Cassowary Crossing

BLUE WATER MANIA
(c) David Astle

Midnight, and the waves in Bass Strait are looking for havoc. A 35-knot gale blows the rain horizontal. The only scrap of colour in the murk is a man swaying in orange oilskins. Steve McConaghy stands at the wheel of Leroy Brown, a 40-foot yacht bound for Hobart.

Suddenly a gust fills the jib and spears the boat into a trough. Nose first, a dolphin dive. Steve is hurled from the helm. Around his waist a canvas tether, as skinny as a dog leash, keeps him from leaving the deck altogether.

The bow submerges. The mainsail swings half-circle. The sail is bashed down. The yacht lies sideways. Somehow the keel’s leaden bulb keeps the boat upright in crises like these. (Crisis is my word. Warren Wieckmann the captain will later describe our Chinese gybe as a hiccup.)

Water gushes into the cabin. ‘A shitload,’ recalls Pete, a crewman. ‘I woke to see fucking Niagara.’ The sleepers scramble up the companionway. They reach the deck to see Ashley unharnessed up forward. He’s loose and drifting towards New Zealand. Fitzy grips the shroud – the gruesome term for the steel cable guying the mast – and reaches into the drink . He grabs the kid by arm and hauls him on board.

Down the same side, Angus, Dave and I clutch the rail, our shoulders and torsos immersed. Skipper Warren would compare my eyes to two fried eggs. (I say fear is therapeutic.) Angus on the other hand is trying to keep his camcorder dry. Dave, a laconic South African who makes sails for a living is twisted into an L: the water triggering the collar on his lifejacket to self-inflate.

For those unfamiliar with sailing jargon, a ‘Chinese’ refers to a boat pivoting against the wind. In effect the wind turns the rigging inside-out. The boat strains against herself, sail versus hull, an internal tug-of-war with the shell almost exploding. The deck becomes a slippery dip.

Quick hands gather in the jib, the smaller sail up forward. The wheel is yanked by degrees. Inch by inch the bow noses downwind. The deck flattens out. All the time the gale demands for actions to be wordless and instinctive and calm. A storm jib is dragged from the beak and hoisted into service. Winches scream. Sheets are retightened, the sails refilling. Leroy Brown powers on, Hobart or bust.

**

A month before the Sydney to Hobart, the paperwork is macabre. The Cruising Yacht Club of Sydney (CYC), the race’s organisers, request the colour of every crewman’s overalls and next of kins’ phone numbers. Just in case. A place like Bass Striat has a reputation for collecting sailors. So shallow is the seaway the waves can double in a blink. Boats are known to flip or tear apart. Whales can shatter rudders. Gales uproot masts like toothpicks from cheese.

As the crew completes the forms I realise that ocean racing has death as a constant possibility. Not by fluke is a lifevest packed with strobe and whistle and dye marker. On your hip rides an EPIRB (Emergency Positioning indicating Radio Beacon), a Walkman in shape that speaks directly to satellites. Tear the tab, pop the aerial and your body can be sited in a four-metre square.

Nevertheless men drown. Tied to the rail you might sink with your boat. The boom can swing across the cockpit unnanounced and smash your skull, or despatch you clueless into Neptune’s arms. The list of fates go on. If you ever thought yachting was the realm of pansies and rich bastards, sail to Hobart and open your eyes.

**

I’ll start at the start. Leroy Brown is nicknamed the dog. To a man the uniform T-shirts and caps show a nasty mongrel defending his territory. A hairy pair of balls hang between his hindlegs. A chain, once attached to a junkyard tyre, is deliberately broken.

The same image adorns the boat’s spinnaker. On a full-blooded run, the wind up the clacker, there’s no sight to equal the hunchbacked mutt drooling at ten times its lifesize. Below the dog are the words MEANER THAN.

Leroy Brown the song doubles as the boat’s warcry. Warren keeps a tape in storage to play in docks on triumphant occasions. Loudly too. Nothing Mr Wieckmann does is twee or pussyfooty.

The man made his money in plastics, but not before working as engineer on WA oilrigs. (‘I met my future ex-wife in Derby 30 years ago.’) His current fiancee, a vibrant blonde half his age, has blithely signed a document to release her groom on frequent and unspecified men’s business, sailng being the greater part of this.

Back in 1987, racing in the Bay of Iraq, Wozza fell in love with 40-foot boats. They were fast and simple and restored his faith in sailing. The following year – the year he won CYC Rookie of the Year – Wieckmann bought a Davison 38 called Chutzpah. Trouble was, he didn’t know what chutzpah meant.

His Jewish accountant put Warren in the picture. ‘Roughly translated, chutzpah is a larrikin with balls.’ Which Warren mutated into Leroy Brown and the name has stuck, surviving a resale and being transferred to his latest investment, a Farr 40 One Design flyer.

