Shooting Stars and Flying Fish

Prologue

Cracking, banging, crunching sounds slip into my dreams and I’m instantly awake. I’ve become used to waking at the slightest unusual sound but this is different, worse, like nothing I have heard before.

Ted and I catapult out of bed and up on the deck into the wind and darkness.

There’s more loud, regular crunching. Fleeting thought: Is that the dinghy hitting the side? No, we’ve hit something . . . stab of pain in the stomach . . . The reef! We’re on the reef.

I realise it’s my voice coming from somewhere.

The noise is now deafening. There’s a large swell and our yacht is hitting the bottom of each trough with a crashing noise that vibrates through the whole boat. Ted rushes for the engine and it roars into life; we’re up and away. The crunching has stopped; we’re free. I start to breathe. Now, quickly get the anchor up . . . 

But then the engine stops again. Ted starts it. It catches, runs, then fails. The boat is bucking and swaying in the swell, and I realise we’re drifting backwards again. No! Stop it somehow. Stop it!

Ted keeps starting the engine but fails each time.

Then we’re at it again; ugly, fracturing grinding.

‘My God, we’re going to lose the boat!’ Ted shouts as the milliseconds stretch into slow motion and his words echo round and round in my head. We’re barely eight months into our voyage around the world. This can’t be happening . . . we’ve only reached the Maldives!

1. The Dream Begins

Before the departure

One leisurely weekend in January 1996, Ted and I were sheltering from the heat in our small sailing boat in one of our favourite shadowed anchorages in Broken Bay, just north of Sydney. It must have been the middle of the day because the silence was broken only by the shrill of cicadas. I still remember tiny details: ochre leaves floating, insects flitting, two kites soaring high above us, hills rising steeply in the background, and no other boats in sight.

We were reading in the cockpit – or at least we were meant to be reading. I was actually watching the way the kites flew, wafting in an unseen breeze as they hunted for prey. A moment came when I glanced across at Ted, my husband and best buddy, and was surprised by what I saw: his face unlined, brow clear, eyes less pinched than usual. He wasn’t smiling, but his mouth was relaxed. I kept watching him, warmed by the thought that he seemed, for now, serene and happy. Slowly, he turned a page. I could tell by the heading that he was beginning a new chapter.

Something happened to me with the turning of that page. Ted’s expression of peace as he started the new chapter shifted something within me. I turned back to my own book, but I couldn’t concentrate.

‘We could stay on the boat,’ I said softly into the silence.

Ted looked up. ‘What? Did you say something?’

I laughed. ‘You never listen. I said that we could live on the boat. We don’t have to live in a house.’

‘Which boat?’

‘The one we’d be living on.’

‘Live on a boat? You’ve got to be kidding. Boats are tough things to live on. For a start, where would you put all your business suits?’

Rush of blood to the head. ‘You’re laughing at me. You like boats better than houses; I like boats better than houses.’ Defensive. ‘Who says we have to live in a house?’

‘You couldn’t live on a boat.’

‘What do you mean? Of course I could live on a boat. I’d love it.’

‘You work twelve bloody hours a day, six and often seven days a week. You’d never see it in daylight.’

‘Well I’d enjoy coming home to a boat at night. And what about the weekends?’

He stared at me for a second and then grinned. ‘Right. If you want to come sailing you have to take time off from the company and come cruising with me. For a whole year.’

‘Cruising? You’re a racing sailor. You don’t know anything about cruising.’

‘Sure I do. You just put down an anchor every now and then.’

‘Ted, the first time we went for a picnic cruise together we had to keep sailing all day because you couldn’t even find the anchor,’ I said scathingly.

This mischievous denigration of each other had always been a feature of our relationship, a relationship distinguished by laughter. What neither of us noticed at the time was that we had started to argue about whether we were capable of sailing away from our daily life, not whether we would go at all. Maybe I didn’t think then that I really would take time off from my company, didn’t think that life as I knew it would even let me do that. But a tiny seed had been sown.

Little were we to know that this small dream would assume a life of its own and take over our lives. I had no concept of the challenges, the fear, the enormity of it all. And if I had known, even a little, of what lay ahead, I would have been terrified.

But I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

Several years before that conversation in Broken Bay, a friend had invited me sailing one weekend when my children were off visiting their dad. It was instant love. On the water, out on the ocean, I felt like a child of the universe. I revelled in the sea’s vastness, its power, the adrenaline rush I got from the onslaught of wild waves, the hurl of the salt spray, the glow of phosphorus across the water at night. From then on, whenever time allowed, I entered every sailing race I could.

