The Infamous Southerly Buster
In a rather intermittent, piecemeal adult sailing career, I’ve nevertheless found my share of excitement.
Article by Nick Walford
Here follow two ripping yarns which, miraculously, in the first, did not result in a young family drowning and, in the second, to the vast relief of two terrified mothers, did not result in a deadly lightning strike upon their sons. I thought them worth telling as demonstrating one of the greatest dangers of storms and lightning, certainly the initial error which often precipitates a catastrophe: a sailor’s complete lack of awareness of their approach or underestimation of their severity.
In a rather intermittent, piecemeal adult sailing career, I’ve nevertheless found my share of excitement. For instance, being dismasted a few kilometres offshore in a Diamond-class racer, mid-week, no other boats about, the skipper having forgotten to bring a hand-held VHF or even a flashlight with which we could have blinked an SOS to the houses on the cliff-tops. Long before mobile phones. No auxiliary power, not even a paddle on board. On a rocky, lee shore with a big surf. We were lucky one motor cruiser did finally happen by, probably the only one that day.
Or the time I was working part-time on an old timber schooner then used for commercial day trips around Sydney Harbour. The foolish skipper, a veteran of the Sydney to Hobart race who should have known better, tried to dock at the Man-o-War Steps near the famous Opera House to unload the paying guests. We were sailing in (the diesel suddenly and mysteriously out of commission in the midst of the approach) despite it being a lee shore in a stiff nor’easter. We found ourselves drifting out of control, beam-on, towards the rough stone landing. The panicking skipper ordered both of us, the crew members, to take a line in our teeth, dive overboard, swim to the adjacent stone seawalls, scale the three vertical metres of oyster and seaweed encrusted sandstone blocks to the top and try to tie off to something, anything, to arrest the drift and avoid staving in the hull. A vain hope as it transpired, though the damage was only a few deep gouges in the timber wales amidships and some slightly frightened passengers. More fool us, we actually did as we were told! Imagine being tossed about in the choppy water between rapidly converging sixty-five foot schooner and stone landing, arms windmilling furiously to reach the seawalls clear of the bow and stern.
By early adulthood we’re already jaded enough not to be entirely taken by surprise in such adversity, and it’s the earlier, unsuspected childhood dramas which imprint upon us most vividly. So it is with the following memories of events long past.
In the very early 1970s a Careel Bay (Pittwater, Sydney) couple took over production of a glass trailersailer, first built in 1968 as the Duncanson 18, and renamed it the Compass Careel 18. The model was rapidly successful as a comfortable family boat and most of them sail even today with a number of enthusiastic Careel associations. They helped drive the burgeoning 1970s popularity of trailersailers but, unlike the earlier Hartley 16, sacrificed much performance for voluminous cockpit and cabin, and the resultant increase in freeboard, windage, draft, girth and weight. One particularly poor design error was such a bad balance of forces that the helmsman had to battle a vicious weather helm on almost all points of sail, even in moderate breezes. Many owners corrected this by fitting a bespoke rudder, and the standard rudder and centreboard were redesigned for a later marque. Their sailing performance has been likened to that of a bathtub, but the following tale attests to their surprising seaworthiness.
My parents bought what must have been one of the earliest boats and it was this, on Pittwater, upon which I learnt to sail in my early teens.
As crewmember with the most experience, it was understood that Dad would be skipper. However, it rapidly emerged that his temperament was surprisingly unsuited and, after many cruises spoilt by his unprintable tirades against a recalcitrant outboard motor or his feckless crew, Mum read the Riot Act, mutinied, sent him below to recover with a jigger of Frigate Rum and unilaterally commissioned me skipper. Quite a learning curve for such a newbie. Oddly, Dad acquiesced happily.
The whole thing seemed strange in light of his earlier, twenty years as a career merchant mariner, which culminated in him qualifying as a foreign going master mariner, eventually ship’s master. Among other commissions, towards the end of WW2, he was first officer of a large passenger liner which had been co-opted by the Australian government as a hospital ship. Earlier, he’d briefly been headhunted from the Australian merchant marine to serve as a naval sub-lieutenant on an American Liberty Ship (the commander awarding him temporary American citizenship to keep it legal, and giving him a sidearm, a bizarre development for an Australian merchant mariner). They needed Australian officers with better knowledge of navigating the Coral Sea. Long before all this, he had sailed dinghies and paddled kayaks on Sydney Harbour as a kid in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Mum put his problems commanding our humble little vessel down to his being used to telegraphing orders from the bridge and knowing that they would be made so by the rest of the ship’s company. A telegraph of slow astern always resulted in just that; not so in the case of our mercurial Johnson 6hp, which refused even to start on most attempts, and certainly flouted Dad’s authority. He just couldn’t adjust.
