Sailing 1957-2025

 

First introduced to sailing at the age of ten, it became the overarching sporting pursuit of my entire life, from village yacht club beside the local river, to the ultimate challenge of nautical sports, to fabulous family adventures. From the day my dad first took my brothers and I out on the Derwent River in our newly acquired Snipe, sailing has been a passion I can’t imagine living without. The very notion of being driven over the water by skillfully harnessing the unseen power of the wind is both enchanting and rewarding.

Austin’s Ferry Yacht Club (AFYC) was a marvellous little family club just a ten minute walk from home. Three classes of boat were raced there in the 1950’s, the 15’6” Snipe, the 12’ Tasmanian designed Tamar and the 8’ Sabot. By the 1960’s, a group of talented young sailors introduced a fleet of high performance 12’ Cherubs. Dad, Bob and I started out in the Snipe class and John began his sailing career in the Sabot. I finished my time at AFYC racing the speedy Cherub, “L’Hirondelle”.

The Snipe class design, drawn by Bill Crosby, first appeared in the July 1931 Rudder magazine. The winner of a competition to find an affordable, easy to build, trailerable family sail boat, the issue of the magazine quickly sold out and the class took off. Today there are over 30,000 hulls registered and over 8,000 Snipes racing all over the world, with international championships every two years.

               Rudder Magazine Article,    July 1932

To simplify construction, the design called for plywood over timber frames. The early fleet of about ten boats at Austin’s Ferry were all built of carvel plank construction, with a steel plate centre board, which made them pretty heavy. Before racing could begin, at least three or four 2-person crews would be needed to carry each  fully rigged boat from the yacht club apron down a ramp to the water. Later, some of the more competitive racers broke away from the heavy planked boats, followed the original plywood design, and built much lighter, faster versions. Today, the class is exclusively built of fibreglass to a strict one design, resulting in evenly matched competition.

In our old planked boats, floatation was provided by two old car tires, one inflated in the bow compartment and one in the stern. When we capsized, which happened fairly frequently in a “Southerly Buster” the decks would be awash. The plywood design had floatation compartments built in.

Originally Dad was invited to crew for our friend and neighbour Doug Ferguson aboard his Snipe “Raven”. In 1957, dad and another friend, Bob Gear, teamed up to buy another older Snipe, “Falcon”, and raced together, Bob Gear on the helm and dad as forward hand.

After 2 years in the Falcon partnership, another Snipe, ZigZag, came up for sale. Dad invited brother Bob and I to pool our life savings from our Hobart Savings Bank accounts, accumulating since grade 1 at Claremont Primary School, and go in on a three way partnership to buy ZigZag. At the time I had 14 pounds and a few shillings saved up and Bob had £11. Dad made up the balance and we were the proud owners of our first yacht!

I was assigned helmsman, dad was main sheet hand and ballast, and Bob was jib sheet hand. As we negotiated for positions at the start of our very first race, we collided with another Snipe, which shoved a large hole through the planks of our bow, sinking immediately to decks awash. Knocked out of our first race before we even got across the start line, we looked forlornly at the serious damage to our new boat and wondered what came next.

At the end of the day’s racing, the entire yacht club rallied around the Brand Family, promising to have us back in the water by the following weekend. I have wonderful memories of those friendly commiserations and offers of help.

There were a number of excellent carpenters belonging to the club and they all sprang into action. ZigZag wa taken to the McCrow’s garage and the splintered planks removed. New planks of beautiful pink King William Pine were fashioned to fit the hole and glued and screwed into place. The patch was primed and painted, and sure enough we were back racing the following weekend! We learned many lessons during that eventful week - about start line manoeuvres, sinking down to decks awash, rescue by the “pick-up boat”, and especially the way a friendly crowd of club members were determined that the Brand Brothers would be able to “get back on the horse”, and not be scared off by their accident. Of course as one of the two helmsmen involved, I had to accept at least half of the responsibility for the collision. Basically none of us saw the collision course unfolding behind our respective jib sails. We quickly learned to peer under and around the low-footed jib to keep watch for other boats.

