My Yacht : Sapphire

Sapphire is an Eastcoast 31, a production sloop of the late 1970's, designed by a well known and highly respected Australian designer called Peter Cole.He designed a 1986 Americas Cup defender called Steak and Kidney, but many other Peter Cole designs of yachts both smaller and larger than the EC 31.went into production. An EC 31 is recorded as the handicap winner of the first ever Lord Howe Island race, which is a 414 nautical mile ocean yacht race from Gosford, just north of Sydney to Lord Howe Island , one third of the way to New Zealand. They have also completed numerous Sydney to Hobart races, and are still sailed in Club races around Sydney Harbour and elsewhere in Australia. Its great to think they were once thought of as modern and cutting edge, but now they are hopelessly outdated and slow by comparison with modern yachts. But everyone regards them as strong and seaworthy. Sapphire is 10 feet wide, draws almost 6 feet, and weighs just over 4 tonnes.

This is the Nav station - theres a VHF radio behind the sliding panelling.

Step Two: Get a Yacht

OK I had the basics from Eastsail and now what I needed was time on the water to put that theory and that practical experience to the test. Numerous sensible people advised me to join a yacht club and go sailing as a crew member for their Twilight races during the week and on weekends.That way I would find out if I was really going to enjoy sailing, and I would get help and encouragement from experienced yachties. If I insisted on jumping straight in and buying a boat they suggested getting a small boat, maybe a laser or a trailer-sailer,rather than something bigger and a lot more expensive that could be unsuitable or that I might end up hating. Or worse than that - and I am sure this was the scenario that was flashing before their eyes as they tried to calm me down - some sort of horrible disaster at sea that could destroy both me and the boat. They were all too polite and didnt want to hurt my feelings or dampen my enthusiasm, especially as I was a potential new member for their Club. They knew from all their own experience how unforgiving and dangerous and unpredictable the sea can be and were all giving me excellent advice but the problem for me was that

a) I knew I was going to love sailing and yachts - I already did;

b) I lived nearly two hours away from Sydney harbour so would never be able to do twilight racing;

c) I didnt want to learn racing anyway, I wanted to go cruising;

d) I didnt want a Laser or a Trailer-Sailer and

e) joining a club and going to races on the weekend would take too long.

I wanted to get sailing in my own boat RIGHT NOW - I had already wasted 40 years and I just didnt want to waste any more time. Everytime there was news about someone I knew or a friend of a friend being diagnosed with cancer or dropping dead with a heart attack at my age, my determination to get on with it was strengthened even more.So I started looking for a yacht.

I wanted one that I could sail by myself - so it couldnt be too big. I wanted one that could sail across oceans- so it would have to be well built for ocean passages. I was told not to buy a wooden yacht, even though I adored wooden boats, because they would require an enormous amount of upkeep and I am not a carpenter so it would have to be fibreglass or steel or ferrocement. And it would have to be second hand because Brand new yachts were way out of my price range.

I was on the internet for hours and hours and hours, looking at yachts for sale, reading yachting blogs, reading about the different types of rig, and keel and sail, reading about fibreglass and cement and steel, ocean passages, storm tactics,rescues, radio, refridgeration,communication...anything a search engine could come up with. I read yachting magazines from cover to cover, all the ads - everything. I went to the Boat Show and to Boat Books and bought manuals and guides and technical journals and I even joined a sailing club and went to a lecture by a solo circumnavigator half way through his voyage. And I enlisted the help of a yachtie, and paid him to look at some boats for me and offer an opinion about their suitability for what I was planning.

Eventually - and this was half way through my sail training - I had a short list of about ten boats that I wanted to look at. And after I had done that, there were two left - an aluminium Adams 35 and an Eastcoast 31,built of fibreglass in 1981. My advisor said either would be good, so I went back and had another look at them and decided I liked the EC31, Sapphire. She was then pulled out of the water for Survey prior to final haggling about the price, which only dropped a little, because she was given a clean bill of health by the Surveyor. He said he wished he was the one buying Sapphire and predicted we were about to have a terrific summer of sailing. At last I had my Yacht, and I was ecstatic. They say there are only two really happy days in the life of a yachtie - the day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it: well certainly the first part seemed to be true!!

