Blue Water Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother, Dot, who credits me with causing much of her grey hair, with love. And no, Mum, I won’t just go and get a steady desk job somewhere. My beloved children, Alisdair and Tui, who’ve made my homecomings warm and wonderful and who patiently tolerated years of being dragged around marinas and shipyards; and to Sarah, who was with me for some of the fun.

  Most of all I’d like to thank The Ocean for what it gives to us all: delight, awe, respect and wonder.

  Maps

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Maps

  Introduction

  Red Sails, No Sunset

  I ALE TRAIL

  II WORKING OUR PASSAGE

  III LOCKED IN FOR WINTER

  IV ICEWARD BOUND

  V ARCTIC LANDFALL

  VI SVALBARD’S CITY

  VII HUT HAULING

  VIII NORTHING ON

  IX AMONG THE ICE

  X A WHALE OF A TIME

  XI PACK PERIMETER

  XII SOUTHBOUND

  XIII THE REAL WORLD

  POSTSCRIPT: CRUISING KITTY

  Pacific Islands and Points South

  PENRHYN

  ASKOY — LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

  KAVA CAPER

  DELIVERANCE FROM MORUROA

  OCEANIC ORANGE GROVE

  IN THE WAKE OF KUPE

  ASKOY LIVES TO SAIL AGAIN

  GETTING THE DRIFT OF THE PADDLING GAME

  TIAMA

  BENEATH THE BOUNTIES

  Open Oceans

  FOOTLOOSE AND FODDER FREE

  WIDE OPEN WHEELHOUSE

  BRAVEHEART TURNS TUGBOAT

  TRIAL BY TASMAN

  TASMAN TRIP ON EDGE

  WHALE TAIL ENDS SAIL

  INDIAN SUMMER

  RIDING A MERMAID ROUND THE HORN

  In and around the Americas

  GALAPAGOS GROUNDING

  DO YOU SAMBA?

  A CARIBBEAN CAPER

  CARIBBEAN JET BLAST

  THE BOAT THAT WOULDN’T FLOAT

  NO STASH, NO SPLASH

  DEEP SOUTHING

  Acknowledgements

  Photographic Inserts

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  One of my first assignments as a cadet reporter was to trot around behind a senior colleague while he interviewed the handful of skippers who had entered the trans-Tasman single-handed yacht race from New Plymouth to Mooloolaba. I was smitten.

  Growing up in a place 50 kilometres inland, with a family whose sole maritime experience had been in a rented rowboat in the park duck lake, my mind boggled.

  The boats were like little Hobbit homes in the water. We clambered down rusted ladders and the skippers cheerily welcomed us aboard and ducked below to pump up kerosene stoves and boil the kettle. I admired their geniality and openness — they had nothing to hide, they were embarked on an adventure and loving every minute of it.

  We sipped cups of tea while they told stories, some of which have stuck with me for life. They were orchardists, builders, engineers, teachers — ordinary people embarked on an extraordinary mission.

  They could tell where they were by sighting through a sextant and were keen to demonstrate how it worked — handling the instrument like it was made of fine crystal. For me, who’d never been more than a few kilometres from a road sign, it was heady stuff and I’d go home at night with my head reeling, toss and turn sleeplessly, and be at the office early, ready to head back to the port.

  There was a cheery devil-may-care attitude that all the skippers shared — something I’d never seen among the dairy farmers I grew up with. They joked with me, treating me like an adult and gave me little jobs to do when I returned after office hours.

  After a lifetime spent among square houses, I was intrigued by the wonderful shapes of the yachts. They were all different, some bulged out, some in, some were angular and others voluptuous. Most of them were wooden, many home-built, and their skippers called them ‘she’ or ‘the old girl’ as they fondly patted the painted and varnished joinery. Every yacht was a work of functional art.

  Belowdecks, sound and light were muted but big structural timbers belied their strength and the closely spaced ribs made you feel like you were looking down the gullet of a whale.

  I watched the waves crumple and pound on the harbour breakwater and dreamed of my own little boat, powered by a triangle of white sail, soaring over the seas like a tern with a thousand miles to go between us and the next landfall.