Dad, Bob and I raced as a threesome for a coupe of years. Dad’s bulk made for important ballast and his strength was important when raising and lowering the heavy steel plate centreboard. However after a couple of years, as Bob and I bulked up, we began secret discussions to address the extra weight that the main sheet hand placed on our competitiveness. After much debate we decided we had to ask Dad if we could race the boat as a duo. Dad was awfully good natured about it and quite contentedly joined the rescue boat crew, leaving Bob and I to race as a two man crew like most of our competitors. By that point brother John was  racing a Sabot, so dad needed to share his time between three sons on two different boats.

               Brother Bob and me racing ZigZag 1961

Summer Sundays were very busy days for the Brand Family. We often started the day at church or Sunday School, then darted down to the club to prepare the boats for the afternoon racing. The boats were kept with mast and boom in place in a gated compound. Prepping them mainly meant getting the sails rigged ready to hoist, checking that rigging shackles were tight, making sure all the battens were in place, ensuring that the ballast inner tubes were inflated and that we had our life jackets and bailer at the ready.

Our life jackets were huge bulky ex military kapok-stuffed cotton canvas affairs that chaffed our chins and held our heads high, but on our tight budget in this luxury sport, they had to do! Our sails were still cotton in those days and required lots of care. At the end of the day’s racing we would share the job of hanging the sails on the clothes line and hosing them down to get rid of any salt they had gathered either from spray or a full dunking in the river. AFYC was located at the convergence zone between the fresh water coming down stream from Lake St Claire and the brackish water coming inland from the ocean. Leaving salt in the fabric meant the risk of it cutting the fine cotton stitching that held our precious sails together. Once washed, we had to take care to get the cotton fabric properly dry. If stored damp, they would go mouldy. Lots of good lessons for young boys.

After all the house keeping duties were completed at the end of race day, we would shower and retire pleasantly exhausted to the living room and mum and dad would serve us a traditional after-sailing hearty soup and fresh baked scones. We had no trouble falling asleep on Sunday nights - sometimes stretched out in our living room chairs before we even got to bed.

Bob and I enjoyed several excellent seasons racing together on Summer Sunday afternoons. We decided to adapt trapeze technology that was being used on more high-performance classes, to our Snipe, at a time when this older class wasn’t using it. Many of our competitors were family men with a combined weight in the 400 lb range, whereas Bob and I as young teenagers weighed in at less than 300 lbs. The trapeze allowed Bob to get his entire body weight outboard and helped us immensely in keeping the boat nicely balanced.

The trapeze consisted of a thin stainless steel cable attached to the same bolt that held the side stays in place on the mast. Bob wore  a harness around his upper thighs and over his shoulders, and a quick release stainless steel hook on the end of the cable attached to the harness. There was one trapeze cable on each side of the boat, and a rubber shock cord gathered them in when not in use.

Bob and I have never forgotten the occasion when a component of the stainless cable broke. One moment he was banked far out, feet firmly on the gunwale just ahead of me, the next he disappeared from sight in an almighty splash. The sudden loss of his ballast caused ZigZag to heel dramatically and I had to round up to prevent a capsize. Bob was still attached to the boat by the over stretched shock cord and we both scrambled to get him back on board over the stern. That was the kind of adrenaline rush we experienced on a regular basis as two young teenaged brothers racing against  mostly older adults.

Towards the end of our time together racing ZigZag, we entered the annual AFYC long distance race from Austin’s Ferry to the Hobart Bridge - a round trip distance of about 16 miles. As we rounded Cadbury’s point on the final leg of the run home, we found ourselves at the front of the fleet, with no one ahead to show us the way. This was a rather unusual but enjoyable problem for us - the first time in our sailing careers!

In 1968, my friend Ian Bruce invited me to crew for him aboard his beautiful brand new Cherub, L’Hirondelle. Ian was deaf and a few years into a career in cabinet making. He had built L’Hirondelle like a piece of fine furniture - perfect in every way, with her clear varnish showing her beautiful wood grain finish.

Ian and I communicated through signing for the years of our friendship, however my signing was limited to the Australian two-handed alphabet method. This posed some interesting challenges at times, with him holding the tiller and main sheet and me holding the jib and spinnaker sheets. There were times when we needed strong teeth to hold the sheets while we conducted tactical conversations!!

