owlrigh

"We've got 60 knots of wind," said my father's SMS. "You'd better get back here."

Ben and I were in northern NSW on a car trip, and had just arrived in Ballina when this message came through. Sixty knots of wind and Cyclone Larry wasn't due to hit the coast until the next day! If the wind was that bad already it meant that the cyclone trajectory had changed and it was heading towards Mackay.

A follow-up message changed things; my father, Phil, had merely been exaggerating. There would be sixty knots the following morning, when the cyclone itself would hit the coast up near Townsville. Where our vessels were kept was at the end of the storm warning.

That night there were messages and calls from yachties all over Australia; people in Tasmania seeing if our vessels were all right, folks in the Whitsundays ringing to say that they were in the thick of things, winds rising and seas rolling on in high.

One guy in Shute Harbour, where our vessels had been for months while working on charter boats, couldn't move despite being open to the south-easterly, the worst quarter for the winds to be coming from with a cyclone. The seas were rolling in there, and as his engine wasn't working he had to sit it out, anchoring his trimaran as best he could and going ashore to see how it turned out. When the storm subsided there were yachts to be found on the rocks, in the mangroves, and boat bits floating all over the harbour.

In Mackay, only sixty nautical miles south, things were different. The worst would be a bit of wind, and in the aftermath there would be a little rain, but nowhere near the amounts that the eye would get, incredible winds and torrential rain.

We made haste up the coast, driving up and seeing how the weather had affected northern Queensland so far; green where it was normally a dried-out brown, rainy where it would be hot and dusty on a regular day. We would be too late for the cyclone itself, arriving the day after.

When we rolled into the boatyard, we found that they'd made preparations. Star-posts were thrust into the ground at every angle of boats, chunks of concrete lain down alongside each and a maze of ropes tying them down. Only those which were actually populated, that is; abandoned boats were left alone, for the boatyard owner had taken off for the weekend, despite knowing there was a threat of high winds. My yacht, despite having been untended to for a month, was tied down from every angle, courtesy of my dad.

That was when we found out that there was another reason Phil has been so eager for us to return. In the eve of the cyclone -- and another, Wati, threatened off the coast at that point -- the owner of the massive yacht in front of where Ben had put his catamaran wanted it moved.

"I can't move if he's there and I have to go!" he had been saying. "I want him to move now!"

He couldn't leave even if he wanted to, for his draft wouldn't allow him to move with the low tides. He was on the side of the creek, high on the sands which dried out in low water. Even I couldn't move with the tides he wanted to move in, and my draft was probably half his!

He phoned and abused me the day we arrived, as my father had passed our numbers on, saying he would go right over La Luna, Ben's catamaran, if he needed to go. Later on he made his physical presence known, Ben and him having a tussle of words on the ground below as I shook with the need to give the guy a planter.

La Luna was moved, and then we sat around to wait and see what the second cyclone forming out in the Coral Sea, Wati, was going to do. Would it follow the same trajectory and hit? It sat out there for days, going from category 2 to 3 and then back again, almost stationary while we worried out fingernails down to the bone. It was much further south than the last, and could have hit about where we were -- and despite everyone saying that being on hardstand was the best place to be during a cyclone, I didn't, and don't, believe it.

We had watched the news in Redcliffe the morning Cyclone Larry hit. A newscaster in Townsville held an umbrella and talked about how windy it was, showing off how his umbrella was blowing inside out. They recycled footage of a palm tree waving in the wind, and he started on about the deserted streets as cars went by him and people walked past.

Clearly not the scene of dramatic 100s of kms of winds where everyone was buttoned down and foliage stripped off trees. He went on in that fashion for hours, making something out of the tiniest thing, much as E. B. White described in his description of Hurricane Edna in The Points of My Compass.

Cyclone Wati came nowhere near land and soon fizzled out, to our relief; Ben headed back down to Brisbane to finish off his responsibilities there and I stayed to commence work on my yacht.

As soon as he was gone I began sanding. First to be done was the antifouling, rubbing it back with wet'n'dry sandpaper. I'd done one side when I realised that it hadn't taken off all the dried-on weedy critters, so attacked it with a scrubbing brush as well. All of this took three days, and those days I was black from antifouling from head to toe. People kept blinking as they saw me, and one afternoon my mother came down to talk to me and saw what I looked like.

"Ai, get away, sucia," she said, calling me for the dirty critter I was.

No, no sirree, I did not; I walked up with my arms open and she ran away, screeching for me to keep away.

