By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (2 page)

I climbed onto my 1953 Triumph and looked up the hill to where a group of my friends were standing, looking on. My old childhood friend Tommy Rochford was grinning at me, cropped hair gelled stiff and sticking straight up from his head. Him and Mick Bolger, Caz and Ziggy Balinski: the five of us used to hang out all the time. In the summer we’d float miles down the river on inner tubes. Mostly, though, we rode motorbikes. It was Tommy and his Maico 400 Enduro that got me hooked: I remember listening to him racing through the woods above our house.

‘Good seeing you, Charley,’ he called out now. ‘I’ll see youse when you get back.’

Russ started his Norton 850 Commando, and Mungo his Triumph Trident T160. I fished out the crude map I’d drawn on a scrap of paper.

‘I thought we had GPS,’ Russ said.

‘We do. This is for back-up. Annamoe to Dublin, Dublin to Kilkeel. Then over here,’ I tapped the bottom right-hand corner, ‘that’s Australia.’

‘Right. See you there, then.’

Our first stop was Kilkeel in County Down, where we planned to stay the night. The next morning we were due to join a scallop boat that would take us to the Isle of Man. In all the years of the TT I’d never made it there; now I would be arriving on a dredger.

It was suddenly a little surreal, trundling down the drive while Tommy and the others waved from the hill where I used to jump my old Yamaha DT100. Glancing back at Dad I felt a mixture of excitement and sadness to be leaving him. I thought of Olly, Doone and Kinvara - at least I would see them briefly on Tuesday in London. But after that I wouldn’t be back until August. I hadn’t intended to do another expedition so soon and I had a lump in my throat and a bit of a wobble in the old chin. Yet in the same moment I could not have been more excited.

The countryside we were riding through now was so familiar; the roads wet, pine trees covering the lower slopes that dominate this part of Wicklow. I might live in London but this was home away from home and it was a thrill to be back. As we climbed the hills we passed a spot where Dad and I had filmed an autobiographical film in 1991 called
I Dreamt I Woke Up
with John Hurt and Janet McTeer. There had been a scene involving a mummified body in a peat bog. When lunchtime came we took off to the Roundwood Inn as we always did. We didn’t bother to tape the area, just took the equipment down to the village and left the dummy half-buried in the marsh. While we were having lunch a couple of Australian backpackers came across what they thought was a bronze-age body. Convinced that they’d made the discovery of the century, they phoned the police in Dublin. The local guard, Sergeant Cronen, knew all about the filming, but as no one bothered to involve him, he didn’t tell them anything. By the time we got back up the hill the place was alive with
gardai
and reporters. It was hysterical, particularly when Dad asked them what the fuck they thought they were doing trampling all over his film set.

Remember what I said about the weather in Ireland being like nowhere else in the world? We were hit by every kind of weather imaginable on this first leg through the mountains to Dublin. Wind, rain, sunshine, hail and even snow.

I was a bit worried about my saddle, which was a tad uncomfortable - the bike was designed for blatting about town, not really for long runs like this. Ewan had ordered a similar bike after seeing a feature on ‘The Baron Speed Shop’ in
Classic Bike
magazine. The Speed Shop is all about ‘Bobbers’: cut-down stock bikes; a style that grew up in America in the 1950s. When I saw what they’d produced I’d wanted one myself.

At the beginning of the year I phoned the owner, Dick Smith, and arranged to meet him at his workshop. Dick works with his partner Del Russell, burning the midnight oil to build these really incredible hand-crafted bikes. He’s real south London - he was like the kind of guys who hung out at the Ace Cafe back in the sixties.

Dick met me in a quiet residential street in Catford and led me down a grassy alley to his workshop. Well, I say workshop - it was actually a garden shed. The end wall was draped with the skull and crossbones, a rigid frame hung from the ceiling and boxes of parts were stacked right up to the roof. It was barely big enough to swing a cat, never mind build a bespoke motorbike.

Leaning on the work bench, Dick lit a cigarette. ‘So what kind of thing were you thinking of?’

Good question. I’d always known what I wanted in my mind’s eye, but to describe it . . .

