Chapter 1

Over the years the title for this story evolved from “The Magic in Three” to “The difference between Time and Eternity” to, finally, “Out of the Ether”, which look like three very different statements, but actually they are related and three different ways of saying much the same thing. Chapter One hopes to show you why “Three” is more than just a number, it’s a very powerful  symbol of something extraordinary, and the key to understanding the source of the power of numbers. This makes “Three” fundamental to understanding the story behind Hansa Sailing which, after all, is what “Out of the Ether” is about.

Time began for Chris’s body on April 26 1946, born in Melbourne Australia to parents Margaret (Peg) and Peter (the prick) Mitchell. Unfortunately for Chris, the youngest of 3 children, at the time of his conception, the prick was  already planning to abandon his family for a new life in New Zealand. This  set the stage for a sad and confused childhood, being ultra shy and full of fear, I remember Chris as a scared little misfit, trying to impress, struggling  for recognition, nothing worked out well, unable to find his place in the world.  I say that as it’s probably true that many little boys need a father in their life,  to answer questions, to give confidence, be a role model.

That’s not suggesting same sex couples can’t provide that guidance, be it 2 mothers or 2 fathers, where I imagine one parent adopts the masculine leaning role, and the other feminine, or in a perfect world both parents balanced in the middle. To what degree they lean either way will influence the family, but that’s the case in any combination, where there can be extreme macho to passive near feminine dads, and the same extremes with mum. I know now that love is the magic which makes these things work, and if it’s  not there we are likely to behave like computers, gears and machines. This is no criticism of Peg, she was a very loving person, but suffering from depression, much of which was caused by me, even when she died aged 100, Chris at 70 was still just her naughty little boy.

Chris discovered alcohol sometime in his 16th year, and at last he was in heaven, full of confidence, free of inhibition, the world his oyster for the taking. He started a concrete paving business at 18, but with little experience and already a binge cycling alcoholic this venture wasn’t going to last too long. This wasn’t the first disaster by any means, and it’s not that chris was a slow learner, it’s more his failure to learn from his mistakes. Looking back I suspect that if it was today he would have been diagnosed with something like ADHD or even be on the spectrum.

But let’s have no excuses, it was a hedonistic alcohol fuelled manic depressive rage which could only have one ending, a break down, and in tears he “ran away from home” leaving behind a destructive mess for Peg to fix. Poor girl, but in those days Chris of course had no way of knowing the concept of empathy. But it’s the way of this world where two opposing sides  of an argument can both spin their version of truth, and I can remember Peg, close to tears, though she was strong and controlled her emotions, saying “what if everyone did as you do you selfish bastard, society would collapse”, to which I replied, “they all do, because in the end everyone do as they want, that’s what they do, they do what they do, so do I“. For that I got and deserved a stinging slap across the face. Peg spent a lot of time close to the edge, but she had a job to do and had to hang on.

But that wasn’t Chris’s way, he was off, and after hitch hiking to Cairns in Far North Queensland he teamed up with 5 lads of similar vintage who all met at the Salvation Army soup kitchen and were ordered out of town by the police, there was an obscure law about vagrancy, so they left for Darwin, 2000km away in the Northern Territory, milking petrol from cars and trucks and stealing from road construction camps along the way. The car’s owner also owned a small bore rifle, but only 10 bullets, so each one had to count, as  we shot kangaroos and plain turkeys for food on the drive through the outback to Darwin.

Regarding boys needing a dad and a stable family, the only evidence I can offer is that of the 6 young men on board, only the owner of the car and gun, the only one who had any possessions, was the only one who came from a home with 2 parents, the 5 other propertyless somewhat confused destitute adventurers were all from what were then called “broken homes”.

Life throws up things like that, it communicates in symbols, it postulates a theory which is like asking a question, is this true?, which will of course be answered, but most people are probably too busy to be receptive, because the answer comes out of the ether, when their mind is still. And then they need to be aware they had asked the question in the first place, which is often signalled in a flashback, but who is going to see the relationship between the 2. First the question is asked, then when all is forgotten the answer comes out of the ether. Mind always tries to link events together in a time line, but that’s not how this works.

So it’s tempting to blame the prick for the chaos which was my early life, it was all caused by being abandoned in those early formative years, but that’s simplistic as parents have their own issues to resolve, and who knows what subconscious debt Peter felt compelled to repay, perpetuate or even generate by leaving. In some cultures children are counted on to look after their ageing parents, in others they simply answer a primal need to reproduce, maybe an engineered approach where 2 or 3 is enough for financial or sibling wellbeing, or a religion may encourage as many kids as possible, or the state says one is enough, while some kids are just a mistake, the unwanted result of a sexual encounter.

Either way they are all in existence to play out their role in the karmic web of life, a key player in their own right, and in the relationship between their parents, they can be the meat in the sandwich, the glue that holds the parents together, until hopefully the books, the interrelated karmic accounts are balanced, and then it’s time to part.

Just who was who in a previous life, who did what to whom, maybe there’s a subconscious anger, an inherent desire for retribution, a settling of scores, supposedly seeking reconciliation, but only creating more confusion. This  out of balance ever seeking balance keeps the wheel turning, which eventually leads to reconciliation, which allows for growth of consciousness, which, if you want a reason for living is the ultimate purpose of life, through the process of spiritual evolution.

I came to know about this as it’s exactly what happened when Peter leaves Peg in an act of ignorant male self interest, but having fulfilled their mutual obligations he’s gone off to his own new beginning, which got him out of the way, and set up a disaster for Peg, which brought on a life of depression and hardship, constant challenge, which she overcame with honours, but sadly expressed in her mantra that “life is to be endured, not enjoyed”.

Peg was a science teacher, she was born in 1916 to parents who encouraged tertiary education, so she achieved a Batchelor of science, major in biology, at a time when very few girls went to university. Charles Darwin replaced any need for a God in Peg’s life.

So Peg saw life as a fluke, a one in a billion, billion google like chance which catalysed when the chemistry was right, then bingo, it happened and an inert thing came to life. It then morphed into other forms, with natural selection encouraging the survival of the ones most suited to the prevailing conditions. If that’s what you think, then your probably right, I imagine that’s how it went. Natural selection would be the mechanism that brings about this sort of physical and intellectual change.

But what was revealed in the development of our first little boat, the 2.3, is that life’s not that simple because we haven’t left any room for all the magic that goes on in the world, which is there if you leave room for it, and if there is no room for magic you are going to miss over half the story. So instead of trying to find a scientific or logical explanation for everything, maybe we could have an open mind for a while and let illogical things exist in their own right alongside Peg’s scientific fluke theory.

When I was born we lived in a typical Melbourne suburban house on a quarter acre block. and although I don’t remember much of the first years, 3 remarkably clear scenarios have stayed with me. My strongest memory was standing in the newly tar sealed road outside our house, it was a hot day and the bitumen had melted, I had wandered out onto the road and my little  shoes were stuck in the tar. I suppose I was screaming for help.

Another memory is being really sick lying in anguish walled in by my baby’s cot. Probably worn out from screaming for help, I left my body and was floating above the cot. Fifty years later I asked Peg if she remembered me being really sick but there wasn’t a convincing answer, and talking to Peg about out of body experiences wasn’t going to get very far.

There is also a memory that I asked a lot of questions, and lying in bed, I realised that one day I would have the answer to everything. That’s a very interesting concept as I now know it’s based in truth, that if you ask a question the answer is coming, but will you recognise the answer for what it is. This is not suggesting we can know the answer to everything, but the answer to everything we need to know. This is also interesting as it shows that little children, babies may not be as most perceive, they may actually be a lot more open to the ether and aware than we think.

Another is the only memory I have of Peter, but peg told me recently that it never happened. I was a toddler helping Peter dig in the garden, and a garden fork pierced right through my foot. Regardless of what Peg said, it’s the only impression I have of my father in those early years.

It’s not surprising that I have a low impression of Peter as it emerged years later that Peg had purchased our house with help from her father, and when Peter left, abandoning his wife and 3 children, his divorce claim asked for reimbursement for the work he did in the garden. I’m pretty sure there was actually an incident involving my foot and the pitchfork, maybe it just missed and it’s spikes only straddled my foot.

But in the end Peter left me $50k in his will which was used to establish Access Dinghy which became Hansa Sailing Systems in 2012. He had removed me from his will, understandable as in his eyes any bequest would only be wasted, “pissed up against the wall” is the Australian expression, plus I had made it known I wanted nothing to do with him, but my sister Virginia convinced him I should be reinstated.

Peter had left when Chris was aged between 2 and 3 so Peg sold that property and we moved to a bay side suburb, to a small cottage on a large block of land that backed onto the beach of Melbourne’s huge port Phillip Bay. Open the back gate and there was 50 kilometres of open water, waves breaking on sandbars, it was a wild frontier in winter, 60 knot gales would blow down our bay side fence, which was propped up against the row of straggly salt resistant pine trees. Even as a little boy it was Chris’s job to resurrect it and I can remember being up in those trees, looking out over the fence top at the wild scene, the fence reeling and creaking before the gale, the wind in my hair, the sleet on my face, it was wild nature and I loved it.

