30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

carefully placed his brimming wine glass to one side in order that he might unfold it to its full extent for me. His finger traced the grid of small neat numerals that I had always seen on charts but never understood.
    These numbers represent fathoms, he said. A fathom is six feet. So you can see that the leaders in the '98 race hit the storm in three or four hundred feet of water while we were further east in fifteen thousand feet. That was my choice. I had been to the weather briefing the day before Christmas and what I saw there disturbed me.
    The meteorological briefing took place on a hot bright Sydney morning. The water in Rushcutters Bay was mirror smooth, Force Zero on the Beaufort scale. The Cruising Yacht Club was chock-a-block. This is one of the rules of the race - the skipper and the navigator must attend the meteorological briefing which was given, in this case, by a certain Kenneth Blatt.
    The clown was wearing a Santa Claus hat, Kelvin interrupted.
    Yeah, well, that was sort of OK at the time but later the hat did make me angry.
    No, Kelvin said, at the time too.
    Lester hesitated. I was uneasy, yes, he admitted. Of course I had no clue of what was going to happen, but there was too much macho ho-hoing to my taste. Ken Blatt put on his red hat and his white pompom and said he'd run the various weather data through three or four different weather models and none of them could give him a coinciding view of what the weather systems were likely to be. So what he told us, in this jokey way, was . . . you're going to get hit by something somewhere.
    To be fair, that's normal for the Hobart, said Kelvin.
    To be fair, said Lester, five yachts sank, six men died.
    Lester and Kelvin and eight other friends sailed from Neutral Bay at one pm on December 26 1998. It was not their boat. They were along as crew on Gordon Cameron's White Lie 2 .
    It was Saturday, a bright perfect summer's day in Sydney Harbour, and as White Lie 2 made its way out towards the Heads there was information available in Hobart that showed a deepening low-pressure system 600 miles away in Bass Strait. They were all on deck here, even Lester who would soon retire to the navigation table where he would remain wedged for the next thirty-six hours.
    We were about third last out the Heads, Kelvin laughed. You have a little spit when you come out the Heads. That's the custom.
    He means a vomit.
    Every time I've done it, said Kelvinator, I've had a spit but never again after that.
    I've never had a spit, says Lester. Never. But I've seen Kelvinator eat half a plate of lamb navarin, throw it up, then finish the second half.
    Only way.
    It's nerves, says Kelvinator, not sea sickness. In 1998 there was a fair-sized swell, but it was nothing like the year before. Just on nightfall we had this ROLLING weather coming in on us in a straight line. In the middle of the night, there are about five of us around the sink, all vomiting in the dark. But it was just tension. You know there's at least a fifty per cent chance you're going to get clobbered. But you're really excited and all of us, except Lester who has gone downstairs to sharpen his pencils, are on deck. This is a great time in any race. You've had your spit and it's just fabulous. You forget you are married. You forget you've got to fire your office manager and your shares are down the toilet. But about three or four hours out, the watch kicks in and now you get serious because you know you've got to race the boat. The wind is twenty-five knots. At this stage, with the spinnaker up, it is incredibly fast. It's the sort of sail you live for.
    By eight o'clock, says Lester, we had travelled sixty-five miles and were due east of Nowra with the wind still behind us. That was when we got the first storm warning. Winds of forty-five to fifty knots south of Merimbula.
    Merimbula, said Kelvin, is, comparatively speaking, sheltered. And you think, oh shit, if it's like that in Merimbula what will it be like when