What followed, under my inexperienced command, but with very welcome mentoring from Dad, were some years of joyful family outings. This first tale I tell, however, was near the end of Dad’s command.
We were sailing a broad reach with the gentle nor’easter back to the marina at Newport, at that moment perhaps a hundred metres south of Longnose Point, a mountainous promontory poking into Pittwater from the western shore with a fringe of ragged sandstone platforms dropping off very precipitously into deep water. Mum drew Dad’s attention to some dark cloud just beginning to peek above the tall ridge of Bayview Heights on the southern shore. “No problem,” said Dad, dismissively. A few minutes later Mum commented again on the rapidly developing storm heads, suggesting we might shorten sail. No, still not a problem. He was seeming rather arrogant now. A few more minutes and Dad conceded that, yes, it just might be a little judicious to fully furl the sails.
As forward hand, I mounted the cabin to flake the mainsail—in my inexperience not thinking to release any sheets or drop the jib first (and we’d never heard of roller-furling headsails in those days). It was just as I’d uncleated the main halyard that the gale struck.
This was Sydney’s infamous southerly buster, common on summer afternoons: a vast, roiling and rolling wall of lurid dark grey, green and purple thunderheads that loomed overhead, almost as if out of nowhere, with a sudden increase in wind to gale force and thunder and lightning, even hail, often quick to follow.
Within a couple of seconds the boat had been spun beam-on, heeling violently as the gale got under the hull and held it over. With the mainsheet still cleated, the sudden increase of force into the mainsail jammed the cars in the mast track so I couldn’t immediately lower it, even with the halyard uncleated, and the jib sheet was still firmly cleated so that, within another second or so, we were dangerously broached, with full capsize seemingly imminent.
I think this was the first time in my life I’d experienced that kind of heart-racing, nerve jangling adrenalin rush and overwhelming fear, a visceral, bodily sensation, but accompanied by a strange mental detachment, part of me stepping aside and considering all with a calm objectivity. I remember coming to the realisation, in that detached part of my mind, that the only reason I was still on the boat was that I had instinctively stayed vertical with some rapid, fancy footwork as the boat rolled beneath me, such that my torso was now plastered against the cabin roof and I was squatting on the narrow, inner face of the port cabin-top grab rail, clutching tightly to the starboard one nearer my shoulders with one hand and almost swinging off the main halyard with the other.
When I looked aft, Dad was performing a similar balancing act, standing on and almost at a right angle to the side of the thwart locker, his shoulder pressed against the lid of the opposite locker as he frantically pulled, time and time again, at the outboard starter cord. True to form, the outboard was refusing to respond, this time with the reasonable excuse that it had never been designed to operate with the shaft horizontal. I remember seeing the masthead clipping the top of the chop and looking the other way to see the aluminium plate centreboard slightly above horizontal, far clear of the water; thank goodness the lock held and it never folded back into the casing.
All around us was chaos. The Sunday afternoon racing fleets had been devastated. Club tenders and powerboat bystanders rushed about frantically trying to rescue dozens of capsized sailing dinghies, with kids flailing futilely in the drink, and even a couple of larger trailersailers had capsized. Keel boats with greater righting moment paid the price with the forces redirected to tear sails or break rigging. Some boats were rapidly driven onto the rocks under Longnose Point.
In that weirdly stretched, slow-motion span of time, at some point, all at once, Dad must have uncleated our jib sheet, the cars released in the track so I could begin to lower the main and the outboard finally started. The boat gradually rolled back to a moderate heel, Dad motored her into the wind and we were again under control. Shortly after that, as always, the southerly buster departed as suddenly as it had arrived.
All this time, Mum and my little brother had been cowering in the cabin—a potentially very dangerous place to be had we capsized and turned turtle—grimly holding on while they were rolled about as if in a tumble dryer.
