Disaster Dick at the Helm

Many, many years ago, while supposedly being educated in Australia, I had a classmate by the name of Richard Burt. We did a lot of stupid things together.

Richard lived in a huge old house overlooking Little Sirius Cove in Sydney Harbour. It was a great place to hang out in—because of its size mainly. We could get up to all kinds of mischief without close proximity of adults. And being on the water, it had a dock…and boats.

Richard didn’t need me around to get into trouble. Earlier on, he’d taken one of his parents’ cars for a joyride and managed to hit a power pole. The car was still driveable, so he slipped it back into the garage with the faint hope that the blame might fall upon other shoulders.

Me and Richard in a school photo

Alas, his hopes were dashed within minutes of the damage being discovered. In his haste to distance himself from the vehicle, his wallet had slipped from his pocket and onto the floor of the car.

Not long after this incident, the neighbour’s dinghy was sent to the bottom when a large boulder landed in it. Richard told me later that he’d been in the vacant lot adjoining his house and had simply wanted to roll the boulder into the bay. But as soon as he dislodged the thing, it found its way into a groove and went trundling over to the neighbour’s dock.

After each of these little adventures, Richard was allowed no visits from friends for a few weeks.

Once his privileges had been restored however, he was soon back to his old tricks.

I was at his place one afternoon when we found the spare keys to the second car and decided to put them to use. Neither of us saw too much risk in messing around with the vehicle as long as it remained within the garage: back it up a little, go forward—practice our clutch-work.

How could any harm come of this?

With the house being situated on such a steep incline, the garage—supported by concrete pillars—protruded out over a courtyard. The street was a cul-de-sac so there was virtually no traffic, and the stairs leading up from the house to street level were clearly visible from beside the garage.

While one of us stood watch, the other was free to hone his skills with gears and clutch. Before long though, we began to broaden our horizon by reversing the car to the far side of the road then driving forward into the garage—nice and slowly of course, taking no chances.

But youthful exuberance led to competition. The challenge was to pass through all the gears, accelerating in each in an attempt to get into fourth before reaching the wall of the garage.

After several unsuccessful attempts, Richard finally managed to get into fourth. A triumph!

But his achievement was not without cost. He was a tad late with the brakes and into the wall of the garage he went. By sheer luck the car stopped before plunging into the courtyard below—and by luck again, no one was in the courtyard when half a ton of bricks went crashing down.

I legged it up the road while Richard took off over the fence into the vacant lot next door. His plan was to get down to the water, climb back over the fence to the boathouse and engage in some innocent aquatic activity.

Unfortunately for Richard though, as he leapt over the fence, his father—who’d been summoned by an urgent phone call from the main house—was exiting the boathouse and the two of them met.

After this one, it was some time before Richard was allowed to entertain guests. But as before, when his time was done, things went back to normal.

A sunny Saturday afternoon some weeks later found Richard and I whipping around the cove in a little wooden runabout with an outboard engine. Richard was at the wheel when he spied his father on the dock, dressed in a pair of shorts.

“Watch me soak the Old Man,” he chirped gleefully. And with that, he zoomed up toward the dock as if to pass it by a couple of feet. But as we approached, he threw the wheel hard over, intending to produce maximum spray.

Well, he not only managed to drench his father, he also flicked the stern of the vessel into the corner of the dock, causing the transom and outboard to part company with the rest of the boat. Under the searing gaze of a dripping Mr. Burt, Richard and I, still seated in what was left of the vessel, slowly submerged.

Mr. Burt didn’t say a word. With a firmly clenched jaw he just shook his head, turned and jogged up the steps toward the house. Perhaps fleeing the temptation to whack the two of us over the head with an oar before we made it to the dock.

An Odd Pair

I’ve forgotten the exact date, but it was a few years ago: I happened to be in London when I heard through the grapevine that there was to be a re-union over Christmas of a number of my friends from Canada who’d begun their lives in Wallasey, a suburb of Liverpool in Northern England .

Bondy

About a week before the mob was due to descend, I discovered that my old mate Bondy (from the fiasco at Club Arroyo Hondo in the Dominican Republic - related in a previous blog) was already in Wallasey—his home town. So I headed north.

