What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (13 page)

Keen to find something to do as a protest, we eventually decided to make ourselves a distraction for the French. The plan was for Greenpeace to try to get into the atoll and for us to create a diversion to enable that.

Another of the crew, Rusty, and I volunteered for this job. We had been doing quite a bit of running around between boats at night in the
Aquila d’Oro’
s nine-foot inflatable with its
nine-horsepower
Johnson motor. Before we set off, I did a report back to Radio Pacific, which was magnificently stupid in retrospect. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ I was screaming across the airwaves. ‘Hello, world — this is our secret plan.’

We set off in the pitch-dark into a huge swell. We had no GPS. From the inflatable the only point of reference we had was the light on the top of the mast. You didn’t have to get far from the yacht before you could no longer see that.

When we got into the boat we knew which direction Mururoa was — but after a few moments the direction changed. So we headed off roughly where we thought it would be. The next moment, from the horizon, the whole planet seemed to light
up. The French, on one of their frigates, had us in their massive spotlights and were hurtling towards us. I had no idea they were Pacific listeners.

‘Shit, Rusty, shit,’ I yelled, and he just about did. We couldn’t see our own boat. The only thing we could see was the frigate, which could only see us occasionally because we were so small and the swell kept concealing us from them and them from us.

Every time you went down you wondered where the frigate would be when you got back to the top of the swell again.

One of the most frightening moments was when the frigate stopped. We were at the top of the swell and we saw huge arms swing out from the side and drop Zodiacs into the water. We’re puttering away with our nine-horsepower while NATO-quality might, including dozens of sailors, was bearing down upon us. But once they were down at our level they had trouble finding us. Before they did, we caught sight of the little light on the
Aquila d’Oro’
s mast and were able to get back on board before they could take us into custody.

While all this was going on, Radio Pacific had got in touch with the boat. They wanted to talk to me because it was so long since I had told them about our plan. Fortunately, Peter was there to fill in for me and did the live cross.

He told me later what he had said. ‘Well, your man’s in the boat. He’s very brave, he’s gone out with a crew member, Rusty. I can see them now, I can hear them now, I’ll be handing you back to Paul soon.’

Not that soon. Just as I got back, trying to synchronise with the swell, I put my hand up to the railing, but the yacht went up and the inflatable went down and I ended up in the water.

‘He’s in the water, Paul is in the water now. This is a very dangerous situation, listeners.’

That was great radio — reporting on the reporter dying. It doesn’t happen nearly often enough. For the handful of people
who were up at whatever time it was in New Zealand, it was broadcasting gold. Not to mention as expensive as hell. So, good for Derek.

The crew threw ropes down and hauled us up on deck. From there we watched the frigate retrieving its Zodiacs and felt very cocky about having eluded them.

In the next couple of days, we learnt, largely from Greenpeace intelligence, that the French were very close to the first test. Peter and I had gone over to the 2 France boat for yet another interview and wine tasting with the rather attractive pair of reporters. I had just done a report from their ship and went out on the deck. They had a hydrophone, too, and I noticed a slight blip. We walked to the stern and looked in the direction of Mururoa. We were very close to the edge of the exclusion zone.

Without actually knowing that a bomb had gone off, we knew that it had gone off. You couldn’t see anything and you couldn’t hear anything. If anything, it was as though you were hearing less than you had heard before. Then a mist rose from the surface, like a frothing of water, and a sort of rain cloud developed and gradually dispersed.

Everyone just stood there in silence. The swell stopped. It was almost the opposite of what you think would happen. It was a moving experience because you realised how big this thing must be to be able to see it from so far away. We had been doing a lot of mucking around and joking, then suddenly the mood turned intensely sombre and you thought: ‘This is why we’re here. This is what it’s all about. How fucking dare they?’

At the same time, in the back of my mind, I was thinking: ‘I wonder if this is wise. I wonder if we’re going to rue being here in this atmosphere on this day in a few years’ time.’

We lost a lot of our enthusiasm after the event. It was hard to justify staying, certainly from a journalistic point of view. No one knew how many tests there were going to be.

No one thought they could stop it, but I thought we could delay it, and the more spectacularly we delayed it, the more it would cost the French and the more it would agitate the world. There were a lot of people in France who were against it. I’m sure it was more the agitation at home than the sanctions abroad that made the French pull their heads in to the degree that they did.

We sailed directly back to Rarotonga with the sense that we had done something, but also with the sort of anti-climactic feeling you get when you’ve achieved a goal and have to make the long trip home to ordinary life again.

‘Be careful of the boat,’ Peter told the crew. ‘Be careful of the equipment, but go like the fucking clappers. Let’s just get back.’

We were exhausted, barely existing. Conversation, which had played such a big part in the journey up, was too much of an effort. We did dress for dinner, however, which entailed putting a shirt on. Sometimes we didn’t bother with pants but we always had a shirt.

