All Piss and Wind (13 page)

Firm, fair, but enlivened by a touch of affectionate humour – just like The Amateurs itself.

Y
OU CAN'T SAIL
any real distance at sea without getting wet. It just doesn't happen. At the least opportune moment the helmsman will lose concentration for a second and allow the combined motion of the boat and the next wave to dump half a ton of sea in the cockpit.

‘Sorry, fellas. Never mind, it's only water!' is the customary lame attempt at mollification.

‘Sure, mate. Care to empty my boots?'

Worse is the effect of steady rain. Despite the most careful raising of your hood, the deluge will inevitably find some way of depositing an annoying little trickle of cold water down your neck. Gradually, over a three-hour watch, this steady stream will completely soak your thermals and underwear. Old hands like to wrap a towel around their necks, but that eventually becomes saturated as well. As you finally go below the options are clear: either sleep in wet clothes, or spend an exhausting half hour slowly stripping off your sodden
garments while you try to find some dry replacements at the bottom of your sea-bag. Nice choice.

But let me be the first to acknowledge that there have been huge advances in the science of protecting sailors against the elements. It's interesting to follow the development of wet-weather clothing and the way it has been influenced by changes in the sport of ocean racing. When the crusty Norwegian sea captain Helly Juell Hansen swallowed the anchor back in 1877 he turned his hand to making oiled canvas jackets for the thousands of square-rigger crews whose courage kept the wheels of world trade turning. These heavy, stiff ‘oilies' made Captain Hansen a fortune, and were the first recognised clothing designed and sold specifically for use in wet weather at sea.

The generic nickname ‘oilie' stuck. Before my first Sydney– Hobart forty years ago the skipper quite sensibly told me he wasn't interested in taking any crew south who didn't have their own wet-weather gear. Dale Munro, a member of the crew on Russell Slade's famous
Janzoon II
, sewed me a bespoke jacket and pants at his dusty upstairs workroom in the inner-city suburb of Chippendale. I can remember Dale carefully taking my measurements like a Savile Row tailor and then transferring those dimensions onto a graded set of cardboard patterns. Each component of the jacket and pants was then marked out on the bright orange rubberised cloth that he eventually cut and stitched together to make my oilies. That gear weighed a ton, but it did me proud for the next ten years – until the metal press-studs and buckles all slowly rusted holes through the bib and straps. Back then the offshore community in Sydney was so small it could be serviced by one or two small manufacturers. Today, many thousands of sets of wet-weather clobber are sold each year in Australia, and they're no longer called ‘oilies', or even ‘wet-weather gear'. The distributors will settle for nothing less than calling them ‘technical clothing'.

Those of us with grey hair (if any at all) remember a simple test we used a generation ago to determine whether a boat was doing serious
offshore work. All anyone needed to do was open a hatch and take a deep whiff. If you were greeted by that unmistakably pungent odour of stale sweat mixed with ripening mould then you could be sure the yacht had been ocean racing. That test no longer works. Modern high-tech gear doesn't retain perspiration or saltwater, and rarely gives off the distinctive pong of old-time bluewater sailing. But it's taken a generation of development in cloth and design to achieve that level of efficiency, and the progress has come at a price. What we outlay these days for a good-quality jacket, pants and thermals might otherwise buy most yachties a decent second-hand car.

A no-nonsense little local manufacturer named Marlin released the first Australian line of ‘off the rack' wet-weather gear for serious offshore sailing back in the 1960s, followed soon after by Taft. (The clothing from Taft tended to be lighter in construction, mainly bright yellow spray jackets that were popular with centreboard sailors.) Those early Marlin jackets were more durable, but the price we paid for heavier construction was that they were absolute sweat-boxes. They kept the water off fairly well, but retained almost as much inside.

For ocean-racing crew, perspiration is as much the enemy as wind, waves and rain. When a body is working hard and constantly, it loses moisture at a rate of up to one litre per hour. The early generations of wet-weather gear were made from PVC and unlined. The cloth didn't ‘breathe'. After 20 minutes of intense physical work on deck or packing a spinnaker below it felt as if you'd been wrapped in a plastic bag. Skin often chafed raw around the most common pressure points at the elbows and knees (let alone the unmentionable agonies of the dreaded ‘gunnel bum'). The other great disadvantage of PVC was that as the air and water temperature dropped, it would stiffen. By the time we'd reached Tasman Island in the Sydney–Hobart, our Marlin trousers were so rigid they'd just about stand up by themselves.