Ten minutes later he was nodding. ‘So we’re talking about something in black, something with big bore TT pipes coming up under the crank case . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That sounds about right.’

‘Rigid frame with a two-inch stretch,’ he was making notes mentally. ‘Like a sort of 1930s broad-track racer. OK, mate; leave it with me and I’ll scribble something down.’

The rigid frame had been stretched all right but as for ‘something in black’ . . . We all wanted black, apparently. Dick delivered something in cherry red instead. I suppose that’s designers for you - you tell them what you want and they build what they’ve always wanted to build. You pay for it and they’re happy. But then so are you because the bike is absolutely gorgeous.

 

Although we had no back-up vehicles this time, we had planned as much as we could. That was only sensible: you can’t just travel across the world without proper planning. We’d created an operations centre at our old workshop on Avonmore Road, with computers and maps, and books covering some forty different countries scattered all over the place. This time we needed not only a route, but also a rough idea of some of the transport we would use. We’d had lots of ideas: North Sea trawlers, the Danish Coastguard, the ICE-T train in Germany. There were a bunch of people working on it, most of whom had worked on our three previous trips - Lucy, Jo, Ollie and Lisa. We worked out there were some thirty-eight countries to get through between Ireland and Australia - including China, which had closed the border from Nepal into Tibet. We had to find a way around that problem and we had to consider the politics of other places. So much of Asia was in a state of flux: Afghanistan, Pakistan . . . Burma was closed to any kind of film-maker. We also wanted to do something with UNICEF along the way, as we had with Long Way Round and Long Way Down.

It was a movable feast and things changed all the time: much of what we thought we could do we found out was impossible, and some of what we thought might be impossible turned out to be OK. After a lot of hard graft we came up with a route and a list of different forms of transport. The first handover, if you like, was from motorbike to the fishing boat at Kilkeel and it would be monumentous.

That’s not a word, is it? My mum’s always telling me that being dragged around the world without proper schooling has given me what she calls a sort of ‘unsophisticatedness’. (Which isn’t really a word either.)

It felt
monumentous
to me, though, standing at Kilkeel harbour later that afternoon. I wondered how big our boat would be: some looked pretty small. My sense of adventure began to wane as I had visions of massive waves and throwing up all the way to the Isle of Man. Oh well, I’d find out before the sun came up.

We were due to sail with the morning tide and had booked a hotel in town for the night. What we hadn’t counted on was the Orangemen’s marching season. I’d always thought the bands marched in July yet here we were in April and they were out in numbers. We were told they’d be parading up and down outside the hotel until at least midnight. After that there was a disco, and my room was right above it. I had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

Upstairs I went through my gear. When Russ first talked about the trip he was thinking about the spirit of the old days, a sort of ‘round the world in eighty days’ feel. His forte is getting things done, working with production teams and logistics, but this would give him a chance to pursue some of his passions too. I just knew that somewhere along the line we’d be on a steam train. A friend of mine called Richard Gauntlet runs an antique shop in Pimlico, and he found this old case and had my initials printed on it. It was great, and I loved it, but it was also, I have to say, really heavy. Now I was handing my bike over, it was mine to carry pretty much till we got to Australia.

 

The alarm woke me at four-forty-five a.m. At least I think it did. I don’t know if I actually got any sleep; the night was full of drums and flutes; disco music pounding into my room. Bleary-eyed but excited I met Russ and Mungo downstairs and the three of us made our way to the harbour.

I needn’t have worried about the size of the boat. We would be sailing on the
Q-Varl
of Ramsey, Isle of Man, one of the largest scallop vessels out there. The skipper was a white-haired, bearded guy called Raymond Hatton, who spoke with a broad Lancastrian accent. He’d been in the merchant navy before becoming a scallop diver and buying his own boat. In fact it actually belonged to the whole Hatton family, which meant that if he wanted some time off either his son or his grandson Danny could run the crew. This seemed a great idea to me. He introduced us to the five crewmen. One of them - a tall, lanky guy - seemed familiar. I soon realised why: this was Conor Cummins, a road racer who also rides short circuit in the British Superstock series. He’s lapped the Isle of Man at an average speed of 126.4 mph, only six miles an hour slower than John McGuinness’s lap record. I had thought Conor was part of the regular crew, but it turned out that his cousin worked the boat. Conor told me that when he found out we’d be aboard he decided to come along for the craic.

