✱   NEW EDITION — Unabridged and Illustrated   ✱

[from “Around the World on a Shoestring” — Chapter 3]

New Zealand to Australia, March 1981

by Joseph Stevenson with illustrations by Rita M Brown

PREFACE

I’ve decided that prefaces are definitely better than postscripts. Make your excuses before the fact I say. Nobody is going to go back and forgive you for an intemperate remark on page five because of a blanket apology on page twenty-nine. If you had to do your writing with malaria mosquitos buzzing around your ears, tubercular drunks hanging over your shoulder, sweat dripping off your nose, and disco drumming through the walls, better by far to make these appeals for sympathy on page one.

I don’t know about you, but sitting here in Calcutta I’m a bit weary with writing all this autobiography. The piece I wrote about Hawai’i I rather enjoyed myself. I read it a number of times. If I still had a copy I wouldn’t mind reading it again. It makes me laugh. The next installment, on the South Pacific, was not so much fun for me. With this one, written under the difficult circumstances sketched above, without a typewriter (sob), without so much as a single cup of coffee (gasp), I begin to wonder what I do it for. Is anybody reading this crap? These days when I sit down to write I generally end up feeling like a geek staring fixedly into the mirror of the past. The truth, I suppose, is that I’m homesick, and all my accumulated mail for the past four months has disappeared into a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Rangoon, Burma. To distract myself I have taken up the pen, but it has not taken my blues away.

The trip across the Tasman Sea came as sort of a climax to 22 months of nearly continuous involvement with boats, beginning with boat repair work in Hawai’i, a boat-building job in American Samoa, followed by sailing roughly 4500 nautical miles of ocean passages from Samoa to Tonga, Tonga to New Zealand, and N.Z. to Tahiti. The sailing experience is difficult for me to write about just because I love it so much. It’s too deep and multi-faceted to explain in a few words, and a lot of words seems like too much. To stand alone on the deck of a sailboat looking out across an endless expanse of storm-whipped ocean, with everything under control for the moment and a cup of hot soup in your belly…you could write a whole book about all the factors that contribute to that moment, but what would that explain? It’s hard to write about the good times, I’ve said that before. First of all, it’s difficult to communicate exactly what it was that was so good, and at the same time I always feel like the attempt is as likely to trigger cynicism as any other emotion. As I try to cram the right words into place, I can just hear the reader saying, “Big deal…” I guess what I’m saying is I wish I were a better writer. Sorry.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I love sailing, all sides of it except for one. I wouldn’t care to own a sailboat. Too much work; never-ending headaches of inspection, maintenance and repair. I’ve done plenty of that as it is. I’m quite happy to sail other people’s boats. Don’t even try to give me one unless a couple of dedicated servants and a large expense account comes with it. No…nobody has tried to give me a sailboat yet, but I mean it, I’m serious. Nothing is more likely to turn a perfectly nice fellow (like me) into a raging tyrant than a few seasons of sailboat maintenance, that is, I repeat, unless he can afford to hire (or con) competent help to do it for him. 

Somebody has to pay for all those days spent scraping gunk off the bottom or brushing it on, those hours in the so-called engine “room” upside-down and bent into a human pretzel with knuckles and elbows bruised and bleeding, the never-ending battle against the menace of water, fresh from above and salt from below, steadily gnawing away at every piece of wood, wire, paint, and metal. “What’s that noise?” “Where’s that water coming from?” and the plaintive “It worked in the shop…” No thanks, just hand me the sextant.

Joseph M. Stevenson   •   Calcutta, India   •   May 20, 1982

ADDENDUM

 This is the “original” unabridged version of this account, well over twice as long as a later edition circulated privately and previously published online. The illustrations, omitted from the abridged version, will assist those wanting to nose into the details of the yacht itself and the foul weather strategies we employed. 

Astoria OR  •   September 2018

✱          ✱          ✱

By the time we got the bad news over the radio, the crew of Seahawk had settled into a routine of sorts, governed by a list of watches and duties I had posted in the galley. An uneasy peace gradually supplanted the incessant bickering and the explosions large and small that had peppered both our three-day “shakedown cruise” to White Island and back, and the subsequent four-day trip up the east coast of New Zealand from Auckland to the Bay of Islands. From there, on March 4th, the five of us set sail for Australia; Michael and Christine Tubbs, the owners, aged 42 and 32 respectively, two recently-acquired crew, Mike Hart and Rod Townsend, both white-collar Kiwis in their mid-30s, and me, 39 years old and now 20 months and 6400 miles down the road from Astoria, Oregon, USA.

I had been living with the Tubbs’ for nearly two months already, helping them to complete final preparations for the maiden voyage of their 37-foot trimaran, assembled over nearly a decade of intermittent labor in their Auckland backyard. Due to an unfortunate complex of personal problems (I’m trying to be generous here) the Tubbs’ had never learned how to sail. Now with their bridges burned behind them and their 10-year-old son waiting for them in Brisbane, Australia, they were face to face with the unnerving task of sailing an untried boat across one of the world’s most notorious stretches of ocean with a “green” crew in the middle of hurricane season, when no sensible yachtie ventures out on the Tasman Sea. I was the only one on board who had ever sailed on the ocean before, and my previous experience came to a grand total of 31 days at sea. In my first 14 days I had learned the rudiments of celestial navigation, and my next 17 days of sailing were spent navigating a new 46-foot catamaran being delivered from N.Z. to Tahiti. On Seahawk I was officially the navigator, as no one else on board had ever used a sextant before or plotted a course. However, it soon became obvious that nobody else knew how to set a sail or even steer by compass, and so the overall responsibility for running the boat and training the crew fell on me by default.

At the same time, I was expected to maintain the pretense that Michael Tubbs was Captain of the boat. For these two months I had tried to educate him to his task as best I could. I spent hundreds of hours answering questions, discussing potential problems, and checking over the boat inch by inch, but in the end there’s no substitute for experience, no matter how many adventure books and yachting magazines you’ve read. During the trip to White Island it became apparent that our captain was prone to seasickness, and that deep down inside he was really scared. Afterwards he called a meeting of all the crew and tried to blame my “recklessness” for his hysterical behavior at sea. Mike and Rod did not agree with this view and took the opportunity to let him know that they were not interested in making the trip to Australia unless I was on board. Out of this meeting came the notion that from now on we would discuss important decisions amongst all the crew and try to develop a consensus, but Tubbs never really recovered from the ignominy of this occasion, and his subsequent behavior became increasingly childish; basically a profound sulk, with attendant bad manners and occasional tantrums.

