands in Perth. Back then, around 1500 miles of the 2600-mile road trip across the continent were still dirt. It would take at least four days for us to drive to WA with the boat on the roof of our antique Holden station wagon, ten days for the regatta, then maybe another six or seven days for the return journey if we came via Adelaide and Melbourne to catch up with friends. Sound reasonable? But those three weeks would also consume all our annual leave. Thus did a long-promised romantic honeymoon seamlessly morph into a sailing expedition. It says much about Australian life 40 years ago that I saw nothing potentially offensive about assuming that this drastic change of plans was quite unremarkable, and that my new wife raised no major objections. That irksomely possessive phrase ‘quality time' had yet to be invented.

We set off in convoy with my old schoolmate Les Donovan, now racing on another Skate and also headed for ‘the Nationals'. By happenstance, Les had also married recently, although he and Sandra managed to squeeze in a conventional honeymoon before our departure. For the trip, Les had borrowed a Holden ute from his dad, who was the local butcher. The tray section still reeked of stale blood, pork fat and mutton, but we chucked our bags in anyway, plus the sails, centreboard and rudder. All set? ‘Better throw a tarp over that lot. Fair bit of dust out there on the Nullarbor.'

Dust would be the least of our problems. By the town of Mildura on the Murray River, our station wagon was beginning to make strange whining noises. We pressed on, but the agonised mechanical shriek from beneath the floorboards soon became deafening. The old girl refused to go any further than Renmark in South Australia, where we left her at a wrecker's yard on the outskirts of
town with a suspiciously self-taught Yugoslav mechanic who promised to have the problem ‘all fixed, no worries' by the time we returned in a fortnight.

There was nothing for it now but to reload the boat and spars onto the butcher's ute and then cram ourselves and all the gear into one vehicle. In the days of steering-column gear shifts and before compulsory seat-belts, three could sit bunched up, shoulder-to-shoulder, across the bench seat. We blokes took it in turns to drive, or crouch in the back among all the bags and sails, getting mercilessly sunburnt while trying to fend off the volleys of flying rocks kicked up by each passing semi-trailer. After 2000 miles of this fun we finally made Perth – and the ladies just about knocked us to the ground in their stampede to enjoy their first hot shower in three days. The worst was over. The crystal Indian Ocean sunshine raised our spirits. The ‘Fremantle Doctor' blew 20 bracing knots along the Swan River every afternoon. It would be all good from here.

Finding a local for'd hand proved no problem and we took to the water for the Invitation Race and were soon romping along near the head of the fleet. Whacko! We'll show these West Coast hicks a thing or three about real racing once the championship heats begin tomorrow! But even as these premature dreams of national glory were starting to take shape in my swollen head, the boat began to slow. Fresh conditions usually suited us, yet even with both crew leaning out hard at the end of our planks the Skate was now sailing like a log.

‘She looks a bit low in the tide to me, mate,' remarked the for'd hand. He was right. We were taking water at an alarming rate. I bore away and headed straight for the nearest safe shore. The water was almost up to the gunnels by the time we could drag the boat onto the grass outside the Nedlands club house. There was, of course, no shortage of sympathetic experts only too happy to identify the cause of our disaster. Torsional forces on the fin had twisted the internal centreboard case, which had, in turn, split the
keel plank. This was major structural damage that couldn't be repaired overnight. The championship regatta began tomorrow. My campaign for the national title was over before it had started. ‘So we came all this way for nothing?' asked my new bride helpfully, knowing the answer full well. ‘Never mind. You can have a nice time sitting on the beach with me watching all the other boys race.' Sure, dear.

That night the club hosted the traditional pre-regatta BBQ and piss-up for all competitors. My mood was far from ebullient. I chewed disconsolately on a chop and drowned my sorrows in Emu Bitter (which wasn't such a bad drop before Alan Bond got hold of the brewery). When we left the party a mob of NSW diehards were still hard at it, sitting around a huge fire they'd made on the beach while demolishing the last two-dozen bottles of beer. Leading the fun were the defending Australian champion, Doug Jeffkins, and his for'd hand Dennis. ‘They'll have sore heads tomorrow,' I thought, ‘but at least the lucky buggers can all rig up and go out racing.'