Despite its “sailing bathtub” reputation, our little ship had weathered the storm better than most, with no harm to boat or crew … except, perhaps, to Dad’s pride as a professional seaman. Despite all the forces of wind into the sails and under the hull, she had found a point, resting high on the generous curve of her beam, past which she refused to pivot. We continue to marvel that she had been able to resist full capsize. It’s possible that the ballast of Mum and little brother inadvertently wedged into exactly the optimal position, low and centred, between centreboard case and quarter berth, made the difference. Had she capsized, we too would have run aground against Longnose Point in short order, perhaps even gone down.
Of course, seaworthy inshore she was but, at the moment of greatest broach, offshore, the first decent swell with a surging whitecap would have finished us off instantly.
That night as we sat watching television we all experienced a lasting light-headedness and feverishness, and the room swaying and rolling as if we’d just stepped ashore from an ocean crossing.
In 1973 or ‘74, at age about sixteen, my schoolmate and I set out in my Flying 11 racing skiff for a school holiday afternoon of freeform fun on Pittwater.
Having gained a valuable foundation of technique on the trailersailer, it seemed time to go to the next level, so I had joined Avalon Sailing Club and raced every Sunday. It was just what kids who sailed did, and my parents guided me in that direction, however, Swallows and Amazons tragic that I was, all I really hankered after was to muck about in small boats and to make romantic voyages to shores unknown. I soon lost interest in racing and was almost always last as a result, a disgraceful personal failing that continues to this day and in which I shamelessly rejoice. So, this lovely sunny afternoon with my mate and no set agenda was heaven.
Most of it was so uneventful I can no longer even remember what we did other than have a good sail in a moderate breeze. What I remember very clearly is the dreadful moment I realised we might have sailed mindlessly into a very dangerous situation. This time it was not the infamous southerly buster which had taken us unawares, but a storm front racing down from the north or nor-nor-east. I’ve never understood how we didn’t see it coming till it was almost upon us. From our position, a hundred metres off Sandy Point, we had all the open water of Broken Bay to our north and might have been able to see it coming, but perhaps it hid behind Barrenjoey Head and the Palm Beach plateaux. Sure, this was long before minute to minute weather reports and radar maps on mobile phones, but a couple of mid-teens with lots of experience on Pittwater could have been expected to keep a better lookout aft. Well, we were still just silly kids, heedless to all but the fun we were having.
Nervous Nelly that I’ve always been, I was almost struck dumb with paralysing fear but gathered enough of my wits together to recommend an immediate retreat to the beach at Sandy Point. However, my friend was having his turn at the tiller and, reckless thrillseeker that he was, insisted on simply holding course for the clubhouse at Avalon and sailing it out.
Consequently, when the gale hit we were heading more-or-less straight downwind, the absolute worst tactic on a lightweight racing skiff with no way to reef or quickly dump the sails, and with no backstay to save the mast. I remember an instantaneous transition to high speed planing, the sensation of the skiff being picked up off the water like a toy, the slightest deviation of the tiller causing a twitchy, violently skittering course, and seeing the mast and mainsail performing reality-defying contortions, sending violent shudders through the hull. Remarkably, this was not one of the two occasions upon which I broke the mast.
We hiked so far out on the toe-straps that the gunwale was under our calves, and if we’d crammed any further astern we’d have fallen over the transom. In my position as crew, the bow wave, no, beam wave, was a great arcing fan of solid matter crashing against my face. I turned my face aft and saw what seemed to be only about one or two of the boat’s eleven feet in contact with the water’s surface and a wake like a speedboat’s.
Thunder rolled over and over us, lightning striking all around at once. Surely, this was our demise. The lightning strikes were so constant that it was like being on stage, blindingly illuminated by rapidly strobing footlights, all glittering through spray and rain. The air was charged, our bodies tingling; perhaps we did catch a few cat’s paws of lightning, but the boat showed no damage. I remember being terrified but also wildly exhilarated. It wasn’t my first squall, after all. My wilful skipper just hooted and hollered out of a maniacal grin.
Typically, it all passed over within a few minutes. We’d covered the couple of kilometres back to the clubhouse in what seemed like moments but had to paddle the last fifty metres on a millpond. And as we approached the rigging deck, there were our ashen-faced mothers, almost levitating over the water in their anxiety to rescue us. They’d been frantically driving up and down the eastern shore, peering into the maelstrom with binoculars for any evidence that their darling boys had not joined Davy Jones. •SCA•
Excellent stories and well written.
Holy moly - two hair-raising stories! Well done!