A last attempt on my part to clear the air was scuttled when, in front of the whole crew, with nothing left to do but pull up the anchor for the last time in New Zealand waters, a sullen Tubbs refused to shake my proffered hand or muster a single friendly word with which to inaugurate our uncertain voyage. At this point I blew a fuse internally, decided that I would leave Captain Tubbs to his own devices, and retired to my bunk. As we motored out of the Bay of Islands someone tapped me on the shoulder with a question from the Captain, “Should we put up the sails?” It was like putting a match to a cherry bomb. I exploded all over him in a tirade to the effect that if he didn’t know whether or not to put up the sails on a sailboat, how the hell was he going to run the boat? I was done whispering in his ear what to do next. At this point I figured my best chance of enjoying this trip was to pretend that Michael Tubbs wasn’t on board. On this cheerful note we began our passage to Australia.

Figure One will give you an idea of what Seahawk looks like. She is 37 feet long overall, and if memory serves me, 22 feet across the beam. The cockpit is located amidships with the mast sitting in the center  of it. The wheel (tiller) is on a post just aft of the mast. Running down the center of the cockpit floor is a narrow well housing a large built-up plywood centerboard which can be lowered into the water under the main hull like an adjustable keel. It acts to give the boat more directional stability and better turning response when tacking (turning to take the wind from the other side of the boat). All the sheets and halyards (the lines used to hoist and trim the sails) come to the cockpit, hence it is seldom necessary to leave the cockpit in the course of normal sailing, a nice safety feature. Of the three forestays (A,B,C), A and B are used to fly the jib and staysail respectively, and C is for mast support only. Only the jib, flown from the first forestay (A) requires a crew member on deck to handle it. 

When bad weather threatens, the first thing you do with this rig is to drop the jib and secure it. If the wind increases, you can put one or two reefs in the mainsail, decreasing its surface area. This can be done right in the cockpit. If the wind gets over 40 knots it’s time to drop the staysail, perhaps substituting the little storm jib. It is possible to hank on or remove the staysail while standing in the forward hatch (D), actually using the toilet as a footstool. If the weather is that rough the toilet may take a bit of spray, but it’s a great comfort not having to go out on deck. I like the center-cockpit, cutter rig (two foresails) design; it’s very sensible for safety, convenience, balance, and adaptability to weather conditions. The only significant disadvantage, as far as I can see, is that because of all the lines and rigging in the vicinity it is extremely difficult to devise a workable canopy or dodger to protect the helmsman from the wind and weather. In tropical, latitudes this is not a serious problem, but in Alaska, or even the Pacific Northwest, it could get to be a drag.

Viewed from the front, a trimaran somewhat resembles a bird with its wings outspread. The two out-hulls are kept pretty much empty for maximum floatation. (If you should capsize, it’s the out-hulls that keep you afloat.) In the center hull, as already mentioned, the toilet is located in the bow. It is curtained off from the next space, a washroom with a sink, a bench, and some stowage cupboards. There are ventilation cut-outs from this area into the “wing-decks” between the center hull and the out-hulls, to keep dampness from building up. I cut and pre-drilled plywood covers for all these cut-outs, to be applied quickly in case wave action should punch holes in the underwings in a big storm. This would serve to keep water out of the center hull in such an emergency. At the same time, I made plywood “storm-covers” for all eight windows on the boat, to be nailed into place should we be faced with a “survival storm”, a real “get-down-on-your-knees-and-pray” hurricane.

Item E is the self-inflating eight-man life raft, which comes completely stocked with food, water, paddles, flashlight, signal mirror, smoke bombs, fishing lines, Dramamine, and morphine. I can’t tell you what a protracted argument went on between Tubbs and me over where to put this $2000 marvel. I reasoned that with the boat upside-down, and undoubtedly a dreadful tangle of lines everywhere, I would not care to dive under the boat with a knife between my teeth to cut the lashings securing this treasure. Tubbs couldn’t really dispute this argument, but neither could he see putting it in some asymmetrical location near the edge of the deck spoiling the racy lines of his craft, and perhaps tempting some greedy wave to snatch it away in the night. I finally shut up, and the life raft was wrapped in a bright yellow oilcloth and lashed to the forward cabin-top, where it sat like a great gold nugget. I came along later and revised the lashings to make them a bit more vulnerable, and taped a sharp knife to the oilcloth to save wear and tear on my teeth.

Just aft of the life raft is the hatch and companionway leading to the forward cabin. Each cabin contains two bunks, a double on one side and a single on the other. The foot of each bunk actually lies beneath the bench running fore and aft on each side of the cockpit. The forward sleepers have their heads toward the bow, and the aft sleepers face the stern; get the picture? In the aft cabin, after the bunks comes the galley, with propane stove, sink, counter, and cupboards. (An ice-chest under the floorboards stayed cold for about a week.) In the extreme stern, with windows all around it, sits a lovely formica table flanked by comfy benches, and featuring a panoramic view of where you’re coming from, which at sea looks pretty much the same as where you’re going. This table, while admittedly quite handsome and sturdy, was for some reason not flat. In the absence of any other area in which to work, I had to do my navigation on the galley table which, with its gently undulating hills and valleys used to drive me wild, especially when trying to “walk” across a chart with the parallel rulers. If I happened to land on a hill, the rulers would suddenly pivot, leaving me to grit my teeth and start again.

That’s the dingy (F) lashed to the roof of the galley, and the wind-vane for the self-steering mechanism (G) sticking up behind it. I argued against putting the dingy here, where it would be in the way when furling the mainsail to the boom or adjusting the self-steering. But again, as with the life raft, it seemed to be symmetry rather than convenience that counted with Tubbs. Having the decks clear would have been a distinct blessing on other yachts I’ve sailed on, but on Seahawk, where one rarely had to leave the cockpit and there was lots of deck space, it didn’t really matter. I never knew Tubbs to touch the self-steering anyway; hanging over the stern was my specialty. Not shown in the drawing are the safety lines I installed running from the cockpit to the bow and stern. Each crew had a “safety harness” as well as a life jacket, and in rough weather was expected to clip the end of the “leash” on his safety harness to some part of the boat when on deck. If a crew had to venture out on deck fore or aft, he or she could clip onto these safety lines before leaving the cockpit.

The “Searunner” series of trimarans designed by Jim Brown are aimed at the backyard handyman interested in serious ocean cruising. The Searunners are not racing machines, designed more for safety and livability for the cruising family, but with following winds and a favorable sea they can be persuaded to “surf” the waves at 15 or 20 knots, a most exhilarating sensation. Their safety record is remarkable. As of about 3 years ago [1978], when the latest Jim Brown book was published, with well over 1000 Searunners in the water, only one boat had actually capsized. (During our shakedown cruise when the wind began to gust up to perhaps 20 knots, Tubbs became convinced that we were about to become the second casualty.) Brown lives and runs his business in Berkeley, California and his books and building manuals bear the mark of Berserkeley ingenuity, creativity, and humor. In particular, the illustrations and cartoons, by an artist whose name escapes me, are really hilarious. There is also a fascinating book, co-authored by Brown and Mark Hassel, with illustrations by the same artist, called “Love for Sail”, that would make anyone drop whatever they were doing and start building a trimaran. Tubbs had this book and constantly referred to it in conversation, almost as if he had made the voyages and fought the battles described therein.