The boat is a spearhead in shape, a sleek V of moulded fiberglass. A web of colour-coded ropes lead from blocks underground to the hatchway.

Downstairs the spartan principles continue. No jacuzzis here. Forget your cocktail shakers. The cabin is a cross between Auschwitz and a fallout shelter. Down either flank the bunks resemble shelves better suited for pot plants than grown men, while a glance at the toilet inspires constipation.

The lone gesture of sophistication is the navigational hardware lodged behind the companionway: a GPS plotter, Datamarine maps, a VHF radio plus a tickertape link to the national weather bureau. On a plastic throne, Angus Gordon is king of this domain.

A genial bear of a bloke, Angus gas a background in hydraulics, measuring waves and second-guessing currents, but now he heads up Sydney’s Pittwater Council. (‘The fact the shire’s girt by sea is no coincidence.’) The same council has issued an official dogtag for Leroy Brown that cangles on the cabin’s roof.

The rest of the crew is Pittwater based, and just as easygoing. Back in 1996 Steve McConaghy raced Soling class at the Atlanta Olympics. He and brother Scott were born in dinghies. Johnno Morris is bowman, the human fly responsible for dancing on the sharp end and swapping jibs in monsoon conditions. Rod Walton, a restauranter on civvy street, has racked up 14 Hobarts and cooks a wicked vindaloo on a swinging butane burner.

Fitzy is another Hobart veteran. His tip for the trip is ‘stereo salamis’ – a bratwurst tucked into either pocket of his drysuit to call on during the hungry hours. Ashley is 21, a shipwright working in Mona Vale. Dave makes sails. A blue-water addict, Pete bought his wife a stuffed dog to deputise during his absences.

Together the team shaved 11 hours off the standing record in the Southport Classic, a toboggan run from Sydney to the Gold Coast. In her first year of sailing, the boat won stages at Hayman Island and the Telstra Cup, though this last event saw a rival boat ‘T-bone’ Leroy’s stern. The damage bill was 20 grand. Prior to the Hobart race, a fiberglass scab is sealed across the dent. Some wag has scrawled Grrrrr on the scar.

Part of the lure of Farr 40 boats is the philosophy of the designer, an Americanised Kiwi living out of Rhode Island. Bruce Farr aimed to build a fast, exhilirating, cost-controlled boat. He also insists that those who pay, are those who play. In other words Warren, the men who shelled out the 460K, is a mandatory part of the helm roster.

**

Sorry. Before the gun goes off on Boxing Day we need to take a detour into mathematics. One serious downside to yachting as a sport are its multiple handicap systems – IRC and IMS. If you really want to know the logarithms, or the acronyms, phone the CYC and ask them to explain TCFs. In the end the pseudo-science saps ‘NRG’ from the contest.

In spectator terms, ocean racing has obvious problems. To write about the sport Inside Sport needed to train for two months and buy a waterproof pencil. But adding opaque maths to the outcome seems an exericse in deeper alienation. Suffice to say, if a Farr 40 boat can beat other Farr 40s, the crew deserves a plaudit, full stop.
**

Race day, Boxing Day, Rushcutter’s Bay. Mobiles run hot on the marina. Kids weep in Daddies’ arms. Girlfriends linger. The air is laced with ‘take cares’ and sausage smoke.

On the harbour the ferry Collaroy tilts to get a peek at the yachts. The gun is yet to go. Littered with choppers, the sky reenacts Apocalpse Now. Chase boats take photos. Cruise boats supply aperitifs and commentary. The harbour twitches with money and colour.

The scene from Leroy’s deck is necessarily reduced. Rod has a stopwatch to synchronise with the warning gun. Steve aligns the North Head barracks as his first tack marker. Johnno lurches from the pulpit, his gloves directing a pathway between the rival yachts.

An orange buoy forms an imaginary line with the stewards’ boat. The fleet creeps towards it, counting down the seconds. Curses ring across the water. Scott is primed for the call to crank the winches. The gun blasts. In a race of 630 nautical miles, the very first is cutthroat.

Eighty-three boats zig and zag towards the Heads. Tack after tack, the bows and sterns just missing. On the cry of ‘helm’s down’, we duck as one and let the boom sweep the deck. We pad to the opposite gunwale, giving Leroy the counterweight to smoke against.

A seaward marker is the last human bauble we’ll see for two days. Facing us is open water and an unsaid urgency to get out arses south. Steve votes to eke out the beat until we get a clean alley for Botany. We tack again. The chute blooms into life, our mongrel eying the boats in pouncing distance. ‘Get comfy,’ says Fitzy. ‘We might hold this line for the next 200 miles.’

