Photo: Charles J. Doane
I was but a shiftless wharf rat, recently shipwrecked, working the docks at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in search of a ride across the Atlantic, when I first met one Geoff Hill in 1992. He was an Aussie, a prosperous young merchant banker, with a new Taswell 56 he had named Antipodes, and was happy to have an extra hand aboard for his passage to the Bahamas.
In spite of the fact that I was responsible for the loss of one of his spinnakers (the unfortunate result of my first-ever attempt at a rope-to-wire halyard splice), Geoff and I took a liking to each other. Geoff shared with me his unique Australian essence, exposed me to several songs the lyrics of which cannot be repeated in polite company, and promised he would one day lure me to the Land of Oz. Sure enough, some eight years later, Geoff scooped me up at the airport in Sydney on Christmas Eve so I could join him racing Antipodes to Hobart.
“Now Charlie,” he cracked in his broad Aussie drawl as he drove me across the sun-splashed harbor, “we want to be sure that you leave Australia exactly as you found it.”
There was little chance of me doing much harm to Oz, but our passage to Hobart was, without doubt, the toughest of my career. Days on end of 30- to 50-knot headwinds do have an annealing effect when it comes to human relationships. I even developed a taste for Vegemite on toast, which was pretty much all we had to eat during our ordeal. And in the end, I didn’t really mind being referred to as “the Seppo” (as in “septic tank” rhymes with “septic Yank,” so Yanks are “Septics,” or just plain “Seppos” for short). By the time the 12 of us aboard (nine Aussies, two Yanks, and one Kiwi) were ghosting up the River Derwent toward Hobart under yet another spinnaker, an immutable bond had formed.
Two years later, Geoff decided to sell Antipodes, after a season cruising in the Caribbean, and summoned me to join him for his last jaunt, from Fort Lauderdale up to a broker’s dock in Annapolis. We also raced together again at Antigua Race Week aboard a big Swan he and an Aussie buddy had chartered. Then again aboard another Swan chartered from a mutual friend of ours, in the 100th anniversary running of the Newport-Bermuda Race in 2006.
We had some real Aussie sailing royalty aboard for that one: Geoff’s buddy George Snow, owner of the famous maxi Brindabella; Bruce Gould, ex-America’s Cup sewer man and one of the lucky survivors plucked from a liferaft during the infamous 1998 Sydney-Hobart storm; and one Lindsey May, who served as navigator and led us to a third-place finish in our class. Later that same year Lindsey skippered Love and War, an old wooden S&S 47, with Geoff and George on as a crew, to an overall win in the Hobart Race.
But for Geoff, racing has never been about results so much as it is about simple companionship. I noted with some interest that Geoff was running a new Antipodes—a much racier Santa Cruz 72—in the most recent Hobart Race. He had announced that this run to Tasmania, his 19th, would be his last. With him as crew was his daughter, Natasha, sailing in her very first Hobart Race.
“It’s the teamwork and the camaraderie, and the laughter, which is important,” said Geoff in an interview before the race. “You tend to forget the hard and the sharp parts, the times you were wet and freezing and wishing you weren’t there.”
“As long as I can remember, Dad’s always loved sailing,” noted Natasha. “As he gets older, I think the memories he treasures the most are the mates he has met along the way.”
I count myself lucky to have been one of them.
June/July 2023
