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

Fuck. You would not want to be in a yacht in this sort of stuff. I went out on to the wing of the bridge deck in a pair of light cotton pants and the wind was blowing the hems of my pants so hard that it stripped all of the stitching out and the hems of my pants just dropped down. It was fucking horrible, but the wind that we were heading into was worse than that. Force 11.
    Just after lunch, says Lester, I am on the nav table when I hear Rager report they're getting fifty to sixty knots with gusts up to seventy-two.
    Then suddenly shit was happening everywhere, then Team Jaguar lost its mast . . .
    Then a loose rope wrapped itself around Team Jaguar's propeller. Jesus!
    Our radio started going mad, said Lester. The news was devastating.
    It was time to get battened down, said Kelvin, to look around the boat to see what will fall over, what will fall out of the shelving. We got the weatherboards across the hatchway. In a full storm you can't have any air down below because you can't let any water in. So it is dark and hot down there. You can't have much light on because you don't want to waste the juice. It's REALLY sweaty. You're dressed in thermal underwear that you will need on top. It's unbearably hot.
    The whole environment is stinky.
    Like most yachts, White Lie 2 is not exactly waterproof so when the water washes across the deck a lot of it finds its way below. When the winds changed everything got very wet very fast. The cleanest and driest place to rest your head was on your hands.
    The two o'clock sked ran for about an hour and a half. And listen to this, this is the forecast: a low centred east of Flinders Island will move to the east-south-east. West, west to south-west twenty-five to thirty knots (greater in gusts) increasing to thirty to forty knots offshore and forty to fifty near the Victorian coast. Swells one to two metres increasing to three metres. Waves two to three metres increasing to four to five.
    We were only off Merimbula and we were getting seas as bad as that. While they were issuing this forecast Stand Aside, one of the leaders, submarines and rolls on a thirty-metre wave. One of the guys is washed off, sucked in, shot like a fucking cannon through the water.
    I remember Sword of Orion, after they reported their position, they said, we don't know where that weather forecast came from. We're getting seventy and eighty knots here.
    When you're on the table, you're really focused on the work, but also this horror began coming out of the radio. Maydays, masts broken, boats rolling over, falling off the top of waves. What was it like, being locked between decks while all this was going on outside? It was frightening, because you don't really know what's going on upstairs. The boat makes some amazing noises. It's like being inside a hollow tin with some lunatic banging on it with a cricket bat. You can't brace yourself.
    At four o'clock we changed course, heading south-east into even deeper water.
    Soon the sky got very white, says Kelvin, and the tops were blowing off the waves and the air was filled with spume pelting at you horizontally, so hard it hurt, like hail. We had waterproof hoods but when we faced the sea the wind just peeled them off.
    I don't know how big the waves were. We didn't have thirty metres, but it was big, and waves were coming from every direction. And the foam was dark, sort of grey, and the water had this weird sort of oil slick, like it had been emulsified. It was very unnatural and yet you're in the thick of it, and adrenalin driven, and there's not that much fear.
    Later I would have a chance to observe Lester working on a yacht off Sydney. I learned things about his character I had never guessed in all the thirty years I'd known him. In the world of business he lacked the killer instinct, but in the face of a violent southerly he was fast and precise and calm and disciplined. This was someone you would want beside you in a war.
    You can't let the fear take you over, said