The first real technical breakthrough in off-the-rack gear came
in the late 1970s when Line 7, a New Zealand company, entered the market with what it described as ‘high-performance offshore wear'. The cloth was bullet-proof, the jacket zipper truly heavy-duty, and there were robust Velcro closures at the ankles and wrists. A customer could order this snazzy new Line 7 gear in any colour they liked, as long as it was white.

The first range was unlined, but the Kiwis then blitzed their competition by adding a nylon/taffeta inner skin to the jackets and pants. This distinctive blue lining reduced the perspiration problem significantly, but there was one small difficulty: the colour ran. The manufacturers and retailers had to cope with hundreds of angry yachties who'd seen their best white crew T-shirts ruined by deep blue stains around the armpits. Responding to this shortcoming, Line 7 advised everyone to just chuck their gear into the tide for a while, claiming the saltwater would seal in the dye.

Another problem emerged after the New Zealand oilies had been stored away in lockers during the first off-season. The cloth was supposed to have been specially treated against mould, but if you left your Line 7s anywhere near damp the inside surface of the fabric would soon be covered in nasty black splotches. I still have my old white Line 7 jacket from 1982. The zipper seized with saltwater corrosion years ago, the hood has some mould spots and the lining still runs. But the cloth itself doesn't look like wearing out. It was amazingly tough gear.

The next evolutionary step in ‘oilie' development was prompted by specialist demands from within the sport. The rise of professional trans-oceanic racing undoubtedly supercharged the development of more durable and user-friendly clothing to match the athleticism of the crews and the terrible punishment they took. Hundreds of sailors were now racing through the extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean every year. Their exploits were regularly featured in the international media and those marketing opportunities were too good to miss.

Henri Lloyd created a range of special gear for the Whitbread Round-the-World teams that featured a new system of coated nylon fabrics with linings. These were much tougher and more flexible than standard wear, but very expensive. During this period a loophole in the law allowed foreign-made wet-weather gear to be imported into Australia as ‘rainwear', a category that didn't attract sales tax. But the import duty was still substantial. Any yachtie going overseas was sure to be asked by his mates to bring back a set of Henri Lloyd gear, duty free. A new Australian firm, Burke, spotted this retail niche and soon established a strong foothold at the budget end of the market with locally manufactured clothing. (They continue to offer a good range of wet-weather gear that tends to be more popular with day-sailers and coastal cruisers than among the offshore community.)

And then along came Musto. In the mid-1980s their signature red and white gear suddenly seemed to be on every boat. The Musto company is English, but it was Ian Treleaven's marketing skill and energy in New Zealand that propelled the brand to such ubiquity in the Southern Hemisphere. The gear was strongly built in coated nylon, with Cordura reinforcement in the seats and knees of the trousers. Musto soon gained a reputation for durability and was also quick to spot that ‘offshore' and ‘ocean' grades of the gear could sell side by side, aimed at different levels of use. This differentiation is now an accepted aspect of the market with most manufacturers supplying at least three grades of clothing. The rise of Musto inevitably put huge pressure on the older brands. Line 7, once the undisputed market leader, now had difficulty moving with the times and was still manufacturing in PVC. The company also tended to sell its familiar old lines too cheaply in an attempt to compete with Musto. It's always a serious marketing error to under-value your own products, and Line 7 eventually retreated from the wet-weather business altogether.

But nobody stays at the top of the tree forever. By the time of the
fiftieth Sydney–Hobart in 1994 Musto had resurgent manufacturers Henri Lloyd and Helly Hansen snapping at their heels. They knew that to challenge for market dominance they would need to deliver a reliable product that featured the latest breakthrough – breathable cloth. A company in the UK that specialised in supplying material for outdoor apparel had devised Gore-Tex, and a new generation of yachting gear was born. The gold/yellow cloth that signalled the patented wonder fabric burst onto the scene like sunshine. If you didn't have that Gore-Tex logo on your oilies then you just weren't competitive. At the same time, Helly Hansen was developing its own alternative breathable fabric.

Early versions of that cloth were not without their problems. Salt dried onto the exterior surface and stopped the jacket from breathing. A heavy crewmember sitting in a puddle of deck water could exert so much compression on the fabric that water would be forced back up through the micropores that allowed the cloth to ‘breathe'. It's no fun discovering you've got a wet rear-end after just paying out more than a week's wages for new gear. In Australia, competition between the Henri Lloyd and Helly Hansen brands for the ‘breathable' market was so fierce that local prices dipped below overseas levels. When some competitors in the second half of the 2000/01 Volvo race switched to a new style of slightly lighter clothing manufactured by the British company Gill, the battle for market share broadened even more.