  After a week or so, the race skippers did just that. We raced around in a motorboat, taking photos, while the skippers waved goodbye. When I finished work a few hours later, I rushed back to the port but they were gone. Not a single sail was to be seen — like they’d disappeared into a void.

  They also left a void in my stomach, and the prospect of reporting yet more Country Women’s Institute scone-baking competitions and crochet displays.

  But they were alive in my head; I imagined the skippers bracing themselves to light the primus and heat their pots of stew. One day that would be me.

  It took many years, with much of my seamanship hard won on trawlers and in offshore delivery trips, while I learnt and read avidly about The Ocean.

  Because seafaring and literature are old shipmates. Much of our language derives from maritime lore and some of our best writing springs from the sea and sailors; people who are inspired by the grandeur and immensity of The Ocean and can paint it with words.

  But The Ocean demands the utmost integrity of people and their vessels. It will find deficiencies of design or construction and tear at them until they break. Every wave that comes aboard has a thousand watery fingers to untie loose knots and send whatever they fasten crashing around the deck. Whoever tied it could have sentenced themself and their shipmates to an airless end by drowning. The seafarer who slips and sleeps on watch can likewise condemn their shipmates to sudden and violent death.

  The Ocean is … quite simply … The Ocean. A contiguous body of water that covers 76 per cent of the planet. Calling it planet Earth is a misnomer. The plastic bag that is discarded off New Zealand may one day wash up in Namibia, The Philippines, Florida or Norway.

  The vitality of The Ocean is essential for continued existence on earth. We must all learn to respect and protect it.

  Red Sails, No Sunset

  I ALE TRAIL

  Perched on a stool in a Bristol pub, with a dreary English winter drizzle slurring the windows, a pint of ale in my hand and a coal fire crackling at my back, it seemed like a brilliant idea; inspired, even.

  ‘Let’s sail to the Arctic next spring,’ I suggested to Sarah.

  She gave me a long, cool look through squinted eyes while she tried to calculate just how many pints had poured past my tonsils. ‘Okay, if you really want to,’ she replied warily, ‘but why the Arctic?’

  Even in the cold, grey, sober dawn of the next day it didn’t seem like too silly an idea, so we began to plan the voyage.

  Why the Arctic? Ever since I was a boy, reading about the exploits of Shackleton, Amundsen and Scott, I had harboured an ambition to sail to the ice. Any ice.

  From my native New Zealand, Antarctica is a long, landless sail southwards, across the world’s roughest water and the hostile conditions of the Southern Ocean. In Antarctica, we would face the globe’s least hospitable weather patterns and have to deal with icebergs and largely uncharted waters. In the Arctic, on the other hand, a small boat can make good most of the distance to the ice pack in the relatively sheltered waters of the Norwegian coastline. The Arctic has been traversed for centuries by explorers, whalers, sealers and research vessels, who have pretty t
horoughly documented the navigable areas. Weather reports and even satellite photographs of the extent of the ice pack are readily available through the Norsk Polarinstitutt, Norway’s polar research organization. If we sailed from Bristol, we would already be halfway to the Arctic. In fact, for much of that snow-and sleet-spattered winter, we felt as if we were already there.

  We settled on Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, as our objective, and began the extensive research and planning that precede any successful yacht cruise. According to the Admiralty’s Arctic Pilot book, Svalbard is the name given 900 years ago to land discovered by the Northmen (Vikings to you and me) about four days’ sail from Norway. ‘From time to time there has been some controversy as to its exact location’, the Arctic Pilot added. It sounded like our ideal cruising ground.

  During the summer of 1986 we had sailed from the United States, via Newfoundland and Iceland, in Elkouba, our 11.6-metre steel cutter. We had no qualms about tackling more high-latitude work in her. Charts were a bit of a problem; especially the reams of detailed cartography needed to navigate the convoluted coastline of northern Norway. Buying a collection like that would put severe strain on a budget that already bulged like Rudolf Nureyev’s leotard during a pas de deux.

