All Piss and Wind (16 page)

My own most vivid memory of Ben-Bob's unique character has nothing to do with sailing. In his younger days he had a habit of ‘going for a bit of a burn' late at night around the streets of Sydney's northern peninsula to clear his head when some knotty engineering problem was preventing sleep. Those noctural automotive excursions were usually undertaken in his vintage Ferrari. Noticing a jumble of automotive parts in his garage one afternoon I tentatively asked what this latest project entailed. ‘Well,' muttered Bob, ‘I'm sick of those bloody hoons in souped-up Monaros and Falcon GTO's always trying to drag me off at the lights.' Hmnn. So? ‘I'm gonna get the Ferrari donk and bung it in the wife's little Fiat 850. Might need a bit of work but I reckon I can make the engine mountings match up almost exactly.
That'll
scare the shit out of 'em!'

I don't know whether he ever made good on this crazy scheme, but it's enough for me just to summon up the image of Ben-Bob's rapid blink and mischievous grin as he hurtled up the Wakehurst Parkway leaving the local louts in a haze of tyre smoke. Australian sailing needs another larrikin like Ben-Bob.

I
T WAS MY GOOD MATE
Steve Grellis on the phone. Steve is a resourceful and well-qualified sailor with whom I've done thousands of happy miles. ‘Hey, Dave. D'ya fancy giving us a hand next week delivering a new 49-footer from Pittwater to Melbourne? She's straight off the showroom floor. Big and luxurious. Got the lot – radar, chart plotter, turbo donk – all mod cons. We'll be stopping at Eden or Bermagui for a bit of R&R. There'll just be four of us if you sign up. Come on, mate, it should be a doddle.'

Who can resist such temptations? A chance for a comfortable sea trial on one of the larger new Tupperware tubs was just too good to turn down. Work can always wait.

But it can also be dangerous making assumptions about any boat, especially a new one. Few things test all-round seaworthiness quicker than an ocean passage. Flaws of design, construction or fit-out will soon become evident; inadequate rigging and equipment ruthlessly exposed. The term ‘shakedown cruise' is a landlubber's euphemism. Friendly roadside service can be a tad hard to find if
you suffer a serious breakdown at sea. Steve and I agreed to meet at the boat the following day to do a thorough inspection.

It was time well spent. The huge popularity of European factory-made yachts has put thousands of people into affordable sailing, but – at least as they're supplied from the dealers – these boats are rarely set up for offshore work. Most were designed for the charter/cruising market and will spend their entire lives as flat-water daysailers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but even a cursory scramble around our shining new ride soon revealed too many things that were lacking on a boat expected to do even overnight service at sea.

The list of its more obvious omissions was daunting: there were no storm sails, in fact no sails other than the main and jib already on the furler. Despite its generous beam, there were no central grab rails below. No lee cloths to stop us rolling about in our berths (all of which were doubles). No restraining strap to stop the cook – who was me – being hurled out of the galley. No extra sheets or lines of any kind or length. No sea anchor or drogue to slow us down in extreme weather. No winch-handle boots in the main cockpit or at the mast. No HF radio (but it did have a flat-screen TV and DVD). There were three separate heads, but no wet locker to hang our foul weather gear. Not to worry. Such minor irritations shouldn't deter a mob of seasoned yachties. We wouldn't be racing, after all, just doing a quiet little delivery down to Port Phillip. Famous last words.

Steve managed to borrow some basic safety and radio gear but there were still plenty of smaller items we needed to borrow or purchase from the local chandlery before we could set off that Friday evening. We yarned about the boat's shortcomings with the shop assistant as he quilled the bill for our flares, bungs, hacksaw blades and spare batteries. After we'd mentioned the lack of any extra lines onboard he fumbled around beneath the counter, finally emerging with a handful of assorted short ends. ‘Here, fellas. You might as well have these. Not much use to us, but you never know
when you might need a bit of spare light stuff.' It was a simple act of seamanlike mateship. Just eighteen hours later that thoughtful gesture would help us save the boat.