The contemporary trend is for lighter, simpler, more flexible clothing. Separate linings are gone – that function is now built in as the inside layer of the multi-laminated cloth. Jackets have been stripped down and streamlined to the point where they are now no more than a racing ‘shell'. The new Slam clothing from Italy has made quick gains in the high-performance market and features an advantage close to the hearts of all distance sailors: a genuinely waterproof zipper. External pockets – not long ago the hallmark of quality gear – are now largely dispensed with, replaced by sleek
hand-warmers. Some manufacturers are now releasing styles cut specially for the female figure and there's a heightened awareness of specialised applications, and of building clothing to a range of price points. While real quality is never cheap, competition between brands means that the local dollar price of top-end gear has remained virtually static for the past four years. This has largely been achieved by manufacturing in China, where labour is cheap.

Consumers are now also protected against exaggerated performance claims by an agreed set of standards. ‘Waterproofing' is accurately rated by resistance to millimetres of mercury pressure. ‘Breathability' is tested in grams of absorption per 24 hours. You can check this information on the swing tags attached to all new gear. But never be fooled into thinking the latest high-tech clothing will guarantee perfect dryness. Sometime soon you're going to get wet through. Trust me.

I
T WAS A PECULIAR
feeling, bobbing up and down off North Head on Boxing Day, beer in hand, as guest crew on a solid little 32-footer. We'd come out to cheer the Sydney–Hobart fleet on its way. For the first time in many years, a combination of circumstances had prevented me from doing the race.
Bright Morning Star
, my usual ride south, surged past us, close-hauled on starboard tack. Familiar faces waved at me from the rail and I suffered that strange pang of separation all sailors feel when their boat heads to the horizon without them. But I was also cheered by the knowledge that within a week or so the comfortable 51-foot sloop would again be my home, this time for the relaxed delivery back to Sydney. Cruising has its own special pleasures.

Courtesy demanded that I make a call to the boat from Hobart airport while waiting for my kitbag to emerge on the luggage carousel. ‘How's it going, fellas? Be there in half an hour or so. Want me to pick up anything on the way?'

These pleasantries were abruptly brushed aside. There was dramatic news. ‘You're not gonna believe this mate, but Big Tony's not coming with us.'

Tony Purkiss, a deeply experienced, happy-go-lucky yachtie from Newcastle was a regular and much-loved member of our crew. Tony had a reasonable excuse for jumping ship: he'd suffered a major heart attack during the New Year's Eve celebrations at Constitution Dock and was now recovering in Royal Hobart Hospital.

Big T had been incredibly lucky. There happened to be a doctor on the boat enjoying the party that night who'd recognised the difference between normal ‘tired and emotional' behaviour and the symptoms of cardiac trauma. Another member of the crew then remembered his compulsory First Aid training well and managed to keep Tony alive with intense CPR until an ambulance could make its way to the boat through the dockside throng of midnight revellers. Tony stabilised quickly and was scheduled to fly back to Newcastle in a few days. His oversize sea boots were filled by two fit young uni students keen for an adventurous ride back to Sydney. The rest of our motley crew comprised the co-owners, Hugh O'Neil and Dal Wilson, Hugh's son Richard, the ever-dependable Steve Grellis as nominated Guesser, and myself. No sheilas. Standards of personal hygiene and grooming were unlikely to reach great heights over the next ten days.

The dynamics of racing and cruising offer stark contrasts, the most obvious of which is that in coastal cruising mode you can actually stop. This profound advantage struck me with heart-warming force on the first night as we swung gently on the pick in the sheltered waters of Port Arthur. Everyone tucked into a feast of fresh prawns, crayfish, chilled white wine and a crisp salad – all consumed in civilised leisure as we sat around a real saloon table with Vivaldi playing on the stereo and the boat completely still. What a delightful contrast this made with trying to shovel in a few
quick gobfuls of stew while bashing to windward during a race! The light lingers well beyond 2100 at 43ºS in summer and that first serene evening helped put everyone in a holiday frame of mind. We took our coffees on deck to admire the ghostly outline of Port Arthur's ruins at dusk, and the mist hanging over the nearby Isle des Morts where so many of the prison's wretched inmates were buried. It seemed so typical of Australia that such a beautiful part of the country should also have such an ugly colonial past.

Cockpit cushions! Any lingering doubts that we weren't seriously in cruising mode were scotched the following morning when a pair of these pristine white seat-softeners emerged from the forepeak. Dal Wilson, who'd commissioned the upholstery as his Christmas present to
Bright Morning Star
, was so moved by this moment of luxury that he immediately rang Mel Godfrey in Sydney on the mobile to announce that her splendid creations had finally been deployed. ‘Up anchor, fellas, and let's go cruising!'