As a divorced mother of two beautiful kids, this wasn’t always easy. I started out with evening twilight races that could be sandwiched between work and dinner, and after a while I graduated to day races. Initially I served in the lowliest of crew positions, slowly learning more about techniques by watching others carefully, and always making myself available to fill in for a missing crew member. I never cared who won. I was ready to toil for months and years at the office if I could enjoy just a few euphoric moments at sea. Graduating to ocean racing was as natural as breathing.

When I started racing, my life was completely dominated by building my business with the aim of giving my children – Kassandra and Simon – a decent start in life. I’d committed myself to giving them a private-school education and spread myself between ‘being there’ for them and working hard to keep us solvent. It left little time for anything else. Sailing became my occasional personal escape.

By the time I met Ted at a dinner party with sailing friends, I had become a reasonably competent sailor by Sydney standards. My enthusiasm still outstripped my ability, and my strength – or lack of it – was a hindrance to serious racing. Meeting Ted, I was impressed by his experience in the sport I’d come to love so well, but he was far too experienced and sought after on fast yachts for us ever to share crewing. Ted had sailed since childhood and his endless love of adventure balanced his commitment to his chosen field of architecture. He had participated in an Admiral’s Cup, a Fastnet, a race around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, ten Sydney to Hobarts and innumerable other ocean races. I was attracted to him immediately. Unlike many of the Sydney men that I knew, he never seemed to feel the need to prove himself, and that took confidence of a very real kind. Compared to the competitive blue suits or the self-applauding sailing jackets that I was used to, his lack of macho bravado was stunning. Even though we rarely sailed together, and never in a race, our lives merged with an ease that was extraordinary, and our relationship was warm, easy and funny. He was also unconcerned and unthreatened by my business exploits, joking that sometimes he had to ‘walk a couple of paces behind’. What kind of confidence was that! He understood my need to concentrate on business to keep my small family, and that most of my spare time was devoted to my children. He even seemed genuinely thrilled by any success I had.

I found it all wonderfully relaxing, and agreeing to marry Ted Nobbs was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. (I had picked up the habit of calling him by his full name, particularly when I was making fun of him. He frequently sailed in a crew with no less than three members called Ted, and his close friends tended to call him Ted Nobbs to distinguish which Ted they meant.)

The shrill sound came from a distance, drilling into my sleep, louder and louder. I groaned, switched off the alarm and heaved myself out of bed, eyes still shut, getting caught in a tangle of sheets as I went. Damn. It was 5.51 am. A grey light from Sydney Harbour outside the window penetrated the room. I could hear the sirens of police cars crossing the Anzac Bridge against the hum of traffic as I dragged on my tracksuit pants.

‘Get up, Ted,’ I said, yanking the bedclothes off him without pity. ‘Teagon’ll be here any minute!’

Our trainer, Teagon, arrived at exactly 6 am. We had to be out there, ready and waiting. There was a grumbling from Ted, followed by a soft patter on the terrace signalling Teagon’s arrival. Before she knocked I slid open the glass door.

Ted appeared soon after, and out in the cold Teagon put us through some of her hellish exercises, accompanied us on a run to the park and back, and was gone by seven. Now the weekday work routine started. It was the same every day. Shower, power drink, carrot juice, tea and toast.

‘Bye, darling!’ I said, kissing Ted, who’d recently sold his share in his corporate architectural practice and was loving working and drawing at home.

As I left for work the 7.45 am ABC news theme chased me out the door.

Home keys, garage keys, car keys and office keys jangled as I clacked down the hallway of our apartment block to the garage and the Audi. To anyone seeing me, I was the epitome of a smart city slicker: suit, silk shirt, black briefcase. I was already tense as I prepared to meet the challenges of a day in my aviation and tourism business: negotiating, dealing, deciding strategy or tactics, playing tough or soft as the occasion demanded, a hundred roles a day. I swung into the rush of cars at the end of the street. A horn blew. Get lost.

Applying my make-up at traffic lights, I fumed and calculated my way through Sydney’s suburbs, cutting across town through dismal terrace-lined back streets. Graffiti snarled across walls, and dark-clothed pedestrians hunched forward into a cold wind. The locked windows of my car cut the noise and smells, and Classic FM drowned out most external sounds. I was apart, air-conditioned, secure.

