Part Two
The sky was a wicked gunmetal blue. Lightning cracked over Yarrabarah.
Don’t want to get caught out here in this one, mate.
Once outside the arms of the marina he opened the throttle and the big outboard lifted the RIB onto the plane, sending her skidding across the ruffled surface of Trinity Inlet.
Five minutes later he slid her in alongside the flank of the big steel schooner, killed the motor, made off the painter, scampered up the boarding ladder.
Rain started to hammer on the wheelhouse just as he made it inside. Big, fat drops spattered the window. Admiralty Island’s mangroves disappeared behind a white wall of falling water. The far side of the Inlet already had whitecaps.
A close call. The Wet had well and truly started, after weeks of build-up and stupefying heat.
It was a bugger, having to spend the summer away from his boat. He was missing the warm, dry weeks on the Huon when he could have got so much done. Trouble was, the Audrey Liza was fulfilling the yachtie cliché of a ‘hole in the water you pour money into’.
He’d gross sixty grand for three months at Ernest Henry – with hardly any outgoings, thanks to free food, accommodation and return flights from Cairns. That was his cosy saloon paid for, right there.
Eight days on, six off. Twelve-hour shifts. Back underground for the first time in thirty years: the mine had transitioned from open-cut and was chasing the main orebody of copper and gold ever deeper.
What the hell, it was only three months.
In Cairns, he’d landed this cushy number for the off days: boat-sitting. Doc had got him an in at the yacht club.
The Wet brought challenges for boat owners. As you’d expect, it was wet – and bloody windy at times, when the Queensland coast was lashed by the tail end of a cyclone, or the sixty-knot squalls of a thunderstorm downburst tore through.
Worse, it was wet and hot, the humidity so high that breathing felt like drinking. Ideal conditions for the growth of mould. Making your boat weathertight tended to compromise passive ventilation. Active ventilation ran down your batteries.
No shortage then of boat owners looking for a responsible, handy, mature bloke to look after their boat. Keep it aired and the bilge sweet. Run the motor once a week and keep the batteries topped up. Fix minor leaks and get onto any mould before it got out of hand. Keep thieves and vandals away by your presence. In return: free accommodation on board and use of the owner’s runabout.
The only downside was having to motor across to the yacht club every day to take a dump. You couldn’t shit the owner’s holding tank full.
Otherwise, a pleasant foretaste of shipboard life, and the perfect environment to wind down from the stresses of FIFO.
He had to face the fact: he couldn’t hack it much longer. They were all kids now in the industry. He had nothing in common with most of his co-workers. The starchy food clogged his bowels; the long shifts clogged his brain.
There was also the fact that he’d grown too expensive for a lot of the mining operations. Tight-wads. Director bonuses and shareholder dividends were another matter entirely, of course.
This might have to be his last hurrah.
Still, there were the six days off every fortnight. Pottering on someone else’s boat, watching the sheets of rain sweep the harbour, fishing for mangrove jack, barramundi and grunter – it didn’t get much better, did it?
The only thing that would make it better: if Leigh could join him. He missed her.
Their catch-up weekend, when she’d returned to Tassie in October! It’d been … memorable.
He went down to the galley and fetched a Bundy and Coke from the fridge. Took Cunliffe’s Complete Yachtmaster from the bookshelf above the chart table and settled into the deep upholstery of an armchair in the saloon.
It was a hard life at sea, all right.
He’d overcome his resistance to navigation theory quite suddenly. Bored one rainy evening, he’d picked up this book – and found himself engrossed.
This was actually a piece of piss. Navigation was basic arithmetic. Passage plans and tidal vectors – trigonometry! Pilotage the memorisation of a few shapes and colours, common-sense principles and procedures, relating what was on the chart to what was on the water. Meteorology: pattern recognition, visualisation of vortices tracking west to east, or north to south, understanding the effect of local features – like those mountains out there with their steaming rainforest. It was hot air and cold air. Simple physics.
His whole professional life had been numbers, visualisation of two-and-three-dimensional systems, strict adherence to procedures, the practical application of physics. He was born for this.
What in the world were you scared of, Jamie Anderson?
The owner of Coral Dreaming said he was welcome to use the old paper charts in the chart-table drawer. They were all out of date and these days, she only used the chart plotter for navigation anyway.
On them he learned the use of a parallel rule and compasses; plotted courses, planned imaginary passages. He went out on deck and practised three-point fixes. Sat in the wheelhouse and fired up the radar and the chartplotter, leafed through the manuals, and started to get a sense for what these electronic aids could tell you, and what they might not reveal. Used AIS to follow the routes of shipping to and from the busy port. Took the RIB on expeditions up the inlet, into the maze of mangrove swamps, keeping an eye out for crocs.