After requesting permission to board we took a look around. The boat was blue-hulled with a white wheelhouse; a dredging arm on each side with ten enormous chain-link scallop nets. It was tall, I mean high in the water, three decks: one for the gear, another where they sorted the catch and the fish deck where the bagged scallops were stored.

The channel was narrow and we sailed with the tide because Raymond wanted plenty of water under the keel. It still looked very difficult to me; we had to zigzag to make it beyond the tight harbour walls before negotiating a sandbank. It was a masterful piece of captaincy, all performed against a dramatic backdrop - street lights reflected in the still water, the town dominated by low cloud draping the Mountains of Mourne. I stood on deck thinking: ‘This is it.’ We were leaving our first block of land, heading out on a brand-new journey.

Russ came over. ‘They say there’s a bit of weather out there: that’ll be a laugh.’

I looked sideways at him. ‘Will they give us breakfast, d’you reckon?’

Would they ever - we were soon presented with kippers, bacon, eggs, toast and beans, the first of many fabulous meals on our trip. As we ate we discussed our schedule for the day. The plan was to steam across the Irish Sea to the twelve-mile fishing zone round the Isle of Man. The zone was known as Area 7, and was closed from June to the end of October to allow scallop stocks to recover. From the beginning of November the boats could fish from six p.m. until nine p.m. If they wanted to fish after nine p.m. they had to go outside the twelve-mile limit where the catch was a lot more scarce.

As we headed into the open sea I was soon caught up in the adventure of it all. David Jackson, who’d cooked breakfast, showed us the engine room where 500 hp of diesel was hammering away so loudly you couldn’t think without ear defenders. The crew had bunks with alarms fitted above them so that when the dredges were down and they grabbed an hour’s sleep, they could be woken in time to bring the gear in. They’d spend a week at sea, sleeping little and working hard: fishing until the fish room was stocked with three to four hundred large bags of scallops. Each bag was worth between £65 and £100 and they needed to fill at least four every time they pulled up the dredges.

It was a four-hour steam to the fishing grounds, 46 nautical miles. We were travelling at 8.4 knots per hour; a knot being 1.16 nautical miles. (The difference between a nautical mile and a land or statute mile is that the nautical mile takes account of the curvature of the earth.) When we got to the fishing grounds we gave the crew a hand with the dredges, which are hoisted by crane, hooked on to two massive booms and then run out on a cable and dragged along the sea bed. Raymond’s grandson Danny told me that one time he was working the cable and chatting away to another member of the crew when the wire ran out: it just rolled off the winch and disappeared over the side leaving thousands of pounds of dredge lying on the bottom.

An hour and a half after we’d dropped them the dredges were hauled in again and the catch was shaken into a trough that runs along the sides of the boat. The scallops and much of the debris that came with them were shunted to the conveyor on the deck below - a great clattering, vibrating machine that sorted everything in about fifteen minutes. Along with scallops we had lumps of rock, squid, starfish, as well as scallops that were less than 110 mm in size. These had to be thrown back. Raymond told me that if the boat was found to have even two or three undersize scallops among the catch they’d be fined at least £500. The penalties for fishing a ‘closed box’ - a no-go area where you were not allowed to fish - were far more severe: a £7,000 fine and your gear confiscated.

The crew shared the work between them; when the alarms went off they’d pile out of their bunks and on to the deck, music blasting through speakers made from a couple of old tool boxes. As soon as the catch had been shaken out the nets were back in the water.

Meanwhile, David fried up some of the catch for lunch, fresh scallops with a bit of garlic and a green salad. God, this was the life.

After a couple of hours at the fishing grounds we headed for Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man. Russ and I leant on the rail with the wind in our faces, watching the rocky coastline, the surf crashing against the base of the cliffs. A lighthouse dominated the headland and we chugged into the harbour with whitewashed buildings scattered across the hillside.