✱          ✱          ✱

There being five crew, ordinarily watches would have been two hours on followed by eight hours off, but for several reasons, mainly the fact that most of the crew were still not adept at steering by compass, I doubled all the watches. For two hours one crew would be assigned as “lookout”, while the other steered the boat, eyes on the compass. Then the helmsman went off-duty, the lookout took over the wheel, and a new lookout came on deck. This system allowed each crew to practice steering without the need to keep lookout at the same time, provided company and help should any problem arise. The boat’s self-steering actually worked quite well, better than most of the crew certainly, but I wanted everyone to learn to steer by hand first. We knew when we departed N. Z. that there was a small cyclone about 1000 miles to the north, and if it should turn our way we would need as many competent hands on the tiller as we could muster. The watches were so arranged that I did not have to share the cockpit with Captain Tubbs, who had been in a profound sulk ever since the sail-raising incident and had so far made no move to take command of his boat.

The only other scheduled duty on board was galley clean-up, which was the responsibility of each crew member once every five days in rotation. Cooking was left to the discretion of the hungry, although anyone working out in the galley was expected to enquire of anyone else not asleep at the time whether they would care to share in the meal under preparation. This system worked quite well in practice and was something of an emancipation for Christine who had apparently been cooking for and cleaning up after Tubbs & Son for many years without any help from Michael. She was not particularly keen on the boating life. She told me she’d gone along with Michael’s dream, for ten years pouring all of the family’s resources into the boat, out of a sense of wifely duty. About the trip she was admittedly nervous, but again felt it was her duty to go it with Michael rather than fly to Australia with her son. In the early days of the trip, as Tubbs sulked and festered, Christine took an interest in things on the boat. I think it was really the first time in ten years that she had enjoyed any significant freedom from heavy domestic labors or social contact apart from her childish and demanding husband. They still spent a lot of time together, but Christine seemed to have decided, much as I had, not to let Michael’s black mood ruin the trip for her. She learned to steer a straight course by compass; Tubbs never did.

The second day out, for some reason I couldn’t find the regular N.Z. marine weather broadcast. At the appointed hour there was nothing on any of the scheduled frequencies, not so much as a bit of garbled static. Strange, but what can you do? There was enough wind from the north to keep us moving westward at an easy 5 or 6 knots, but not enough to rekindle the captain’s fear of capsize. Tubbs merely sulked, I immersed myself in my navigation, and everyone else began to relax and enjoy the pleasant weather. For this trip I had decided to use the trigonometric functions on my little $20 Casio calculator instead of the big book of Sight Reduction Tables. On the Tahiti trip I’d had the use of a pre-programmed navigational calculator that belonged to the boat. This time I manually punched in the spherical geometry equations that were pre-programmed into that other calculator and came up with the same results. It just took a little longer. I had a goodly collection of equations for figuring out any number of things and I spent many hours during the trip trying them out. I only used the tables once, just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten how. They make things easy, but it’s a heavy book and hard for a traveling man to pack around.

Then at about 5 PM on the third day out, the weather forecast came in loud and clear. Cyclone “Frieda” had done the very thing we had hoped she wouldn’t do. Not only had she changed course from east to south, but the storm was now moving towards us at a speed of twenty knots instead of six. The voice gave the projected location of the storm’s center for various times in the next twelve hours and I jotted down the coordinates. The only good news was that apparently Frieda had not increased in severity. Her winds were still being clocked at a maximum of sixty knots, nothing to sneeze at, but just barely rating the title of “cyclone”. My hand shook a bit as I plotted the predicted path of the storm as well as our own projected course. They coincided neatly at a point about 150 miles north and slightly west of the North Cape of New Zealand. I was glad I had given the Cape a wide berth. More ships are lost on a lee shore than sunk by wind and waves. According the radio we had about 24 hours before the storm would be upon us.

The trimaran is a fast-moving design. In 24 hours a tri should easily cover 100-200 miles, and there’s generally a big difference between being smack in the path of a storm and being 100 miles away. But there was a serious problem for us regarding evasive action. We were presently headed west and Frieda south, and the wind was out of the north. To continue west would put us right in the path of the weather. Our only chance to avoid the  storm was to turn east, back the way we’d just come, never a happy choice. Furthermore (see Figure Two), in the southern hemisphere the winds of a cyclonic storm revolve in a clockwise direction around the center of low pressure. For us this meant that as the storm system approached our position the winds would likely move around to the east, and we would be faced with having to beat our way into the mounting seas, bound to be slow going as well as hard on the boat. To head south was to close with the N.Z. coast, the last place I wanted to be in foul weather. 

In my big green Bowditch (“The American Practical Navigator,” the Bible of marine navigation), discussing the tactics of hurricane evasion he speaks of two sides to a hurricane: the “safety side” and the “danger side.” In the southern hemisphere the danger side is the right (east) side if you are in the path of the storm and facing its center. If you can head for the safety side (A), the winds will tend to push your craft out of the path of the storm. Whereas if you must head for the danger side (B) the weather will try to push you into the path of the storm and fight you every step of the way.  Nevertheless, our best bet seemed to be to head east, as close to the wind as possible, and hope we could get far enough east of the storm that the winds would stay northerly and not hinder us (C). Remember, Frieda was still over 100 miles north of us and reportedly on a course that would pass about 100 miles west of our current position. To turn around and try to put another 100 miles between us and Frieda seemed like the prudent thing to do.

Still, this was the situation I had dreaded right along, and the reason I’d wanted to push Seahawk a bit during the trip to White Island. If it happened that we were forced to run for it in nasty weather, I’d wanted to have some idea of how the boat would react. But Tubbs had gotten hysterical every time the wind had come up and screamed bloody murder until we dropped the mainsail, so I never got a chance to let Seahawk kick up her heels or even to check the adjustment of the rigging with a bit of strain on the mast. At one point in the recriminations after that trip I accused Tubbs of concealing some defect in the construction of the boat. It puzzled me that he should be so nervous about what, by all reports, was quite a seaworthy design. Eventually it dribbled out that he was worried about the strength of the underwings, but “capsize” is what he had actually been shouting about, a different issue entirely. So here we were, faced with a bad choice, but no real alternative. I explained the situation to everybody and changed course 180 degrees. Tubbs held his peace. The wind had already moved somewhat to the east, and to sail east and not south we had to take the weather pretty much on the nose.