**

Two hours in, the eeriness of a Sydney to Hobart takes hold. All around is Pacific. You seem to race alone. Maxis have soomed ahead. Other boats have lapsed behind, or taken remoter runlines. Every yacht will choose a different course to Hobart, depending on breeze and current and pressure systems.

Angus has pre-plotted our route with way points – much like milestones along a road. He shouts average speeds from the nerve centre. Wind speed, direction, water temp shimmer in red on the mast’s instrument panel. A wager starts up. Whoever grubs the most knots from Leroy wins the equivalent amount of rums in Hobart. (Steve will score a 23 off Flinders Island.) Night falls. The dark is stitched by ghost lights. Drizzle starts. Rod breaks open the honey joys.

**

Don’t sail to Hobart in hopes of a gourmet experience. Sailors seem to live on Anticols and Sustagen. (On land it’s rum.) The further we go, the more fugitive the meals. If the pressure is on, you starve in silence.

On the bladder front, less water means less pissing. To kneel in a 3-metre swell with 30-knot head wind and piss off the stern rail is a required art. (Yes, you can disregard the toilet. That’s just there to jolly Amnesty.)

Sleep is another namby-pamby notion. A twin-shift system provides some break but the cabin, reeking of socks and Araldite, is loud with sea noise. Halyards groan. The radio quacks and the wind shrieks. Instead of sleep your brain wins a type of dreamless coma.

**

Six miles off Kembla at 9pm the wind picks up. We change to a wider spinnaker. Johnno hoists the replacement sail inside the old one, and the old one is tugged down. The skill is called peeling. Not for one moment does the yacht want for canvas.

Make that kevlar. You won’t find a stick of wood on board. Chute poles are carbon fibre. The hull is epoxy/E-glass. Sails are made of dacron mix with kevlar veins, coated in polybenzobisoxazole or PBO for short. Joseph Conrad would roll in his sea grave.

**

Twenty miles off Eden at 3am, Leroy broaches, the technical opposite of a Chinese. Broaches see the boat turn with the wind. The boom swings like a poleaxe, locking the boat in a death shake. No matter the crisis – or hiccup – the crew remains serene, easing the yacht back in the groove. The Farr 40 design is made for these conditions: a tailwind on rolling swell. For much of the night yachting resembles wave-skiing. And then we Chinese…

**

Dawn in Dawn in Bass Strait, day two. The water is Salvo grey. Muttonbirds trace the sloppy water in flight. A squid lands on board and squirts ink in panic. We overtake Ausmaid, stricken by helm damage, and burn past Terranova.

If a boat can’t be identified by its colouring, we depend on regular skeds to fill in the details. Skeds are radio check-ins, an alphabetical rollcall of the fleet made twice a day where each boat’s position is publicised. Angus jots the numbers and tells the gang we’re coming twelfth.

**

Our first sight of land after 36 hours are three granite lumps named The Hazards. The Devil’s Kitchen looms, followed by Storm Bay. The names like the features intimidate. If the lighthouse keeper on Cape Raoul lacks a modem, I swear he’s the loneliest soul on the planet. In keeping with the landscape, sleet and brine lash the boat.

Right now the race is at its toughest. Nor-easterlies have switched to a brute sou-wester, shirtfronting the boat. We slap into troughs hour after hour. The wind is gale force. Every man must be on deck. Metres off a dolerite cliff the mainsail rips, frayed by the spreader wires. Night is coming on. La-di-bloody-da. The crew almost whistles as it hoists a trysail – a foul weather compromise – and Leroy ploughs on.

**

We round the Iron Pot at midnight and steam down the Derwent under full sail and starlight. Overtaking Rager, an Adelaide maxi in sight of the finishing line sums up the fight in our 40-foot dog.

A strobe buoy signals the end. Pete shines a torch at the sail number, while Wozza on the wheel bellows the boat name. Headlights flash welcome on Battery Point. Sozzled groupies at Constitution Dock, with no connection to the crew, attempt to sing the Leroy song until Angus finds the tape and blasts them with the original.

We moor beside ten larger boats, a skateboard alongside a line of precious Malibus. Beers appear. Handshakes work their way around the cockpit. At 59 and a half hours, Leroy Brown is the eleventh fastest boat in the Cup’s history, and the new record holder for its size. But the mood is more relief than glory, more pride than jubilation.

A million rums in Customs House will help recount the voyage. (So sticky is the pub’s carpet I imagine bowmen must lather their deck shoes in the stuff.) We drink till dawn and finally decide on breakfast. The race’s adrenaline will take a few days to leave us, despite the exhaustion, the windburn, the hypothermia, the constipation. As a team we’d been on a whirlwind trip of Hell and somehow lived to host the slide show.

In a years to come, sailing almanacs around the world will tell you that Nokia won line honours in the Telstra, but I can’t help thinking the details have a phony ring.

[Inside Sport, 2000]