Aspendale in 1950s and 60s was a working class suburb, with more affluent families living along the foreshore. Our place was a battle axe block, that is a long narrow axe handle driveway with an acre sized axe head facing the beach. It was perfect for me, a very shy little boy who soon fell in love with anything that would float. I didn’t like being in the water, so boats let you stay above, riding over and cutting through it’s waves, but staying dry, and in the best boats warm and cozy.

Peg bought a few caravans which could be towed away to a holiday destination, or we would have families, who became friends staying onsite each summer. It must have been scary for a tow away customer to have the van hooked up to their car and checked by a 10 year old boy. So Chris was obviously a practical hands on little guy. These caravans needed constant maintenance, which I was always involved in.

Going fishing for flathead was always the highlight of summers, so we always owned some sort of rowing boat, until I figured out how turn them into sailboats. The best fish were about a mile offshore so why row all that way when you could sail?

Aspendale is best summed up with these words cut and pasted from “Get your bum wet – again”, the little booklet of our early sailor’s personal stories compiled by Pat Gabriel.

“As a youngster growing up on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, Chris’s mother Peg recounts many tales of his escapades. Hilarious as they are now, no doubt they would have been extremely testing and frustrating for any mother to cope with. Even as a preschooler Chris had an extraordinary passion for building sailing craft. As he matured from childhood to adolescence and then manhood, his boats developed from simple rafts to sailing vessels of various shapes and sizes”.

“Peg, laughing now tells of the time her back fence was turned into a raft, and on numerous occasions her broom handles disappeared to be used for a higher purpose – masts and booms. Perhaps the funniest tale is the time Peg was driving home from work. In the distance she saw a small sailing boat with a brightly coloured sail out on the bay. As she got closer her  interest turned to horror when realised that the bright little sail was in fact her brand new orange floral bed sheet. Chris had struck again”!

“At the age of eight Chris built an 8ft catamaran; at 15 he half built a scale version of a famous turn of the century trans-sailer, (luckily this vessel was never completed), and at 23 built a seven metre cruising yacht and sailed off to South East Asia. This little ship was eventually wrecked on the Indian Ocean coast of Java. If he had been one more mile to the east it would have been Nusa Kambangan, Indonesia’s notorious prison island – where he probably belonged anyway. Chris went on to live in South East Asia on and off for the next 20 years, much of that time was spent developing the perfect sailing tender that was the predecessor of the Access Dinghy”.

But back to Aspendale in 1960. To bribe me into staying at secondary school (instead of doing a boat building apprenticeship), Peg bought a 12ft  Rainbow, a flat bottom sloop rigged scow popular at one of the local yacht clubs. That was upgraded to a 20 ft Lightweight Sharpie as an incentive to keep me in school for year 12. I was not a good student, didn’t excel at anything, seemed to make a mess of most things I put my hand to. I think I hated school, though that’s a very strong and distasteful word, it’s the opposite of love, it’s used far to freely when dislike or disagree would be  more appropriate. Today I’d be diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum, and probably had, still have ADHD.

Despite this great backyard and what should have been a fantastic  childhood, Chris was an unhappy excruciatingly shy little boy, a loner, a bit anti social. Young men think they know it all anyway, but shyness adds to the inability to ask for help when it’s desperately needed, so a lot of poor decisions get made, next there are lies and coverups to hide the truth.

Then follows the inevitable slow spiral down to rock bottom, but that leads to a revival, a growth in consciousness, and confidence as the fallacy of so many common presumptions are revealed, which in a way justifies that rebellious spirit.

Here we have a young man’s shyness which leads to an inability to seek advice when it’s needed, exacerbated by typical young man immature ego which tries to prove he’s always right, which becomes a surprising positive when its discovered that just because the world follows a particular path it doesn’t mean it’s the best, in fact more often than not the opposite is true.

Which should be quite obvious as everything in this world is in motion, it’s born, grows, then decays and dies, from a grain of sand, the smallest creature on earth to the entire universe, it’s all in a state of change and evolution. So what looks right today won’t stay that way for long, and invariably will end up being yesterday’s folly.

So I learnt to start with a clean slate, to create an imaginary void, then out of the blue, the ether, would pop all these options, and when they all line up, all boxes ticked, the picture is so good you just know it’s going to work, which means you can see the future. What’s really fantastic though is that the future always turns out even better than what you had imagined.

The usual response is these ideas come from the subconscious mind, which allows our ego to claim ownership and bask in its cleverness, but it turns out the opposite is also true as out of the ether it came in response to surrender, admitting our ignorance, acknowledging that we know nothing. Once drawn into this truth and witness this extraordinary power and absolute genius, it’s then quite obvious what our little self and it’s conceited ego is really up to, and that’s to divert us from the truth.

This is therefore about trusting those “gut feelings”, and about leaving a  place for “knowing” alongside the logical process of thinking. So how does that align with Newton’s laws of motion which describe the relationship between a body and the forces acting upon it. The third law says “for every force there is an equal and opposite force”, which is true for actions and relationships within our polarised physical world as described by science, but that doesn’t leave room for that neutral force from the ether, so maybe  we need a fourth law of motion which does. We will have to work on that and see if we can find one before you read the last page of this story, that’s if you get that far.

But back to the chaos as it sets the stage for this true story, and shows that being in the gutter is not a bad place to be, as it’s from there that a different sort of evolution begins. On arrival in my gutter a word like serendipity had no meaning, but things so evolved to where it exactly describes my experience, and became the expected norm. It’s a beautiful word coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole in “The three Princes of Serendip”, a fairy tale in which the heroes were “always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity of things they were not in quest of”. So maybe Western Man was a lot wiser in those pre-science olden days.

The caravan business at Aspendale was very taxing for Peg, life was a constant battle to support her three teenage children, so she changed direction and trained to become a science and biology teacher. Teaching has to be one of the most honourable professions, along with nursing, both dominated by women, and Peg became a brilliant teacher. Eventually she sold Aspendale and moved away from my bay, it had served its purpose, her 2 “successful” children were both working in the medical profession while I was either building ski lifts, working in iron ore mines, driving bulldozers, and hitch hiking around Australia doing casual concrete paving and construction work. It was an alcohol fuelled existence, passing time, meaningless, gathering hedonistic experiences, but maybe that was its purpose.

At age 21 I moved back to Peg’s suburban house as I’d decided to build a  25 foot Top Hat, an Illingworth and Primrose JOG design, and go cruising. JOG means Junior Offshore Group and was a popular category of mini offshore racing sailboat, and the Top Hat was among the best. A double spreader masthead rig on a moulded plywood full keel hull, the Top Hat is still about the best choice if you wanted to sail solo around the globe in a 25 footer. But for me the basic plan would have been to combine my 2 passions, sailing and smoking dope, which could be smuggled back to Australia to fund my pointless alcoholic lifestyle.

The Top Hat was built in the carpark behind a nearby service station, an imperfect job, but not bad when you take into consideration the mountain of empty beer cans that grew alongside the hull. There were always friends dropping by to share in the adventure, and a drink. I look back with a tinge  of sadness at the wasted opportunities, if only I knew then what I know now. But that would have negated this story, so better press on.

I’m leaving Graham the co-owner of the Top Hat out of this, not because I want to preserve all the glory for myself, but to protect him from embarrassment. We eventually sailed out of Port Phillip Bay on Xmas Eve 1968 headed for Sydney, and into the path of a southern storm which decimated the southbound Sydney to Hobart Race fleet, but we were going the other way, with the wind so survived. For Peg it was just the beginning of another chapter in her endless nightmare.

In Melbourne we hailed from a “Royal” yacht club, which gave us reciprocal rights at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron with its stately sandstone buildings, one of Sydney’s most exclusive social clubs. So there we were at 10.00 hours on July 19 1969 (the day before US time being west of the date line), in one of the bars drinking, playing snooker and watching the lunar landing on TV. “one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” is one of those very clear memories I have from those days.

Our Top Hat stayed in and around Sydney for at least 2 years, before we cruised north to Gladstone where we stopped to work and wait out that summer’s cyclone season. The upside of tropical cyclones is they brought a lot of rain and shut down building sites, and it’s then that mushrooms grow, including the psychedelic varieties of which there were 2 types. They grow in and around cow dung in tropical, sub tropical climates. Blue Meanies where common, they look like 10mm sized half domes standing on 50mm long stalks, are blue in colour. Gold Crowns look more innocuous, they can be mistaken for common edible mushrooms, except they develop a yellow sphere at the centre of their crown. But what distinguishes these mushrooms is the blue underneath, it’s like a blue dye and being common to both is probably the poisonous psychedelic ingredient. You  can eat these things  raw, boil them into a soup, or at Kuta Beach in Bali you could have a blue meany magic mushroom omelette for breakfast.