As the evening progressed the ocean got rougher, and the waves began to jump up and slap the underwings with an impact that shook the whole boat. By this time I had done some research into this problem of wave action on the underwings. Some Searunner builders choose to build “open wing,” leaving the wing decks largely open except for the main structural members connecting the center hull to the out- hulls, thereby eliminating the pressure of the waves against the big, flat plywood panels of the conventional design. Brown’s builder’s manual contained a few suggestions for strengthening the construction in the wing deck areas, but these suggestions had not been incorporated by Tubbs into his boat. Eventually I realized that he had already cracked both underwings down the middle where the two plywood panels butted together, probably during one of his two excursions on Auckland Harbor before I came along. He had gotten into some major difficulties on the second trip, though he refused to elaborate, and what I know about it now came in bits and pieces from Christine, from some neighbors, from my own guesswork, and from one subsequent incident that took place later in our voyage. Those long cracks, one on each side, I remembered filling with epoxy when we had the boat out of the water in Auckland. I had already made some provisions for serious damage to the underwings at suggestion of another Auckland Searunner owner (the pre-drilled plywood covers for the ventilation cut-outs). 

As the waves began to work on the underwings, Tubbs began to sputter and I began to reduce sail, until finally around midnight the last sail came down. There seemed to be nothing else to do. To proceed was punishing the boat for little gain, to alter course was to head for greater danger, and so we “hove to.” The boat seemed take care of herself pretty well with the tiller lashed down, and we all turned in.

Dawn was red and angry-looking with big black clouds covering the northern horizon, recalling the old sailor’s ditty: “Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.” The morning weather broadcast announced a new projected path for Cyclone Frieda. She had apparently drifted eastwards of her earlier course and was now headed directly for our new position as near as I could figure. When no one was watching I lay down at the leading edge of the wing decks and looked at the underside. The cracks I remembered had reopened down the middle on both sides. In addition, inside the port wing a stringer had pulled loose from the plywood, and the protruding nails had punched a few extra holes in the skin of the boat. I pulled the nails to keep them from further mischief. The actual damage was slight, and pretty much self-draining should water get in, but it was a warning not to push too hard into the weather. I got my face washed several times during this inspection; the ocean was still quite rough. I mentioned my findings to Mike and Rod, but not to Tubbs. I figured there was a chance that he might use such an excuse to order us back to New Zealand, an order which would have resulted in open mutiny, a situation I wished to avoid if at all possible. With the weather acting up our Captain was not feeling at all well, and there was no chance whatsoever that he’d be making any such inspections himself. 

With Frieda heading straight for us, we were now free to run for the safety side of the storm, also the Australia side I noted with some satisfaction. The wind had come around almost easterly; we put it on the port quarter and sailed southwest under storm jib, staysail, and double-reefed main. It was an odd-looking but well-balanced rig, and we ran downhill all day at 7 or 8 knots, mostly in bright sunshine; the dark clouds to the north never caught up with us. I began to wonder what had happened to our cyclone. I was actually feeling a bit let down that^–afternoon when I wrote facetiously in the log: “Weather: Mostly fair with occasional cyclones,” a parody of the typical Auckland weather forecast: “Mostly fair with some clouds, occasional rain, and possible thunderstorms.” By late afternoon the dark clouds had vanished, the 20 knots of wind had backed somewhat to the north, and in the absence of a new radio report I decided that Frieda had either passed us by, gone off in some other direction, or perhaps just blown herself out. I put the boat on a westerly course, with the north wind on the starboard beam, and as night fell we were once again pointed towards Australia.

But the weather would not cooperate, and before long we were beating into roughening seas much as we had the night before. Again, the waves began to pound on the underwings, Tubbs began to grumble, and I dropped the staysail at 8 PM at the end of my watch. Christine was at the helm with Mike Hart on lookout about 9 PM when I crawled out of my bunk and prepared to go back on deck. It didn’t sound so good out there. All of a sudden Tubbs came exploding out of his bunk across the way and started raving that I was trying to destroy his boat. I let him rave as I put on my foul-weather gear. Then Mike Hart opened the hatch from the cockpit to see what all the commotion was about. The two of them began to shout at each other, and it was really the both of them I was addressing when I finally yelled, “BE QUIET!” Just before I went up on deck I said to Tubbs, in the calmest, coldest voice I could muster: “I’d advise you to watch your mouth.” Surprisingly enough it shut him up. Looking back on it I think it finally dawned on him that the rest of us were about ready to stuff a rag in his mouth and strap him into his bunk. 

Up on deck it was bad news. Christine, bless her, was doing her best, scared but determined, but the weather was getting out of hand. I took the wheel and sent her below. After a few more minutes of crashing through the night, Mike and I dropped the main. We were now down to just the little storm jib out on the first forestay and just barely moving. The storm jib really belonged on the second forestay for better balance, but there seemed little point in shifting it now. The weather was still building, boat was complaining (not to mention the owner), and I was not about to turn around and sail east again. After another ten minutes or so I gave the wheel to Mike, clipped onto the safety line, and went out on the bow to gather in the storm jib. I gave up trying to guess what Frieda might do next. We bagged all the sails, lashed everything down, and retired to our bunks.

There are many possible strategies to bring a boat safely through bad weather, but one of the simplest and most reliable is just to pull down the sails, close everything up tight, go below and wait. Like a bottle with a cork in it, so long as it doesn’t hit something solid and break, chances are it will, like the red red robin, keep bob-bob-bobbin along. I had read a book belonging to Tubbs by a man who had sailed a trimaran around the world single-handed and non-stop, and this was his one and only foul-weather tactic: take down the sails and go to sleep. True, his boat took such a beating that she eventually broke up and sank, but he did make it around the world, and I reckoned we could make it through the night. Sometimes this tactic is combined with a small sail and the rudder set so as to keep the boat nosing into the waves, but every boat is different, and it takes a bit of experimenting to find out how to set the sail and tiller for best results. I did not propose to start experimenting at 10 o’clock at night. Besides, a multihull doesn’t rock and roll the way a monohull does when left to drift in a running sea; so long as the waves didn’t start breaking over the boat, I saw little reason to start fooling around on deck.