We hadn’t seen each other in a while so we had a bit of catching up to do, an activity which invariably involved lengthy sessions at various pubs.

Well, by the time the rest of the lads began to filter in I was beginning to show signs of fatigue. But my old mates from Canada—who I also hadn’t seen for years—couldn’t be neglected. I had to keep stepping up to the plate.

At this point we were all bunking in the rambling expanse of Dukey’s attic: He’d been brought up in this huge, kind of run-down place and the Ducal manor was the inspiration for the Duke’s nick-name.

Anyway, as soon as the local pub opened at midday we were there. When it closed around three, we’d head back to Dukey’s attic for a nap.

We’d wake up, eat a huge meal; prepared by Mrs. Duke and ‘Aunt Jude’—a mysterious woman reputed to have worked with the French resistance during the war—then head back to the trough. It was a rigorous daily routine.

I’d been in Wallasey perhaps two weeks when I decided I couldn’t take this punishment any more. So one night, during the height of the revelry, I quietly slipped away from my friends and made my way to the railway station.

“I want a ticket on the train going the furthest distance from here in the next half hour,” I told the ticket-vendor. Peering at me rather oddly, he sold me a ticket to a place called Fishguard.

I fell promptly asleep on the train, waking up a couple of hours later to observe stations with names like Tywyn and Aberystwyth.

The next morning we stopped a mile from the town of Fishguard so I had to walk through the pouring rain until I found somewhere to stay.

“Ahh,” I thought. “Peace at last,” when I’d checked into a B&B. I dried off in front of a radiator and plunged into bed where I luxuriated until around seven that evening.  After supper I thought, “I’ll just slip out for a pint, have a brief chat with the locals, then head back for an early night.

Dukey, Simon, Paul, Me

Of course, as the mythical ‘they’ might be inclined to quote, “The best laid plans…” the ‘pint’ inevitably led to another and I met a bunch of interesting locals.

The point of the story is that the two landlords of this particular pub were best friends despite the fact that they’d fought on opposing sides during WW11.

I don't recall the British partner’s name, but he’d been a naval captain. The other was Heinz, who had been a Stuka pilot. Heinz spoke perfect English but with a strong German flavor.

On the walls of the pub were pictures of the British captain—his ship—his crew, mingled among photos of Heinz—beside his Stuka—with other German pilots.

Chatting with the British partner one afternoon, I learned of an incredible coincidence. A couple of weeks previous, Heinz and a traveling customer were talking about the war and it turned out that the customer had been a ship’s captain in the Med.

When he told Heinz the name of his ship, Heinz had replied, “Ah. I vos the vun who sunk you.”

Rather than taking a swing at Heinz however, the captain shook his hand. Apparently, once he’d disabled the ship, Heinz had circled around in his Stuka until everyone had left in the life-boats before dispatching the vessel to the bottom. The two ex-adversaries ended up the best of friends.

Bliss on Biscayne Bay

I drove down to South Miami to escape the snow during the winter of 1970, landing in Coconut Grove.  It was here I met Alan Bliss, who ran a sailing school and boat rental on Biscayne Bay.

Seduced by sunshine and palm trees I ended up staying for over a year, becoming one of Alan’s sailing instructors and general fixer-upper. This latter function consumed the majority of my time as his motley fleet was in a deplorable state of disrepair.

Captain Bliss

I remember one time we had a group of kids from a local high-school taking lessons. I’d managed to get my lot back to the dock in one piece and was standing there watching as the other boats returned.

One of the vessels—a 21 ft. Victory—came frothing down the bay with a strongish following wind and a student at the tiller. Dave Bleakly the instructor was struggling on the foredeck trying to get a jammed headsail down when suddenly the boat veered off to the side and went crashing into a vessel sitting peacefully at its mooring. The Victory bounced off this one and went slewing into another.

Scraping free of its second victim, the boat-full of students went charging off in search of fresh prey. At this point, Dave abandoned the head-sail and went racing aft. “Give me the f-----g tiller,” he yelled, leaping toward the cockpit.

The helmsman stood up and calmly  handed it to him—a useless stick of wood now that the rudder had dropped out of the boat. Equipment failures such as this were not uncommon in the Bliss fleet.

Alan’s personal vessel was in a comparable state of repair. It was called Harm’s Way and certainly lived up to its name with its owner at the helm.

