Learning after 60 — the big sail

THERE comes a time – like reaching the big six zero – when you should do something completely different. As a result, I am learning to sail. Not taking a dinghy around Lake Burley Griffin, but rather taking a 14-metre yacht from Brisbane to Port Douglas, north of Cairns – about 1800km — with my brother, Greg, and his son Timothy.

So far, a little more than half way, it has been an experience of, to borrow some words, her beauty and her terror the wide jewel sea for me.

One thing you do as you grow older, is to learn how to learn. Learning to swim, ride a bike, drive a car, then a truck, learning ski, white-water canoe, fly an aircraft (not yet), or whatever, begins with a fear, not so much of failure or inability to learn the skill, but that in learning how to do it you will inflict injury upon yourself, others and/or your own or others’ property.

Worse, you might inflict death upon yourself or others.

With sailing there was a lot to learn – sea depth, wind (speed and direction), tide and current (speed and direction), navigation, using the two-way radio, how to put sails up and down, how to dock this monster without smashing it against the dock. And how to do several of these things at once and doing these things while pitching about in a fearsome wind and rolling deck.

It is not like a car, which you can stop and call the NRMA. Once this 11,000-kilogram vessel moves it takes a fair time for it to stop. You can’t just put on the brake and put it in reverse.

We had a few days training in Brisbane, during which I have to admit I almost went into a complete flunk until I clutched at the knowledge that others of similar physical and intellectual ability could do it and these things can be learned.

The first training day began in a ghastly folly. We were so concentrated on manoeurvring the vessel that we forgot to disconnect the power cable at the dock. A couple of onlookers screamed stop, but there was a sickening crunch of broken wood, steel and plastic as the whole power post was ripped forward.

But someone disconnected the cable and we were away. Later, the marina was very understanding in the face of my humiliating confession, and their odd-job man said fixing the damage came with the daily charge.

You usually see these yachts in photos with sun and sand in calm sea, plopping anchor wherever they like, but life is not like that. It has been the windiest, wettest, coldest July in a century in Queensland.

We have been facing a couple of deadlines – dates to arrive, drop people off bring people on. The winds and the sea do not respect that.

We just had get moving, and a couple of days later approached the Wide Bay bar – at the southern end of Fraser Island – in poor conditions. We had called the local Coastguard who volunteer to escort nervous vessels through, on the perfectly reasonable expectation of a solid donation. Sounded like a good deal to me.

We met them in a surging sea. I had all the waypoints plotted on the Raymarine autopilot, but that was a two-dimensional game which bore no relation to the three-dimensional reality.

All sails down and motor running, I just kept my eyes and steering on that yellow Coastguard boat. Our yacht surfed down three-metre waves, lurching almost uncontrollably to left and right. It was too intense to be terrified.

And we finally came into the calm water behind the island, wan with expiry of nervous energy.

The volunteer Coastguard and voluntary marine radio monitors do a sterling job.

A few days later we pushed too far. We imagined berthing in a marina in Bundaberg in the late afternoon. We simply ran out of light. All the natural outlines of land, horizon and other features suddenly disappeared. All that remained was a two-dimensional wall of black, peppered by a bewildering array of blinking red, green and yellow lights.

This was a major shipping lane. Surely, I thought, no-one was as silly as I, so there would be no-one else out there to run in to. I was right. But after successfully berthing it was like waking up from a horrid dream and realising that all your teeth have not in fact fallen out.

It has been unfortunate to have a little pressure to be places at certain times, but it has also forced us to sail in conditions that fair-weather sailors would not go in and we are better for the experience.

You begin to learn your vessel and admire its designers. We are sailing a Beneteau – one of several French names that go under the rubric of “Plastic Fantastics” because they are made of fibre glass.

A seemingly magic force – several tonnes of lead in a keel – rights the boat against enormous walls of water that swell around it.

Waves that terrified me on the first couple of days became a matter of course a week later.

And I have gained a new hero – Captain James Cook. How did he do it? In the narrow channels of the Great Sandy Strait between Fraser Island and the mainland, the fog comes in, and in the Whitsunday islands hidden coral shoals await every keel. I have got a depth sounder and electronic charts that tell me where I am, how deep it is and what to expect. Moreover, I have a motor to reverse me out of strife.

Even so, today at sea, you are still a bit on your own. You can’t nip down to Bunnings to buy a new widget for the compass mounting, or turn on a garden tap for more fresh water, or assume a continuous source of electrical power.

But it has been worth it. The places few can get to. The birds, turtles and whales. And then, out of the sea, comes a session of intense joy. Half a dozen dolphins start playing at the bow. We are booming along on full sail at seven knots with the wind behind us, and the dolphins are loving it. They race ahead and cut across the bow and then leap into the air.

You can go to a hundred Sea Worlds or aquariums, but there is nothing like the real thing at sea.

The dolphins are clearly playing or at least have a curious sticky beak at this white monster.

The three of us are on deck watching. The Beneteau is on auto-pilot. And no-one seems to be in control here except the dolphins.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 28 July 2012.