Heading into the hormonally charged teen years coincided with us moving from Port Elizabeth up to Springs on the East Rand in the then Transvaal (now Gauteng).
The two places could not have been more different in a million ways. But the biggest difference from a sailing point of view was the wind. As I mentioned, Port Elizabeth is known as the Windy City for good reason. Springs (kindly termed Suspension City) didn’t suffer from the same weather issues. Wind was something that happened after eating too many beans. Not anything to do with atmospheric pressure.
We joined Murray Park Yacht Club, based at the rather grand sounding President Dam. It wasn’t grand. It was a puddle that sat in the shadow of a mine dump (for anyone unfamiliar with mine dumps, they are vast mountain-size piles of dirt that have been excavated out of a mine). This meant that on the one day a year there actually was wind, it was blocked or changed direction every few seconds as it fought its way around the mine dump.
This meant frustrating sailing, particularly when you came from a place where you sailed for survival, not to tack on every wind shift.
As a result, most of our weekends were spent sitting on the side of the dam waiting for the wind. If there was enough wind for a race, I’d invariably spend it getting more and more cross as the wind would shift and change and require a lot more patience than I was blessed with.
Me aged about 13 sitting waiting for the wind at Murray Park
The only time the wind really got up was just before the monstrous electrical storms, that typically rolled in at around 4pm most days in summer. The sky would cloud over, the wind would pick up and everyone would get frightfully excited and charge out onto the water. We’d all race around at top speed waiting for the bridge boat to wake itself out of its afternoon snooze. By the time the race gun would go, the first large drops of rain would be pelting down. You’d possibly get half way to the first mark when the incredible lightening bolts would start forking their way down….
Think about it. You’re sitting in a puddle of water with a large metal pole pointing into the sky, tantalising the lightening bolts to find a way to earth, while you clutched a metal tiller. It wasn’t the brightest thing to do really and I recall that during one of these storms, someone was actually struck by lightening and killed on the bank.
The race would turn into a disaster. Hailstones and torrential rain would pelt your skin. The wind would howl from a billion different directions at once, often turning into mini whirl winds causing your sail to flog back and forth without you going anywhere while getting brained repeatedly by the boom. Invariably boats would capsize all over the course and the rescue boat would be pushed to its limits trying to get to everyone.
The race would be abandoned and everyone would make there way back to the clubhouse, suffering from hypothermia and shock, which called for the grown ups to have a few shots of Old Brown Sherry to warm themselves up.
So a day’s sailing at Murray Park could be summarised as long spells of boredom, couple with frustration, followed by excitement, then sheer terror and recovery in the bar. It did however have a fabulous social scene. And it was there that I became friends with Jenny, a girl I’d go on to sail many regattas with. More on that next time.
I have dug out some old photographs of me as a young girl in my early sailing days. (Apologies for the picture quality but they are old and have been scanned in from prints).
The pictures below feature my first ever boat - the good ship Baroness. It was made of wood. You pay a fortune for wooden boats to punt up and down the Thames - particularly around Henley - but this was not one of those. This was a cost effective training vessel for me to learn in without worrying too much if I ploughed into the bank a billion times a day (which I did).
I could be wrong but these pictures might have been the day she was ‘launched’ with her shiny new name stuck on the side. Why else would we have pictures of it - unless it was a momentous event in that I was sailing without crying? But I’m sure I have memories of my mother cutting out the letters painstakingly and sticking them onto the boat with much cursing. So no doubt these pictures captured that handiwork before it got destroyed by me. That’s what I would do if I was the mother.
In this picture, my father in his infamous speedo (do you still where them dad?) helps me prepare the boat while I stand nervously by. I look quite small really.
And this, with me posing with my new ‘yacht’ and the mass of optimists (that’s the name of the boat, not the mood of the parents whose children were in them) hitting the startline. As I mentioned previously, starts were hairy.
The next two pics features me as a fashion disaster. Actually, that was just my sailing attire. You can tell we shopped at the finest sailing outfitters. In this instance, I was the crew on the boat behind me (called a Mirror) which I sailed with my stepfather (although he wasn’t my stepfather at the time. It all got a bit complicated along the way…)
Almost all of my early years and teen memories of weekends and holidays revolved around regattas and sitting next to dams/rivers/puddles waiting for the wind to start blowing or stop blowing so hard.
In hindsight, I guess it was what kept us out of trouble, stopped us playing pac-man games all day and inspired me to do this. I can’t say I loved every minute of it at the time, but I’m certainly glad I spent my childhood that way. I should probably force my children to do something that makes them cry most weekends - they’ll appreciate it when they’re older.