The Cherub was one of the early high performance dinghies that truly tested the mettle of their crew. They would sail so fast that they literally took off and flew, with spray flying in all directions for a few moments, before an almighty crashing splashing capsize. The trick was to recover as quickly as possible, right the boat, get back in, sort out the mess of lines and sails and return to racing, knowing that most of our competitors were likely to experience their own crash and burn disasters before the afternoon racing was over! The adrenaline rush of an our speeding L’Hirondelle remains with me to this day!

                             Cherub Racing - 1968

One of the interesting aspects of the Cherub class is that the design rules are far more flexible than, for example, the Snipe class. This has both positive and negative effects in competitive sailing. The Snipe design parameters for hull, mast and sails have remained essentially unchanged since 1931. A twenty year old boat can therefore remain completely competitive against a brand new boat, meaning that it is the skill of the crew rather than design tweaks in the boat that determine racing outcomes.

With the enormous flexibility in Cherub design parameters, those who could afford to would constantly push the envelope. If their latest boat wasn’t quick enough, they would sell it at the end of the racing season and work feverishly through the winter months building a new and hopefully faster boat. This required an interesting combination of skills, from understanding how design tweaks might effect the speed of a boat, to the woodworking skills to actually build it!

After a couple of seasons racing L’Hirondelle together, Ian Bruce decided to embark on the path described above - to build a new and hopefully faster Cherub. Ian sold L’Hirondelle to me, which in addition to putting me at the helm of my very own “flying machine”, also led me down another path of skill acquisition.

Ian sold me the boat, but wanted to keep his trailer for his next boat. This meant that I was now in need of a trailer, and none were for sale. My dad said, “You should build your own trailer”. So with his help I did. Dad helped me to draw up the design of Ian’s trailer, buy and cut to length all the steel U channel materials and numerous steel gussets for all the corners, used wheels, bearings and springs from an auto wrecker, an axle shaft from the foundry scrap heap and a welding machine borrowed from his work.

After all the components were acquired and cut to size and shape, we laid it all out in the back yard and dad taught me how to weld. Because the materials were fairly light weight - mostly 1/8” or 3/16” - I blew holes through the metal until I learned the skills of the trade. Dad was  good at showing me the ropes then standing back and allowing me to make mistakes until I got it right. By the time all the gussets were welded into place top and bottom on all the corners, I had learned to weld and the finished product looked quite decent.

Because of his complete range of foundry skills and generous, affable nature, dad was well known among the yachting community for his ability to lead a team of amateurs through the process of building a wooden pattern, a sand mold and finally pour a lead keel for a home built sail boat. Of course the professional boat yards didn’t hesitate to contract a keel to a professional foundry. Dad’s skills were appreciated by back-yard builders working to a tight budget. They would sometimes spend years collecting scrap lead from here and there until they had finally accumulated enough to proceed with the job. Because of the dangers posed by the molten lead, the toxic fumes, sparks, flying nodules of molten lead etc, a back yard pour was generally a day of great anxiety and adrenaline, capped off with a round of beer or two and a team of very relieved and grateful amateur boat builders.

One of these occasions was to introduce the Brand Family to the art of boat building and the joys of co-owning, cruising and racing a 30’ keel boat. Keith Topher, an agronomist, and Geoff Jennings, a municipal council administrator, were a couple of years into the building of a 30’ Viking designed by British naval architect Alan Buchanan when they called on dad to help them pour their lead keel. At this point in the project, the Celery Top frames of the hull and deck and the King William Pine planking were completed, but the partnership was low on cash and the building schedule was falling behind. Keith and Geoff instantly took a liking to dad, realized that he had many of the skills they needed in the project and could potentially split the budget from two to three families. Thus the Brand Family was invited to join the partnership to build, own, maintain and sail Katandra.

When our family joined the Katandra partnership, brother Bob and I were in our teens, had taken two years of compulsory carpentry classes at Newtown High School, and were expected to take on semi-skilled and labouring duties as part of the family contribution. Our first big job was to fill the hundreds of half inch holes all over the hull where the planks had been riveted to the frames.