When she returned I made up to her again and this time she ran away with me in slow pursuit; the idea wasn't to catch her, after all. She ran behind whom we called Tripod, for he was one of three Johns in the place and was distinguished by a trimaran. He was trying to epoxy and stood blinking at us in confusion as my mother hid behind him and shouted at me to go away.

I fell down on the grass, laughing, and let my mother slip away.

She was unsuspectingly approaching her own boat when I sneaked after her, and said boo just as she was about to climb the ladder. See her fly! I've never seen her go so fast up a ladder in my whole life.

There was more sanding to be done, this time the topsides; I was just going to paint over all existing paints, and for this my dad handed me his orbital sander. It was a tool of the devil.

"Look, it's easy," said my dad, making it look so as he held it in place with one hand and easily glided it over the paint. When I tried I left big gouges and stripped paint back to fibreglass, and that was with 120 grit! I gave over in the end, using a torture board to manually sand back the topsides.

Ben came back soon enough and decided that the antifouling would have to go. It obviously hadn't been taken back to scratch in years, for it was flaking off everywhere you looked -- even though I had gone over it and scraped what I'd found. Not good enough, and my three days of work were for nothing and he took to using the angle grinder to take it back. I sanded along behind him, finding that the evil sander I had originally been using was broken, and a proper one is actually very easy to use, especially if you are short and can use your body to prop your arm up when doing the undersides of your yacht.

Just as well that Ben did grind back; he found osmosis all over the boat. Osmosis is where water comes in through the gelcoat to the fibreglass below and creates a spongy acidic bubble which, left alone, penetrates through the hull and becomes a serious problem. He also found a leaking fibreglass hole in the keel, and places where the original construction of polyester fibreglass hadn't been mixed properly and was so soft you could dig at it with your fingernails. It's disconcerting to see gouges from such little pressure! These were all fibreglassed and epoxied over, one worry done away with.

When I'd come back I found the bilge full of water, leaving me baffled; I'd cleaned the bilge dry when I'd left. I was to find that every deck fitting leaked -- for none had been done properly. Even more time was consumed in rebedding stanchions and sealing fittings.

In the midst of all this work, Ben sold his catamaran. Hardly had he put it on the market when people from all over Queensland started phoning and turning up, and then one bloke who didn't seem completely useless offered him a reasonable amount. No more La Luna for Ben, and he has now moved aboard Gecko with me, his little lucky tikis stuck on the bulkhead and enough tinned coconut milk and baked beans to keep us going for years. It's not too great a change, as he had mostly been living on board since we arrived in Mackay back in February, but now it's official.

The boatyard was an odd place to be. People were always asking Ben thing about my boat, probably because he was doing the canopy and obviously working outside, whereas I was tinkering inside for the most part. There were dramas galore -- two blokes had an argument involving crashing of beer cans against a head, another got kicked out (with his boat) from the yard for arguing with the boat yard owner, and then there was the owner of the place himself.

The first day in his office and he found out that my boat was mine, he was in rhapsodies over having found a female into boats. I name dropped Ben so many times in that conversation you'd think I'd no thought of my own. Outside of the office, he had arguments with everyone. Even look sideways at his lumber and he went off at you! So you did it while he wasn't looking, using them as temporary supports and the like.

More important was the way he ripped you off. All of his prices, which looked reasonable when I first discussed them with him, were without the benefit of GST. So what I thought was within budget was suddenly hundreds of dollars more, and yet nothing I could do about it as I was already on land. If I'd known otherwise I would have gone to the cheaper, more reasonable, sandblasting-allowing place just down the creek!

Last Thursday night there was a tide high enough for me to leave and get back in the water, so it was a mad rush of undercoating and antifouling on the morning before I was put in. I dashed along in front of Phil and Ben as they painted, doing dusting and last-minute sanding. People had been telling me that there were strong wind warnings on for the area; leaving the Pioneer River and going over the bar is not something one should do in high winds, as it gets a bit choppy, and I'd have to go right into the wind and swell, so instead I am stuck in the river until the weather calms down a little. It gets very rough there if not going in proper conditions.

My yacht is anchored off the waterfront restaurant, where people cheered as us we anchored in the middle of the night, and children call out to say hello during the afternoons. Despite the roaring current and lack of suitable place to put the dinghy, it's good to be back in the water. The noticeable difference in speed was instantaneous as we puttered down the creek. The boat looks spiffy again; certainly worth it.