As the crew assembled after work we all cursed the 25-plus knots of south-easterly that promised to make the delivery a long slog to windward. The Bureau of Meteorology was reporting three-metre swells at the wave-rider buoy off Botany Bay. Not so pleasant. ‘Let's have some dinner and a couple of settling ales at the club. Then we'll decide when to push off.' It was a good call. By 2200 the southerly had eased a little and gone further east. We motored up Sydney Harbour into the lee of Watson's Bay and began setting up the main for one reef – always a sensible configuration for delivery work in a stiffish breeze.

Immediately, we struck our first problem. Most cruising boats have a system of permanent lazy jacks and a mainsail bag along the boom that allows the sail to be quickly dropped and secured without the labour-intensive and sometimes dangerous process of ‘flaking' and then securing the main with ties. But the jacks and bag had been incorrectly installed on this new boat, locking the reefing lines behind strong stitching and canvas. We had to carefully cut through that sailmaker's mistake to free the first reefing line and then attempt, in darkness, a makeshift repair that held things together. Half an hour later we finally cleared the Heads and turned south with one reef, fiddling with the furler until the jib was roughly in balance. Next, as we tidied up the main, we discovered that the sail ties supplied with the boat were too big to pass through the tiny reefing-point eyelets. Brilliant. The first of the chandler's short ends was promptly pressed into service as a brailing line. With the boat nicely heeled we began to romp along, making good miles as the crew settled into a comfortable ‘one on/three off' watch rotation. But not for long.

‘All hands! All hands!' At 0320, about four miles off Port Kembla, the off-watch rushed up the companionway to answer the
helmsman's anguished shout. ‘We've got big trouble, fellas. No steering!' The twin wheels spun drunkenly as the boat turned slow circles, crash-gybing back and forth in the two-metre swell. There was a decidedly nasty crunching sound issuing from somewhere inside the stern. This could be serious strife.

We removed the access port for the emergency tiller to discover the top of the rudder-stock thrashing about wildly at least six inches below deck level. Whatever locking nut or ring had held the big spade in place was now nowhere to be seen. We wouldn't be solving this problem quickly.

Someone shone a torch down the hole. The top bearing was in place and apparently undamaged. That's a start. In the darkness below we could see that the steering quadrant – still mounted on the rudder stock – was all that had stopped the whole assembly from dropping out of the boat. But that horrible grinding noise was the quadrant banging about violently with each wave as it tried to gouge a hole through the inside of the hull. The bottom bearing, where the stock exited the boat, was already taking a terrible pounding. If we couldn't get this chaos under control quickly the quadrant would soon bash its way through the fibreglass and we'd start taking water.

Normally when the internal chain or wire mechanisms of a wheel steering system fail it's a relatively simple matter to fit the emergency tiller that all boats carry. But when the rudder has dropped down into the boat there's no way of attaching that tiller to the top of the stock. Serious strife indeed.

Stay calm, think logically. We were now only about four miles off Wollongong but in no immediate danger of being driven onto the rocks or foundering. Our first job was to simply settle the boat down. We furled the jib, centred the main and then streamed large buckets on mooring lines from both stern cleats. By adjusting the length of those lines and trimming the main it was possible to keep the big boat reasonably stable. It was now 0415. We clustered in the
cockpit to consider our situation. Any type of jury-rigged top bearing was unlikely to hold the weight of the rudder, let alone the huge torsional loads if we ever got underway again. Everyone had plenty of offshore experience. One of us was even an engineer. There just
had
to be a solution. We decided to first try getting the whole rudder assembly back up into position before tackling the bigger issue of how to keep it there.