I stopped at an intersection. A girl in a black miniskirt and ridiculous heels ran along the footpath to a stationary bus, balancing a cup of coffee, her shoulder bag slipping. Just as she arrived, the bus’s automatic doors closed. She peered through the glass, waving at the driver, but the bus just sat there for a moment and then pulled away. Five metres along it stopped at a light. She raced forward again and knocked on the door with her free hand. The light turned green and the bus left her standing.

I still remember the pleading face, the black miniskirt, the precariously balanced coffee. What is curious to me now, all these years later, is that I didn’t wonder at the driver’s lack of kindness. It was normal. That was just what bus drivers did every day in Sydney.

At the office I could hear my heels do a rat-a-tat-tat on the hard floor of the white-walled glass building as I greeted people – ‘Good morning’, ‘Good morning’, all the way to my office. The day, like all my days, went fast: meetings, short interviews, decisions, figures, answering emails. When I looked up in the early evening, my staff were streaming past my door and waving goodnight. I looked at the work still piled on my desk. The sound of their departures faded with the light outside, leaving me exposed in my lit office. Around 7.15 pm I grabbed my bag and sped out the door.

I was tired, always tired. I never thought of how I used to be a dreamer and had wanted to write or act or both. I had produced poems and plays and my notebooks were littered with scatterings of half-finished efforts. My first play had been produced onstage when I was seventeen. In my twenties I had earned my living as a television presenter and an actor. But that young woman was long gone. Now there was just the businesswoman, strong enough not to go broke but certainly not a millionaire. I had won various awards, had a place and a reputation in the Sydney business community, and saw myself as a responsible, if mediocre, provider.

I reached the underground car park of our building at 8 pm. Inside our apartment Ted was in his office on the phone. Around him, sketches and architectural drawings covered every centimetre of space. I kissed his forehead, flung down my bag and headed for the kitchen. Shall we walk up the street for dinner? I wondered, but then decided to make a stir-fry instead.

This was my favourite part of the day. Glass of red wine to hand, I pulled ingredients out of the refrigerator, grated ginger, crushed garlic, put on rice to cook. Soon I would put on some music, light candles, and Ted and I would eat and share stories of our day.

Ted came out of the study. ‘Put all that food away. We’re meant to be at the Mixing Pot for dinner.’

I swung round from the stove, wok in hand. ‘No we’re not. Who with?’

‘It’s okay. They won’t be there until 8.30.’

———

The fact was that despite three years having passed since that day in the anchorage in Broken Bay, we were living in an apartment, not on a boat. We still worked full throttle, cramming in theatre, functions and dinner with friends where we could. We were the typical inner-city Sydney couple, running as fast as we could to keep up with all the other rats in the race.

I knew that the conversation over every dinner party would be the same: what was going on in Sydney’s CBD, how much our real estate was now worth, our new cars, the newest restaurant, a different wine to drink. I had worked half my life to get where I was; but where was that? Over dinner my mind was always only half present, smiling, chatting; the other half was yearning, wanting to be out on the boat, away from it all, sailing.

So what had happened to our dream? At first it had grown by itself like a living thing, a wild vine out of control. We would leave our adult children, our family and friends, stop work completely for a year, take the dog and sail away. We didn’t know where this improbable adventure would take us. But the longer we delayed the more remote it seemed. We’d agreed this break was a fantastic goal, but breaking the millions of tiny invisible strands that bound us to our city lifestyle seemed so hard.

We had made a little progress. We had sold our terrace house in Paddington and bought a tiny flat on Blackwattle Bay in Glebe. It had little upkeep (compared to the terrace with its leaves clogging the gutters, constantly failing plumbing and a pool that had to be cleaned and plants watered) which meant more time on the boat, and was easily rentable when the time came. But ‘life’ kept getting in the way.

For some time, Ted, ever the adventurer, had been learning to fly small aeroplanes, and announced that while waiting for me to be ready to go sailing, he was going to fly himself to London and back. I had to take a breath before answering. He had flown a mere 400 hours. ‘Right, Ted, fly yourself to London and back. Why not?’ I couldn’t help thinking, Most people would do more sailing, read a few books, mow the lawn. Not Ted.

And so it happened – and it kept him busy for a few months. I was glad he was occupied doing something he loved, but his next idea was even more crazy.

