Crew

By about May 1994 I was getting sick of eating fish and chips for lunch every day so I quit Captain Delicious and joined the crew of a sailboat headed for Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. The yacht, "Crusader", was skippered by a Scottish retired merchant seaman named Sam, whose aim was to show Christian films and deliver Bibles to the natives. Sam needed three crew, so once again it fell to me to recruit two mates for the job. My seamen of choice were Michael "Thwaite means field" Haythornthwaite and Steve Rauch. On the first leg of the voyage from Auckland to Suva we were joined by two Bible college students, both great guys whose extra crewmanship proved invaluable on our maiden passage. Dubbed "the floating footpath" by some other yachties in Suva harbour, Crusader was a 50-foot, 27-ton yacht made of an inch thickness of cement smeared over steel frame and chicken mesh wire. Being concrete, Crusader didn't rot, didn't rust, and didn't move. Whereas race yachts take only four days to sail from Auckland to Suva, we took 12 days. But they were a pretty amazing 12 days. Here is a letter I wrote home as a bright-eyed 20 year-old (first, a small piece of background info: we sailed to Fiji in tandem with another yacht called Ipo Kai (referred to by Sam over the radio as "Eko Pie")): DEAREST Mum Dad Alastair Catherine and Evelyn, Wow! The trip so far has been amazing and I don't know where to start. Well, we saw you guys disappear from the wharf and Mike and I both looked at each other in total disbelief as we tried to comprehend the next 5-6 months. We had a great night's sailing to Tutukaka yacht club and arrived there at noon Sunday and left for Fiji (after Sam had finished clearing customs at Whangarei) on Monday evening. Steve and I are on the 4 - 8 watch (twice a day) and we had a real scare just leaving Cape Reinga on Tuesday morning. We had a storm and were forced to take down all sail and just let the wind and waves do their thing. That's when the sea sickness set in. All six of us were feeling lousy but only three of us 'hove to' for a few days while popping dozens of seasick pills. The weather eventually cleared up and it wasn't long before we were itching to jump in the 'briney'(Sam has taught us some real seaman terms). We eventually persuaded Sam to let us have a swim while we were in the doldrums for a few days. According to the chart, where we swam was 5.5km deep and we went over with masks and snorkels. It's amazing to look down - you don't see anything but a beautiful purple/blue/mauve colour but you can see a long way down - if you know what I mean - you feel real giddy. By this time we had conned Sam into unreefing the sails and putting an extra sail up. The boat is quite capable and we hit 10 knots a few times. One of the bizarre things of the Pacific is the flying fish. They leap out of the water and literally fly, only a few feet high, for ages - 10 or 20 seconds and it's sometimes hard to distinguish between these and some offshore gulls we had. On Thursday night we had to heave to (quite clever - you reverse the headsail, tighten the mainsail and give the wheel full windward lock, effectively stalling the boat in one position) for eight hours in the Kadavu passage while we waited for the wind to swing. It swung all right! That Friday we were heading upwind for Suva and the wind dropped off completely. Then five minutes later the wind hit us from an unexpected angle at about 40 knots with rain that felt like shrapnel. We were so scared (again) and the wind kept up for one day and we headed for Nandi to shelter. Sam rang Ipo Kai on the VHF and told them our plans - they heard us but we didn't hear them. We were told later by Ipo Kai that they heard us and were praying like mad that we wouldn't head there because there are tons of reefs there. Anyway, we got to Suva, navigating through other reefs, on Saturday. The waves are really amazing out on the ocean - about two to three metres high but about 10m spaced. They roll along at about 20 knots and look really freaky. Night sailing is freaky too because every piece of broken water lights up with luminescence and it looks all glowy.

Captain Delicious

One morning on my way to work I was passed by Grant Gibellini in his mustard yellow Triumph 2000, which was a big relief because I was on foot and he picked me up. I had not only got my brother a job in the hothouse but also his mate Grant, and our friends Mike and David Haythornthwaite. I’m not quite sure why my boss needed so many positions filled, but paying us only $4 per hour, he virtually could have afforded to start white slavery. The hothouse job wasn’t the only job I recruited my mates for. As a first-year university student I got a part-time job in the city at a new fish and chip shop called Captain Delicious. It was in, I think, Auckland’s first ever food hall, down the bottom of the BNZ Tower. Despite bringing with them their own secret fish batter recipe, the owners – brothers Bing and Ben – had hired a professional chef to make salads for the salad bar, and it wasn’t long before he was passing on his salad-making skills to me. Next thing I'd finished uni for the year (and also for good – my bachelor of science was boring me to tears) and I was working full-time as master and commander of Captain Delicious, rocking up there early every morning to boil eggs, pasta and spuds for the egg, pasta and potato salads, and also mastering tabouleh and fish frying. The office consisted of a phone/fax tucked in a corner near the door and my brother and I still joke about seeing one of the owners on a number of occasions having intimate phone chats with his (we assume) girlfriend, standing up but trying to minimize the appearance of a front-bulge in his pants.