Psilocybin is the active ingredient in psychotropic mushrooms, mescaline is in peyote and other cactus, while LSD is the synthesised chemical, all of which are really dangerous as they artificially open the user up to psychic adventures, and there will be a price to pay later. But as said above, tropical cyclones bring rain which shuts down building sites, the mushrooms spring  up overnight so the looney fringe living on yachts had a few days off to go on a psychedelic trip with time to recover as the waters drained and the worksites reopened.

But that’s never the end of it as each of these misadventures, be it abuse of alcohol, common recreational and psychedelic drugs come at a price, over time they take you off on a fantasy journey as they artificially interfere with your mental state and balance, so my inevitable day of reckoning was coming.

The Brisbane to Gladstone Yacht Race is an annual event, but in 1972 as the fleet approached the safety of Gladstone, tropical cyclone Emily with 100mph winds was closing in from the opposite direction.  The storm   crossed the coast just near Gladstone and quickly lost power and turned into a rain depression, but the damage was already done at sea, and while the fastest trimarans made it to port in time one tri was rolled over and washed  up a creek, drowning 2 of the crew, and only 7 of the keelboats managing to finish the race.

On board one of those yachts was an interesting character who plays a leading role 30 years later in the drama which is my life, and its significant that he sailed on stage in a hurricane. That’s if drama is the right genre, a comedy is probably more appropriate. If you step back and treat life like a movie it takes on a whole new perspective. These days I prefer the view from the moon watching the world go round, but you can zoom in and there are all the characters, including your own body in costume on stage playing out  their roles. So to remove this from real life we should now treat this as a  script for a play with imaginary characters.

Seth was part owner of a 50 ft Phillip Rhodes designed Ketch and had left the boat in New Zealand to travel on ahead to see the east coast of Australia. He’d rejoin the boat later when it arrived in Darwin. Seth hitched a ride north from Gladstone on another yacht, and we followed soon after in our Top Hat.

The south east trade wind was blowing hard when we tacked the 20 miles south down the channel inside Facing Island that protected Gladstone harbour. We then turned north to NNW and ran before the strong wind with a reefed mainsail, number 2 Genoa sheeted to leeward as if on a tight reach, with the working jib set on the second parallel forestay sheeted through the outer end of our spinnaker pole squared out on the windward side. This is a great rig  for running in a strong wind.

There is a passage inside the Great Barrier Reef which is maybe 100 miles offshore at this its southern end, so we had short steep seas, not ocean rollers, and surfed down every one. Our log only read to 15 knots, but we were routinely off the dial doing 17/18, probably 20 knots, the 25 to 30 knot southeasterly being channeled from the jib to fill the Genoa set behind and supposedly in the lee of the mainsail. The rig was out front and perfectly balanced, pulling us forward, not pushing, the helm was weightless as the boat steered itself, on every wave the mainsail would luff and flap and did nothing. The main was really set in case we needed to lower either of those headsails as we could always lower the Genoa in the main’s lee, and gybe the main to blanket the jib if we needed to get it down.

But we didn’t have to and ran on day and that night to be off Mackay in 30 hours, having averaged 7.9 knots in a 25ft keelboat, including tacking that 20 miles south to get out of Gladstone harbour.

A Top Hat is a displacement hull, which means it doesn’t plane so has a maximum speed governed by its waterline length. With a WL of about 18ft  we had a theoretical max speed of about 5 knots so an average of 8knots is fast. I can remember sitting on the foredeck as the stern lifted on the next overtaking wave. As we accelerated and began to surf the bow would depress, you’d tense sensing we were going to nose dive, but it never did, there was a roar as sheets of solid water washed out each side, the mainsail flapped as it backed, the bow would lift and there we were, the back half of the hull buried in the wave, the front half in the air, doing 20 knots. On one wave there was a load crack from the back somewhere, which turned out the outboard motor which was raised up high, but not high enough as it had cracked its mount.

We had a passenger on board for this leg of the journey, Lester was the project manager of the construction company who was building the new Gladstone power station. He was a sailing enthusiast, but had never lived something like this, and I can imagine today him telling the story, to his grandkids about that wild alcohol fueled ride. There were no road rules in those days to say you can’t drink while driving a sailboat.

Mackay is at the southern end of the Whitsunday Passage and gateway to the Whitsundays, a group of mainland islands, meaning they are made of rock, with hills and valleys, bays and coves, not coral islands or atolls which are flat with little protection. An atoll is typically a ring of coral surrounding a shoal and may have no inner island at all. In summer months tropical cyclones breed out in the pacific just south of the equator and travel west, curving south to terrorise the Queensland coast. But in winter the south east trades blow, so the Whitsundays, with many unspoilt tropical islands and secure anchorages are home to many resorts and several large marinas, so owners use the Brisbane to Gladstone yacht race to move their boats north.

Like a junky, an alcoholic is at the mercy of an outside force, it’s always there needing attention, which adds an unnecessary complication as it’s always got to feature in forward planning. You have to look ahead to where your next fix is going to come from, which means it’s compromising every decision you make. Life’s a breeze if you can get yourself to the extreme opposite end of the survival spectrum, that’s where you don’t need or want anything. But that’s probably too whacky a concept in today’s consumer society.

Imagine a nice wholesome existence, a tidy mind which stays on course, good at discriminating between what’s going to be helpful, peaceful, and what’s going to cause chaos, strong enough to resist those ever present temptations, be they to do with security, stature or sensual pleasure.

Pour in some alcohol and it lowers the bar, it clears the way for that little bit of extra pleasure, it blinds us to danger, while in the opposite direction are stimulants that artificially open mind to psychic and euphoric adventures.

Alcohol is a fluid like water, it flows down and seeks its own level, it’s passive. Smoking dope is like fire, it’s active, it’s wispy smoke rises into the clouds, and takes us with it. In my hedonistic heyday life was a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, through alcoholic binge, crash, recover cycles.

But to see it you have to get outside that compromised mind bubble your living in. Cold Turkey locked in a padded cell is the quickest way to beat chemical addiction, while its partner psychological addiction needs to be tackled as a mind game. It’s a bit like a vinyl record which gets stuck in a groove, each revolution it’s digs deeper, turning habits into addiction. To  break it step back from the bubble and see it as a boxing ring, in one corner your mind craves attention, in the opposite corner it doesn’t, they are the two fighters, but you should not identify as either and you’re not going to let those clowns dictate to you again, it’s over, that’s final. Then, as if by magic it’s gone, the temptation, the desire, the lust is gone, because they aren’t you at all, just runaway functions of your mind. Unfortunately if you’re inside that ring you have to dance to their tune.

This theme of life being like a movie, a tragic comedy in my case, and that you are an observer watching the clowns on stage does not divorce me or you from responsibility for the consequences of the clown’s actions, but it gives a different perspective, from a consciousness outside the body, seperate to, not dependant on that body. It also shows mind as a bit of a trouble maker, it’s portraying you in a role that is not exactly you, so it needs to be brought under control.

Unfortunately the full realisation or awareness from this new perspective probably has to wait until the ramifications, the cause and effect of the clowns actions has fully played out. It’s called karma which has a very solid foundation in Asia where this movie is set. But it’s good to start somewhere, so we should continue with some of the background scenes as we make our way up the Queensland coast to Port Moresby.

There were a couple of yachts in Mackay outer harbour when we arrived, and I can’t accept full responsibility for being the driving force, but we all thought it a good idea to head into town for a drink. This part of the world  has extreme tidal variations, and while we had left our boat at anchor, one of the yachts was moored to the wharf, tied up using the expensive 16mm genoa sheets as that’s what was on deck and seemed a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately when we left for town it was high tide, when we returned it was low, 10 metres lower and the yacht on the wharf was hanging on an angle off the wharf by its Genoa sheet bowline, luckily it ripped the cleat off the stern or the whole 10 ton boat would have been suspended. There was so much load on the bowline the only solution was to cut the Genoa sheet and down she went, splash is an understatement. Do you see what I mean that alcohol causes all sorts of miscalculations, in this case the haste to go to town for a drink didn’t leave time to figure all the implications.

After that mooring incident we had a common bond with the team on that boat, we were all obviously losers, so next day we left together for Brampton island. Brampton was a resort with a very secure wharf and landing area,  and after dropping anchor we were keen to go ashore, for food and drink, essential staples of life. We all rowed ashore in our dinghies and assembled on the wharf, just as a honey moon couple were catching a 2 ft coral trout, which they successfully landed, and we were asked to take photos recording this wonderful omen for their new life together, but instead of enjoying the  fish for dinner that night, the skipper of one of our boats took the fish and threw the it back in the water. The bride burst into tears, and I wonder later in her life, did it work out, did it end in divorce, I doubt she ever forgot that incident, she would be about 70 now, or did she carry it to her grave.