What then ensued was a passage of extraordinary sporting karma that still makes me chuckle today. The following morning, as I wandered enviously among the fleet of Skates being readied for battle, Doug sauntered over with a trademark durry hanging from his bottom lip. ‘Wanna sail up front with me, Dave?'

Nonplussed, I blurted out some form of lame enquiry as to why he'd suddenly dumped Dennis.

‘Haven't. Silly bugger's gone and hurt himself. Can't get wet.'

I looked around for the injured party. The defending national champion for'd hand was sitting dejectedly on the club verandah with his hands and feet swathed in bandages, a pair of crutches leaning against the chair. He gave me a feeble wave and thin smile.

‘Dumb bastard got so pissed last night he thought he was one of those bloody Fijian fire walkers. Went straight through the bonfire in bare feet. Twice! Hospital reckons he won't heal up for three weeks at least. Bloody idiot. So, mate, you coming or not?'

… and some have greatness thrust upon them. It took me all of 30 seconds to dash back to the car, grab my sailing clothes and get changed. You don't think twice about sailing with the best skipper in the country. But wily old Doug knew from the outset that we weren't likely to retain his title. Sailing small boats fast requires split-second teamwork and levels of mutual understanding that go beyond words. That takes years of racing together to develop. Also, despite their common class dimensions every racing dinghy is set up differently, and every skipper and for'd hand divide their various tasks in different ways. It was three or four races before Doug and I began to start working confidently together, and the whole regatta only had seven heats. We were soon out of contention, but still had plenty of fun. And as the ten-minute gun fired before each race I always remembered to be quietly thankful for my good fortune to be out there at all.

Two strong images stick with me from that crazy regatta. As we rounded the windward mark for the first time and I'd hoisted the spinnaker, Doug's country drawl was on me in an instant as the boat jumped up onto a plane and went skittering across the Swan River.

‘Got a sec, mate?'

‘Sure, what's the problem?'

‘Light me a fag, would ya?'

The skipper thrust a packet of unfiltered Temple Bar at me as he patted his pockets for a box of matches. We were screaming downhill in a 14-footer with no more than a foot of freeboard, kite flying and spray everywhere. Hardly ideal smoking conditions. But what's a poor for'd hand to do? I jammed my foot against the spinnaker sheet, got the cigarette going and handed it aft. Doug settled in for the run to the bottom mark, puffing contentedly all the way. ‘Ta. Appreciate it, mate.' He followed this ritual in every race. Even when we capsized, Doug somehow managed to keep his precious ciggies dry.

The other moment that I retain with clarity was a simple lunchtime scene in the kitchen of the Nedlands Sailing Club. The Ladies Auxiliary had set up their cheerful daily production line to make sandwiches for the ravenous crews. One face among all those industrious wives, girlfriends and mothers seemed familiar. I strained to catch her name above the banter. It was Margaret. Margaret? Margaret
Court
! The reigning Wimbledon, Australian and US Open tennis champion, happily slicing onions and beetroot for a mob of scruffy sailors. (Her husband Barry – son of the State Premier – was a keen Skate skipper who was racing in the championships). Only in Australia.

Back in Renmark, the bush mechanic – after first mucking around with the main bearings and gearbox – finally discovered the problem with our car was a busted differential. There were scores of dead Holdens of similar vintage in his wrecking yard so it was a simple job to cannibalise another diff and replace the wrecked unit. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but I made sure our route back to Sydney included a little detour to Eden on the NSW south coast where I knew most of the returning Sydney–Hobart yachts would be stopping for a breather and a few quiet sherbets up at the Angler's Rest. A bloke's gotta keep in touch with his shipmates, even on his honeymoon.