AUSTRIAN WHARRAM CIRCLE
Pahi 42 MOTHER OCEAN - Michael Lynn (ex Tiki 26)
Hier kommt nun wirklich eine Story - nimm die ein bißchen Zeit dafür
Bilder werden folgen
Letting the days go by:
From Monohulling to Wharramizing
"And you may ask yourself:
Well - how did I get here?"
David Byrne
Time is the middle of August 97, place is three miles off the Corsican West Coast. Somewhere to starboard, hidden in a grey, wet haze, lies Calvi. For the first time in three months I am a bit cold and on the verge of being worried. Channel 16 is jammed with an unnerving amount of bad luck stories like "broken mast off Cape Corse, man overboard in the Strait of Bonifacio, small motorboat missing, anybody seen it" and so on and on and on. Well, it is not precisely a fine day, allright: Winds are going through sudden changes of direction from NE to S and strenght from 4 to 7 Bft. on a half hour basis, fat black clouds keep squatting between the Corsican mountains, sending rain squalls out to the sea from time to time, a confused, steep sea and a sick, brownish-grey hue to sky, sea and everything do not really brighten up anybody´s mood.The northbound 10 Meter monohull that we had closed in on for the last half hour suddenly does an involuntary gybe, puts her nose into the wind and her boom end into the water, gets up again on shaky legs, crew takes down all sails and continues under engine alone. Her mast moves like a pendulum in a turn-of-the-century clock. There is a marked difference between the way these guys over there must feel right now and the way things are going here on Mother Ocean, a Pahi 42 about to complete her three months´ voyage from Monfalcone in the Northern Adriatic around Sicyly, over to Sardinia and up the Sardinia and Corsica West Coasts to Southern France where she will spend the winter. Of a crew of eight, two are up here with me, handling the sail changes made necessary by all those sudden wind shifts, five can be seen through the half open sun hatch, engaged in an endless row of trivial pursuit games, and number eight has just announced that lunch will be ready in a minute. "How much are we doing", he asks through the open hatch. "Seven knots?"
"Haven´t been below ten for the last hour. 14,8 knots was top speed." - "Oh."
I am steering her quite easily, humming an old Talking Heads Song: "Letting the days go by..." The hook line in the lyrics gets me thinking: "Well - how did I get here?". Oooooh,yes, boys - how the hell did the Austrian landlubber get here, allright?
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Around 1870, Vienna city council decided to put an end to the floodings that plagued large parts of the then fast growing city and to put river Danube into a new, straight bed with ample room for the dreaded spring floods to spread behind a solid dam without causing damage. The old river bed was cut off, leaving a lake some two hundred meters wide and some six kilometers long in the northern outskirts of Vienna. Apart from some local fishermen, nobody paid any mind: Watersports was not precisely the biggest concern of late 19th century Viennese.
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Around 1890, Vienna city council hired a handful of British engineers to supervise the installation of the new municipal gas works. One Edmund Drory was among them. The guy must have missed his favourite pastime badly: Sailing. One day Drory discovered "Alte Donau", the cut-off river arm, as a substitute for whatever he had been sailing on back home, got a dinghy in and a few more people together - and that was the root of Union Yacht Club, up to today Austria´s largest sailing association with a Union Yacht Club on almost every important lake in Austria (and there are more than a few!)
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In 1968, a little boy of 10 watched with big eyes as dozens of sailboats surfed along that same Alte Donau in one of these warm, strong southeast breezes that give certain summer days in Vienna a distinct sahara-like feeling. It took that boy two more years to shake the bills for sailing lessons out of his mother´s slim wallet and another four months to confront Austrian Sailing Association with a very serious issue: "Yes, that kid passed the test indeed, but what kind of license should we give him? License "A" for sheltered waters is not available to youngsters below 16!" They invented the "Helmsman´s certificate for sheltered waters" as a substitute. I still keep it in a drawer. That boy was me.
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In the following years, my grades at school took a heavy toll: I wound up staring for hours out of the classroom´s window to the trees in the nearby park. As soon as the branches were stirring in the slightest bit of a breeze it was bye, bye homework and hello, sailboat for the afternoon. My pal Gerhard and me sailed old, wooden "Drory", Union Yacht Club Stammverein´s Pirat dhingy in every weather, saved our pocket money for at least partly watertight oilskin jackets that extended the season into late October and dreamed wet dreams of a cowboy carreer on Finn Dhinghys or Flying Dutchmen.
