I think everyone has a mate like Scotty. I certainly do. I met him on the bus to Orewa when we were both young and foolish and on crutches after motorcycle accidents.
I’ve always reckoned a man is rich if he has a few mates around who’d stand by him through anything, and Scotty is certainly one of them. So despite being the subject of this column he remains a true and valued friend … down to the little eccentricities that seem to come out only when he’s on the water.
When he gets on the water he reminds me of my father, who was about as much use on a boat as a wheelbarrow. Let me first introduce you to his fishing style, which he practises to perfection.
An eggbeater reel on a Warehouse two-guide rod, fished with the drag backed right off. Every so often he’ll whip the rod it back, crying “Christ did you see the way that pulled line off,” as the slack drag lets line peel off and the fish spits the hook.
It then becomes only a matter of time before a wayward jack mackerel picks up the mile of twisted, free flowing nylon and wraps it around every other line beneath the boat.
Neither is buying flash fishing tackle his thing. He once came to a fishing trip to the Coromandel with one rusted Kahle hook, that had been attached to his line since the last fishing trip. I think that had taken place sometime shortly before Rob Muldoon became Prime Minister.
“Oh no I’ve lost me hook,” was the inevitable plaintive cry. “There’s some in my fishing kit,” I offered. I didn’t really mean for him to uplift the box of hooks, select one for his line, then place the full box back in his kit. What a beaut.
His contribution to the bait that weekend was a packet of long life squid. I don’t think the manufacturers claim of “long life” meant that it could be opened, then left in a plastic bin in the garage for three weeks before use. Whhheeee that had the boys retching over the side.
I went fishing with Scotty and his dad once, and let’s just say the apple did not fall far from that tree. The boat was his Dad’s pride and joy, about 13ft long and supplied with enough horsepower to get it to the moon. Faced with this evil handling, tempestuous monster, no one was brave enough to actually push the throttle open, so we wallowed along with the bow pointing skywards as we headed to our fishing spot at trolling speed. We anchored up, while both of them fished with Warehouse eggbeaters, the drag released off and every few minutes cried “Christ did you see the way that pulled line…”
Underwater, the fish were more likely to become tangled in the miles of snaking nylon than fall onto a hook, and we came home with a mighty catch of Zilch. I often wondered if a Scotty & Father fishing trip had been the inspiration for drift netting.
Things only got worse when Scotty decided his own boat was the go. An old plywood thing “powered” by a 30 year old Blueband Merc that never really wanted to get out of bed in the morning.
After much cranking and fussing it would eventually start to catch and wind up. I never could work out why, when sitting in the wash close to a lee shore, my mate would first haul up the anchor, then start the outboard. Or try to start the outboard, as the case may be. That caused a few occasions where, like my old sailing skipper used to say “You coulda cut washers off me ringpiece…”
The first time it wouldn’t start, he proudly unearthed the boat’s auxiliary - an air cooled TAS. Now these outboards were originally responsible for at least half the earth’s air pollution problems and were noisy enough be heard by longhaul 747s as they passed overhead. Despite all the fuss, they were slightly less effective at propulsion than a kitchen eggbeater.
And Scotty’s had been lovingly preserved for years, lying in the bilge up by the bow wrapped in some salt-water soaked towels. It seemed reluctant to start, despite this care and attention. Fortunately the Blue Band got its nose out of joint about this and decided to kick into life, sputtering, belching clouds of blue and rattling like packet of Jaffas on the Orewa Picture Theatre’s sloping wooden floors
When the boat finally hit the dock we were once again fishless. And for some reason, I was always busy on the weekends I was invited out again.
But typically, you know, often when we’ve fished in a competition together, the bugger’s beaten me. Must be that soft drag setting …. or maybe he has better hooks. It’s not really true that someone up there hates me. Is it?
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Trying to Kill Me Mum
I should have started to get worried long before the enormous bow of the Powles 38 motor yacht loomed over the top of our little Shetland 18ft runabout.
A smart man would have known it wasn’t clever putting his Dear Old Mother’s life in the hands of someone who was proud of having consumed 300 LSD trips. That person was DA.
DA’s once towed a Ford Escort Car home from a gig because the car’s front bumper was hooked on the towbar of the Transit van that he used to cart his Disco show around in. (His show involved setting up a gigawat of sound gear, taking an acid trip, donning his Dr Death skull mask and long black cloak and playing himself ear-shattering music all night.)
