Читать книгу The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race - Bruce Knecht - Страница 13

WITH A TATTERED chino wardrobe, a gray beard, and a pipe hanging from his mouth, Richard Winning, the owner of the Winston Churchill, looked as if he were from another age. In fact, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the modern world. Rather than buy a sleek new racing yacht, he had chosen to spend a quarter of a million dollars rebuilding the Churchill, which was constructed in Hobart out of Huon pine in 1942. Winning, who was forty-eight, was a child when he first saw the boat, and it was love at first sight. When the yacht came up for sale two years before the 1998 Hobart, he jumped at the chance to become its owner.

A classic yacht with a teak deck, brass fittings, and an oyster white hull, the Winston Churchill was one of the best-known yachts in Australia. It was among the nine boats that had competed in the first Hobart, and since then it had sailed in fifteen others, twice circumnavigated the world, and become an icon for a bygone era of graceful wood-hulled sailing yachts.

Life had been good to its owner. Winning ran part of the retailing company his great-grandfather had founded in 1906. It adhered to principles that seemed almost quaint, refusing to borrow money or to spend much on advertising, but business was booming. Winning, however, found little enduring satisfaction in financial success. He had the gnawing sense that he was part of a generation that has never faced the kind of challenges that men should. “All blokes want to be tested,” he liked to say. “We’ve had it too easy.”

For him, racing a distinguished old yacht with a crew that included several of his oldest friends was more than a sporting event or an escape from everyday life. It was a chance to reenter the natural world, to be a part of a great undertaking, and to do battle with a force that was bigger than any man. It was also a test in which things he considered genuine—seamanship, old-fashioned workmanship, and camaraderie—determined success. In a time when the most celebrated achievements involved technology and stock prices, Winning was more drawn to the sea than ever, in part because it still presented the same challenges it did when the Churchill was launched. Winning’s crew shared his way of thinking. John Stanley was its most important member. Stanley had sailed fifteen Hobarts in his fifty-one years and was, like the Churchill, something of a legend. He had been called Steamer ever since a childhood friend said he had as much energy as a steam-powered Stanley Steamer motorcar.

Steamer started sailing dinghies when he was eleven, and the sea had held an unshakable allure ever since. He had competed in many of the world’s great long-distance yacht races. In 1980 he crewed in the America’s Cup for Alan Bond, the Australian rogue who won it three years later, ending the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year reign and what had been the longest winning streak in any sport. In 1998, Steamer was working for Winning as a foreman in a boatyard Winning owned, although on the water their roles reversed: there, it was often Steamer who made the decisions.

Over the previous few years, both of Steamer’s hips had been replaced, and he walked with the hobble of a mechanical duck. In the months before the race, one of his kidneys was removed after it was found to contain a cancerous tumor, a large melanoma was cut away from his right forearm, and asbestosis was discovered in one of his lungs. But Steamer wasn’t about to let any of that get in the way of racing. He simply had to sail. Even in appearance he seemed destined for the water. With his broad mustache, sizable jowls, and barrel-shaped chest, he looked like a walrus.

As much as anything, Steamer loved sailing’s history and traditions. Sometimes, after he had had a few beers, he would tell his friends that he thought modern society valued the wrong things, that there weren’t enough people interested in learning how to make things or in developing the kind of seamanship that’s required for long-distance ocean racing. “All the races are getting shorter. No one has the time.” One of the things Steamer liked most about long-distance sailing was how a group of men from every imaginable background, living and working together in close quarters, got to know one another in a way that just didn’t happen in normal life. “Whether you’re rich or poor doesn’t make any difference when you’re on the water,” he would say.

One of the Churchill’s crewmen, Michael Bannister, drove a one-man garbage truck for a living. As a teenager, Bannister told friends that he was going to join the marine police or work on a ferry after he finished school. A high-school guidance counselor talked him out of those ideas, but when he was drafted to serve in Vietnam and an application asked what part of the army he would like to serve in, he wrote, “Small ships, small ships, small ships.” He ended up working on an ammunition supply vessel, and upon returning to Australia, he worked as a department-store salesman for a while, then began driving various kinds of trucks. When he wasn’t on the road, he was on the water.

Bannister met his wife, Shirley, at a post-regatta party at the CYC. She didn’t care about his modest professional life, and she learned to live with the fact that Bannister spent at least one day of every weekend sailing. When their only child, Stephen, was younger, Bannister took him along. Stephen was born three days apart from fellow crewman John Dean’s son, Nathan, and the two boys spent countless weekends playing on the beach while their fathers raced. Bannister and his son were extremely close; when Stephen was older, the two of them sailed together competitively.

Bannister had been looking forward to the Hobart for months, and he couldn’t wait to get started.

Just before 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning, Geoffrey Bascombe was swimming past the Winston Churchill, which was tied to a dock just outside the CYC clubhouse. Like its owner, the Churchill looked out of place and time.

Bascombe, with an enormous body, bulbous nose, and a two-foot-long beard, presented an altogether different image. He hadn’t weighed himself in more than a decade but knew he was somewhere over three hundred pounds, the reason his friends called him Mega. A former navy sailor who made his living taking care of boats, he had just finished scrubbing the bottoms of four yachts to ensure that they were free of speed-hindering grime. Now that the work was done, he stopped paddling so he could admire the Churchill, which he had seen many times before but always from greater distances.

Mega’s eyes were drawn to an area of the port side near the bow, where he saw a vertical dark line. It was about a foot long and ended just above the waterline. Swimming closer, he was shocked to see what looked like a serious flaw on a yacht that obviously had been meticulously maintained. It looked as if some of the caulking, which is supposed to fill the spaces between planks to make a wooden boat watertight, was missing. The gap was about as wide as the width of a pencil, and when Mega peered inside, he saw what appeared to be a black rubbery compound.

As soon as he emerged from the water, Mega walked toward the Churchill’s dock, anxious to tell its crew about what he had seen. He knew missing caulking could be the result of shifting planks. With wooden boats, some movement is inevitable, but too much can be catastrophic because it could spring a plank. Mega spoke to two men whom he assumed were members of its crew. “There’s some caulking missing,” he told them. “You should make sure the owner knows about it.”

Richard Winning had been the first member of his crew to arrive at the CYC, but he heard nothing about what Mega Bascombe had seen.