30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

you poke your nose around the corner into Bass Strait? Now it's clear, we're definitely going to get clobbered, but what can we do? Turn around? Go home and say, ah, sorry, it was going to get rough? No, you're stuck like a train on rails. You're not only stuck, you're committed, you're CHARGING towards it flat out. And, Peter, honestly, the conditions were perfect. By nightfall we were as far as Jervis Bay, that's eighty miles in just eight hours, pretty good for a big heavy boat.
    We took the spinnaker down before it got dark, said Lester.
    Other crews might have been able to deal with a spinnaker in the night but it's fair to say, said Kelvinator, that we're more cautious. Some of these other boats, they train all year, the crew sleep out on the rails. But we're amateurs. We haven't done a lot of racing at night with spinnakers on.
    If you get hit by a line squall . . .
    It wraps around your mast.
    Yendys had trouble with its spinnaker that night. They were bringing it down in thirty-eight knots.
    Yeah, it broached, rolled on its side. These guys are pros but they lost their bowman off the side without a life jacket.
    He wasn't hooked on. He . . .
    Got washed clear off the boat and then a big wave dumped him back on the deck.
    That was a lucky bugger.
    That was a very lucky bugger.
    That first night out, as White Lie 2 hurtled down the coast, the crew worked their shifts but now Lester knew there was a storm ahead he would not leave the desk. He may have been one of the few navigators in the race who kept his radio on all the time.
    I'm a control freak, said Lester proudly, wobbling his head as he always does when he speaks well about himself.
    The one thing I don't like about sailing, said Kelvin, is going into the night. Going into the night with a storm coming is really a gut-churner because if you're going to die, you'd really like to die in the light. There's a whole lot of noise in the night, creaking stuff, and most of it is to do with stress, on wire . . .
    A little boat will hurt you but a big boat will kill you. There are wires that can snap, spinnaker poles that can spear you right through the chest . . .
    While White Lie 2 carried my friends through Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday morning, a cool pool of air in Bass Strait was deepening into a low-pressure system. At first it was moving eastwards but then it slowed down and was cut off from the high winds that might have sent it safely on its way.
    At three in the morning there was a sked, says Lester. That means that the navigator of every boat calls in his or her position, and they give us a forecast. There are two of these a day and they take an hour or more to get through every boat.
    If the forecast had been a fish, said Kelvin, you would know enough never to eat it.
    Well we didn't know that then, said Lester, but the forecast they gave us at three in the morning had been issued at nine o'clock the night before. What was forming ahead of us was actually a cyclone.
    They don't call it a cyclone in these waters.
    They call it a fucking storm.
    At four in the morning of the second day, while we were off Narooma and Montague Island, it was snowing in Victoria. In midsummer. We had no idea.
    By now the leaders were starting to get the serious weather from west-south-west. They still didn't know the extent of it, but we were in the lee of the mainland.
    By the middle of the morning the low-pressure system was starting to pass directly over the racetrack and these terrifying winds and seas hit the shallows of Bass Strait. What you've got here is swirling cold eddy colliding with the warm East Coast current. This is horrendous - the waves collide and whip up Bass Strait until it feels like you're in a washing machine in hell.
    I'd only been on Bass Strait once before, says Lester, and that was on a freebie on the QE2 in 1986. And we had a Force 10 storm. The QE2 had to throttle back from about thirty knots to twenty-five and I thought to myself . . .