The crew of four split into halves: the physically smaller pair would go below, unscrew the access hatches in the aft bulkhead and crawl through with torches to assess the damage. The other two stayed topside to concentrate on improvising the control system and lifting power we'd need to get the rudder back in place. With the extraordinary strength of desperate men, the blokes inside the stern found that they could push the whole rudder up a few inches if they timed their effort with the right wave. From above, we dropped the stoutest of the chandler's gift lines down through the now-vacant bearing hole. The ‘inside' team hitched that line to the top of the rudder stock below. We then bent the other end of that precious bit of braided rope to the tail of the mainsheet, looped it over the boom and down to a winch to form a crude lifting tackle. Slowly, the square head of the stock was ground back up into position. Our problems were far from over, but at least the terrible pounding of the quadrant against the hull had stopped and the boat was unlikely to sink. Now, how could we secure the rudder and make it usable?

Sometimes the dumbest questions are rewarded. ‘Maybe that bloody nut is still around here somewhere on the boat?'

‘In this sea? Fat f—g chance.' Pessimistically, we felt about on the after deck and reached into a small void between the cockpit floor and the upper step of the transom swim platform. There it was! A threaded stainless locking ring, complete with its Teflon washer. Miraculously, after more than an hour of bucking about in the swell, those vital parts hadn't slipped into the tide. Energised by this incredible stroke of luck we now set our weary minds to solving
the next logic puzzle. The rope keeping our rudder in position was still holding, but it also prevented us from getting the locking ring back onto the top of the stock. But if we undid that line to get the ring on, the spade would immediately drop back through the boat. Stalemate.

By now we were close to exhausted. There was a brief discussion about calling up the Coastal Patrol or Water Police on the VHF radio for a tow, but experienced offshore sailors don't like to be defeated so easily. A crude idea formed in my weary mind. Now so tired and dry-mouthed that I could hardly speak, I just managed to squeeze out a single word: ‘breadboards'. What? There were a couple of those cheap white plastic cutting boards in the galley. Maybe one of them had an edge the right length to jam between the quadrant and the bottom of the boat so that we could screw the ring on?

Steve scurried back through the boat and grabbed all the breadboards from the galley. It worked. There was now just enough space to recover the chandler's line while still keeping the threaded top of the rudderstock in view. As I rushed to haul out the rope, I noticed that the casing had already begun to chafe through. This was a close-run thing. The delinquent locking ring was threaded back on with a triumphant twirl and we bashed it tight with a screwdriver and hammer. That bastard's not coming off again for a while! We had a rudder again. Let's go!

It would have been foolhardy to now press on to Melbourne trusting that our improvised quick fix might last for the next 450 sea miles. There was obviously something wrong with the way the steering mechanism had been made or assembled. We needed to have the boat hauled out, inspected and properly repaired. Anywhere in Sydney Harbour would have been practical, but for warranty reasons we now had to sail the boat all the way back to the Pittwater yard of the Australian importers. That was a minimum twelve-hour trip. Seriously knackered, we turned the yacht north and blessed the owner for installing an autopilot.

Within minutes of our arrival a team of anxious shipwrights on overtime had the big sloop out of the water and were swarming all over its rear end. After removing the rudder they decided it had probably been assembled with insufficient thread exposed above the top bearing. The locking ring simply worked its way off with the constant motion of the rudder. To remedy this they chiselled out one of the spacing shims at the lower bearing, but this required them to then grind more than five millimetres off the top of the rudder blade to stop it catching against the hull. A quick brew of epoxy, some lock-nut goo and considerable brute force did the rest. Perhaps it was best that the owner wasn't there to witness this spectacle. As they worked, we told the repair team the story of how we'd managed to keep the boat together. The senior shipwright allowed himself one of those remarks that could only be made by a non-sailor. ‘Well, you blokes could've been in real trouble out there. You were bloody lucky.' Lucky? Tell us about it.

Whether our mishap was the outcome of poor design, faulty manufacture, sloppy installation or just plain bad luck I didn't really know (or, by then, care). But what it did underline was the danger of assuming that any large yacht is seaworthy, especially when it's brand-new and has never been tested on a passage. Meanwhile, that short length of chafed rope that somehow held up the rudder has never left my sailing bag. I'm not a superstitious person, but it's the closest thing to a lucky charm I'll ever have.