“I thought the bloody van was going a bit sluggish,” he once recalled during one of the many hours we sat together on the windward rail of the 46ft ocean racer we both sailed on as crew.
“It was only when I tried to back into a carparking space that I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.”
Now readers you may be thinking that this is all a tall tale. But the contents of this column are true, or at least as close to the truth as 30 years of alcohol abuse will allow my brain to recall.
Truth is always stranger than fiction and if I could tell you the real name of DA (those are in fact his initials) and you typed them into Google you would find that he’s still an acknowledged world authority of some esoteric electrical computer stuff and has written a number of learned books on the subject.
How did my poor old Mum get involved in all this mayhem? Well, she was bored back in NZ so I bravely suggested she come over to visit me while I was working in the UK.
Her trip coincided with the start of the 1980 Whitbread Round the World Race, in which the Late Great Sir Peter Blake competed in Ceramco NZ. We also had the start of the Cowes Torquay Cowes Powerboat Race, which would have to be one of the world’s most famous (Ted Toleman competed in one of the first Cougar cats – which were designed by Colin Chapman, of Lotus cars fame).
We were covering both events for a couple of magazines. So I just figured I’d drag me Mum along for the weekend. And she came along, enjoying the festivities and the mayhem.
We had two boats – the big Powles and the 18 footer – which we used as photo boats and for entertaining important clients during the day. After the Cowes Torquay Race finished the bigwigs from the magazine company went home and left us to it.
A couple of hours later, after a meal ashore at Cowes and a few Heidseick champagnes we found ourselves barreling up the Solent in the wee Shetland, the Powles thundering a few feet behind us, with one of the crew hanging over the front of the bow above the water, holding onto the outside of the pulpit with one arm. That person is also very well known in the international boating magazine community so has also to remain nameless, unfortunately.
To this day my poor Mum believes DA tried to kill her and when he visited NZ in the early 90s she refused to even speak to “that mad bastard who tried to kill me.” The truly remarkable outcome of that day was that the other Dave, (ooops) who hung off the bow, managed to survive the exercise. But me Mum’s never forgotten it and, I think, has not quite forgiven me either.
A smart man would have known it wasn’t clever putting his Dear Old Mother’s life in the hands of someone who was proud of having consumed 300 LSD trips. That person was DA.
DA’s once towed a Ford Escort Car home from a gig because the car’s front bumper was hooked on the towbar of the Transit van that he used to cart his Disco show around in. (His show involved setting up a gigawat of sound gear, taking an acid trip, donning his Dr Death skull mask and long black cloak and playing himself ear-shattering music all night.)
“I thought the bloody van was going a bit sluggish,” he once recalled during one of the many hours we sat together on the windward rail of the 46ft ocean racer we both sailed on as crew.
“It was only when I tried to back into a carparking space that I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong.”
Now readers you may be thinking that this is all a tall tale. But the contents of this column are true, or at least as close to the truth as 30 years of alcohol abuse will allow my brain to recall.
Truth is always stranger than fiction and if I could tell you the real name of DA (those are in fact his initials) and you typed them into Google you would find that he’s still an acknowledged world authority of some esoteric electrical computer stuff and has written a number of learned books on the subject.
How did my poor old Mum get involved in all this mayhem? Well, she was bored back in NZ so I bravely suggested she come over to visit me while I was working in the UK.
Her trip coincided with the start of the 1980 Whitbread Round the World Race, in which the Late Great Sir Peter Blake competed in Ceramco NZ. We also had the start of the Cowes Torquay Cowes Powerboat Race, which would have to be one of the world’s most famous (Ted Toleman competed in one of the first Cougar cats – which were designed by Colin Chapman, of Lotus cars fame).
We were covering both events for a couple of magazines. So I just figured I’d drag me Mum along for the weekend. And she came along, enjoying the festivities and the mayhem.
We had two boats – the big Powles and the 18 footer – which we used as photo boats and for entertaining important clients during the day. After the Cowes Torquay Race finished the bigwigs from the magazine company went home and left us to it.
A couple of hours later, after a meal ashore at Cowes and a few Heidseick champagnes we found ourselves barreling up the Solent in the wee Shetland, the Powles thundering a few feet behind us, with one of the crew hanging over the front of the bow above the water, holding onto the outside of the pulpit with one arm. That person is also very well known in the international boating magazine community so has also to remain nameless, unfortunately.