The teen years will follow (with more pics…featuring bad, bad hair).
Despite the fish incident I managed to get over the trauma and kept on sailing. By the time I was 12, I was regularly racing in regattas, from the local Interschools at Redhouse Yacht Club, to regional and national events in places like Swartvlei and Knysna.
These events were all fabulous - not because of the sailing you understand - but because they invariably included a disco at same point during the regatta.
The discos were a brilliant opportunity for the girls to stand on one side of the clubhouse giggling and the boys to stand on the other side punching each other’s arms and generally trying to be cool and disinterested at the same time. In between there might have been some grown ups throwing out some super embarrassing parent dancing but we mainly ignored them.
There was one boy in particular who I’d fancied from about the age of 7. I didn’t really register on his radar at all, or maybe I did and he didn’t speak to me out of shyness. Whatever the truth of the situation, I would look forward to every sailing regatta, not because of the sailing, but because he would be there. And there’d be a disco. And there was a slim chance that maybe one day he’d ask me to dance.
He finally did. It was at a regatta at Knysna Yacht Club. The song was Live is Life from an 80s one hit wonder band Opus.
To this day, if I hear the song, I am transported back in time to the inside of the Knysna Yacht Club, dancing with The Boy. After the single dance, he proceeded to ignore me again, but I didn’t care. Life was complete.
Until the next day. I started off racing really well, up in the top of the fleet. Gradually I started to drop back. I felt awful. Blinding headache. I eventually gave up and sat on the bank crying, feeling like a loser and worst of all, knowing that The Boy had seen me drop out.
As it happened I was staying at the same house as he was (I have no idea whose house it was come to think of it). When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t see. It was as though someone had dropped acid in my eyes over night and it was impossible for me to open my eyes in any kind of light. Turned out that I had pink eye. Very badly. So that was the end of that regatta. And I’d looked like a pink eyed rat in front of The Boy. For a 12 year old girl, this was roughly equivalent to being paraded around the town without clothes on.
I survived and apparently, he didn’t mind much either because several months after that it was the Nationals at Swartvlei. It was New Year’s Eve 1985. We were all gearing up to usher in 1986 at the tremdendous regatta disco.
It started out with the usual boy / girl split. But eventually, as midnight neared, The Boy approached me and asked me to dance. The song was Forever Young by Alphaville. Sigh. Despite this happening 24 years ago, there’s no way I’d ever forget what the song was.
We held onto each other and went round and round and round in circles. I felt so incredibly dizzy for a million reasons. The music filled me. I was slow-dancing with The Boy. If I’d been shot down by a sniper right then, I would have died completely and absolutely happy.
When the song ended, we left the disco and walked next to the lake holding hands. Holding hands!! Actual physical contact with The Boy. At a minute to midnight, we stopped. He counted down and at the stroke of midnight, leant forward and kissed me. Just a peck. Nothing more. That was enough. My first kiss. It was bliss.
My early sailing years and my first crush are sweet memories tangled together. It may not have been the obvious route to developing a love of sailing, but it worked regardless.
For anyone who, like me, has had to watch Finding Nemo a billion times, you’ll be familiar with title of this blog post. However, I’d like to point out that I don’t believe fish to be either food or friends.
On the food front, I’m allergic to all sea creatures so even if I wanted to eat it, I can’t. And I don’t see me becoming friends with fish any time soon either. They’re not quite as skin crawly as birds with their pointy beaks, evil twitchy eyes, clawed feet and flapping feathers. But then again, birds don’t have gills that flap open and closed, slimy scales or quite as pungent an odour.
Anyway - there is a point to this, bear with me - I had an incident with a fish once when I was a young girl.
I was out sailing my boat, racing, doing well. I was at the furthest possible point away from home when a fish somehow jumped out of the river and straight into my boat.
It was shocked. I was more shocked. It lay there flapping its gills desperate for air. I sat there frozen to the spot, staring at it in horror. The longer I stared, the more it flapped and flopped. The more it flapped and flopped, the more I stared.
The sane and humane thing to do would have been to grab my bailer (a large plastic bottle cut in half used for scooping water out of your boat in high seas), scoop the fish out and throw it back overboard.
But I couldn’t. I am the world’s most squeamish person when it comes to small creatures, particularly small creatures in distress. This fish was in fact not small. It could have made a good size lunch.