Katandra was carvel planked with approximately 1.25” by 2” strip planks of  King William Pine. The frames were laminated Celery Top Pine. Each plank was clamped into place, glued to the one below it, and fastened to each frame with a bronze rivet. This laborious process entailed one person working outside the hull pre-drilling the narrow hole for the rivet and countersinking a broader hole for the rivet head. A partner worked inside the hull, drawing the rivet through the hole, sliding a convex bronze washer over it, then hammering the bronze rivet over the washer to tighten the plank firmly to the frame and the plank below.

At the end of the riveting process, the outside of the hull had hundreds of shallow holes which had to be plugged with specially cut King William Pine plugs dipped in glue and hammered into place. At the end of the plugging process, the hull had suddenly sprouted a bad dose of “chicken pox” and the protruding plugs had to be levelled and sanded smooth with the hull, using first a sharp chisel, then an electric disc sander. This was one of the first major jobs that brother Bob and I were assigned to. We spent several weekends working from ladders getting the job done. The picture above shows the hull immediately after the rivet holes had been plugged and sanded.

While the three fathers took on the bulk of the carpentry and steel work, the kids of various ages helped with mostly unskilled and semi skilled wood work, priming, painting  and clean up.

In addition to the keel, dad’s other metalwork contributions included a galvanized pulpit, pushpit, stantions, custom goose neck for the boom with built in roller furling and the shroud and mast head fittings. His final flourish was a beautiful cast bronze name plate which formed the full-width step into the companionway. The mast and boom were crafted in tapered box sections of Douglas Fir, known in Australia as Oregon Pine.

Meal times on work days were marvellous family affairs - picnics and BBQ’s in the Topfer’s back yard. After seven years of skilled work by three families of amateur builders, Katandra was finally ready for launching. Her name is a Tasmanian Aboriginal word meaning “song of the sea birds”.

Katandra on launch day

Proud owner/builders on launch day

We kept Katandra on a mooring at Bellerieve Yacht Club. Jeff Jennings raced her but the Brand and Topfer families preferred cruising.  I have some lovely memories of cruising the Derwent River and D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

In the summer of ????, dad decided to bring Katandra to Coles Bay for our annual  summer camping holiday. This was quite logistically challenging, but as always dad was up to the challenge. The prevailing winds in Tasmania are from the South West, and the preferred moorage corner in Cole’s Bay is sheltered from these winds. However periodically, South East gales blow up and the Cole’s Bay moorage is open to these, presenting a lee shore. About half a dozen commercial fishing boats were moored in the bay at that time.

Rather than risk anchoring in Coles Bay for two weeks, dad once again hired Roger Maxfield, this time to help him place a heavy mooring for Katandra. The mooring was assembled from two huge cast iron steam engine wheels recovered from the foundry scrap heap, tethered with a heavy chain yoke. I participated in the placement of the mooring and remember much huffing and puffing as the components were lowered into place.

Then came the task of sailing Katandra up the East Coast of Tasmania to Coles Bay. Friends with offshore sailing and navigating experience were signed on as crew for the trip. Sailing around the outside of the rugged Tasman Peninsula can provide challenging sea conditions, but the option is a short cut through a man made canal at Dunally, which for a deep keeled boat like Katandra has to be negotiated at high tide. We accomplished this and eventually picked up our brand new mooring in Cole’s Bay.

The following week we made our usual pilgrimage by road to the Cole’s Bay camp site and set up our camp. We would row out to Katandra in an 11’ plywood dinghy borrowed from the Harmon family, motor the yacht over to the short fishing dock owned by Roger Maxfield, pick up our passengers for the day and sail the pristine waters of Great Oyster Bay.

Our longest day cruise was to Bryant’s Corner, a delightful South West facing bay close to the southern tip of the Freycinet Peninsula. We had eleven people on board, including dad, mum, brother John, and I. The only other crew member I remember from that day is Geoff Fysh, aged 11 at the time.

After a leisurely sail south, we dropped anchor in Bryant’s Corner and set about enjoying a beautiful sunny day lounging on deck, playing guitars, swimming, snorkelling and paddling the dinghy ashore. Little did we know that we were enjoying the calm before a horrendous storm.