To this day my poor Mum believes DA tried to kill her and when he visited NZ in the early 90s she refused to even speak to “that mad bastard who tried to kill me.” The truly remarkable outcome of that day was that the other Dave, (ooops) who hung off the bow, managed to survive the exercise. But me Mum’s never forgotten it and, I think, has not quite forgiven me either.
Blakey’s Boatshoes
It wasn’t long after fire crackers were banned in New Zealand. Some readers may recall those big bangers that were the size of your thumb and frightened the living beejasis out of the neighbours’ cats.
We had arrived in Saint Malo, France after completing a yacht race that had taken us around the English Channel for a day or so. St Malo is a stunning old French medieval city, located in a part of the world where 40ft tides are common, so you lock into the dock area for the night and leave again the next day on the high tide. We tied up next to our rival yacht, which we called Trilodog, a 45 footer crewed by a real bunch of Hoorah Henries.
As we tied up one stuck his snooty nose out through the hatch and said “Oh we don’t want you next door, there could be trouble….” We treated that with the contempt it deserved and continued to raft up alongside…. but we stored it away for later revenge.
We set about exploring St Malo. It’s one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been. We enjoyed the cafes and had a few beers on the town, which was in full-on party mode with street theatre bands and entertainment of all kinds.
And there it was – a shop that sold nothing but big juicy firecrackers. Not your girly pretty ones, oh no, these were cat scarers of the mightiest variety. I walk in and pulled out a pile about three feet high.
“I’ll take these,” I said.
“”Zees are for ze Bastille day next veek … you vill not use zem until then?” asked the shopkeeper. Actually he asked in French but my spoken French is about as good as my written French, if you get my drift.
“Oh no said I. I’d never do a thing like that,” summonsing an angelic look.
In a night of utter mayhem, a few highlights stood out. The boys from Ceramco NZ were in town (it was a couple of weeks before they were due to set out on the 1980 Whitbread Round the World Race).
Throwing crackers at a pair of Ceramco crew who were pretending to busk with air guitars – then having them fall bodily on the fireworks before they went off. They smothered most of them, but not all, and their nice red crew shirts were pretty second hand by the end of the evening.
I met Peter Blake for the first time. One of the other crewmen took a ginormous cracker off me and used it to blow up one of Blakie’s boat shoes. He laughed and took it well, knew how to sweat the serious stuff and let the unimportant slide I suspect.
A particularly obnoxious pommy journo called Alec Bielby was chatting up a very tasty blonde, who was way too young and good looking for him anyway. We had to save her! We sneaked up behind him and placed a lit firework between his feet. When it went off he jumped a foot in the air, his face an inch from hers as he screamed “f*** at the top of his voice.” The blonde’s eyes narrowed in disgust as she looked at Bielby like something the cat had brought in. Mission accomplished.
We put a cracker under a wheelie bin and it blew the thing about 5ft in the air. These were serious crackers, these babies.
One of the crew got arrested for stealing potted palms, but they had to let him go for lack of evidence. Let’s just say the boat owner was pretty annoyed the next morning when he found the palm stuffed in his bunk along with 3 inches of dirt.
We staggered back to the boat at some ungodly hour.
And as we crossed Trilodog to get to ours, we dropped a string of double happy crackers down the forehatch. Lit ones.
That’s what’s known in the trade as a self fulfilling prophecy…..
We had arrived in Saint Malo, France after completing a yacht race that had taken us around the English Channel for a day or so. St Malo is a stunning old French medieval city, located in a part of the world where 40ft tides are common, so you lock into the dock area for the night and leave again the next day on the high tide. We tied up next to our rival yacht, which we called Trilodog, a 45 footer crewed by a real bunch of Hoorah Henries.
As we tied up one stuck his snooty nose out through the hatch and said “Oh we don’t want you next door, there could be trouble….” We treated that with the contempt it deserved and continued to raft up alongside…. but we stored it away for later revenge.
We set about exploring St Malo. It’s one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been. We enjoyed the cafes and had a few beers on the town, which was in full-on party mode with street theatre bands and entertainment of all kinds.
And there it was – a shop that sold nothing but big juicy firecrackers. Not your girly pretty ones, oh no, these were cat scarers of the mightiest variety. I walk in and pulled out a pile about three feet high.