Glasshouse

At the end of sixth form I decided I needed a holiday job, so I headed to the countryside and went door knocking in a tomato hothouse area. I literally knocked on the front door of a house and must have caught the owner at lunchtime because I was able to deliver my spiel to a Scottish man named Roy, whose wife was called Robin - hence their car numberplate "ROBROY". They owned about three white Scottish terriers which would turn green from running through the tomato plants. I know this because I got the job. The job was my introduction to hard physical labour, and also involved a half-hour bike ride to and from work (I was saving for a car). Sometimes at lunch I would even cycle to the bakery for a quick sit-down to scoff my pie and donut before scurrying back to the vines. First thing in the morning was tomato picking time and the acrid smell was not for the weak-stomached - my brother worked a stint in the hothouse and one morning the smell was enough to make him throw up, to which Uncle Rob responded, "it's all in your head laddie." Obviously people who live in glass houses don't throw up. From the tomato hothouse we moved over to the beans hothouse for a game of try-to-spot-the-green-string-beans-hiding-in-amongst-the-lush-green-foliage-then-fill-up-your-pouch-til-it-needs-emptying-then-do-it-all-over-again-for-the-next-two-months til 12 o'clock lunch, which meant we'd broken the back of the day, much like our actual backs. After lunch it was outside for a bit of sawdust sifting with our friend the Norse horticultural student - we'll call him Steve. One person's job was to wear the gloves and spread around the cheap grade sawdust on top of the chicken mesh table to separate out the woodchips, while the other person shoveled the sawdust on to the table from a pile the size of Vesuvius. You knew it was time to switch roles when the person shoveling got sunstroke. Cycling as quickly as possible away from work was my only source of energy for the sweaty ride home. A year and a bit after starting the job I'd saved enough money for a car, which meant I had to decide whether to buy a Triumph Herald, Fiat 850 or Renault 12. I went with the orange Renault 12 for $700.

Chapter 4.

With only six months to go on the course I took a gap year during which I traveled to Remuera to work as a dish pig in two restaurants diagonally opposite each other at a large intersection. Cycling home in the dark one night I noticed up ahead a group of youths loitering on the footpath and spilling out onto the road. I didn't bother swerving for them and they grabbed my bike and brought me to a halt. One of them mashed a piece of buttered bread into my face, obviously leftover from what his mum had packed for him that night. Then they let me go so I carried on to the next intersection and stopped at the red light, which turned out to be a mistake because they caught me up and before I knew it I was out cold lying on the road and waking up to the sound of a concerned motorist yelling from her car, "leave him alone!" Needless to say I continued riding home making sure I'd left enough of a gap between myself and my pursuers before stopping at any more red lights. Also that year I did Axis Ad school for which I did two months work experience in an ad agency creative department under the auspices of creative director Gordon Clarke. At the time he was pitching for the Tourism NZ account which he lost with efforts like a picture of a man in a forest and the line, "Where the only man-made thing is you." The winning entry was the 100% Pure NZ campaign with the genius NZ % sign. To his credit GC was the first and only person to ever tell me to get over myself - probably the best slogan I've ever been given. Recently I googled him and read a funny story about how once while entertaining dinner guests he got up and started vacuuming. Despite my creative partner and I getting runner up we didn't get a job and I continued washing dishes and deep frying poppadoms and working on my portfolio before returning to AUT to finish my four-year diploma.

Chapter 3. My journey as a writer.

When I was 21 I decided to enroll in a Diploma in Advertising at AUT. I was accepted but, having heard that group presentations were involved, my fear of public speaking prevented me from starting, so I continued working as a builder for another year. The following year I reapplied and this time went through with it. I did the course partly because I was sick of my job and also because of perceived societal pressure to go to uni to “get a piece of paper”. I think I knew at the time that all I needed to get a copywriting job in an ad agency was a good portfolio, but as an early-twenty-something with time to burn I decided to spend a few years as a student instead. I was only really interested in the creative side of advertising but the three year course required me to do papers not only about the broader business of advertising but also straight business papers like accounting and commercial law (which I failed two, possibly three times before I was given a pass mark). The one paper – and lecturer – that made the university experience worthwhile for me I found buried at the end of my second year in the lazy summer holiday. Led by NZ ad guru and copywriter extraordinaire Jim Falconer, the copywriting paper uncovered a love of language which I had lost since I was a kid.