At exactly 2 o’clock in the morning I was rudely awakened by a tremendous crash as a big wave hit the boat. I reluctantly pulled on my already-wet clothes. There was no point in going out there in dry ones, they wouldn’t stay that way long. The boat was strangely quiet. It seemed impossible that anybody could actually be sleeping, but nobody stirred. How did I feel? Well, before we ever left New Zealand I had done everything I could to prepare for the possibility of cyclone weather. I had harped continually on this possibility all the time we were outfitting and stocking the boat, and I’d had to fight hard for some of the gear we had on board. I had studied all the available literature on foul-weather tactics for multihulls and talked to other owners. I’d been through every inch of Seahawk and had scrutinized our human resources as well. Like the generals with their H-bombs I was almost eager to see some action. I knew, or believed at any rate, that we were not likely to face winds of more than 60 knots, and that such a fast-moving storm would be unlikely to trouble us for more than a day. (Actually, the last weather broadcast I’d received, earlier that evening, had demoted Frieda from her cyclone rating. They were now calling her a “severe depression,” an apt description of the effect she was having on my crew.)

I had lived through such weather before while tuna fishing offshore in the Pacific Northwest, and I had little doubt that I would live through this one as well. I knew that no one else on board was quite as sure about it no matter how I reassured them, but my confidence was their best support, and I kept that in mind later when my own knees began to shake. They had never seen anything like what lay outside, and my first priority was to see that nobody got hurt. I reasoned that if I kept any helpers in the cockpit and safety-harnessed to the boat, it would be hard to lose anybody unless we capsized. Of course I could lose it and fall off the boat or something equally fatal, but that kind of danger is always there on a boat, and with so many other people depending on me I was going to be extra careful. I confess I’ve always preferred the thought of drowning to getting run over by a city bus. So many of the battles we wage in the lives we lead are over abstractions: love, money, loyalty, prestige, doctrine, and so forth. How many of the dangers we fear are real? There is a simple reality to a storm that threatens to smash your boat and take your life. It’s an honest game, and if you win nobody gets hurt.

The scene on deck was intimidating. The wind was screaming through the rigging and all around the boat I could hear great waves breaking in the darkness. My job was to get the boat to take the waves over the bow or the stern. The biggest danger lay in getting it broadside where breaking waves could do real damage, even flip us over, a real disaster on a multihull as it is impossible to right the boat once capsized. A trimaran turned turtle will not sink unless the waves succeed in breaking up the boat, but there is no question of’ righting it again. You set up housekeeping in your upside- down craft, turn on your emergency radio beacon, and hope somebody finds you soon. If the boat breaks up, you deploy the life raft and start paddling and praying.

The first thing I tried was trailing a line with a chain attached to the end. Even without any sails up, the wind is moving the boat, especially a lightweight multihull. If you trail lines in your wake it can help to keep the boat pointed away from the weather, or so it said in the books I’d read. I opened the hatch to the forward cabin, where Mike and Rod had their bunks. I reached in and switched on the spreader lights up on the mast, illuminating the deck area, and asked Rod to prepare the line and chain. I closed the hatch while Rod went to work and took a look around. Apparently Tubbs had been out on deck at some point in the night as someone had done a very messy job of trying to keep the main halyard from slapping against the mast. There was a tangle of lines in the cockpit, and as the weather raged around me I tidied up and secured loose ends. Rod fed the line to me from below and I ran it over the side. Trailing a line and chain established that we were sailing downwind on the starboard tack, but it did not seen to have any straightening effect on the course of the boat relative to the weather, and I fed it back down the hatch to Rod. 

Interesting fact: there are only two “ropes” that I know of on a sailboat. One is the “bell-rope” attached to the clapper of the ship’s bell, often elaborately knotted, and the other, the “bolt-rope” is sewn into the perimeter of the sail. Aside from these there are lines, sheets, halyards, vangs, rodes, warps, hawsers, and half a dozen others I never learned or disremember, but no ropes. Technically what I was feeding into the sea at the moment was a “warp”. It’s the function of a line that determines its proper name.

At this point Captain Tubbs appeared in the cockpit, as white as his foul-weather parka. “Put out the sea anchor!” he croaked. A joke perhaps? A proper sea anchor which you could toss out in a bad storm to keep you dead in the water and bow-on to the waves, was the one thing I had not been able to persuade him to purchase. The beauty of such a device, basically just a nylon parachute on a long bridle, was that once in position it needed no attention, that is to say, no one on deck. When there was nothing left to do, or you were too tired to do it, you could utilize such a sea anchor to keep the boat under control. It would have meant a cash outlay of at least several hundred dollars and Tubbs pleaded poverty. I had finally agreed to a compromise, getting an extra crew member in lieu of a sea anchor, but it irked me when, just before our departure, our poverty-stricken captain went down to the duty-free shop in Auckland and spent over $400 on two gold wrist watches, electronic marvels that would do everything but whistle Dixie. I don’t think they could whistle Dixie, but I’ll never know for sure because Tubbs couldn’t figure out how to make them work (and I didn’t feel like trying). A thick book in five languages came with each watch, and after a week or so Tubbs got his watch to tell approximately the right time, but even two professional jewelers they consulted couldn’t seem to make sense out of Christine’s or get it to perform even one of its countless functions. 

 I reminded the captain that we didn’t have a sea anchor. I refrained from suggesting that he tie a line on to his gold wrist watches and try throwing them over the side. I got out what we did have, an automobile tire “drogue.^” Figure Three shows how it works. A piece of chain (A) helps keep the tire (B) down in the water, while another short piece of chain joins the tire to a large swivel (C). From the swivel, which keeps the lines clear if the tire should twist or spin, a line runs through a block (D) on each out-hull and secures to the big jib winches (E) at the rear of the cockpit. Unlike a sea anchor, the drogue does not stop the boat, in fact the boat must keep moving for it to function properly, hence there must always be someone at the helm. When the two bridle lines are of equal length, should a wave push the boat to one side (known as a “broach”) the line on that side becomes slack and the tension on the other line helps to pull the boat back on course. (See Figure Four: in this case the boat has broached to port. Port is left, starboard is right, basic nautical lingo. We covered this right?) 

That’s the theory anyway; I had never employed such a device before. Before our departure I had prepared two such drogues, complete with all the necessary lines and hardware. If we somehow managed to lose the first, I had another, bigger, stronger and heavier all the way around. (I’d had one conversation in Auckland with a man who’d lost two such drogues in the process of sailing his homemade tri across the Tasman.)

Putting out the drogue was the one thing that really did make me nervous. First of all in our low-budget operation I had to join two lines to make each side of the bridle. Since the necessary knot wouldn’t pass through the blocks on the out-hulls, I had to run the “boat end” of each bridle line through the block first, then join it to the “drogue end”. Then, when both bridle lines had been joined in this fashion and secured to the winches, I had to get out on the stern, heave the tire into the drink and hope that the lines wouldn’t tangle, or worse, foul the rudder, before the bridle came taut.