“I’ll take these,” I said.
“”Zees are for ze Bastille day next veek … you vill not use zem until then?” asked the shopkeeper. Actually he asked in French but my spoken French is about as good as my written French, if you get my drift.
“Oh no said I. I’d never do a thing like that,” summonsing an angelic look.
In a night of utter mayhem, a few highlights stood out. The boys from Ceramco NZ were in town (it was a couple of weeks before they were due to set out on the 1980 Whitbread Round the World Race).
Throwing crackers at a pair of Ceramco crew who were pretending to busk with air guitars – then having them fall bodily on the fireworks before they went off. They smothered most of them, but not all, and their nice red crew shirts were pretty second hand by the end of the evening.
I met Peter Blake for the first time. One of the other crewmen took a ginormous cracker off me and used it to blow up one of Blakie’s boat shoes. He laughed and took it well, knew how to sweat the serious stuff and let the unimportant slide I suspect.
A particularly obnoxious pommy journo called Alec Bielby was chatting up a very tasty blonde, who was way too young and good looking for him anyway. We had to save her! We sneaked up behind him and placed a lit firework between his feet. When it went off he jumped a foot in the air, his face an inch from hers as he screamed “f*** at the top of his voice.” The blonde’s eyes narrowed in disgust as she looked at Bielby like something the cat had brought in. Mission accomplished.
We put a cracker under a wheelie bin and it blew the thing about 5ft in the air. These were serious crackers, these babies.
One of the crew got arrested for stealing potted palms, but they had to let him go for lack of evidence. Let’s just say the boat owner was pretty annoyed the next morning when he found the palm stuffed in his bunk along with 3 inches of dirt.
We staggered back to the boat at some ungodly hour.
And as we crossed Trilodog to get to ours, we dropped a string of double happy crackers down the forehatch. Lit ones.
That’s what’s known in the trade as a self fulfilling prophecy…..
The Madness of Hot Paddies
“Ye’ll be wantin to come home and stay then….”
A great bear of an arm thrown warmly around my shoulders was my introduction to Eugene from Malahide Marine.
It was an Irish boating company and I think it might have been benefiting from the same pot of government money that was fuelling John DeLorean, inventor of stainless steel sports cars. Pity about the Renault engine, but they sure made good time machines, those DMC’s.
Anyway, back to Malahide. I flew to Dublin to trial a range of Starcraft tinnies and report on the experience for a London-based magazine. The boats were actually made in New Zealand at the time and Eugene was importing the range of boats. Because I was from NZ, I got the job to go review them – you have to understand that magazine editors have a habit of making that kind of weird association. (The same editor once sent me to interview Shane Acton, who had set off from the UK in a boat somewhat less seaworthy than a Hartley 16 trailer sailer, absolutely no experience at all and sailed it round the world. I got that job because my name was Shane and I lived in the London suburb of Acton. That made me, apparently, the ideal candidate for the interview because we had something in common.)
So reader, you can understand that working with editors, whose minds tend to behave like that, is bound to create bizarre moments.
Again back to Malahide. They had arranged a test session on a river system called the Shannon. The Shannon is a huge series of interconnected lakes, marshes and a river which is a major transport network through Southern Ireland. It’s incredibly beautiful.
We met Eugene at Athlone and headed up the Shannon. Errr, perhaps I should explain that a bit further. We walked into a tiny, smoky little pub whose ceiling appeared to be about 3 inches above my head and the floor level was as pissed as most of the regulars.
The barman poured a Guinness just as soon as my shadow darkened his wonky doorstep.
I reached for the creamy pint and committed an almost-treasonable sin of trying to pick it up before it had properly settled. I was forgiven, but only after promising to leave future pints for at least five minutes, if I accompanied him home to dine and stay with his family, and to destroy zillions of brain cells while discussing rugby in great detail.
Ah the Irish, you’d never meet a more hospitable person anywhere.
So we got onto the boats. The only glitch was that it was December (Northern Hemisphere remember, pre global warming) it was snowing, and the boats were all open.
You have to hand it to those Irish. Blasting through the falling snow in the open tinnies was, shall we say, “bracing.”
Their solution to this was to haul up at a pub, which seemed to be about every two miles, lurch inside and order a Hot Paddy, which was the Irish version of a hot whisky toddy.