‘I’ve been talking to a few people and I think we’ll hold a London to Sydney air race.’

‘A London to Sydney air race?’ This time I was gobsmacked. ‘You’ve got to be kidding! What kind of organisation would that take?’

‘A little bit,’ he conceded. ‘But why not? There have been three races already: in 1919 and 1934, then one in 1969. It’s about time we had another. If I talk to the government, we could run one to coincide with Australia’s centenary of Federation in 2001!’

I sighed and giggled at the same time. ‘Sure, Ted, why not?’

And so that happened, with a large cast of organisers, and was enormously successful, attracting some forty tiny aircraft which had to make twenty-three stops to get from Biggin Hill Airfield in London to Sydney Harbour. Just what is wrong with a 747? I couldn’t help thinking.

While all this excitement was going on it was sometimes hard to remember our sailing aspirations. Sometimes I despaired that they would stay, forever, merely frustrated yearnings. So to keep the dream alive I’d begun to read every book I could find about people who ‘went sailing’. I read everything from Joshua Slocum’s tales to Joanna Hackett’s The Reluctant Mariner. I read Peter Nichol’s A Voyage for Madmen, then everything available on heavy-weather sailing. I read books on sea anchors and disasters at sea, on how to protect a boat during a 360-degree capsize. As I read more and more about sailing oceans, currents and winds, cyclones and seasons, something started to dawn on me.

One weekend on the boat I was in the cockpit studying charts and sailing books, and Ted was polishing the top of the cabin. I called out to him.

‘Ted, when we leave here, the best way to go, according to the winds, is west.’

‘Yes – keep the wind behind you,’ he answered.

‘And when we get to Darwin, the wind is still from the east. So best to go west.’

‘That’s right. Just wait until you get into the trade winds. Beautiful sailing.’ His eyes took on a faraway gleam.

‘To get a wind to come back, we’d have to go down into the Southern Ocean.’

‘All the way – unless we go north to Asia.’

‘We’ve already agreed we’ve both spent enough time in Asia. But no, not the Southern Ocean. It’s too cold down there.’

‘We could go to Patagonia, then around the Horn.’

‘Around the Horn? Do you think I’m crazy? I’m a warm-water girl. You get seventy knots across the deck down there.’ I thought for a moment. ‘So that means we’ll just have to keep going –’

‘West,’ said Ted smugly.

‘And that means –’

‘That’s right. We’ll have to sail around the world.’

‘But we’ve only allowed a year. I can’t be away from the office longer than that.’

‘It won’t take us longer than three and a half years,’ said Ted, and then he went back to his polishing.

It took me a few weeks, but I began to realise that I would either have to give up the idea altogether, or start seriously planning to sail around the world. Every morning when I woke, in that dreaming moment before the hated alarm rang, the idea seemed more real, and less insane. Why not? Why not?

Friends, however, could not believe we were serious.

‘You wouldn’t do it,’ said one. ‘I know you, Nance. You’ll never leave your children for three and a half years.’

‘But they’re all grown up and doing their own thing,’ I said, though I could hardly bear to think about leaving them. I would miss them so much, this pair of adorable miscreants that my whole life had been wound around. Both Kassandra and Simon had moved away from home and were making their own successful lives, Simon as an actor and Kassandra as a sculptor. They were articulate, well travelled, and established in the Sydney arts scene. When we broke the news to them, they seemed both aghast and delighted.

‘That’s great, really great,’ said Simon, but he kept staring at me for a while with his mouth open.

‘What a wonderful thing to do!’ said Kassandra. ‘It’s about time you stopped working so hard. But –’ and now she looked worried ‘– how on earth can you leave the company?’

Yes, how? I thought to myself. My daughter knows me too well.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my ninety-four-year-old mother when I first broached the subject with her, then she refused point-blank to discuss it any further.

‘How will you ever leave the dog?’ asked another friend.

‘We’ll take her,’ I said.

‘What about your business? You’ll have to sell it.’

‘I’ve already sold the travel company. Only the tour company is left, and I haven’t worked out what to do with that yet. Remember it’s a public company now – I floated it. So I only have a shareholding. Someone else will manage it.’

Despite my blithe assurances I sometimes had difficulty convincing myself that we really would go ahead and do it. I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to cross an ocean, let alone sail around the world. The longest I’d been at sea was three nights – and that had been with a large crew.