  I had read magazine articles by a yachtsman from Bermuda, Warren Brown, who had sailed his 19-metre aluminium sloop, War Baby, along the route we were looking at. After a barrage of letters and a few phone calls, we managed to meet him and his wife, Anne, at their London flat. Warren ferreted out all the charts we needed from various wardrobes and cupboards around the flat and, even more generously, added guide books, bird spotters’ manuals and a Norwegian/English dictionary to our growing pile of printed matter. He also imparted an invaluable oral encyclopaedia of hard-won knowledge and advice from his own trip in War Baby. It was a very magnanimous gesture towards a couple of fresh-faced would-be Arctic adventurers whom he’d never met before, and our first taste of the camaraderie that exists among those who sail to the less-frequented parts of the planet.

  For me, to be bound for the ice under sail was the realization of a long-held dream. I had always dreamed of a life afloat, forever en route to another exotic port of call, another adventure.

  That was a pretty hard fantasy to maintain while I received secondary education at an institution called Stratford Agricultural High School, where most of the conversation was about automobiles, grass growth and the fat content of one’s milk. But a like-minded mate and I soon began to work on our dream ship. Pretty much as I would end up doing again later on in life, we built the dream boat on a very limited budget using whatever came to hand — in this case, discarded sheets of corrugated roofing iron, with the end of an apple case we stole from behind the greengrocer’s shop as a transom. On race day, when almost the entire population of the town — park warden included — was at the race track, we towed the boat behind our bicycles to the park and launched it on the largest body of water for miles around: the duck pond.

  We didn’t waste time on a bottle of champagne; we didn’t even know that this was the traditional means of ensuring a long and propitious voyaging life for a new vessel. Voyaging in the duck pond was a big enough misdemeanour in its own right, without compounding the crime by scattering broken glass about the place.

  Furtively, we launched the boat and paddled out from shore, out of our depth. Our combined paddle-power sent the boat bounding across the pond, cleaving a path through the limpid brown water and scattering a gaggle of displaced ducks. We were afloat — masters of our own destiny — and for the first time I felt the buoyant jubilation of a sailor. I had turned my back on the shore and my bows towards a new adventure.

  Perhaps jubilation was the problem, because it turned out to be anything but buoyant. Or, perhaps, it was just inexperience. Anyway, several metres into the voyage, our craft took a sickening list to starboard, water rushed in, and her tenuous hold on positive buoyancy was overwhelmed. She sank, like a sheet of corrugated roofing iron, beneath the murky water and the lily pads to the duck pond’s version of Davy Jones’s locker. Dave and I floundered ignominiously back to dry land, and I learnt the perils of joint command as we loudly blamed each other for the demise of our ship.

  This tragedy notwithstanding, I had been bitten — I had tasted the glorious sensation of being afloat, in my own vessel, master of my destiny. She was a long way from a Cape Horn clipper ship, but she was the boat that set me sailing.

  That night my mother lectured me at great length on the variety of maladies one is likely to contract from wearing wet clothes. But she did not realize that she was dealing with a changed man. A few wet clothes? So what? They were nothing to a sailing man. I’d devoured the few sailing-ship books stocked by the local library and read all about seamen clambering onto yardarms to furl topsails off Cape Horn with body and soul lashings and tattered oilskins to keep Patagonia’s foul sleet and ice at bay. Tepid pond water and oxygen weed were nothing to me.

  That year my grandfather arrived from the South Island for Christmas, and I quizzed him eagerly about what it was like to sail on a ship between the two islands. ‘Bugger that for a joke,’ he replied, ‘I was crook as a dog.’ He took an aeroplane home.

  From school I drifted in to a cadet reporter’s job with the local evening newspaper, the Taranaki Herald, under the meticulous editorship of Mr George Koea. Newspapers like that do not exist any more. The Herald had a dedicated staff of old-time journalists who, with the odd exception, were concerned with the absolute accuracy and the social implications of everything they wrote.

  It was great training in the manual skills of newspaper work: plotting weather maps, compiling shipping columns and reporting on flower shows. But, more importantly, it was good schooling in the importance of being accurate and honest in all I produced. For the first two years I was totally absorbed, but then I began spending time down at the docks talking to fishermen and yachties. The rot was setting in.