Sailing School Drop Out

At Eastsail Sailing School I must have been the most eager student they ever had. I wanted to know everything and never stopped asking questions in class and on the water and when on the Boats always volunteered for any chore that needed to be done - except maybe cooking which I am hopeless at. Once the instructor so misinterpreted my questioning of things he was asking us to do that he spat the dummy and said there was no way he could teach me anything and that he was taking the boat back to the Dock to find someone else to take the lesson. I was shocked at his outburst and explained I simply wanted to understand why he, Brian, did this particular thing differently from the way another instructor , Wendy,had previously told us to do it - was it an important difference or maybe I had misunderstood him or the previous instruction - I just wanted to know and get it right.
The instructors were interesting people who had one thing in common - they knew heaps about sailing and were all very experienced sailors. We all loved listening to their stories of hair-raising near misses, groundings, storms, men overboard, gear failures, rescues at sea and all their other adventures. One instructor was more interested in talking about his high speed runabout than sailing, and another had us learning to do a gybe in wind and weather that another instructor the same day had described as too wild for beginners.

. Brian was a Captain Bligh sort of character with major financial problems that made him moody and unpredictable.On our first day out, after he had agreed to stay on board and continue the 5 day Course, he cursed me and suggested I go and hang myself because I was so usless, but later when I suggested I should be the one leaving, he begged me to stay because if I went he would lose his job. So I stayed after he agreed to try extra hard to teach me.

In spite of these personality issues from all my instructors I had learned an enormous amount, and I enjoyed every minute of it.The one thing I needed was time on the water, which unfortunately I could not download from the internet - I just wished I could have been like those instructors who had been around yachts and yachties and been sailing all their lives.
I wasnt too upset or surprised when at the end of all my Eastsail training on New years Eve 2006 Brian failed me. However he passed another student who on the last day had said he still wasnt sure what the difference was between a tack and gybe!I hope Brian didnt think that failing the course meant I was going to walk off the Jetty and never set foot on a boat again because if he did he would have been shocked to have learned that six weeks before I had actually bought my own boat! Not only that, Sue and I had been sailing it by ourselves in Pittwater.Once, on an Eastsail training day we had even sailed right past my boat on her mooring - but I didnt let on as I stared like an infatuated teenager at my new girlfriend, Sapphire.

Step One: Learn to Sail

The obvious way to learn how to sail is to go to Sailing School and I quickly discovered several based around Sydney Harbour .They mostly offer a cheap "Introduction to Sailing" as a way of attracting people to their more expensive proper sailing courses and the one I went to with Sue required us to front up one cold midwinter Tuesay evening to attend a lecture where we learned that ropes are sheets, port is left, the front is called the bow and sails on modern yachts work like the wings on a plane to create lift as the wind flows over them. The following Saturday was a beautiful crisp winter day and we went onto their Sydney 38 for a sail down the harbour and learned about winches and tacks and gybes. We immediately booked the Beginners Sailing Course but a couple of weeks later when they phoned and said the Course would be postponed because there were too few students I rang Eastsail, a much bigger outfit and booked myself in to the Beginners course there. It was called the "Start Yachting" course and consisted of four half days of sailing and instruction on their beneteau yachts. It seemed that what usually happens is that you pick four weekends and do one half day each time but I couldnt wait so I did them all in one weekend where there were vacancies in the morning and afternoon courses on the Saturday and Sunday. Next I did the Competent Crew Course, two weekend sails which involved sailing out of the harbour for the first time and sleeping on the boat. Finally, just before Xmas I did the Day Skipper Course. For the Theory part of it I had to take a week off work and travel to Sydney every day for 8 hours of lectures and then on Friday afternoon an exam. The practical part was five days living onboard, during which time with two other students and our instructor we sailed north as far as Newcastle and back. In my next Post I will review my experience of Sailling School and illustrate with some photos.