    Once there was tension on the drogue I could pay out the “boat end” section from each winch, but until then there was no way to pay the lines out slowly without letting someone else out on deck to help me, which I had decided not to do. By this time Tubbs was on his knees in the cockpit praying and throwing up, and had been joined by Mike Hart, who was game but terrified.  As long as they stayed in the cockpit and clipped on with their safety harnesses I didn’t worry about losing them, but I didn’t want either one of them out on deck. I put one on each winch and threw the tire off the stern. It went out without a hitch. I had my winch-operators feed out more line until we had about 150 feet of bridle from drogue to boat. Trouble was, in the dark there was no way to tell if the lines were exactly even. The boat was still careening from side to side and I remembered that we had to get moving enough to keep the lines taut. I turned the key on the motor but there was nothing.

I guessed as best I could on evening the bridle lines and sent Tubbs below. Steering to keep the boat stern-to-the-waves was difficult at best. The drogue was helping but not that much. The boat still broached frequently as the waves pushed us along and correcting it with the helm wasn’t easy. Sometimes there was just no response as you sat slack in the trough of a big wave, the compass telling you you were broadside to the weather, just waiting for the “big one” to come crashing down around your ears. Another problem was that the compass, rather small to begin with, was set into the forward wall of the cockpit, a good four feet in front of the wheel. There being no protection whatsoever from the elements in the cockpit of Seahawk, the wind (a solid 50 knots with higher gusts at this point) was blowing rain and sea-spray through your field of vision, and it was hard to see the compass.

I gave the wheel to Mike Hart for a moment, but just then the boat hurtled into another wild broach. Mike turned to me and said, “I’m sorry but my nerves are shot.” I had been saving Rod up to this point, and now I opened up the forward hatch again and stuck my head in. You could tell somebody had been throwing up. “Rod, can you take the helm for a while?” and told Mike to take a break. As Mike disappeared aft into the galley. Rod entered the cockpit swathed in his bright yellow oilskins. I gave him the course and told him, “Just do the best you can. Don’t panic if the boat broaches; use the helm and she’ll come around eventually.” Rod sat down beside the wheel, his lanky body leaning forward with his eyes glued to the compass, and pointedly ignoring the storm he held the fort while I went below for a cup of coffee.

It must have been about 4 AM by now. Tubbs was quiet in his bunk, from whence he did not stir for another twelve hours. Christine was tense and pale, but able to make coffee on our lurching galley stove. As I drank mine Mike Hart suddenly announced, “I’m going back out there. If I don’t go now I never will.” and he disappeared up the ladder. I had counted on Mike for energy and enthusiasm, Rod for steadiness and stability, and Tubbs not at all. Things were working out pretty much as I’d expected. I chatted with Christine. She apologized for not standing her watch. I laughed and told her we could manage for the time being, but that it would go easier on her at the court martial if she could come up with a pot of hot soup.

When I finished my coffee, I went back on deck and relieved Rod. I tried the engine again and it worked! Things were starting to go our way. I set the RPMs for about half normal cruising speed, just enough to keep us moving amongst all the turmoil, and it made an immediate difference. Not only did it become much easier to steer, but I knew that the sound of that little Italian diesel chugging away was a great comfort to everyone on board. Soon after the engine started, the first light of dawn gave me enough visibility to even up the bridle lines on the drogue. It also brought the awesome sight of mountainous green waves with white breaking crests as far as the eye could see in every direction, probably averaging about twenty feet high with occasional whoppers. 

Wave height is a deceptive thing, and probably the most commonly exaggerated statistic connected with a storm at sea; my estimate is consciously conservative. You may have noticed that when diving into water from a high place, it always looks about twice as far when you’re up there looking down at the water as when you’re down in the water looking up. On the sea it’s exactly the other way around. A twenty foot wave maybe doesn’t sound like much, or really look like that much when you’re on top of it, but when you’re down in the trough and you see a twenty foot wave rearing up behind you, it looks like a monster about to gobble up your little boat in one crunching bite and make mincemeat out of your composure, your rational mind, and your personal dignity. 

In the trough of the waves the motor kept the bridle lines tight from drogue to boat. Then as the following wave began to push the boat, the lines would tighten and stretch dramatically. Occasionally when a particularly big wave had us in its grip, the tire would actually come popping out of the water and roll down the wave face for a few seconds before the chain pulled it under again — a snapshot etched on my mind forever.

It was downright nerve-wracking to look behind. Every wave threatened to engulf the boat, snap the lines, and send us to the bottom, yet somehow we rode out each one, the lines held, and the boat no longer broached at all. I tried the self-steering and it worked perfectly. As full daylight arrived we were sailing through the storm on automatic pilot. I set the storm jib and shut down the engine. I stood on the roof of the aft cabin, holding on to the mainsail boom and surveying the scene: the endless miles of green and white froth, the dull grey sky, the roaring wind, and Seahawk, all cream and orange, sailing herself. Mike, Rod, and I took half-hour watches. I went below on a break and played a tape of some favorite Joni Mitchell songs: Electricity, Amelia, Woman of Heart and Mind, Barangrill, Raised on Robbery, and Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I had to put my ear close to the little speaker; it was still plenty noisy outside. Afterwards all those songs played in my head and echoed in the sound of the wind and waves for as long as the storm lasted. 

By about 8 AM the weather was moderating noticeably. Christine was still unable to sleep, and I talked her into taking a half-hour watch. I sat with her in the cockpit for a few minutes, and then left her alone in her big white slicker with all those waves. She’d have something to tell her grandchildren (and her husband). As the morning wore on the weather moderated rapidly, and by noon I had brought in the drogue. I checked the underwings; there was no further damage. By the time Tubbs emerged from his bunk late in the afternoon, the sea was flat calm and we were forced to motor. The maelstrom of the past night had become a duck pond, and about 6 PM I suddenly realized that lack of sleep was starting to make me grouchy.

✱          ✱          ✱

It took us another 11 days to reach Brisbane, days that were largely uneventful, at least compared to the drama of our first five days at sea. When everybody (except Michael) seemed to have the knack of steering by compass, I began to use the self-steering routinely and established a new schedule of single watches, each of us standing a two-hour watch followed by eight hours off. There was more time now for chatting, napping, reading, and culinary experiments. Tubbs eventually noticed the cracked underwings but didn’t make an issue of it.