You have got to feel for young couples, their hopes and aspirations for their children, but how often it doesn’t go as planned, doesn’t work out, like my mother Peg was a great example, but I was too selfish to see that when it mattered, instead I made things worse. But now it’s what I see all around me, young mothers showering love on their children, but you can’t see their past which is going to dictate their future, so all you can do is wish them well.

We parted ways at Brampton and sailed on to Townsville where my uncle and his family lived. My cousin was home from university for a mid term break, so he joined us on the next leg to Cairns. Dunk island was a resort along the way, but I can’t remember much about this stop, except it had a small farm with a few milking cows so there should have been golden crown mushrooms growing in the cow dung, but we couldn’t find any. So we mentioned this to the barman, who understood our distress and gave us, or we did a trade for some tabs of LSD. I think it was then mid afternoon so returned to the boat and left for Cairns, about 12 hours away.

I can’t remember how we organised our watches, probably 3 hour stints, so with 3 on board it would be 3 on 6 off. The best watch is to be there at dawn, so from 03.00 to 06.00. We would then have breakfast, which would have included Alcohol, and took the LSD. It’s quite an experience scudding along before the moderate trade wind, past Fitzroy Island and into Cairns on a Sunday morning, drinking rum and tripping on LSD. You have to go about your business very deliberately, there are people on the public pontoons watching, you are totally paranoid and lost all social and spatial perspective, like judging the boats speed and distance from the wharf was a big problem. You can’t tell if what you’re seeing and sensing is hallucination or not, we would have inched forward, unable to gauge our speed, but somehow we came along side and tied up some lines, then ducked down below to get out of everyone’s sight. If you have never experienced an induced hallucinatory thing like that, and I hope you haven’t, don’t.

I remember Grahme and I left the boat and walked into town, along the main street, but then I remembered my Cousin was alone onboard so I hurried back before something crazy might happen. Each step I took felt like a giant leap, like walking on the moon, and you wonder how this must look to the normal people passing by. My cousin was still there down below, he felt hungry and was trying to eat a pickled onion, he was starring at it held in his fingers, totally stunned by the flavour and texture, the sensations beyond any description, but that’s what LSD does, if your lucky. If it’s bad then it can be total and very dangerous paranoia. I was just thankful he hadn’t tried to leave the boat, if he had anything could have happened, we would have been sprung and arrested for sure.

Cousin Phil had to return to Townsville and university, but was really reluctant to go, he’d experienced a charge of this extreme hedonistic manic behaviour, he didn’t want to go back to what was the wholesome normal mundane life he’d planned, but he had to as I couldn’t be responsible for destroying his life as this Cheech and Chong, fear and loathing lifestyle was not sustainable, even I could see that.

There’s no need to focus on this sort of detail again, you can imagine the rest, but Newton’s law says for every force there is an equal and opposite force, so if we are going to appreciate the highs of this story which come later, we’d better record the depth of the lows.

***

Cairns is a really great city, it’s got all the tourism credentials with its reef, the hinterland, harbour and international airport with direct flights to key Asian cities. There’s several major hotels along the waterfront, and a huge park  with magnificent fig trees to climb, but Australia’s darkest side is also on display, not the cause, but the effect of the European invasion.

The European “settlers” of Australia rounded up and shot, poisoned, and enslaved the indigenous population causing upheaval and disillusionment and the broken society we see in places like Cairns today is the result. What we see before our eyes at any moment is a statement, a snapshot, it’s a symbol with a message. Ive been to Cairns many times and my strongest impression is the tropical perfection of protected harbour and marinas, the glorious park with its giant fig trees and behind that the row of hotels and the city. But the most powerful stuck in my memory is about 100 aboriginal people, men women and children having a boozed up party on the public pontoons, in another world, a world of their own, the only connection with   the white mans world was the booze being supplied from the other side of that park. They made me look like a model citizen.

Some will say what an embarrassment for Cairns to have that going on, or from the other side, what an even bigger embarrassment to have caused it. Fortunately for the white man he sees no connection, because at the core of his religion it says the saviour died for his sins, so this lack of connection negates the need for real soul searching effort to find solutions. Why should he even feel remorse and say sorry.

While alcohol is not the cause, it is responsible for so much anti social behaviour, it lowers everyone’s expectations as consumption of alcohol is cleverly promoted as normal, an accepted dietary staple, it’s what we all do, it is who we are, it’s even the image we like to project, but it’s really a pest, its pernicious, it’s degrading, and a poison, much like that other legal drug tobacco,

But like tobacco it’s been woven into the fabric of western society. The Australian cricket team each year hold a glitzy televised gala function to present the Alan Border Medal for the top players that year. It’s named after AB who was a national team captain. In the live prime time TV line up of all that years players they all stood there smiling for the cameras each proudly holding out a bottle of “pure blonde beer”, even those players who didn’t drink. On prime time TV! That certainly lets everyone know who’s standards control sport in Australia.

Unfortunately I didn’t have these views back then in Cairns so there’s a lot more misadventure to come in this alcohol fuelled story, which finally ends when 25 years later I bounce of the front of a train as it pulls into a Bangkok suburban station.

After working on building sites in Cairns for a month we loaded a few cases of rum, and Seth as he had made his way to Cairns, and we set sail for Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. We worked again there on construction sites for 6 months then sailed back to Australia via Thursday Island to Darwin. It was all much the same story, same cycles, mediocre to degrading outcomes, what’s surprising looking back is how normal it seemed, and wasn’t met with derision and outrage.

After 6 months in Darwin we left for Indonesia, via Dili in East Timor, now called Timor Leste, but then still a Portuguese colony.  This time our crew was Helen, an English girl and her boyfriend, but they fell out, which became violent in Dili so we enlisted the help of the captain and crew of an Australian ship in the harbour who coerced her ex onboard and took him back to Darwin.

From there we sailed to Kupang, the capital city of the Indonesian half of Timor, then on to Sumba, a fascinating place where my brother David and his wife Tuti lived. We had to cross the Savu Sea, it’s deep water as these are mountainous islands, and I’ve been told that it’s so deep that it’s part of a deep trough that links the Indian and Pacific oceans through which submarines can sneak, which gives this region great strategic value.

It was thought at the time by some paranoid strategic planners that the fallout from the fall of Vietnam (from the USA/Australian point of view) would see arms and guerrilla forces moved to support a “communist” takeover of East Timor when the Portuguese left. This had to be stopped as it would create a red staging post to destabilise Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia, and leave that deep submarine passage open to surveillance by hostile forces. So a blind eye was turned to allow East Timor to be absorbed into Indonesia. In reality the last thing on the mind of Ho Chi Minh as all he wanted was for the western colonial parasites to get out of his homeland. East Timor was duly invaded by Indonesia, so Fretilin, the East Timor nationalist force who had fought to expel the Portuguese fought on and eventually prevailed, Timor Leste being formed in 2002 as a centre left independent nation.

***

You don’t want to arrive at unfamiliar ports like Waingapu at night, which makes it an overnight sail to get there. It was a flat calm so we were motoring along slowly, powered by our 9 hp outboard, as dawn brought its light there on the horizon ahead, coming towards us I could see dolphins or porpoises, even small whales breaching, they were obviously migrating to somewhere, there were thousands of them, they were a couple of hundred meters off to our side, it was hazy and quite mystical as the flat calm shiny water blended into the early morning sky so there was no real horizon, except those creatures were still coming over the horizon ahead as they disappeared into the horizon behind us. It was like that for half an hour, and while it was tempting to turn toward them to see what they were, in that eeriness you couldn’t actually gauge distance, and therefore their size, and they could have turned out to be a 5km long conga line of killer whales.

David my brother is a doctor of medicine, Tuti is Javanese and did a PHD thesis on the matriarchal Minangkerbau people of Padang in West Sumatra, so here we were dealing with some more intellectual beings.

David and Tuti lived on the Indian Ocean side of Sumba in a coastal village near Waikabubak. Their house and medical practice was in the valley where the locals grew rice and other staples, but these interesting indigenous people lived in traditional villages established on top of the many small hills rising from and around the valleys.

Sumba is a fascinating and being out of the way has preserved its own customs, culture, and architecture. Their traditional religion is Marapu and here we see one of the last megalithic cultures on the planet. While we were there we attended the burial ceremony of a prominent village elder, and a huge tomb had been cut and hollowed out at a nearby quarry. That stone, about 8m x 4m x 1.5m high had been dragged into position by hundreds of men and boys hauling on huge ropes woven from vines.

On the funeral day there were thousands of people from all the nearby villages, each had brought their gifts of traditional tie died fabrics, and food including animals who would give up their bodies to sustain the crowd. I witnessed these animals being killed in what looked like a painless death as prayers were said, a knife pieced an artery in the neck, there was no evidence of fear, the animal eventually collapsing to the ground as it died.

