All Piss and Wind (18 page)

Crew professionalism also helps promote a form of unconscious apartheid that's continuing to divide our competitive yachting fleets. Despite the odd aberration caused by older, smaller boats attracting a generous new rating, the gap between the well-funded contenders and ordinary entrants is widening rapidly. While rank-and-file yachties may be able to cope with the ‘big money' boys shouting themselves the best boats and gear, the prospect of them now also buying up all the best sailors is understandably disheartening. Ocean racing is, after all, meant to be a fair contest between teams. Amateur crews who spend their precious spare weekends antifouling the boat while the owner scratches together his last few dollars for a new jib don't enjoy being trounced by a platoon of
well-paid ‘rock stars' (who then immediately fly off to another regatta). The inherent hypocrisy of pretending we all compete under the same conditions has begun to stick in the craw. Surely the appeal of racing on a ‘hot' boat is sufficient inducement for top crew to participate in the sport. The additional fistful of dollars should not be required.

Perhaps these market forces are inexorable, but there's always a consoling aspect of offshore sailing that none of us can sidestep: luck. No amount of money can overcome bad weather or unforeseen gear failures. One of the most professional crews in the last Sydney–Hobart was forced to withdraw by the time they were abeam of Botany Bay. A minor electrical fault prevented them from canting the keel. Their race was over after ninety minutes. That was, I'm happy to confess, still quite a comfort to our ragtag mob of mates as we pressed on across Bass Strait two days later. Unpaid.

 

Postscript
: In mid-2006 the CYCA decided that yachts using movable ballast or canting keels would race in a separate division in the Sydney–Hobart.

M
OST OF MY CHILDHOOD
pocket money was impatiently saved up into modest amounts and then immediately spent on sailing gear. My parents despaired at this lack of thrift. Once the shillings had accumulated to the desired sum, I'd be straight onto my pushbike for the 20-minute pedal down to the chandlery in Sanders boatshed at Cabarita. The prospect of acquiring a shiny new double-swivel shackle for the mainsheet block was just too tempting. Then the 25-minute ride home (slower, because it was uphill), with the precious new gear safely tucked away in my pocket and all the fun of fitting it to the boat still ahead.

Looking back, I now understand that half the enjoyment of those trips was the visit to the old chandlery itself. Crossing the threshold into this Aladdin's Cave of marine delights as a genuine customer made it legitimate for a curious 12-year-old to ferret about for half an hour or more, lost in the seafaring dreams triggered by the surrounding jumble of boating equipment. Back then a ship's chandlery had a distinctive smell – a mixture of galvanised chain, hemp rope, varnish, Stockholm tar, hardwood flooring and the
slightly oily saltwater tang of the slipway that was usually right next door. They were dark, muddled places in which the stock lay about in huge disordered piles and only the proprietor knew where anything was, and sometimes even he wasn't really sure.

Sanders was on the Parramatta River, then still a busy commercial waterway. It sold robust, no-nonsense gear for trawlers, work-boats and sensible cruising yachts. Most customers just fossicked around until they found what they needed, then took it to the chandler for a price. (He was often busy putting the eye splice onto a mooring buoy and would grunt ‘Whatever you think's a fair thing, mate. Just bung your money on the till.') In the days before racing sailors all became so weight-conscious, everything on sale at a good chandlery was made to last. Buyers didn't expect to be coming back in a few years to replace a horn cleat. Once one of those solid bronze castings was bolted through their deck the expectation was, ‘Well, that'll see
me
out, that's for sure.'

Today chandleries have wall-to-wall carpets and the larger ones are laid out like supermarkets. They smell of plastic. Their most profitable lines are designer wet-weather gear and deck shoes. (You can pay $650 for a pair of hand-stitched Irish sea boots.) Yet still I welcome any excuse to visit a chandlery because the old magic of immersing myself in the evocative world of boating equipment is undiminished. I admire an ingenious new mainsheet snatch-block, then turn over the price tag and discover it's worth more than the whole VJ dinghy – sails and all – that I raced as a schoolboy. There's much more than simple price inflation behind that difference: the sport itself has undergone huge changes, and those developments are reflected in the extraordinary range of stock now carried by ships' chandlers.

I'm fortunate that one of my best sailing mates, John Sturrock, is also a successful chandler. With his brother Doug (another fine sailor), he co-owns one of Sydney's most popular boating shops, situated near the Cruising Yacht Club at Rushcutters Bay. Johnno
has been in the trade for most of his life and provides an illuminating perspective on the way that business has changed.

‘I used to love those old chandleries, too,' he told me. ‘They looked like plumbing shops. There was one just down the way a bit from here. You'd go in and the most prominent feature in the whole place was this enormous pile of toilets. Every shape and size imaginable. No racks, no boxes, no price stickers – nothing. If you asked the chandler for something he'd usually say, ‘Yeah, I think we've got one of those', and then he'd start digging through a mound of stuff. Sometimes he'd be four feet down before he found what you were after.

‘In those days most of the ships' chandlers' work was servicing the boatyards, but the replacement business is not what it was. People don't break as many things as they used to – like blocks, ropes and rigging gear – because the stuff now is built lighter, stronger and it's more functional. We spotted that shift in the market quite early and our clothing and footwear lines have taken up much of the slack.'

Sturrock has also seen a significant shift in the type of people involved in recreational yachting. ‘When we were kids, we mucked about in dinghies, got into the serious racing, then graduated to keel boats and went offshore. By the time we were responsible for a yacht ourselves we'd built up a bank of experience and we knew how to do a lot of the work on those boats. Now you see people getting into quite big keelboats as their first yacht. They're reasonably well off, they're not doing it on a shoestring. They're using their boats more, and spending more. It's not like the older blokes who are still happy with deck shoes where the stitching is all blown and the soles are falling off. These people want to look good on a yacht.'