We loped along behind Maria Island reaching at nine knots under full main and the #3 genoa, letting the yacht's generous waterline length do all the work. But those sparkling early conditions soon gave way to typical Tasmanian coastal weather: alternate bursts of rain, calm, sunshine and savage little 40-knot gusts that often clocked through more than ninety degrees in seconds. It kept us all interested until we rounded Schouten Island and sprinted up the Freycinet Peninsula to a late-afternoon anchorage in Wineglass Bay. Half a dozen icy-cold Cascades appeared in the cockpit a nanosecond after the skipper had pronounced himself ‘Finished with Engines' for the day.

Wineglass was at its glorious best and remains one of the most beautiful stopovers on the entire east coast. It's a perfect anchorage for yachts – a high, narrow entry provides immediate protection from the sea (the stem of the ‘wineglass'), and the bay itself then opens out into a broad semicircle of safe mooring water and good holding for any anchor. From the boat you survey a perfect horse
shoe-shaped beach with brilliant white sand and craggy rock mountains at each end. It's no accident that Wineglass is the favourite R&R stop for yachts returning north after the Sydney–Hobart.

We soon recognised some familiar profiles mixed in with the tough little local cray boats and cruisers:
Merit
,
AFR Midnight Rambler
,
First National
(that year's Sydney–Hobart handicap winner), and a mob of Victorian yachts returning from the Melbourne–Hobart event. The friendly VHF chatter between boats was broken only for Morning Devotions – the 0745 Tasmanian Coastal Weather forecast – which is always heard in respectful silence. Our tiny Zodiac rubber dinghy took an eternity to inflate by hand pump (triggering the inevitable Viagra jokes) but the opportunity to get ashore prompted some notable heroics. The youngsters embarked on a hike/climb expedition to conquer the closest peak, while the owner's son, Richard, swam the 200 chilly metres from the beach back to the boat – an impressive effort from a bloke who'd not long before lost the use of an arm in a motorcycle accident.

Our rough plan, weather permitting, was to set sail the following afternoon and continue up the coast overnight, through Banks Strait and on to Deal Island the next day. For once, the wind gods were kind. By midnight
Bright Morning Star
was abeam of Eddystone Point, sauntering along at six knots with sheets eased in the warm glow of a full moon. Only half-concentrating on the helm my mind was swiftly snapped to attention by the familar ‘swoosh' of broken water. We'd been joined by dolphins. An extended family pod of more than 20 of these captivating creatures played tirelessly at the bow or arched through the air in stunning displays of synchronised swimming. The glimmer of moonlight on their glistening backs formed a vivid visual signature to this unforgettable moment. The cheerful, exuberant company of dolphins is one of the sheer delights of blue-water sailing.

Not so delightful was a robust cold front roaring up from the
south. The unflappable computer-generated voice of the automated weather sked cheerily promised us 30–45 knots and average seas of four metres. Time to reassess our plan. We could get to Deal Island without problems, but it may not be such an agreeable destination if this southerly system went north and kept us pinned down there for a few days. Flinders Island was the better option, but by the time we'd decided to make for the remote fishing outpost of Lady Barron (the closest sheltered anchorage), we were already well to the west of Cape Barren Island. That put us on the wrong side of a large lump of Tasmania. There was now nothing for it but to take the long, difficult route to Lady Barron up Franklin Sound.

With the wind already gusting to 25 knots Hugh made the prudent call to tackle this tricky passage under motor. The scenery here has a transfixing wild beauty, and it's easy to forget that in many places the Sound shoals to just three metres.
Bright Morning Star
draws 2.7 metres, and it was now close to low tide. For the next few hours we were all kept busy taking turns with the binoculars to pick up the sequence of tiny navigational leads and transit points dotted along the shore that mark the only safe route. Steve made endless trips up and down the companionway calling headings, watching the depth sounder and checking the GPS positions against our track on the chart. There was a collective sigh of relief when someone recognised the low roofline of the Fishermen's Co-op dead ahead, and a string of small buoys marking the entry channel.

As we finally inched towards the wharf at Lady Barron in late afternoon light we could see
First National
already tied up, snug alongside an old long-line trawler. Their delivery crew sensibly eased the yacht's docklines to allow us a berth in-between. They didn't fancy their lightweight fibreglass hull being crunched all night between our substantial tonnage and a wall of rusting steel. This seamanlike courtesy also gave them the prime outside position for a spot of sunset fishing off the stern. Within minutes they'd hauled in a bucketload of decent-sized trevally for breakfast. On
BMS
our interests were more to do with issues of cleanliness. For a modest $2-in-the-slot the ablution block behind the Co-op provided us with our first hot shower in four days. Now, off to the pub!