There must have been a thousand of people to feed so there were several animals sacrificed, there were kitchens set up all around the field surrounding the tomb stone. During the day the body and items required in the afterlife were placed in the tomb, while the huge lid, weighing maybe 50 tons, its log ramp and the ropes to haul it were prepared. Wrapped around that stone lid were woven ropes starting at around 300mm in diameter branching off to smaller ropes like a fan so the thousand men, to the beat of traditional drums and chants could haul that huge lid up the ramp and onto the tomb.

The Sumbanese trade and barter what they need, and my Doctor brother would be paid for his services in cloths, chickens, rice, or reciprocal services, so around his house was growing into its own small village. David and I are chalk and cheese, he is an intellectual type, a medical doctor and  phsyologist. Im the opposite, just a hands on practical builder of things, but the thing we both have in common is we are both eccentric, so you have to feel for Peg who had to raise us as a single mum.

The best way to understand who I was at this stage of the journey is to see me as suffering from culture shock, as ignorant, self absorbed and ill equipped for what I had already seen, let alone what lay ahead in the highly sophisticated cultures of Hindu Bali and Java, which has layers of traditional animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, then Islam, followed by Dutch colonialism.

In Indonesia you find there are the outlying islands like Sumba, out of the  way so they still have their traditional character. While back near the centre is the most densely populated island on earth, with many of the planets active volcanos over 3000m tall, with its traditional, Hindu, Buddhist layers, which then adopted Islam. So you find over much of Indonesia the coastal areas and big population centres are Islam, but up in the hinterland are the traditional cultures, and these were the only places the Christian missionaries could get a foot hold. Except way over to the east, the spice islands of the Molluccas, or Maluku Province which is predominantly Christian as it’s the spices which drew the Dutch here in the first place. Bali is in the centre of the long arc of Islands next to Java and is predominantly Hindu as it was a  refuge for Hindus as new religions spread through Java.

Bali was however conquered by the Dutch East Indies military forces in campaigns in 1906 and 08. It was a very embarrassing chapter for the Dutch and is an example of European Colonial overreach. I don’t want to single out this bad behaviour and embarrass our Dutch friends, it’s just that this episode comes up early on our time line. We started in Australia where the predominantly English migrations forcibly took over land occupied by the indigenous population, and Australia is still in denial of the facts and does not teach school children the extent of the murder and massacres routinely inflicted on the aboriginal people. It was actually a crime under British law at the time. So we sailed on to Bali and find something similar happened under Dutch colonial rule. If we continued on around the world, to China, India, Africa, North and South America it would be the same story as all the rest of the white skinned nations of Europe competed with each other to dominate the Planet.

***

As the Dutch forces approached the Denpasar royal palace the King and his family and the royal court emerged and walked in silent procession towards the Dutch  force. When within 100 paces of the soldiers the Raja signalled to a priest who plunged a dagger into his chest. The rest of the procession then began killing themselves and others while women mockingly threw gold and jewellery at the Dutch soldiers.

As more Balinese emerged from the palace the Dutch opened fire and the pile of corpses grew higher, and its estimated 1000 civilian men women and children died. After the bodies were looted of valuables the palace was razed by fire and the force moved on to the next Palace of Pemecutan where the Dutch let the nobility kill themselves and then proceeded with the looting.

The massacre is remembered locally as “Badung Puputan”, the fight to the death, and is glorified as an example of residence to foreign aggression. The Dutch returned in 1908 and sealed their control of Bali. But the image of the Netherlands as a benevolent and responsible colonial power was shattered, and the embarrassment proved a turning point with a new ethical policy established, leading to the preservation of Balinese culture and making it into a living museum of classical culture. In 1914 Bali was opened to tourism, so the harshness of the 1906 and 08 invasions paradoxically triggered an international uproar which contributed to the preservation of Bali’s culture, to make the island one of the most popular tourist destinations on the planet.

What’s particularly interesting is going back to 1602 when the Dutch government brokered the amalgamation of 4 international trading companies to form the VOC in Dutch, or DEIC, the Dutch East India Company in English. The VOC was the worlds first transcontinental employer and corporate pioneer as it issued bonds and shares of stock to the general public, so became the worlds first formally listed public company. Wikipedia states: “With it’s  pioneering innovations and powerful roles in global  business history, the company is often considered by many to be the forerunner of modern corporations. The VOC also served as the direct model for the organisational reconstruction of the English/British East India Company”. (In 1604).

That’s interesting as it makes the VOC and BEIC the worlds first shareholder owned multinationals and the beginning of “Globalisation”.

So when we get to chapter 7 and the brief history of the DCCC, the Democratic Christian Capitalist Club, remember these examples of European white man overreach in pursuit of wealth and power as the DCCC members explored, raped and pillaged the world as they fought each other to build their respective colonial empires.

As we will see, these democratic predominantly Christian nations have trouble reconciling with their past behaviour as understanding and taking responsibility for ones actions is not really one of the tenets of their religion.

***

We left Sumba and sailed along the Indian Ocean coast of this arc of Indonesian islands collectively named Nusa Tenggara. It’s a wild coastline and from the sea looks uninhabited, but these islands sit on the southern edge of the Sunda Shelf with the shallow protected waters of the Java Sea  to their north, so all the ports and communities are there. Between the island are choke points causing ferocious tidal currents with dangerous whirlpools, which adds to the isolation of the Indian Ocean coast, though Sumba further to the south east does provide some protection.

Between Flores and Sumbawa is Komodo Island famous for its dragons, and next to it is little Rinja Island which on its southern inhospitable face is a horseshoe shaped bay guarded by its own small rocky island, and in there you can anchor, close in to the shore as it’s very deep. During the night you will hear creatures crashing around in the jungle, so when you wake at dawn, there in the first light will be Komodo dragons beachcombing for what might have washed up in the night. I’ve been there several times, it’s a mystical place at dawn, but that was 50 years ago and it won’t be so secluded today.

We were now a crew of 4 as somehow we were joined by a small monkey which I had probably purchased after seeing him for sale in the local Waingapu markets.

Anyway our little guest clearly showed up our folly, as we all smoked tobacco so had cigarettes on board, we were rationed but had enough to cover the journey, but our little mate was aware of their symbolic importance.

Monkeys are the epitome of mischievousness and you need to be always aware of what they are doing, but we of course fell into complacency and relaxed our guard, ok where is that little devil, so check first the open cigarette alcove, but too late as out would shoot that monkey to spring into the fore cabin and out through the fore hatch, then up the shrouds to the lower spreaders caring a packet of cigarettes.

No kidding, he would sit up there mocking us, gritting his teeth, chattering, no laughing at us as he opened the packet and drew the cigarettes out one by one, tearing each to pieces and throw what’s left at us down on the deck. But monkeys don’t have a long attention span, maybe have ADHD like me, so the game would end with a shriek of laughter as he tossed the half empty packet over the side and swing his way up the shrouds to the top spreader. The damage done so we would go back to whatever we were doing and  he’d eventually come down pretending nothing had happened.

Looking back I doubt its a good idea to take a baby monkey from its mother, no different from taking small children from their families, it will hurt everyone involved at different times and in different ways, but it’s done all the time.

While some people manage to tip toe through life being mindful not to hurt others, I was busy heading in the opposite direction slowly working my way to the bottom, piling on one selfish deed after another, oblivious of the effect on others, or where it might be taking me. I can justify it all now as an example of a journey into the gutter, without which we wouldn’t have the foundation for this story, but this destructive behaviour is certainly not recommended as the path to even Buddha’s void, let alone the freedom of the oneness.

In that light it’s actually a slap down of religious stereotyping that portrays its priests and righteous flock as straight laced do gooders and presumes that a drug crazed alcoholic hedonistic anti social non-law abiding misfit couldn’t be on a spiritual evolutionary journey. Instead it shows anything is possible, and the fabulous sense of humour of the ultimate joker.

How dare you call the “Holy Spirit” the Joker they might say. Well I doubt It gives a hoot as it’s so aloof but so connected, in a league of its own, the ultimate magician, technician, even dietician if what foods to eat is your question, and the real trump card to have in your hand, on your side in any situation.

***

It’s about 5 days sail from Sumba to Bali and you know you’re getting close when you cross paths with the exquisitely painted Balinese outrigger canoes out fishing in the Indian Ocean. Then you see the smoking peak of Gunung Agung, the 3000m plus volcano which is the central governing feature of Bali up there above the clouds and haze.

I can remember clearly the morning we motored in toward Sanur Beach then turned to port (left) to head west parallel to the shore and entered the channel leading into Benoa Harbour. So on the port side there were Indian Ocean rollers rising up into sparkling turquoise surf on the reef 100m to our left, with the shore break 100m to our right. We passed the fishing village to port which was home to a big fleet of those colourful sailing outriggers canoes and the turtle fishing fleet, then your inside the very well protected Benoa Harbour. In those days we would be the only cruising boat in the Harbour and anchored off the beach about 200 metres past the small wharf.