Satisfying this increasingly fickle market can be a daunting retail challenge. Sturrock's shop, which isn't large, nevertheless manages to carry around 3500 permanent lines in stock. These range from
tiny five-cent stainless-steel washers to a plough anchor too heavy to lift. And if he hasn't got it, John can order almost any item in: his bookshelves groan with trade catalogues that he estimates list a total of more than three
million
boating items. Demand for the latest novelty is constant. At the moment everyone wants a waterproof cover for their mobile phone, but the racing skipper with everything can also shout himself some natty night-vision binoculars for $6285. Just the thing to help the navigator find Broughton Island at 0200 with no moon or stars.

At the other end of the scale the diversity of apparently basic items is astonishing. Two examples: the shop offers four quite different types of boat hook, and five versions of the humble deck broom. Fashion plays an increasing role in the chandlery business, not just in shorts, slacks and shirts but in more specialist areas such as ‘technical clothing' and boating footwear. Sturrock sells 24 styles of sailing shoes (ranging from $130 to $230 a pair), plus six types of boots. Wet-weather gear – from six major manufacturers and in a huge choice of colours, styles and weights – now delivers a major component of any chandler's turnover.

Modern chandleries have to carry an exhaustive range of individual items in even quite basic areas. This multiplicity stems from the fact that a boat is two complex things in one form: a sophisticated transport device, and a floating home. They are expensive to build and difficult to maintain because they have thousands of interlinked parts, all of which must withstand the multiple assaults of sun, saltwater and high levels of mechanical stress. And unlike cars, which come in a standard range of models, very few boats are truly the same. To give some impression of this problem, consider the sheer numbers of lines that a shop such as Sturrock's has to provide. There are 250 different block configurations on display, 60 types and sizes of shackles – standard, twist, ‘D', galvanised and stainless (plus 30 types of snap shackles) – 160 different screw fasteners, more than 200 types of nuts and bolts, 50 sizes and types of rope,
60 paint, varnish and polish products, and more than 50 different marine plumbing couplings. It's a stocktaking nightmare.

But there are elements of the chandlery business that seem relatively unchanged. ‘We're still asked for a lot of advice,' John confirms. ‘It's mostly about paint. Everyone wants to know what's the best antifoul treatment for their boat, and how to strip the old stuff off. Deck finish is another area that can give some people trouble. We carry a big range of these products and can usually help them get a good result. The Sydney Opera Company once turned up asking for our help with a sloping stage that kept tipping their performers over. We made them up a special brew of fast-drying deck paint mixed with non-skid. It worked, but it smelled terrible. The air-conditioning in their building distributed the stench everywhere and the whole cast had to be evacuated.

‘Some of the requests can get pretty weird. A bloke once came in the shop to ask me “What can I do about the sea urchins in my swimming pool?” Another fellow, I think from a country to our near north, ordered some large inflatables, a patrol boat and even wanted to know if we could get him a submarine. We eventually worked out he was trying to organise a coup and had to tell him we'd prefer not to have his business, thanks all the same.

‘A while back we'd sold a fellow a log [electronic speed/distance instrument] but he reckoned it wasn't working. We went down to the boat and found that it seemed to be working fine. These things have a liquid-crystal display – black numerals on a grey background. It turned out the owner always wore his favourite pair of Polaroid sunglasses, and these were filtering out an angle of light that then made the whole LCD screen look black. It had never occurred to him to take his sunnies off.

‘The most common questions we get start with the words, “Have you got one of those …” We most probably
have
got one of the left-handed thingummyjigs they're after, but the hard part is working out what it actually is that they want. People come in,
empty-handed, and just announce “I've broken the handle on the toilet.” What make? The handle, the lever or the twist fitting on the inlet valve? We start from scratch and can usually narrow it down. Still, a lot of people choose incorrectly, then bring the item back. We often hang on to the thing and put it away somewhere, knowing that eventually another person will come in and want one. The hard part is first remembering that you've got it, and next where we put the damn thing! It pays to have a pretty good memory in the chandlery game.'

John is a patient, knowledgeable man with an obvious affection for boating people. While the internet has now made it easy for owners and tradesmen to source obscure items from anywhere, the old-fashioned personal style of retailing still has its rewards. Nothing pleases him more than helping an around-the-world cruiser get properly set up with the right gear. When these circumnavigators finally return to Sydney after up to five years away, they usually revisit the Sturrock chandlery. ‘They pop in and say “G'day” as if it was only yesterday that we managed to find them that hard-to-source part for their old bilge pump.' Cruisers are a bit like that. Time means nothing to them. If they were normal people they'd be racing every Saturday like the rest of us.

But the retailing memory that still raises the biggest smile from Sturrock involves the offshore community at its casual best. ‘It was one of the years that I didn't do the Hobart race,' he remembers. ‘We always open the shop early on Boxing Day so the fellas can get any last-minute stuff they might need. Anyway, a bloke comes in and says he's interested in buying some clothing. Fair enough. So he chooses his first layer of thermals, then the heavier outer layer of polar-fleece stuff. Finally, we help him select a good wet-weather jacket and pants, and some sea boots. All done? Fine.

‘The fellow then asks if he can use our phone. No problems. He dials up: “Darling, you're not going to believe this …” Turns out he'd been strolling along the dock that morning to wish a few mates
good luck for the race and one of the boats was short a crewman. There wasn't time to pop home to pick up his gear – and he most probably wasn't game to break the news to his wife face-to-face anyway!'

Who'd marry a yachtie?