The bar of the Furneaux Tavern would see a fair bit of us as the predicted NW blow set in. Our masthead instruments were now registering gusts of more than 50 knots as rain squalls churned the surface of the Sound into a soup of spuming whitecaps. There wasn't much point taking on Bass Strait in those conditions if we didn't need to. We shouted ourselves a slap-up dinner in the pub restaurant and waited a mere 90 minutes between ordering and the arrival of the food.

Half the main courses listed on the menu featured wallaby meat – they're in plague proportions on Flinders – and as we waited for our meals to arrive there was widespread speculation that the chef had popped out to shoot a few. Never mind, have another glass of this quite passable Merlot. There was a memorable full-and-frank exchange of political views over dessert in which the co-owners began from positions somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan while the young students gamely held the progressive/humanist line on behalf of the Leaders of Tomorrow. Needless to say, the Reptiles of the Press (and this writer in particular) copped a hammering from both sides. Truce was only declared over coffee-and-a-dash back at the boat.

But no matter how convivial the company, cabin fever always tends to set in after a couple of days of enforced shore time. Dal made a strong bid for the ‘Captain Grumpy' award by complaining he was being denied his favourite ration of baked beans at breakfast. It was explained, with considerable tact, that this predilection placed him in a minority of one and that securing a feed of beans might therefore require him to exercise his own culinary skills. Rising to the challenge he cooked breakfast the next morning (for the one and only time on the trip) and soon after we all inevitably needed to vent our newly created reserves of internally generated
methane. But we waited until Dal came below to make our point in a wordless – but nevertheless eloquent – way. These things happen when there are no womenfolk around to moderate the unfortunate loutish extremes of male behaviour.

The timetable was now getting tight for the uni boys, who needed to be back in Sydney within three days. Every weather report on the radio was transcribed and exhaustively analysed. Hopes for departure rose and fell with each forecast. Clearly, we needed our own predictive measure as a reliable guide to local conditions. Steve eventually provided the appropriate mechanism: ‘Listen, fellas, there's only one infallible method. If your last piss of the night off the stern doesn't blow back on you then it should be OK to leave port the next morning.' Immediately dubbed
The Grellis Index
, this foolproof system will no doubt eventually take its place beside the Beaufort Scale as an invaluable guide for seafarers. Meanwhile, those of us who tended to place more trust in the boffins at the Bureau of Meteorology kept listening to the weather skeds.

On the third morning at Lady Barron we spotted indicators that seemed like they might develop into a 12-hour gap between low-pressure systems. It certainly looked worth a go. We checked with the brassy woman in the public bar of the Furneaux Tavern who doubled as Lady Barron's Coastal Patrol radio operator. ‘Well, boys. If youse are thinking of going, youse had better piss off right now. This break won't last long. Two or three hours tops. See youse all next year!'

So out we nosed, back down the narrow channel and through the treacherous tidal race of the Pot Boil. Open sea at last! The breeze quickly strengthened again, just as the lady in the bar had predicted, and we sailed with three reefs in the main and the storm jib. That gave us more than enough horsepower as we thrashed into Bass Strait, just holding a course for Cape Howe. It was wet, hard sailing but by now our pride wouldn't let us contemplate turning back into the protective lee of Flinders Island. After a full rotation
of watches we were rewarded by slowly moderating conditions. We shook out the reefs and changed up to the #3 genoa. From mid-afternoon the breeze lightened even further and went NNE – a ‘dead muzzler', bang on the nose. The boys had a 0730 bus to catch from Eden to Sydney the following morning so by the time Gabo Island came into sight the motor was running. In the end we made it into Twofold Bay with five hours to spare.

Somehow the magic of cruising seems to diminish once you're stopping at familiar ports and sailing along well-known coastline. The good burghers of Eden lost their fascination with visiting yachts long ago and now tend to treat returning Sydney–Hobart crews as a business opportunity and little more. (The one noble exception are the generous people of the Volunteer Coastal Patrol who always let us use their hot shower and are happy to pass on the latest weather forecasts.) Sydney is only a two-day sail north of Eden and none of us felt like staying a minute longer than was necessary to provision, refuel and top up the water tanks. ‘Let go for'd! Let go aft! Give us your best course for South Head, Mr Navigator!' The stiff SW breeze had finally returned and
Bright Morning Star
was soon romping towards home. In one perfect watch we sailed from Bermagui to abeam of Montagu Island in three hours. It was absolutely glorious, stress-free sailing that reminded us all of just how much we enjoy being offshore.