The wharf is still there at the end of its causeway, but the fishing village is long gone as the shoreline there is dominated by a row of hotels and resorts. When we sailed into Bali in the early seventies, everyone said we were too late, the place is spoiled by tourists. But of course all that’s relative as I returned over the next 25 years and it was slowly changing, but now 50 years later looking at Benoa Harbour on Google Earth, with a toll way crossing the bay which I once rowed across to take the back way to Kuta, yes I’d say those good old days are long gone. Now the place is suffering the downside of ugly tourism, and many will yearn for the simplicity of natural subsistence living, but the question is how best to survive and grow today and the uncertain future.

For Graham the co-owner of our boat it eventually became untenable with my increasingly tasteless behaviour and I’d teamed up with Helen who was now financing the journey, so we had the inevitable threes a crowd situation. So Grahme went home, and in hindsight, to the safety of Australia.

Helen and I lived a lazy life and either stayed on board or in a room at a Losmen in Kuta. One day we had a visitor who was paddled over by a local fisherman. Alan was an American surfer who owned a Hobie 16 surf cat which needed some replacement fittings, and yes we could help so he came on board. He needed a few small blocks, shackles and some rope, which he offered to pay for in ganga, and asked if we would like to try some cocaine. Well I’d never said no to anything so why start now, and so began a flirtation with what is possibly the most insidious and destructive drug of them all, at that time we need to add, as cocaine later evolved in to freebase, ice and synthesised methamphetamines which are far worse.

We became friends with Alan, who after I confided our plan to acquire a cargo of ganga and sail it back to Australia told me about people he knew who had made oil from hashish in Nepal, how you did this, and the advantages of moving oil rather than perishable, bulky and smelly plant material.

There was a group of American surfers who spent time in Bali, they were members or offshoots of the Laguna Brotherhood, generally known as BEL, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which began in the 1960’s around a group of Laguna Beach surfers, grew into an LSD religious cult, which became a cover for a domestic and international drug distribution operation which at that time in the early 70’s was in full swing.

If you google Brotherhood of Eternal Love history you’ll find all the angles on this crazy story, hundreds of pages, but well worth a scan, but the relevant episodes to this story is how the Russian and USA government’s misadventures In Afghanistan had opened up a drivable roadway across Western Asia, which was being used by hippy travellers, a number of whom collected bundles of Afghani Hash on their way through. This became a regular supply route for the BEL who had agents residing in Afghanistan who would source and package commercial quantities ready for despatch by the passing hippy/ travellers/smugglers. That’s hardly your image of the innocent Haight Ashbury flower children. All we need is love sang John Lennon, plus hash and LSD.

Actually the BEL was joined by Timothy Leary the LSD guru who unsuccessfully ran for California Governor against Ronald Reagan, aided by John Lennon who wrote and performed “Come Together” as Tim Leary’s campaign anthem.

This is relevant to our story here as when the Russians invaded Afghanistan the Hash dealers had to leave, and the most opportune place for them to move to was Bali, but we will come back to this connection later.

We need to bring Seth back into the story as he had travelled on from New Guinea to Bali and teamed up with one of the owners of a NZ cruising boat which was resting in Benoa while the other owners went home to work for a few months. Seth had just returned from North Sumatra and brought back 60kg of Sumatran Ganga and they were about to leave for North West Australia with this stash in the bilge, and would return as soon as a sale had been completed.

So we had just learned how to make Hash Oil, and Seth had the contact details for a supplier in Medan in Sumatra, so Helen and I were ready to set sail up the Indian Ocean Coast of Java and Sumatra and fulfil my adult life long ambition to be a drug smuggler.

But before we leave Bali I’d better report on the fate of our 4th traveller on the trip from Sumba. We moved to Kuta for a few days after arriving in Benoa, so the next day I went back to the boat to check on our little monkey. But he wasn’t there, but then I saw him holding onto the anchor chain at the bow of a boat next to us about 1/3 of the way to the shore. By the time I got there he was gone, but then I saw him trying to swim the rest of the way, so I rowed over to scoop him up, he looked spent and lay panting on the dinghy seat. I didn’t know what to do, I’d brought him here to a strange land, so we went back to the boat and I laid out the food I’d brought him. When I returned next day he’d gone, so someone had either taken him off the boat  to safety, he’d had made it to shore and found a way to survive, or he wasn’t going to survive, or he’d drowned. I don’t think he should ever have been taken from his mother in the first place, even if he was orphaned he should have been left in his own community, and I should not have added my bit to the folly. It’s funny how such seemingly meaningless little incidents can stay with you, when some really damaging disasters are easily forgotten.

I also never forget the plight of a young Balinese mum who lived in that fishing village we passed on our way into the harbour. Her husband was an enterprising young entrepreneur who sold his services to visiting yachts, he’d fill your tanks with fuel and water, sandpaper and paint your woodwork, ferry you back and forth, but this platform raised his profile and he got a job crewing on small ships, and next he’d found himself a better life in Europe with a new family and abandoned his responsibilities in the so called  paradise of Bali.

When I returned a few years later on another boat, Mum’s brother who had picked up the service business told me the story, and invited us to dinner at their thatched hut in the village. When we got there you could sense the panic as they scurried around scavenging and borrowing things from the neighbours to feed us. Looking back I know what I should have done in this situation, like why couldn’t I have given her brother the few thousand rupiah I’d blow on beer in a day so she could have bought food for the family for a month, but I didn’t as I was living in an ivory tower oblivious to the plight of the little people struggling around me.

It’s the same when tourists are bargaining for Balinese art with obviously small time travelling salesmen, they drive the price down afraid of being ripped off by these con artists. Well sure you need to be aware of scams, but there’s nothing to be proud of when you bargain down to where there is next to zero profit for the vendor, particularly when it’s out of the tourist season and a buyers market. If it is about pride then I wish I’d done things differently, something deserving which leaves those in your wake smiling and better off for the experience.

***

Better we stop here and review the situation as I’d been living in a delusional world totally unprepared for what we were sailing towards. An ignorant, egotistical, hedonistic, misfit, trying to hide his insecurities with bluff and bluster, presenting an air of confidence, reliant on, propped up by alcohol for artificial courage. I can remember Peg using the word “uncouth” a lot to describe me. The dictionary says “Lacking good manners, refinement or grace”, which actually sounds like a compliment.

This was a recipe for disaster, a lambs to the slaughter, instead we weren’t lambs but ugly examples of conceited westerners who knew nothing about the world, no sense of history or culture, no respect for others, a sort of parasite, taking what they can, giving nothing of value in return, certainly not leaving the world a better place in their wake. There are lots of ugly individuals, maybe not this extreme, touring the world.

I don’t believe in pre-determinism, like there is no point in sitting under a tree with your friends playing a guitar saying there is no point in working because what lies ahead is God’s will. Don’t laugh, that is the mindset of many young men in mainstream religion communities, as it’s an easy justification for being lazy.

Everyone creates their own future, it’s the tally of their minds activity, very much like any business, there is a continuous accounting system and if things go awry there will need to be austerity measures, if that’s unheaded a reckoning will occur, a rebalancing, which in human terms can be a so called accident, but it’s not really an accident but a balancing act.

People who have a lot of so called bad luck in quick succession are only experiencing a rapid rebalancing, like they are in a vortex, it’s just a catching up to meet the next adventure they and their associates have created.

If you find this too far fetched then brand the rest of the story a novel, a work of fiction, all in my imagination, which some of it may well be for you as that’s the nature of mind. This is after all a world where opposing ideas are both seen to be right, just ask both sides of a political argument.

So there are probably 3 choices to consider here. One I’m just a looney, two the story is based on fact, and three is who’s facts are they as different minds will see different things, with extra complications when it comes to extreme paranoia, like the things people see and hear, at what level are they happening, what are they actually imagining, is a character who features in a paranoia episode a hallucination, or were they a conscious player, or were they involuntarily or subconsciously triggered by a force within or outside themselves to act a certain way to feature in someone else’s paranoia drama.

So life’s like a play, with more to see than meets the eye, and Helen and I were sailing into unknown territory, dangerous in a way, but not really as the outcome had already been created, a reconciliation was due, so we were on our way into our already predetermined immediate future.

***

There s a fault line under the arc of islands which form the Indian Ocean coast of Indonesia, with a dense row of volcanoes for much of its length. Indonesia has the highest number of active volcanoes of any nation with 76, 45 are in Java, many are over 3000m tall. So sailing along in light but variable winds on gently undulating ocean swells, smoking pot and snorting cocaine  is a surreal experience, pseudo mystical and increasingly delusional.