On one of these days in the emotional doldrums we caught a marlin on our line. This huge fish leapt out of the water. It was the sort of magnificent thing that would normally make a fisherman scream with joy. There was no way we were going to be able to pull it in on a hand line. I looked back at Peter and he looked at me, and without saying a word or even looking at the fish, he reached over, grabbed this huge knife and cut the line.

At one point a big storm blew up. That’s when you really have to concentrate because if the boat yaws in the water and a wave catches you beam on, then that’s it — possibly you’re all dead, definitely the trip’s going to take a lot longer. Later that night the weather had calmed down, but only slightly, and the spinnaker was up. When a boat’s got the spinnaker up it’s under a huge strain. We were inside, playing checkers, when Peter suddenly said, ‘Is the spinnaker up?’

‘Yeah, we’re making really good time,’ came the reply.

‘The spinnaker shouldn’t be up,’ he said. The wind’s too strong.’

At that exact moment, there was an unbelievable explosion, as though an incendiary device had gone off next to us. The boat stopped. We had been going fast and then we weren’t moving. I looked out of the porthole, and it was like a blizzard of confetti coming down. The spinnaker had blown into a million pieces.

Peter had been lying on the top bunk. I watched from the bottom bunk as two wizened little old man legs swung around and came down onto my stomach. He climbed over me with all his force and shuffled down next to me.

‘Six thousand fucking dollars,’ he said. ‘That’s what that’s cost me.’ A huge tirade of abuse followed. Then he slothed back into his bunk, his point made, and we continued on at a much slower speed.

The other highlight of the trip back involved the bearded, almost feral cabin boy. His bunk was right up in the bow with the sails — the worst place to be on a boat. We seldom saw him. It was as though he wasn’t on the boat. At this point, the boat having been very poorly provisioned, we had pretty much run out of everything to eat except Hubbard’s carob breakfast cereal. We could have kept the French navy and Greenpeace supplied with Hubbard’s carob breakfast cereal. Naturally, men alone at sea for a long period start to fantasise to themselves. I used to dream of Georgie Pie. I pictured myself walking into Georgie Pie and buying a pie and sitting down at one of their squalid little tables and eating it. It was partly because I loved Georgie Pie pies, but I think mostly because I could not imagine a harder floor, a more stable building. I could not imagine a more rock-solid item of food, come to that.

One day the feral cabin boy came on deck and announced that he was going to make scones. Peter and I watched him disappear into the bowels of the ship. We heard the occasional clatter of pots
and pans, but without speaking it was obvious we both knew we would never see a scone. The cabin boy had presumably yielded to insanity due to the rigours of the voyage, which was very sad.

But after what seemed like a very long time, the aroma of baking scones wafted up from below. We hadn’t had anything that remotely resembled food for a long time and I’m sure we were both intrigued, but not sufficiently to inspire conversation.

Then another inordinate amount of time went by and through the gloom of the dark cabin, this bearded little troll of a man appeared, bearing a tray of scones, with a little bottle of jam and a little dish of butter. He walked gingerly up the stairs and stood before us. And before we could say anything, the boat went up a swell and we just had time to notice the sorrow in his eyes before he fell backwards and all the scones and jam and butter went flying into the bow. We barely had time to realise how magnificent it would be to eat a scone, before it was taken away from us. That’s the ocean. It gives and it takes away.

Peter looked at me and I looked at Peter.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said.

We got off the boat at Rarotonga, at which point we started to buck up. As I walked down the wharf, I could not bring myself to turn around to look at the
Aquila d’Oro
. ‘I’ve done it,’ I told myself. ‘I didn’t need to do it and I certainly don’t need to do it again. I will never get on a boat like that again.’ All I wanted to see was land. To be honest, even though I’ve always loved boating, I’ve never got sailing.

Many years later I finally had the boat of my dreams — roughly 60 feet, 40 tonnes and $2 million worth of it. I prided myself on my ability to berth this boat singlehandedly. When I was a child, my father used to take me to watch people making a hash of backing boats down ramps. That was his idea of entertainment. In my case, boat and man were one. There were times when people at the marina applauded when they saw me bring this
boat in unaided. I was piloting and also doing the ropes and fenders on this huge thing.

Once I was bringing it in with my eldest daughter Lucy on board. We were outside the breakwater and doing seven knots.

‘Hold it on this course,’ I said to Lucy, ‘while I go down and put the fenders on.’

I left her in charge, thinking nothing could go wrong at that speed. Little did I know while I was on the lower deck that Lucy was fighting with the wheel, trying to get the boat to remain on course.

Then, vaguely, in one ear I heard a not terribly alarming scream — definitely not the sort you would expect to hear from someone facing death. I looked up and could see that we were moments away from driving straight into the breakwater.

I leapt up. Lucy had completely removed herself from the wheel and was standing metres away with a look of inevitability about her. I managed to avoid complete disaster by the narrowest slither of margins. I was seconds away from not only making a substantial insurance claim but also from that thing boaties hate more than any other — embarrassment.