No, what I did was attempt to sail back home for miles (or certainly what felt like miles) all the way back to the yacht club having abandoned any hope of finishing the race. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the river I sailed on wasn’t known for its calm surface and lack of wind. So I spent a lot of time with my boat heeling over in the wind. This was fine until I had to tack, which meant changing direction. Everytime I did this, the fish would roll with the boat and flop and flap its way over to the other side, narrowly missing my bare feet by millimetres.
It’s safe to say that by the time I got back to the yacht club, I was in hysterics, quite beside myself. A final large gust of wind hit my sail, capsizing my boat and both the fish and I landed unceremoniously in the water in full few of all the spectators. The poor, desperate fish, still alive amazingly, swam past my legs touching me as it raced away. That was the final straw.
I sobbed and wailed and could barely breathe with the stress of it all. Unfortunately, when trying to explain to my father and the several thousand witnesses what the matter was, instead of an outpouring of sympathy, I got side splitting mirth. My father in particular found the incident highly amusing and liked to share the story at any important event like 21st birthdays or weddings. Sigh
And tonight, I had to face my fish fear all over again. My husband has headed abroad for a week leaving me alone with the boys and a new tank full of fish. We’ve already had one fish casualty, which husband dealt with. But it is with some trepidation that I approach the tank every morning in case there are any floaters.
This evening the boys and I were looking at the fish when son 1 says: “Mummy, what’s that?” And there trapped behind the filter thingy and the glass wall was one dead fish. The other fish in the tank did seem particularly jittery, as you would be if there was a dead comrade rotting away in the water you swim in.
I knew what had to be done. Turning green around my gills, I attempted to pry the fish out of its fishy grave. It wouldn’t budge. I eventually had to stick my hand in the tank and try to wiggle the filter thingy, all while trying to avoid the other fish who thought my hand was something to be tasted (insert shiver and gag emoticon here).
The fish finally drifted free, only to be set upon by his hungry/curious friends. My stomach now positively heaving, I managed to scoop it up into the net, catching several others in the process, so I had to empty it out and try again. Several times.
At last I was the lucky bearer of a dead fish which got unceremoniously flushed down the loo.
We then had to say a little prayer for the fish, wishing him well in fishy heaven, before I could flee the scene.
Here’s hoping I don’t have any fishy encounters as I sail across the Atlantic…
So I could now sail a boat and take part in races and not come last every time. The problem was that it was still quite scary, particularly the race starts.
At Redhouse Yacht Club, the start lines were a choice of three white poles on the opposite bank of the river. Depending on which line the powers-that-be decided to use, you had to line the pole of choice up with the flag pole of the clubhouse.
You’d get various signals to count you down from 10 minutes to the start. If the wind was howling, you could zig zag back and forth across the narrow river about a bazillion times before the starting gun went off. If it wasn’t, you could end up miles from the start line pointing the wrong direction with your father yelling obscenities at you from the bank.
The trick to a good start is to time it perfectly so that you hit the line at speed as the gun goes. This is tricky. It requires lots of spilling of wind out of the sail. It requires being on the right tack so that you don’t get forced to tack out of the way. It’s all very stressful with lots of boats all buzzing around the line like a swarm of angry bees.
I invariably got it wrong and was either too early and had to go back over the line and start again, or too far back.
But there was one occasion when things changed. It was early into my new high-flying career in the A fleet, still the only girl and therefore a bit of a novelty to all the boys who felt it was their duty to make me feel awkward. On this day there was the usual teasing from the boys. I’d like to say something snapped in me, with the red mist descending, me proving to them all that I was just as good as they were.
That’s not what happened. It was sheer luck. Absolute fluke that I happened to start a race ahead of everyone else. I was stunned by this small victory - and even more put off by all the shouts of abuse coming from behind me - but worst of all, I had no-one to follow. I had no idea what to do, where to go, who to copy.
I manage to hold my lead until the first bend in the river, before the boys started passing me. It was worse than always being at the back. I felt so embarrassed. I could have happily drowned right then. I was just approaching that age where the tiniest thing caused maximum embarrassment, so to be passed by everyone in the fleet was more humiliating than walking onto the stage to collect an Oscar with your dress stuck in your knickers.
But when I got back to shore, those boastful boys all stopped by my boat as I derigged and washed it, and said: ‘Great start.’ I felt as though I’d broken some invisible barrier and had made it. From there on in, I got better.
To sail from the UK to Brazil, the first leg of the Clipper Round the World Race. To do this while being a mum to two young boys, running my own business and all the normal juggling mums do.