We set sail from Benoa Harbour heading south out into the gentle Indian Ocean swells and turned right, next stop North Sumatra. But of course that was a fantasy as Chris hadn’t done his homework, it had been calming and reassuring sailing around in the more protected seas of Indonesia, but we were now in the Indian Ocean sailing straight into the full force of the north west monsoon, the opposite of the SE Trade which had been our friend back on the Queensland coast. In front of us was a wall of turbulent black clouds, from the rocky Java coast to the stormy horizon out to sea.

This required tacking to windward against 20 to 25 knot squalls, hard on the wind, against sheets of horizontal rain, and of course the ocean current was also going the wrong way and against us. Just a single squall I thought, but no, it was relentless, maybe it died to 10 knots close inshore, where we had to go to try to make headway, zig zagging short tacks just outside the shore break, till we arrived at the next headland where we had to tack offshore, but at headlands the current in stronger, so even though we had tacked a mile offshore, when we returned on the opposite tack we would be back where we started.

Helen was in the horrors of seasickness, but Chris pressed on and they made it to Cilacap, about 3/4 the length of Java, but it was obvious they couldn’t carry on like across the Sunda Strait and up the length of Sumatra, so they pulled in behind Nusa Kambangan, Indonesia’s notorious prison island, which protected the safe haven of Cilacap Harbour.

A new plan was hatched to fly to Medan, buy some ganga, and somehow get it  back to the boat and distill it into TLC oil. This was never going to turn out well, because if it had been successful Chris would have acquired resources, money, that he did not need or deserve, it’s something for nothing, but there is actually no such thing, you always have to pay, eventually. The best thing someone who wins a lottery can do is give away most of their winnings, do something good for others, because if you don’t it will ultimately burn you.

On the other side, if Chris had actually acquired the Ganga, the project would have gone pear shaped, totally out of his depth as he would have been either ripped off, or busted, and ended with a drug conviction, which would have spoilt the rest of the story. So with the wonders of hindsight the only logical outcome here is a fiasco.

Luckily they met an accomodating naval officer in Cilacap who allowed the boat to stay at his secluded jetty. They took a bus to Jakarta and caught a flight to Medan. Memories are vague, but it didn’t take long before a classic paranoia episode took over my life. I was seeing all sorts of coincidental things, which can all be explained as actually occurring, it was my interpretation that was wrong. I thought we needed to have a cover for being there, and organised a few business negotiations, but this masquerade ran out of control, as I became more and more suspicious that I was being watched. I checked into a 5 star hotel on some whim, where I eventually broke down, screaming and pleading for protection from those who were after me, then I collapsed.

Somehow Helen found me there, she was bewildered by it all, and pretty concerned as she was financing this escapade. I remember an Australian embassy official visiting, and not long after that an influential Christian elder arrived and intervened just as the police were taking an interest, smelling some easy money. I was then moved to a nearby private psychiatric clinic and was stabilised, but not till after there must have been an incident that I don’t recall, but I woke up on a hospital trolley with an aching chest, and on the table next to me was a electric shock apparatus, a box plugged into a wall socket with 2 leads with large clamps on them. I’d been given electric shock treatment, it felt like my arms must have been the electrodes as my chest ached severely, muscles had been convulsed, strained and stretched to near their breaking.

I later witnessed the guy across the dormitory get the same treatment, he  had descended into a horror fit of screaming and wailing, so they strapped him down clamped his arms and after some violent convulsions he fell silent and into a deep sleep. So I presume that’s what happened to me. The doctor who owned this clinic told me my bedside companion had broken down after a flock of birds destroyed his crops leaving his family destitute. Mine was another story altogether.

I was there maybe a month at a guess, I was in a dormitory with other patients while Helen was staying in another room by herself.   Eventually it was arranged to repatriate me to Australia, back to Peg who arranged a local psychiatrist who talked me into checking into a psychiatric hospital, where I stayed for about 6 months. I was diagnosed as manic depressive, today called Bipolar, and prescribed lithium, but I knew that was not the full story, yes I was manic for sure, still am, there is always so much to do, you need to be manic to do it, but I’ve never been judged as depressed.

You would think this was an opportunity for reflection, maybe a change of direction, but no, there was unfinished business, or as it panned out the adventure was just beginning, so soon after being discharged from the hospital I hitch hiked back to Darwin as Seth’s boat had arrived and I could hitch a ride back to Bali and my boat which hopefully was still sitting in Cilacap.

In Darwin I worked on construction sites for a couple of months staying in a communal house the boat’s team had arranged, but eventually we set sail for Bali. Seth didn’t say much about the trip to WA, and I didn’t ask, but when we arrived in Bali the 36 foot Kiwi boat was back, and I learnt that they had got as far as Perth, arranged a trade, but that night the boot of their car was broken into and the stash was stolen. So much for honour among thieves.

I took a bus and train back through Java to Cilacap, thanked my host for looking after the boat, and set sail for Bali. It was calm and light winds, I was physically drained and wasted, I didn’t get far as I fell asleep and woke up the boat bouncing on the bottom, we were in the surf being washed up on a beach. I walked ashore, said goodbye to the boat, and quite relieved that  this chapter was over. It was the easy way out, but I had run out of options, except get back to Bali and catch a ride back to Australia.

Seth was planning another trip to Australia, 300kg of Ganga was mentioned, but one of the boats owners revolted and went to a conference on drugs being hosted in Denpasar by the DEA, and told them about the planned voyage. So those big plans were cancelled, but as everyone was running out of money, Seth arranged for a 10kg parcel of Ganga purchased from a dealer in Kuta, and was on his way back to the boat when he was stopped by police and arrested.

So with the captain in jail we weren’t going anywhere, but still life was rather idyllic, living on board in Benoa Harbour, with a constant stream of visitors as we were now famous amongst the traveller community living in Kuta. Then one day in sailed a little 32 footer, it motored over towards us, we were all sitting on the coach house watching, and were greeted by the visitor who yelled out across the water; “do you know where we can score some dope”.

Really, you can see what I mean about a comedy, so let’s say this was the beginning of act 2. The visitor despatched his 2 crew to Medan to score, but they never returned, just kept going, they crossed over to Penang in Malaysia and headed out along the hippie highway for India. Anyway this wasn’t all that bad as it evolved into opportunity to get back to Australia, so a new plan was hatched.

We had a bunch of people stranded in Bali who needed to get back to Australia. There was the New Zealand owner of the 32 footer, the Kiwi part owner of the 36 footer who’d made the ill fated trip to WA the year before, there was an Australian hippy who was stranded in Immigration detention for a couple of years, so immigration who were detaining Seth asked if we could get him off their hands, there was me, and then there was Steve, so I’ll explain where he fits in.

No one had much money, so we needed a stash to pay for the trip, so I was dispatched to Kuta Beach to see what could be arranged. My “Laguna Brotherhood” friends from the past were keen to help as one of the Afghanistan based hash smugglers from pre the Russian invasion had a stash of very exotic Marijuana which was earmarked for a number of old friends in Australia. If we could carry that, and his brother Steve he could arrange one kg of hash, and about 5 kg of Sumatran tops. Done, we’d arrange the voyage and I’d be back for the dope on the night before departure.

It was a moonless night thankfully as I rowed someone’s dinghy around the wharf and then west across the tidal flats and channels towards Bali International Airport. There were a few fish traps along the way, so you stayed near them as they marked deep water, which wasn’t a major issue as it was a rising tide. About a mile in a channel turned north west up towards the southern edge of Kuta. I left the dinghy hidden in mangroves, making sure I was invisible in the night, it was a 15 minute brisk walk through the shadows to my rendezvous, then straight back as this time I wasn’t hanging around for dinner and drinks.

We had cleared immigration that afternoon so technically I shouldn’t have been in Kuta at all, but we wanted to be able to up anchor and be heading out of the harbour at the first light of dawn. Once out of the channel it was pretty well a heading of due south out into the Indian Ocean then 960  nautical miles to Exmouth Gulf in WA where we planned to repeat the exercise, a pre dawn arrival so the stash could be buried ashore and we’d be at the anchorage before sunrise. All went to plan, but what was extraordinary was the sunrise, it was the most extreme violent red orange danger sky I’ve ever seen. As the saying goes, “a red sky at night is the Shepard’s delight, red sky in the morning is the Shepard’s warning”. To a superstitious person it would have been a very bad omen, as  it turned out to be.

The story gets a bit complex here but it needs to be told. The Kiwi 36 footer with its co owner and Seth onboard had been here the year before, a car had been borrowed to cart the 60kg stash to Perth from a local single mum, who was busted a few months later so in negotiation with the police she had told the story, and so was on standby for the next adventurers who needed to borrow her car.

Back in Bali at the DEA conference were Australian drug police, so they were expecting and had prepared the surveillance resources for the imminent arrival of that sizeable 300kg shipment. But we arrived and while we only had that measly 7 kg on board, we were very special, to the police, and on some psychic insight scale as shown by that incredible sunrise, if your game to relate the 2.