  Eventually the rot took over. I did a few, nauseous, trips on commercial fishing boats, and realized that no matter how much my back and my hands hurt, regardless of how wet and cold I was, I would still much rather be there, at sea, than anywhere else I had been. I did one wet and windy yacht delivery trip from New Plymouth down the west coast of the North Island to Wellington, and became obsessed by sailing. Not the yacht-club-and-pink-gin school of sailing, but the hands-on sailing of the old school. I worked on garbage scows and charter boats, I fished and sailed, learning how to hand and steer and knot and splice, and everything I could of the sailoring trade. I loved, and I still love, all boats indiscriminately, from the finest purpose-built racing yacht to the blunt-bowed garbage scow. They all hold a potential for romance and adventure that no sedentary, shore-bound edifice can aspire to.

  A few months before my 21st birthday, I was shipwrecked in the Galapagos Islands while crewing a 58-foot schooner on a delivery trip from Sydney to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The ship, Sereno, was lost, along with one of my shipmates, but the disaster did not dampen my enthusiasm at all. I just couldn’t say no to a boat trip, and still can’t.

  Things went on in this way for several years. I spent time commercial fishing, working on charter boats and delivering yachts, interspersed with bouts of journalism during my ‘straight’ periods, until 1979 when I returned to New Zealand from the Sydney–Hobart yacht race. A few months later I left again, on Ocean Mermaid, a 75-foot ketch, for a wet and windy delivery trip from New Zealand around Cape Horn to Antigua in the Caribbean. Ocean Mermaid was owned by a young English aristocrat, on whom his people had bestowed the title ‘Right Honourable’. He was about the least honourable ship-mate I have ever been to sea with.

  We arrived in Antigua just before the hurly-burly of the island’s annual regatta, or race week, began. The local boats were honing up their tactics, and after each Wednesday-night race session a huge tub of rum and fruit drink was mixed up at Nelson’s Dockyard. Rum was cheaper than fr
uit juice, so the spirits outnumbered the syrup many parts to one and produced a punch with real clout. Sailors who were accustomed to climbing masts at sea clambered up the dockyard flagpole or swung from the rafters in Nelson’s venerable spar loft.

  Amidst this joyous revelry I met my future wife, Sarah; but a few weeks after Antigua Race Week, she left for Scotland in Exactment, a 47-foot ketch, and I took Omuramba, a Swan 43-foot sloop, to New York via Bermuda. With a couple of expatriate Kiwis who had represented Canada in the world Laser champs as crew, we’d sailed the boat hard during race week and picked up a bit of brasswork but, after a lifetime racing out of Cape Town and as a South African Admiral’s Cup team boat, she was starting to show her age. Omuramba’s owner, an expatriate South African film director, virtually handed me a blank cheque. ‘Fix it,’ he said, and I spent the cold winter months at Essex Boatworks in Connecticut, USA, supervising Omuramba’s total refit. Sarah flew across from England and we settled into a life of comfortable domesticity, working at the boat yard by day and living by night in a loft apartment over a barn where almost-retired boatbuilder and engineer Pete Gref pottered away at various projects.

  ‘Well,’ Pete would say to me, ‘When are you going to make an honest woman out of her, lad?’ Eventually, with a lot of cajoling from Pete, the question popped itself and Sarah and I decided to get married.

  Our first step was to visit the local priest, the Reverend Joshua Crowell. He welcomed us into his study, closed the door, and fixed us both with an intense stare. ‘What you must decide,’ he said from under lowered brows, ‘is that you both really are 100 per cent sure that you are suited for each other and that you can live together for the rest of your lives.’

  ‘Well … uh … we have actually been … sort of sailing together for the last three years, and…’ I stammered nervously, not sure how he’d take the news that we’d been living together outside lawful matrimony for some time already. Like most people in the small Connecticut river town, the Reverend Crowell is a sailor himself, and his stern face softened into a broad grin. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can probably tell me all about compatibility, then.’