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Ten years later, after a real cowboy intermezzo in OK dhinghys, we were reunited in a Pirat again, Gerhard at the helm, me in front, getting all the water while he got most of the glory. We were steadliy working our way up the the list towards national championships, doing races in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary,and Tchechoslovakia. One spring weekend in 1983 we returned to Alte Donau for the Viennese Open. We were sitting in a cafe by the shore when fellow pirat sailors Tom and Karin walked in with a suntan that looked completely out of season. "Where you been?" I asked. "Sailing the Adriatic. We are getting the offshore license. Want to come along in the autumn?" Out on the sea? Me? I had always felt that the Big Blue was especially big compared to me and my sailing skills. But if THEY could do it, well...
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I quit dhingy sailing the next summer, had my inshore license the same autumn and experienced a new set of wet dreams about buying a boat and making a circumnavigation. Maybe it was allright thinking big, but even with a very fine salary as a freelance copywriter for advertising agencies, the 42 feet I dreamed of where absolutely out of reach.
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Cafe Stein in Vienna looks very much like the inside of an oversized bathtub, filled to the brim with design furniture and beautiful people. I wound up there late one night in spring of 86 with a girl I did not exactly want to have breakfast with, if you know what I mean. I was somehow relieved when she started some smalltalk with a guy sitting alone at the next table. Little did I realize that the next 30 minutes would change my views of boating forever. "Mike is into sailing, too!" the girl said. "Really?" said the guy and produced some photographs from his wallet. Looking at them, I asked myself if I was holding them right or wrong side up: The object shown was much too bizarre for shure identification. It seemed to be sitting on water, allright, and somewhere in the tangle of what seemed to be a forest of stays something like a mast rose up - but if it was really a boat, I reckoned the designer must have consumend 21 reruns of "Mad Max" in a row before sitting down at the drawing table. "What the hell ist THIS?" I asked. "This is a Wharram!" the guy answered gravely. "And I really am in love with that thing. Best boat I ever sailed on."
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Usually, I hate shopping. The one exception to the rule is Freytag&Berndt, an Austrian company specialised in cartography, that runs a shop for travel literature right in the center of Vienna. The cellar is filled to the brim with sailing stuff: Charts, almanacs, traveller´s stories, poster calendars, videos... - you can buy it here or it does not exsist. When I walk in there, it is not exactly shopping. Feeding frenzy is a more appropriate word. One day, shortly after that evening in Cafe Stein, while leafing through the shelves of Freytag&Berndt, I stumbled upon a copy of Jim Andrew´s "Catamarans for Cruising". Remembering those photographs of the bizarre catamaran, I bought it and started reading. Even though the boats in that book are a bit outdated now, it remains the most comprehensive (and easy read) discussion of the physics of catamaran sailing I have seen up to today. The whole thing was very much centered on safety, mirroring the capsizing argument going on in the early seventies between monohullers and multihullers. What struck me most was the name "Wharram" that sprung up whenever the talk came to best seakeeping, maximum safety, easy handling, appropriate rig sizes and the likes. My mind kept wandering back to those photographs. I finally made a mental note of Jim Wharram and his bizarre catamarans.
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I can make no rational explanation of what happened then. It was like slowly, but steadily falling in love with a girl that does not turn your head the first time you see her but instead gets you into talking, asking questions, considering, wondering - till finally you find yourself thinking of nothing else and no one else. I kept doing my usual rounds on all kinds of charter boats: Those infamous new year´s voyages with somethimes four or five Austrian yachts full of crazy guys and girls sailing on December 27th from Grado, first to some Yugoslavian port to buy duty-free booze, and then on to Venice to spend a New Year´s Eve from hell on St. Marks square with the rockets flying horizontally and the splintered champaigne bottles piling ankle high all over the square, waking up the next morning on the boat, badly hung over and in freezing cold, to the broadcast of Vienna New Years Concert played full blast over the communications system of Marina St. Helena. That first voyage round Sicily and to Malta, riding an aged Alpa for hours and hours under spinnaker in the silver light of the full moon with the skipper producing XXL-sized joints out of vintage Moroccan grass. That first trip along the Scottish West Coast, coming home with 25 per cent overweight luggage caused by a huge collection of single island malts, that first offshore race organized by Austria´s leading sailing magazine Yacht Revue... - and all the time I looked around the ports for those crazy looking catamarans that were so strikingly different from anything I had ever seen and sailed before. There were not so many around: A huge red Oro from Holland I spotted in the island port of Vulcano, another onshore somewhere in Yugoslavia, the odd Narai IV... My pals became shure I was slowly going crazy, standing half hours in front of the definitely offbeatest boats in the whole port and returning somehow glassy-eyed and not ready to discuss matters with anyone.