After moving the boat to an anchorage we tidied up and headed to the customs/harbour masters office to get clearance. There we were, 5 fine young men, sitting around the customs officers desk, and he picked up the phone and dialled, then without much preamble quoted a number and hung up. He then started looking through our personal possessions, and it didn’t take long before he found some loose tops in Steve the American’s shirt pocket, but no problems said our customs man, it was nearing noon and suggested we go over to the pub and come back after lunch and he’d sign us into Australia.

It was not entirely a liquid lunch as Steve discovered a ball of hash in a pants pocket, which he immediately swallowed, me, I was feeling pretty edgy, was this another round of paranoia or was I actually witnessing something extraordinarily special. Who could have written this amazing script?. At this stage I didn’t know about the Joker or it’s ability to manipulate anything.

We went back to the customs office and the other guys were interviewed, apparently I was too insignificant to warrant a one on one which suited me. I saw through the open door Steve being interviewed, but he was more interested in zooming in on the spider’s web in the ceiling corner through his Nikon with its 1000mm lens. But in the end it all went well and we walked out of there free to travel Australia. Our customs friend had suggested a resort we should stay at so off course we took his advice.

Parked outside was a red sporty sedan driven by an attractive blond, who beckoned to Steve did he want a lift, sure honey, but next day I saw that blond and the customs officer together with their children, she was his wife.

At this resort I was growing increasingly suspicious that we were under surveillance, there were several detective aged males, not together but doing different things, like 2 at the bar drinking, 2 playing pool, and some women, but they all wore really loud gaudy shock orange yellow and red very bad taste batik shirts, as if they were trying to make us feel easy. But people that vintage don’t wear these LSD inspired motifs and colours like that, so it rang more alarm bells with me.

I was hanging out with Steve, because the 2 Kiwis were away hatching the next stage of the plan, and in his room Steve showed me the address book his brother had given him, who wanted what from the special stash, and what they were to pay. I was shocked and I convinced him that we had better get rid of this down the toilet, and he should move on, and when we got this sorted I’d bring the stash to Sydney. I meant it, it was my idea of what was the right thing to do.

So Steve left, hitch hiked to Perth, and was given a lift out of town by a very helpful plain clothes policeman. When he got to Sydney we heard how he was taken in for more intensive interrogation. Next day back in Exmouth the guys went and borrowed the car, dug up the stash and we would meet down at the creek where I was to take the boat, but here there had been a miscalculation, it was a low outgoing tide so we ran aground, tried to winch her in, couldn’t, but we had to go so left instructions with the poor gentle soul who we’d helped Bali immigration deport, who was in a state of speechless shock as you can imagine, he was to pull the boat into the creek as it floated on the rising tide.

While all this was going on there was a small Cessna doing low flying exercises along the beach, and in hindsight it’s obvious that we were under serious surveillance, and that phone call made quoting a code number was to swing the operation into action.

But the only way to see this through, and be able to tell this story I joined the guys in the car, me in the back, heading down the coast to some deal they had arranged.

We didn’t get far, about 5 miles out of town there were 2 police cars blocking the road, so we slowed and stopped, I heard Dave in the front passenger seat say the classic, “”this looks like a bust”, as a 3rd car came sliding in sideways behind us in a cloud of dust. Yes it was a bust, and all the officers leaped out and braced themselves behind their cars, guns drawn. They were after all expecting a 300kg cargo which back then was huge, so they must have expected a gunfight.

They took us one at a time to the back of the car and asked us what’s that in the boot, “I don’t know, never seen it before” seemed the right answer, but the other 2 said it was a bag of dope. There were 3 cars, one for each of us, but when they were bundling me into mine, they flew into quite a panic as there on the back seat was a pistol.

We were taken straight to the police station for interrogation, again I was correctly treated as the least significant, so I lay down on a mattress on the floor and went to sleep, or it looked like I was asleep, but I could hear under the doors what was being said in the interview rooms. From one room I heard “it was in clear plastic bags in the cabin so everyone knew it was there” and from the other room “you’ve got me so I’m not saying anything about anyone else”.

When I was interviewed it was after midnight and everyone was tired so they were done with me in half an hour, I didn’t know anything about it. The other 2 had confessed so the police were assured of a good result, they were also from NZ, one was the skipper, the other had been there the year before, so not a lot of energy was spent on me.

We were remanded next day and kept in a police lockup. Apart from us there was a constant stream of drunk aboriginal people being arrested, which  again emphasises how alcohol abuse is responsible for a big percentage of social upheaval all over Australia. The mosquitoes at night were horrendous, best not to swat them as the splattered blood only attract hundreds more, so I stripped the cover of my crude mattress and cocooned myself inside it. I  still have that mattress cover today, it’s not a prized possession, just a memento that always seems to survive my travels.

After a couple of days we were moved to the low security Geraldton Prison about 850km drive to the south. We chose not to stay on remand but move into the prison system while we awaited our trial, about 4 months away, I worked in the carpentry section where inmates were taught skills and did maintenance work. Most were in their for alcohol related offences, and failing to pay family maintenance, which of course is alcohol abuse related.

I wrote regularly to Peg, and all our mail was scrutinised by the superintendent, and police, so I told Peg how if I could get some drawing tools and paper I’d be able to design a sailing crayfish boat which the prisoners could build. The jail already owned a conventional crayboat, but I could do better than that, plus the superintendent was also commodore of the local yacht cub, so the next thing I’m called into the office and taken down the street to buy what was needed.

I designed a 45ft sailing workboat to be built in ferro cement, and made sailing scale models which we tested on the harbour. Meanwhile we had been allocated legal aid assistance. Two lawyers were assigned to defend us, being optimists we agreed with the option we should all plead not guilty. They assigned one lawyer to the Kiwis and one to me.

One night there was a commotion in the prison and into our dormitory stormed the superintendent and a bunch of other staff, they were all really drunk and were obviously in the middle of a communal bender. I hadn’t consumed alcohol for 3 months, and life was pretty good, my mind was becoming clear and sharp, so I was becoming more aware of the pervasiveness of alcohol. As the trial grew closer I opted to return to remand where I’d wear my own clothes and have a private cell, so I could think about the future.

Remand was in a section of the admin building, and on each consecutive Thursday night, there would be activity in the rooms behind my cell. It grew louder and louder, it was the sounds of an all male drunken bender, and in my new sober state I was able to put 2 and 2 together. I’d noticed on a model testing visit to the yacht club that the staff carried out a few cases of beer and spirits and loaded it into the prison van. The superintendent was  the commodore of the yacht club, a licensed club, he was also president of the licensed golf club, and a couple of other clubs, and the thing all these clubs had in common was aboriginal residents of the prison were always hired out to these clubs, they maintained the golf club greens, were gardeners at the yacht club and general unskilled work. I may be misguided, but it looked to me like part payment for these services was resources for the screws fortnightly booze-up. I didn’t know it then, but it’s obvious now  that I was being educated on the role alcohol plays in Australian society. This was also exposing a level of slavery, with the currency being alcohol payed  to the prison slave owners.

Trial day came and off we went to court. There was a circuit judge and a jury. We all pleaded not guilty and away it went. The prosecution gave all their evidence, we didn’t have to do anything, and then it was lunch time so we were to adjourn, but first the magistrate called everyone to attention and advised the jury to not discuss the case outside themselves, and said in these circumstances, because we 3 had pleaded not guilty, the law states that evidence of a co accused cannot be used against another co accused, so at this stage there was no evidence against me, and he gave the prosecution the 1 hour lunch break to come back with something new or I would go free despite what conclusions the jury may have reached.

So back to the cells we went, the implications of the events hadn’t sunk in yet with us, though my lawyer had told me to keep to myself, so back in court we resumed with the judge asking the prosecution had they new evidence to present, no your honour, so would the accused please stand. He addressed the jury and told them he was taking this out of their hands and I was free to go. I walked out and was followed by my lawyer who wished me good luck, and said don’t say a word about this for 7 years, the statute of limitations, after that the prosecution could not mount a retrial. So I’d  escaped again without a criminal conviction.

In hindsight the legal aid defence team had come to an obvious conclusion. The 2 New Zealanders had confessed and were going to be found guilty. I was an Australian who had made no confession and there was little to implicate me other than one of the Kiwi’s testimony. If we all had the same plea of not guilty then I would go free. So they assigned us 2 lawyers to control the direction of the defense. If it hadn’t gone this way then I would have picked up a criminal record which would have curtailed global travel and derailed this story.

Along with that extraordinary sunrise it begins the list of serendipitous events which mean little on their own but plenty in the context of this story. The lesson for me is we need a broader definition of serendipity and allow events to play themselves out, because what starts off looking like deadly danger may be just the beginning of a cycle with a truly serendipitous ending.

Serendipity- a combination of events which are not individually beneficial, but occurring together produce a good or wonderful outcome. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

But when you’re lived in my shoes for a while you start to doubt there is such a thing as an accident.

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