At about 2.00 pm, we noticed a commercial fishing boat making a beeline for Schouten Passage, just to our south, separating Schouten Island from Freycinet Peninsula. The fishing boat suddenly altered course dramatically and veered straight towards us. Slowing a moment to seaward of us, the skipper shouted that unseasonal hurricane force winds had just hit Hobart, 100 miles south, and were wreaking havoc in the city. Our anchorage was badly exposed to the winds and we should leave immediately.

The fetch across Great Oyster Bay from Swansea to the Freycinet peninsula is approximately 10 miles - enough to enable hurricane force winds to whip up very heavy seas. Suddenly our idyllic summer cruise turned into a great drama. We bellowed at those ashore in the dinghy to hurry back to the boat and readied for a quick emergency departure, shortening sail and preparing to hoist anchor. By the time the shore crew arrived, large swells preceding the hurricane were already heaving the foredeck. Dad started the engine and asked me to take in the anchor. We had no anchor winch, so it  was challenging work hauling the anchor chain by hand on a now wildly heaving foredeck.  We had limited experienced sailors on board - women and young people out for a leisurely cruise. Dad sent all of them below and closed the hatch as we began dealing with the ever increasing wind now screaming in our rigging. We debated turning tail and following the fishing boat that had warned us of the storms approach, through Schouten Passage. However dad reasoned that the building storm surge funnelling through the passage might make for dangerous waves that would cause the dinghy to surf down on our stern, endanger our transom-hung rudder and poop us. So the decision was made to claw our way off shore, motor sailing directly into the storm.

Sea conditions grew so wild that everyone below became violently seasick - everyone except my poor mum, who spent her time reassuring our young passengers and passing buckets from one to the next. At one point the dinghy took on a lot of water and the extra weight caused the deadeye that the tow rope attached to to pull out of the bow. To recover it we had to do a dangerous gybe  in true hurricane conditions, sail back to the dinghy and try to secure it. I was assigned to climb into the dingy in the heaving conditions, bail out as much water as possible, attach the tow line to the forward seat (there was nothing else to tie off to) and climb back aboard Katandra.

We got back underway again but the tow line attached to the seat meant that the dinghy no longer towed straight but veered off to the side, taking on more water. Eventually her weight caused the seat to break away and once again we watched the dinghy recede astern. Dad decided that it was too dangerous to attempt another recovery and we would have to write it off.

We clawed our way directly into the storm for  about 5 hours before we were able to run before it into Cole’s Bay. I remember being quite nervous as we approached the dock in its confined space but we managed to round up nicely, drop the sails and motor into the more protected waters in the lee of the jetty. We barely had our bow line ashore when young Geoff Fysh virtually walked the tight rope to the dock shouting over his shoulder “Thank you Mr  Brand!”

We soon learned that the hurricane had left a trail of devastation across Tasmania. Roofs were torn from many homes and commercial buildings, trees were uprooted and boats sunk. Had it not been for the warning from the passing fisherman, combined with our good seamanship and tenacious sailing, Katandra could certainly have been wrecked on the eastern shore of Freycinet Peninsula and who knows what might have happened to our crew. As a strange post script to the adventure, the following day the name plate of the Harmon’s dinghy washed up onto the beach in front of our camp site!  

A few days later a South Easter blew up, threatening our mooring spot. We watched Katandra closely until we decided that the combination of wave action and receding tide was making the mooring unsafe. We rowed out to her, climbed aboard and felt her touching the bottom between waves. We quickly started the engine snd motored over to the jetty once again. We discovered later that the two large cast iron wheels of our mooring had not had time to bury themselves in the sand, and dragged together, lessening their effectiveness and now putting the boat to close to the shallowing beach. Unfortunately the mooring was abandoned and we were not able to safely use it again.

Co-owner Keith Topfer, dad’s original Snipe skipper Doug Ferguson, dad and I sailed Katandra back to Hobart. The combination of Cole’s Bay experiences represent some of the more dramatic moments of my sailing career, posing some real dangers to boat and crew.  My dad always remained calm under trying conditions, never shouted at his crew, and made sound decisions which kept us safe - all qualities that I took in and have tried to incorporate in my own skippering style.

Rounding Cape Horn, January 1978

Brand Clan sailing Cloud Ten Summer 2022