Racing shadows across an ocean

As the night sky flushed with the Anzac dawn Van Diemen III was on a course to cross the Equator south and west of the “other” Christmas Island.

On watch from 4am to 6am, it was not a time to contemplate the Rudd-Gillard’s disastrous and lethally alluring boat people policy. Nor was I thinking about Prime Minister Gillard’s myriad other calamitous policies, encapsulated succinctly by one senior ALP politician in an e-mail to me late last week thus: “Carbon tax , refugees, pending harsh Budget, Greens handling of Israel boycott continuing to make them out as extremist party despite the avuncular Brown veneer, AWU Howes threatened Govt over c tax, that no support if one job threatened, ie his one, Combet jeered at meeting of AWU members in Pt Kembla, riots at Villawood, Hobart residents don't want a Detention Centre, and the West awaits the end of the wet season(?) In anticipation of more boats, let alone NBN, scandals continue in SA Labor, is that enough?!” The list doesn’t begin to encompass the entirety of this failed government’s calumnies but it will do as an indicator of its continuing ineptitude. Out here in mid-Pacific, the sea state and weather are of more pressing concern. In the past three days we have come through the Doldrums, the area near the Equator now referred to by meteorologists as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) where winds originating in the northern and southern hemispheres come together with often unpredictable effect. We have had no wind and we have had 30-plus knots, we have basked in sunshine and we have been stung by driving horizontal rain. Shortly after coming on watch two nights ago, the stars were blotted out by a cloud which brought gusting winds driving the leeward rail down despite two reefs in the eased mainsail and propelling the yacht along at better than 10 knots for an hour and a half. The automatic pilot is a wonderful friend on long passages such as this cruise to the US but it cannot anticipate waves like a good helmsman and the motion of the boat changes immediately a skilled hand takes the wheel, lifting the 20m yacht on the crests and easing her down into the troughs rather than blindly crashing into the seas. The pilot had the helm when the photograph (above) of me and a relaxed Robbie Vaughan was taken. There are still a few bumps in the night though, dumping bathtubs of tepid water (the temperature has dropped from 30C to 27C since we left Samoa) in the lap of the leeward helmsman, washing our remaining coconuts from the aft-deck and sweeping unsecured lines through the scuppers. Below, the critical liquor locker drawer broke as the weight of bottles rode forward, smashing unopened bottles of Bushmills Irish whisky, a rose´, Gordon’s gin and a half-empty bottle of 25-year-old Appleton’s rum. The bouquet from the bilge was exquisite. But even though we are beating to windward, the breezes coming primarily from ahead, it has not been all banging and crashing. As we were sailing under a clear sky, with the waning moon still lighting up the ocean, small blobs of phosphorescent creatures swept by, rising and falling in the surging wake and the shadow of the mainsail raced alongside, leaping and stretching over the foamy bow wave. Like Peter Pan’s shadow, sewn to his heel, Van Diemen’s spirit flies but cannot break its bond with the yacht. When Venus rises off the starboard quarter this Anzac morning, constant and familiar, a guide and an assurance, it is impossible not to think of the young men who possibly waited for the same star to rise nearly a century ago and may have found some solace in its constancy before moving ashore to their deaths.