It’s true that drinking alcohol in the cold is the worst thing you can do because it brings the blood vessels to the skin and cools you down further.
But it sure felt like the right thing to be doing, motoring from pub to pub, walking in with icicles hanging off our eyebrows, then sipping away on a hot toddy while enjoying the Irish hospitality.
These are the things memories are made of. And as I headed towards the departure lounge in Dublin, Eugene was imploring me to come back and spend Christmas with them.
The conclusion to this story was getting a bollocking from the resident technical engineer for not writing a long enough story about the Starcraft. How was he to know that the entire episode had consisted of trying to freeze ourselves to death, while using a wicked mixture of whisky, hot water and sugar as antifreeze? In the madness I hadn’t bothered to make any notes and for some reason my memory was flawed… it was a lesson I never again repeated.
And you know what, I reckon if I turned up on Eugene’s doorstep, nearly 30 years later, he’d clap that great arm around me, shove a Guinness in my hand, and ask “to be sure what took you so long…”
A great bear of an arm thrown warmly around my shoulders was my introduction to Eugene from Malahide Marine.
It was an Irish boating company and I think it might have been benefiting from the same pot of government money that was fuelling John DeLorean, inventor of stainless steel sports cars. Pity about the Renault engine, but they sure made good time machines, those DMC’s.
Anyway, back to Malahide. I flew to Dublin to trial a range of Starcraft tinnies and report on the experience for a London-based magazine. The boats were actually made in New Zealand at the time and Eugene was importing the range of boats. Because I was from NZ, I got the job to go review them – you have to understand that magazine editors have a habit of making that kind of weird association. (The same editor once sent me to interview Shane Acton, who had set off from the UK in a boat somewhat less seaworthy than a Hartley 16 trailer sailer, absolutely no experience at all and sailed it round the world. I got that job because my name was Shane and I lived in the London suburb of Acton. That made me, apparently, the ideal candidate for the interview because we had something in common.)
So reader, you can understand that working with editors, whose minds tend to behave like that, is bound to create bizarre moments.
Again back to Malahide. They had arranged a test session on a river system called the Shannon. The Shannon is a huge series of interconnected lakes, marshes and a river which is a major transport network through Southern Ireland. It’s incredibly beautiful.
We met Eugene at Athlone and headed up the Shannon. Errr, perhaps I should explain that a bit further. We walked into a tiny, smoky little pub whose ceiling appeared to be about 3 inches above my head and the floor level was as pissed as most of the regulars.
The barman poured a Guinness just as soon as my shadow darkened his wonky doorstep.
I reached for the creamy pint and committed an almost-treasonable sin of trying to pick it up before it had properly settled. I was forgiven, but only after promising to leave future pints for at least five minutes, if I accompanied him home to dine and stay with his family, and to destroy zillions of brain cells while discussing rugby in great detail.
Ah the Irish, you’d never meet a more hospitable person anywhere.
So we got onto the boats. The only glitch was that it was December (Northern Hemisphere remember, pre global warming) it was snowing, and the boats were all open.
You have to hand it to those Irish. Blasting through the falling snow in the open tinnies was, shall we say, “bracing.”
Their solution to this was to haul up at a pub, which seemed to be about every two miles, lurch inside and order a Hot Paddy, which was the Irish version of a hot whisky toddy.
It’s true that drinking alcohol in the cold is the worst thing you can do because it brings the blood vessels to the skin and cools you down further.
But it sure felt like the right thing to be doing, motoring from pub to pub, walking in with icicles hanging off our eyebrows, then sipping away on a hot toddy while enjoying the Irish hospitality.
These are the things memories are made of. And as I headed towards the departure lounge in Dublin, Eugene was imploring me to come back and spend Christmas with them.
The conclusion to this story was getting a bollocking from the resident technical engineer for not writing a long enough story about the Starcraft. How was he to know that the entire episode had consisted of trying to freeze ourselves to death, while using a wicked mixture of whisky, hot water and sugar as antifreeze? In the madness I hadn’t bothered to make any notes and for some reason my memory was flawed… it was a lesson I never again repeated.
And you know what, I reckon if I turned up on Eugene’s doorstep, nearly 30 years later, he’d clap that great arm around me, shove a Guinness in my hand, and ask “to be sure what took you so long…”
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