Where it all started for me:The Americas Cup

I'm not sure where my interest in sailing came from, though a Psychologist might make something of the fact that my mother ordered me to get back out and sail my big brothers P Class in gusty wind that frightened me when I was 12 , or, if I didnt, she would take me straight home and that would be the end of sailing for me. Well I didnt, she did and it was! Well at least for the next 40 years.

But like it was for many Kiwis, it was the Americas Cup that really got me going, though for most their interest in the AC didnt start till Michael Faye mounted the first Kiwi challenge for the cup in 1986. I am not sure how it came about but I had been following the Americas Cup even before Australia II took it off the New York Yacht Club in 1983. That year was my final year at Medical School and for the last three months of my formal medical education I went to work in a tiny polynesian Island called Niue for three months. I desperately tried to make my little radio tune in to Radio New Zealands pacific broadcasts to find out what was happening, but it wasnt until the Time magazine arrived on the island a few weeks after it was all over that I read about that Ben Lexcens winged keel and that unbelievable victory.

Three years later I was working as a GP when AC fever began to sweep New Zealand as the first ever Kiwi challenge for the Cup was mounted with KZ7, the "plastic fantastic" 12 metre yacht, and Chris Dickson its Skipper. In the Finals of the Challenger series, Dickson was knocked out by Mr Americas Cup, Dennis Connor, the American skipper who lost the Cup to the Australians, but who then went on to win it back from them. All Kiwis know who Dennis is - a man we loved to hate, especially after he said things about the Kiwi challenge like "Why would you build a plastic yacht unless you wanted to cheat?" At that time all other AC boats were aluminuim but nowdays theyre all "Plastic" - so Kiwi ingenuity was just showing the way. At the end of the series it seemed all of New Zealand was Cup mad, and thereafter the madness just grew until the Cup was won in 1995 by Peter Blake, Russell Couts and "Black Magic". In 2000 Team New Zealand succesfully defended the Cup against several American Syndicates, including Dennis Connors "Stars and Stripes"as well as the French. Swedish and other eurpoean teams.

Sadly Team New Zealand lost the Cup in 2003, sailing a boat that just wasnt up to it - Kiwi ingenuity got the better of them, but remarkably in 2007 in Valencia they regrouped and came oh so close to winning the Cup back from the Swiss. That last race against Alinghi, when TNZ lost by ONE second must rate as the greatest AC Match race of all time!

Throughout all these years I constantly scoured newspapers, magazines and the Net for every detail I could about the Cup. Team NZ had a compound in downtown Auckland while I was living there, and I would often drive there after work, after everyone had already gone and the security fences were all locked up, and I would peer through cracks in the gate to get the tiniest glimpse of the latest boat. When I turned 50 I was given a ticket for a daysail on an old AC boat on Sydney Harbour and when I stepped aboard I was so excited and emotional I almost burst into tears. I guess you could call me an Americas Cup "Tragic".

But here I was at 50, and though I knew just about everything there was to know about the Cup, and though I loved everything about the sea and about sailing, I didnt know the first thing about how to actually sail a boat. And thats what struck me like a thuinderbolt out of the Blue one day in 2006. "This is crazy" I thought " I'm going to have to do something about it"

This is what its all about: Read this First

I sailed here by myself from Sydney Harbour in March 2009 a journey of about 100 miles, my biggest adventure to date. It was fantastic. I was surrounded by Pilot Whales one afternoon - they behaved a bit like dolphins but were much bigger and didnt leap out of the water but broke the surface to breathe all round the boat. I had some fabulous days sailing, and got better at using the Hydrovane, my wondrous new self steering gear. I had moments and sometimes hours of almost magical joy. And to think that when I was talking to people about buying a boat many advised getting a little one to start with just in case I might discover I didnt like sailing. I always said to them " I know I'm going to love it" - and I do.

The next few postings will describe how I learned to sail just over two years before, how I went about getting a boat and what happened after that. Then, once the story is up to date I will document my progress towards making my first genuine Blue water solo journey - across the Tasman to my homeland, New Zealand at the end of this year.