Boarding school

On Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time in about 15 years. I was expecting to see some revolutionary new shape of snowboard, or at least a throwback to a retro design – a bit like how the latest skateboards look like the long, thin, downhill boards of old. But unlike skateboarding, snowboarding doesn’t really have much of a history to throw back to. On hearing that I virtually hadn’t snowboarded since the invention of (the) sport, my helpful bro-in-law John brought me up to speed on a few skiing essentials, including that you are now in the minority if you don't wear a helmet. My first thought was, “what, even including snowboarders?”, because, you see, I’d always thought that snowboarding was the cool thing to do on the mountain, while skiing was just for conformists. But that all changed when I asked John, “are your skis wider than normal skis”, to which he replied, “it depends how you define normal skis – anything goes these days.” …Okay, I’ll just be over here twirling my 90s dreadlocks. After hiring my boots, board and helmet, and figuring out how to do up my boots, put on my complimentary wristguards (they go on the outside of the gloves) and lock my front foot into the bindings, it was time to join John, my twin five-year-old nieces and eight-year-old nephew in plopping backwards into the chairlift for the tranquil, scenic ascent to the point of uncertainty. As soon as the top of the chairlift came into view I got some slight jitters about the all important slide with your chairlift chums down to where you are well clear of the turning chair. Adding to the pressure was the fact that I only had one foot in the bindings, but I found some spare plank on which to put my back foot and made it down ok. It was such a beautiful day (it felt more like a day at the beach than on icy snow), I was determined not to ruin it on my first run with a stinging face plant or dislocated shoulder, so, after making the whole party wait while I clumsily secured my back foot, I gently began my descent, stopping every metre or two to look in awe at my already tiny relatives disappearing ahead of me. I was happy to find that after such a long hiatus, snowboarding is like riding a bicycle, except you face sideways, and you don't hold onto anything... so maybe skiing is more like riding a bicycle than snowboarding. I digest. Next day my nephew and I went skateboarding and I discovered I can still ollie - there is now probably some cooler word for it - so I must say I'm tempted to get back into skateboarding... I'm just not that excited by having to get my old job back at the chicken hatchery to pay for it.

Breakneck

Ollie back to 1989, when I was saving for a new skateboard. I already owned a Santa Cruz Tom Grosso(?) mini that I bought off a guy at school with one blue and one green eye who loved to talk about skateboarding, and who once instructed me to find out for myself a bit more about one particular aspect of skateboarding, to which I replied, "I'll do that for homework." His nickname for me was "runner boy", because I was doing a lot of distance running at the time. I needed $340 to buy a new deck, trucks, wheels, bearings and accessories from Cheapskates in Henderson, and the obvious pathway to my dreams lay in sacrificing my two-week school holiday for a job breaking necks at the Waitakere Chicken Hatchery, where my sister had worked before me. She had the unenviable task of sorting the reject chicks from the good ones, then breaking their necks using a special thumb technique. I wasn't given that job, and instead ended up on forgettable tasks like cleaning and stacking plastic trays and hosing out tanks etc. I saved my $340 and proceeded to Henderson to get me some wheels etc. The skateboard deck I picked had graphics depicting death, eg skulls and/or demons, which didn't impress my dad, a church pastor, so he gave me the choice of either returning the deck to the shop or scraping off the graphics using a brick. I took the deck back and swapped it for a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso 'toybox', featuring a picture of a toybox.

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.

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.