The Columbus Day Regatta is held each year in early October on Biscayne Bay. It is a weekend when it seems every vessel in Miami is out on the water. Alan and I went out in Harms Way to compete in the yacht race.

Some sailors raced regularly while others had no experience whatsoever in competition and were absolutely clueless in regard to racing rules—an obvious recipe for disaster. On top of this, the wind on the day I speak of was fluky, resulting in vessels of all sizes arriving at the first mark in a clump.

I was on the fore-deck struggling to set up a spinnaker (with the bent, broken and frayed equipment common to Alan’s vessels) and all I could hear from every direction were angry shouts demanding right-of-way and buoy-room, the crunching of hulls coming together and strings of furious expletives.

By some miracle we managed to round the mark unscathed and I hoisted the spinnaker for a downwind leg of the race. As every sailor knows, once the spinnaker goes up it is imperative for those in the cockpit to haul in the sheet so the sail will fill.

Well, there was only Alan in the cockpit and the sheet was not being attended to…with the result that the light sail wrapped itself around me. And Alan was completely ignoring the rude words I was shrieking at him through the cloth. Suddenly the boat lurched over.

Struggling free of my sailcloth cocoon I found Alan to be in a state of distress. Both his hands grasped the bow of another vessel that had ridden up over our gunwale and pinned him to the far side of the cockpit. I dashed aft and the two of us managed to shove the other boat clear.

As soon as we’d done this, Alan began shouting at me to get the sheet on. He appeared totally unfazed by the incident, a fact that led me to assume occurrences of this nature were not uncommon in his racing career.

Despite the calmness one might associate with his name, sailing on one of Bliss’ boats was rarely a relaxing experience.

Banking on the Planking

Rob and I had been in Puerto Banus on the south coast of Spain for a couple of weeks. We ran into a few friends and were generally having a good time. However, every weekend we were tantalized by the parties held aboard a magnificent seventy-foot wooden schooner.

These regular events featured a veritable bevy of bikini-clad damsels and would attract a sizeable group of spectators on the dock. Drinks flowed, music played—those on board were in their own little world, seemingly oblivious to the envious eyes watching them from ashore.

I felt as I imagine ‘The Great Gatsby’ character Nick must have felt as he gazed across the bay toward the glittering lights and laughter that accompanied one of Gatsby’s lavish shindigs.

Right at the beginning of our stay, I’d singled out the owner of the schooner and tried to cozy up to him at one of the local bars. He was a friendly Englishman and we seemed to get along just fine—he made no mention of the parties though.

Rob--the straw that broke the camel's back

I can’t recall what changed the situation, but finally, on the third week of our stay, the coveted invitation was issued for the following weekend.

It was a Saturday afternoon and the docks were thronged with sightseers strolling about inspecting the lavish craft in the marina. By the time Rob and I arrived at the gangway leading to the schooner, the party was in full swing.

With arms clasping a bag of beer to my chest, I elbowed my way importantly through the milling crowd to the head of the gangway with Rob close on my heels. Both of us were attired in our number one’s for the occasion.

The stern of the vessel was some ten feet from the dock and the gangway consisted of a wide wooden plank with a few stanchions supporting a rope. As I stepped onto the plank it bent rather alarmingly under my weight. I strode forward intrepidly however, a confident smile on my face as I acknowledged the greetings of those on board. Behind me, I sensed the bitter envy of those lesser beings stranded on the dock.

I’d no sooner reached the center of the plank when it gave a startling downward lurch. I realized that Rob had stepped onto it—and he carried a few more pounds than me. Then came a loud crack like a pistol-shot and the wretched plank parted beneath my feet.

When I surfaced—still clutching my bag of grog—I was greeted by polite laughter from the vessel, and hoots of it from the dock.

I turned to find Rob’s head bobbing in the water behind me. “Why the hell didn’t you wait till I was across before you stepped on the #@&*%#! plank?” I snapped.

Talk about short term memory loss! “I wasn’t on it.” He protested.

“Then what the &%#@ are you doing in the water?” I countered. Of course he had no reply to that.

The rest of the afternoon turned out fine. The sun was out so we dried quickly, and our dramatic entrance was a topic of mirth on future occasions.