A couple of days after the storm we passed Norfolk Island, 100 miles or so north of our course. Norfolk, which belongs to Australia, seems to be a quiet and peaceful place where nobody locks their front door. Recently the island had been rocked by news of a burglary in which some jewelry had been removed from the house of a long-time resident. After much agitated discussion in the local press, the thief apparently turned penitent, the jewelry was returned with an apologetic note, and Norfolk Island breathed easy again. We were able to pick up their radio station for a day. It was all 50s pop music. I remember hearing “Green Door,” “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation,” and Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz.” If they have television I imagine they watch “What’s My Line” and “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

In the absence of any moves on his part towards reconciliation I continued to ignore Tubbs, and he continued his trans-ocean sulk. Rod, Mike and I spent many hilarious hours recounting his various gaffes: Tubbs’ antics at the helm, the knots he came up with, his distaste for galley duty and so forth became the comic relief of the trip for the rest of us. My communication with the Captain was limited to giving brief answers to direct questions (like “Where are we?”), hence I got into no arguments.

Rod managed to keep out of trouble pretty well, but Mike used to mix it up with Tubbs now and then. I recall one occasion when they got into a shouting match over something or other, and when they had simmered down they ended up going out on the bow of the starboard out-hull and having a heart-to-heart that went on for nearly an hour. I was on watch, Christine was sunbathing on the port side deck, while Rod was keeping me company and feeding me glasses of wine. We wondered to each other what might be born of the reconciliation taking place out on the bow. Then the conference broke up, the two Mikes came bouncing into the cockpit like brothers in Christ and announced that they were going to make scones.   

Tubbs asked me where Christine was, I pointed to the port side and said, “On the out-hull.” Next thing I knew he was crawling into my bunk with a flashlight in his hand. When I heard him calling her name I suddenly realized that he had thought I’d said, “In the out-hull.” The only way into the out-hull was to wriggle through my bunk and into a narrow crawl space leading through the wing-deck. I cracked up at the thought of Christine huddled out there and Michael not thinking it odd. It reminded me of days during our repair-and-make-ready work in Auckland, when Seahawk was hauled out of the water. Christine sometimes used to seek out thankless jobs in such secluded parts of the boat just to get away from her whining, griping husband. “I might just crawl out there myself,’’ I gasped, as Rod and I rolled with laughter.

About ⅔ of the way across the Tasman and somewhat south of Brisbane lies Lord Howe Island, another Australian property. I wanted to catch sight of Lord Howe for navigational reasons. First of all, until you actually see an identifiable point of land, all navigation is nothing but sophisticated guesswork. If you announce that a certain island will pop up on the horizon tomorrow at such and such a time and it actually does, it gives you a lot more confidence in your calculations as you close with terra firma at the end of a long passage. In addition, the more direct route to Brisbane, which would pass at least 50 miles north of Lord Howe, passes quite close to two infamous mid-ocean reefs, Elizabeth and Middleton, already strewn with the wrecks of unlucky ships. To confirm our position with a sighting of Lord Hove while in the neighborhood of these reefs seemed like a wise move.

Lord Howe did indeed appear on the port bow on the appointed day, though 3 or 4 hours later than my prediction. I blamed the discrepancy on an easterly current, the all-purpose navigator’s excuse, impossible to confirm or deny. Ocean currents, which are virtually impossible to detect or measure without high technology [in 1981] can move as fast as 4 knots an hour, which means 100 miles a day in a direction you might not want to go. The pilot books will give you statistical probabilities as to their strength and direction in a given area at a given time of year, but like the percentage “chance of rain” figures the weather man gives us, such figures are not a reliable indicator of what will happen on any given day. This is one more reason why a navigator must always allow a healthy margin for error. As this hypothetical current of mine would be pushing us in the direction of the reefs, I set the course a good 10 degrees more westerly than I might have otherwise until we were well past the danger.

One night as I was crawling into my bunk after coming off watch, I noticed a little puddle of water on the floor boards. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, it might have come through the hatch from the cockpit or somebody might have spilled something, but there was something about that puddle that wouldn’t let me fall asleep. Reluctantly I climbed out of bed and lifted the floor board. The bilge was full of water, salt water. I roused everybody and we manned the pumps. There were two hand pumps and one small electric, and using all three it took close to half an hour to pump out the boat.

The water was coming in through a pipe that acted as sort of a bearing for the shaft on which the centerboard pivoted. The open end of the pipe had been sealed with, get this, a rubber chair-leg tip, the kind you use to protect the floor. In the construction days Tubbs had just pushed the rubber cap the end of the pipe and figured that was good enough to keep out the sea. It also developed that this rubber tip had come off once before, during one of Seahawk’s two trial runs on Auckland Harbor before I came along. Tubbs had done nothing to correct the problem nor mentioned it to me. There was no need for me to say anything once I was sure we weren’t going to sink; I just stood back and let Captain Tubbs grapple with this problem. Captain Tubbs slapped the rubber cap back on the pipe. I scratched my head and gave each helmsman coming off duty the additional duty of checking the bilges and making a note in the log. By the time we had pumped out the boat for the third time I got impatient with Tubbs, who couldn’t seem to think of anything to do but slap the chair leg tip back on, and I devised a way to keep the rubber cap on the pipe. It was makeshift but it held, though we continued to make regular bilge checks for the rest of the trip. 

As the weather and the water warmed up I took to bathing in the following fashion: first a bucket of sea water over the head, then a heavy lather all over with shampoo — ordinary soap is useless in salt water. Next I would jump overboard holding on to the end of a line secured to the boat. To tow behind a moving sailboat at up to 5 or 6 knots is a marvelous sensation and an excellent way to rinse off the suds. Any faster than this can get hairy, as I’d already found out on Vehia, the racing catamaran I’d already sailed from N.Z. to Tahiti. For my first tow behind Vehia I tied a loop in the end of the line and threw the line in the water first. Then I dived off the stern and looked around to grab the line. The boat was moving along at about 10 knots, and I just barely managed to grab the line before the loop went zipping past me. When I did get hold of the tow line I thought it was going to pull my arm right out of its socket. It was difficult to keep my head clear of the water in order to breathe, and I was frankly scared by this unforeseen turn of events. I was eventually able to get back on board without assistance, but never again did I jump off a moving boat without the line in my hand, and certainly never at 10 knots.

The Australian coast came into view one afternoon more or less on schedule, and Rod, Mike, and I broke out a bottle of champagne we’d been saving. The Tubbs’ didn’t even come out on deck to see. Brisbane’s harbor is sheltered by a big sandy island, and with night falling we had just enough time to get inside the island and anchor for the night. The next morning, Saturday the 20th of March, we crossed Moreton Bay with all its fishing boats and cargo ships, and cleared customs half a mile up the Brisbane River.

Mike, Rod, and I had agreed that the first two things we wanted to to were (1) get our stuff off the coat and (2) swill some of that famous Australian beer. Rod had a sister in Brisbane and Mike a brother, and I had already accepted an invitation to stay with Mike’s brother for a few days. We took Seahawk on up the Brisbane River to a moorage at the Botanical Gardens, where the Tubbs’ reportedly had some yachting friends. We tied up between a couple of pilings, and ten minutes later I had my pack and fiddle on deck ready to jump ship. Christine thanked me with some kind words, and I gave her a big hug. I liked Christine, and I hoped she would somehow find a better lot in life here in her native land. 