The next time he came off shift, he’d do a radio course at the yacht club. Get his short and long-range certificates in one weekend. Then he’d be able to stand a watch, maybe help with a yacht delivery.
This incremental, modular acquisition of knowledge and skills suited his orderly mind. The mind which Mags had always found plodding and timid.
Timid? If his wife of thirty years could see him now …
The phone jolted him from his reverie. He picked it up from the table: Stevie’s photo with its wide grin. You could see her in him, couldn’t you?
‘Son?’
‘Hey, Dad dude. How’s it hanging?’
‘Clown.’
They bantered for a while. Then his son got around to the reason he was phoning.
‘You still coming to ours for Christmas?’
It’d been mooted when he dropped the campervan off on his way north.
‘That’s the plan. Might only be Christmas Day and Boxing Day, though. Your old man’s gotta earn some coin.’
‘Yeah nobody says that these days, bro.’
‘Says the bloke who asks me how it’s hanging. Whatevs.’
‘Dad, stop embarrassing yourself … Only the reason I ask is, Mum and Ian are coming, too.’
‘Groovy, funky and far out.’
‘Dad.’
‘Your mother and I can play nicely these days. It’ll be fine.’
‘I should hope so. Just wanted to give you the heads-up.’
‘Appreciated. First dibs on the campervan. Don’t make your old man sleep on the living-room couch with the dog.’
‘Fair enough. Oh, yeah, and by the way, you’re going to be a grandpa.’
‘By the way!?’ echoed an outraged female voice in the background.
After the call, Jamie tried to work out what his actual feelings were, amidst the conventional expressions of delight, enquiries after the gender of the offspring (unknown at present) and the wellbeing of Laura, the mother-to-be (excellent, if occasionally nauseous). Then being ribbed about his own great age and impending senility.
His son was about to be a father. His son!
He realised with a start that he’d seen the thirty-two-year-old real-estate agent as still a boy. He wasn’t even sure that he himself was a grown-up, by any reasonable standard. Grandpa. Shit …
He was still digesting the news when his phone rang again. Busy day: two more calls than he got most days.
This time, it was the logo of E.W. Doherty Traditional Shipwrights that appeared on his screen: a woodcut image of a hand wielding an adze, the outline of a wooden sailing vessel.
‘Doc?’
‘Hello, Jamie boy. How’s life in the tropics?’
‘Steamy, mate, steamy.’
‘Bet it is. Tassie’s not far behind you for heat today, though I doubt we can match the humidity … Just calling to let you know, your boat’s ready to go back in the water.’
A pang of dismay. He’d known it was coming, of course. All the same, he’d hoped to be there for the momentous occasion.
‘Hello?’
‘Yeah, sorry, Doc. That’s great. Thanks for letting me know. So what’s the next step?’
‘Err, putting her back in, mate. Is something wrong?’
‘Nah, just … nah, it’s all good. Oh, and by the way, I’m gonna be a grandpa …’
After the call, he turned his mind back to the hours, days and weeks of fairing that great, rounded form, sweating behind his mask despite the winter chill of the shed, passing the torture board over the timber until the pencil marks were erased; checking again with the flexible batten; finding a new raised spot that needed levelling: pulling the carpenter’s pencil from under his beanie again. On and on, until his shoulders burned with the agony of it. Witnessing the rough, sea-beaten boards becoming smooth, golden; breathing in the aroma of the Huon pine with its remarkable oils, absorbing it until he thought that he too must have become rot-proof, impervious to the auger of the dreaded shipworm.
He heard again the dry clatter of lignum vitae mallet on iron, driving the twisted cotton into each long, long seam. By the end of the day his head had rung with it despite the ear defenders. He heard caulking mallets in his sleep in the dead of night.
Learning to apply just the right amount of force to drive the tow into the wedge-shaped seam, not through it. Stan’s or Doc’s critical eye appraising his work as he waited for the dreaded ‘Do it again,’ or the ultimate seal of approval: ‘It’ll do.’ The tendons from wrist to elbow had screamed with the pain; he had that hard lump of muscle inside his forearm still.
The vegetal, nutty smell of the linseed oil putty that had to be applied to every seam over the caulking. ‘Just be thankful we don’t use red lead any more, Jamie boy.’
The gradual, incremental joy of seeing his boat – his beautiful, beautiful boat – come into her full glory under his hands and the unforgiving supervision of master craftsmen.
It would probably never have to be done again, during his stewardship of the Audrey Liza. ‘She’ll go twenty years or more with that job. Keep her bottom clean and antifouled, her topsides touched up, and this boat will still be watertight when you’re in your nursing home.’
To miss the culmination of those thousand hours of labour, it was bitter.
Coming up:
This Friday in The Last Orchard: Leigh settles into a routine at her orchard – and makes an intriguing discovery. (Paid subscription.)
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Jamie gets a chance to use his largely theoretical seafaring skills for real.