I didn’t share my doubts with Ted though, because by now he was telling friends it had all been my idea.

But what was I to do about my elderly mother?

Over the ensuing months things began to take shape. Most importantly, we had at last found the right boat to take us around the world.

After scouring marinas for weekend after weekend, poring over advertisements and looking at hundreds of different boats, Ted remembered a great boat he’d sailed on during a tough ocean race from Sydney to Vanuatu. During the race the fleet had encountered high winds and had had to deal with wild, dangerous seas. Most of the boats in the fleet sustained considerable damage, one even lost its mast. Yet while the other crews were reporting horrific difficulties on board, the Peterson 46 on which Ted was sailing, Mercedes VI, remained smooth and unruffled no matter what seas she encountered. They were even able to cook and eat a roast dinner in the middle of the gale!

We started searching in earnest and finally found a boat for sale in New Zealand and loved her immediately. She was the same Peterson 46, a long-keeled cutter-rigged sloop, called Enchantress. The long keel under the boat, as opposed to the ‘dagger’ keel on modern racing boats, meant that she rode very steadily in the water. And although as a sloop she had only one mast, the cutter rig gave her two smaller sails before the mast, rather than one large one. These smaller sails are easier and lighter to handle than one large sail, especially for a yacht with only two people on board. She was ideal for any kind of ocean.

As well as her strength and sea-going capabilities, below decks her sleek lines and warm cedar panelling were elegant and snug. She was well designed and compact and offered almost every home comfort. With separate cabins both forward and aft, each with their own ensuite, we could envisage having friends sail with us without anyone being cramped. We could even seat ten for a dinner party.

Given my work schedule, taking time off to sail her across the Tasman was not an option, so we employed a crew to ferry her from Auckland to Sydney’s second yachting playground, Pittwater. Once in Sydney we started to spend all our weekends on her, and I felt the dream coming alive again. Whenever I looked around her lovely warm saloon I would try to imagine being at sea in her.

We still did not sail together much but spent our time renovating and upgrading Enchantress for our journey. She was only 13.14 metres long and a mere 3.84 metres wide, but she might as well have been the Queen Mary given the drama that accompanied every aspect of her preparation for our trip. Ted was so thorough that by the time he was finished it would have been easier to name the parts of the boat that were original rather than those that had been replaced. Apart from replacing almost everything replaceable, such as rigging, electrics and sails, we installed an inverter to give us 240-volt power. We put in a deep freeze, a microwave and added more storage space. Neither of us had special mechanical, engineering or electrical knowledge, but Ted applied himself with fervour and fairly glowed as he worked. There was a new warmth in his smile.

Only one thing bothered me as our plans continued – the name written on the topside of the boat. Enchantress might work as the name of a man’s boat, but this was our boat, both emotionally and financially. Fustratingly, we couldn’t agree on a new name: Ted was drawn to names like Resolution and Deliverance, while I fancied names like Hobo and Swish. We were at a stalemate.

One Monday morning we were rushing to get back to shore and on to our workday routines. I was wearing an old shapeless tracksuit as I stumbled to the bow in the dawn light to free the mooring while Ted took the wheel. The elastic in my tracksuit pants was a little loose and I hitched them up as I leaned over the mooring lines, half asleep, my long, uncombed hair falling over my face.

Another sailing boat glided by with a lone sailor, trim and silver-bearded, at the wheel.

‘And is that the enchantress on the bow?’ he drawled.

I stood up at once, arms stiff by my side. I turned to yell with as much dignity as I could muster: ‘That’s it! We’re changing the name of this boat.’

Driving home that morning, we passed the warehouse containing old artists’ spaces opposite the Anzac Bridge on Blackwattle Bay. The sign out front said Blackwattle Studios. Blackwattle. We’d found a name we could agree on.

When my mother died suddenly after a short illness, I realised that although I hadn’t really admitted it to myself, the idea of leaving her had been troubling me greatly. Not long after, we were faced with another delay which couldn’t have been more unexpected.

In December 2001 I was told I had breast cancer. My first reaction was indignation. Me? I’m healthy. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. During the testing process something happened which shocked me almost as much as my diagnosis. I was sitting with other ‘second recall’ women on a long flat bench, our backs to the grey and white wall like schoolchildren, waiting for good news or bad. Muffled sounds from the woman next to me told me she was in tears.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked. ‘Have you had bad news?’

No, she told me. Her cancer had been caught early. They would