National labour

We took 17 days to sail from Fiji to New Zealand, landing in Opua in the beautiful Bay of Islands. From Opua we sailed overnight to Crusader’s final resting place in Auckland Harbour. Despite it being winter, I had a strange desire to continue traveling south, so I went and lived in Christchurch with my sister for a while. I had decided that I wanted to be a yacht designer, so I went around the boat yards looking for labouring work, and wound up working for an old guy who made Olympic row boats. I can’t recall exactly what purpose I served, but I remember one day drilling bolt holes in seats, and making a mistake, which caused the old man to exclaim, “stuff in Christ!” – obviously the dyslexic version of “Christ ‘n stuff”. Pushbiking to work in sub-zero temperatures wasn’t for me, so after two weeks I quit my job and headed back to West Auckland, where I got a job in a large fiberglass yacht factory. I was helping an old man called Martin to assemble a large fleet of small inflatable/fiberglass, see-through-bottom fizzboats, ready for shipping offshore. Martin liked to call people nerds, and complained that over his lifetime he'd paid over a million dollars in tax. One of the other boatbuilders, a mate of mine, was helping to churn out a new yacht design called a Farr Platu, or as he called it, “plaadu”. Sometime in January I either quit or was laid off the job, and with my yacht design ambitions behind me, I asked a builder friend of mine for a labouring job.

Three months in a leaky boat

We never made it to Kiribati. A week after setting off from Fiji our boat sprung a leak and almost sank, so we turned back for Fiji. We approached Suva Harbour at night, and decided to negotiate the channel to the anchorage in the dark instead of heaving to and waiting til morning. We didn't read the channel lights properly and our boat came to a grinding halt on top of a reef. Skipper Sam was in conniptions, so Mike sprung to and radioed the coastguard, who told us he'd knocked off for the day and couldn't help - laid back Island styles to the extreme! Fortunately some other yachties in the harbour were listening in on their radios, and on hearing our plight, donned wetsuits, jumped in their rubber duckies and selflessly came to our aid. Using two anchors they cleverly lifted us off the reef. During our three week layover in Fiji we hitch-hiked around the island of Viti Levu, went to the movies and saw Schindler's List, did some token missionary work and took a token dive over the side of the boat to check for damage in preparation for our return sail to New Zealand. We set sail once more for the last leg of the voyage. As we were nearing New Zealand we saw an air force Orion fly low over us a few times so we turned on our radio and received instruction from them to change course and head toward a stricken yacht in the area. (Mum and dad later told me that they had an anxious wait between the first phone call from the coastguard telling them that a yacht in our area had activated its emergency position-indicating radio beacon, and the second to say it wasn't our boat!) About four hours later we found the tiny yacht bobbing helplessly and with its two crew looking quite relieved to see us. We threw them a line and started towing them back to New Zealand, which, given the headwind and our unreliable motor, turned out to be a bit of a hopeless task. A charter fishing launch came out from New Zealand and took over the tow, costing the two guys $5000 including bait.