Michael rowed us to the dock, and as I climbed out of the orange dingy he offered me the handshake he’d refused me back at the Bay of Islands the first day of the trip. “Thanks for everything.” he muttered, looking at my feet. I shook his hand, said “Good luck.” and was gone.

✱          ✱          ✱

This account of Seahawk’s passage to Australia is the story of both a success and a failure. The voyage itself was a success. Despite the unknown quantities of a new boat, an inexperienced crew and the physical trial of inclement weather, both boat and crew survived relatively unscathed. The failure was in my relationship to Michael Tubbs, or perhaps it wasn’t a failure, perhaps it was what might be called “an unpleasant inevitability,” “just what he deserved,” or “getting the job done goddammit.”

But deep down I know that there must have been a better way, and I regret that I couldn’t find it. These days [in 1981] I am reading a lot of books about ethics and ethical behavior. It’s a very tricky subject. The Tibetans, for instance, in order to obey the letter of the Buddhist precept not to shed the blood of living creatures, used to sometimes strangle their animals when they got a hankering for meat. Was it cruel of me to ignore Tubbs, to wait in vain for him to even make an attempt to stand up and take command? Was it kind of Christine to baby him all those years, wait on him hand and foot, and cater to his every whim? I did what it seemed like I had to do, even if it was a course of action I came to adopt in a moment of anger.

My meeting with Tubbs, our early conflicts and the work we did together to ready Seahawk for the voyage have already been detailed in my previous account “South Pacific.” I won’t review them here, but in the months before we set sail, while I was still trying to coax him into joining the party, my guiding philosophy was: “This man has been sent by God to try my patience.” God tried my patience every day, and often found it wanting. The next day I would try again, and so would God. My patience finally collapsed during an incident described earlier that coincided with our departure from New Zealand. It seemed like a failure at the time, but perhaps there is another side to it, perhaps patience is not always a virtue.

I believe in the quasi-military system of command that has long been a tradition at sea. Our “discussion and consensus” idea never really had a chance. There are many occasions aboard ship when the safety of the boat and the crew depends on fast action. There is no time for an encounter group, discussion, compromise, and consensus. There must be someone whose responsibility it is to assess the situation, decide on a course of action, give orders, and not be all day about it. That is not to say that there can’t be discussion, but if there is no time for it, the others on board should have enough respect and discipline to follow orders whether they understand them immediately or agree. Real boat Captains are more often cantankerous than careless, more often intemperate and downright impossible than incompetent.

I once worked for a 61-year-old fisherman on a two-man offshore tuna troller, a man who had a reputation for burning out his deckhands in a single trip, trips that often lasted 4 weeks or more. He was a loner and a diehard, a stingy, impossible-to-please taskmaster who had built his own 57-foot boat, and had more regard for her than for any human flesh and bone. One morning we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a tempest of roughly the same intensity as Cyclone Frieda. As I stood there gaping at the size of the waves sweeping past us, old Joe Smith put the boat into gear and barked, “Throw out the jigs.” I was too astonished to say anything, I just fed out the fishing lines, and with waves breaking over my head we fished that storm all the way from Coos Bay, Oregon to San Pedro, California. Sometimes days went by without a civil word exchanged between Joe and I, but I had confidence in that man, who had seasoned his boat lumber in a warehouse for seven years before starting to build the “Spirit,” and that’s the reason I was able to sleep nights when the weather threatened to fling me right out of my bunk.

Yes, I believe that there should be one captain per boat. He must have real authority and he may not be a nice guy. The trouble is, and I’m afraid this is one thing that attracts many unfortunates like Tubbs to yachting, that this kind of authority or “playing God” can seem quite an attractive proposition, especially to people who have been pushed around and pecked at all their lives by their parents, spouses or employers. To suddenly become King of your own floating castle, to be judge and jury, priest and policeman, to marry and bury at sea…what a rush! Ah yes, that’s the life for me, on the open sea…that’s for me…the open sea….for me….sea…..me…..zzzzzzzzzzzz…

The night closes in around the ship like an impenetrable wall, echoing only the splash of the bow wave and the creak of the rigging. Captain Tubbs stands alone at the helm, gripping the polished hardwood spokes of the old wheel, hat tilted back exposing a brow furrowed with tension and watchfulness, his leathery jaw set against the wind and weather, gnawing at the stem of a pipe that went out hours ago. A cup of coffee is delivered up from the galley, and after two gulps he gives the order, “Haul on the bowline and hose down the poop deck.” Down below, sleepy crew leap out of their warm bunks to obey the call. “What’s the course?” he calls to the navigator. “Dead ahead, Sir,” comes the prompt reply. 

The Captain peers intently into the black curtain of night, sensing what he can’t quite see, or can he? Moving shadows to port, eerie noises to starboard, and what’s that smell? He turns to find the first mate standing by. The guy never changes his underwear at sea, says it’s bad luck. “Here Nelson, take the wheel,” Tubbs grumbles, trying to conceal his affection for the old salt. “Loyal as an old dog,” he thinks, “and always there when you need him.” With practiced fingers he quickly adjusts the sextant and takes a fix on Venus. “Just as I thought,” he cries, “we’re in the Hudson River.” Nelson farts and says nothing. They understand each other.

What these armchair admirals don’t realize is that the real sources of a Captain’s authority are his or her experience and acceptance of responsibility. Michael wouldn’t crew for anybody else and so he never learned to sail. He wanted to start at the top, but he didn’t have the experience and he didn’t really want the responsibility. When his authority was mysteriously taken away, or at least thoroughly undermined, all his pleasure evaporated. Whether or not he understood how or why it happened I didn’t care then and don’t know now. We completed the trip without my once having to actually refuse an order (there were precious few) or restrain him physically. It was a strange affair, and having struggled with the writing of it, I understand it a little better than I did at the time.

 Since then I’ve had one exchange of letters with Christine, who writes (in August 1981), “I’ve decided that living on a sailboat tied up in the Brisbane River is what you call a dead loss…” Apparently Seahawk has become a river duck, and it sounds as if Christine, who once told me, “The boat is Michael’s dream, I always wanted to fly an airplane,” would like to spread her wings. She’d make a sailor; Michael never will.

Mike and Rod and I tucked into the first pub we came to, and in the middle of my second glass of ice-cold Aussie beer I suddenly remembered a joke I’d heard from my friend Seiffe in New Zealand. 

Question:  What’s green and sits in the corner? 

Answer:  The Incredible Sulk.

✱          ✱          ✱