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I finally found my first Wharram in the last minute-ads section of German Yacht magazine: A Tiki 26, built by a guy from Switzerland who had motored her down rivers and channels from Basel to Camarque and abandoned her in a little marina near Grau de Roi, either because he had finally found out that a 26 is too small for a crew of six or else because he was more of a builder than a sailor - a syndrome I have since found pretty common in self-builders. Anyway, the price was a joke and the sails still wore the tapes Jeckells had tied over them for delivery. I christened her "Tequila Sunrise", gave her a new coat of paint and started my carreer as a soloist, running into a force 7 Tramontana on the maiden voyage from Port Camarque to Barcelona and on to Mallorca, did Corsica with a crew of three the same summer, sailed her on Lake Neusiedl near Vienna the following year, got bored with the lake, took her down to Italy and did a week in the Tremiti Islands with my then girlfriend, and went down to Corfu for a six weeks´solo in the Ionian the third year. On the second day of sailing her I found out that all the talk about Wharrams was right, hanging suspended on top of a two and half meter wave somewhere near St. Maximien, that one time not slowing her down by a slight movement of the angled rudder blade, as I had kept doing all morning, but letting her surf down smack into the back of the next wave at full speed. Adrenaline was up to my eyebrows when the bows bit into the water, deeper and deeper still - and then coming up as smooth as silk without a drop of water on her foredecks. Yeah, sex is better - but only on the few occasions when it is really exceptionally good.
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By the time I sailed Corfu on my Tiki, my Pahi 42 was already under construction. It was one of those rare cases of precisely the right things happening at precisely the right time until everything moves on some metaphysical railway track without stations, crossings or bypasses for the next couple of thousand miles. It started out with me finally hunting down the address of Gerhard Bobretzky, Jim Wharrams representative in the German speaking countries. Surprised to find out he lived in Vienna, I rung him up and visited him. The idea was to find a secondhand Wharram around 40 ft with room for all the friends I had made while sailing and with room for me and the people who would someday care to join me for a circumnavigation. I wound up with a copy of "Two Girls, Two Catamarans", which I devoured the same afternoon, the Wharram Design Book, which I studied again and again till it finally fell apart, and the address of a guy in the Lake Neusiedl area that had given up on building a Pahi 42 and wanted to sell one half-completed hull and enough stuff to complete building.
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I drive a BMW, have done pretty successful advertising for the not so successful Austrian conservative party, and if it means money, I even wear a shirt&tie. Doesn´t precisely fit the descripition of a hippie, does it? Still, I have a very lively connection to what would count as the Vienna version of underground: designers, musicians, painters, computer hackers, partly pretty weird persons, partly really fine people. Two of the finest I ever met ran a tiny furniture design shop in a damp cellar in a pretty hip part of the town.- Christoph is a multi-material artist, doing everything from painting expressionist oils and writing psychedelic poems to building impressive installations out of junk he finds in waste containers during his drunken strifes over builing sites in the dead of the night. Dietmar is an electronics engineer who one day got fed up installing radio stations and phone switchboards in Central Africa and returned home to Vienna with a set of bongo drums and a dream about a carrer as a designer. They joined up and started designing kitchens, tables, the shopfront of Microsoft in Vienna and the entrance of Ogilvy&Mather advertising agency. "Aren´t you fed up with those kitchens?", I asked them over a beer, "Don´t you want to do something real big for a change?" - "Like what?" - "Like a boat".
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One rainy summer day we arrived in the little town of Weiden on the shore of Lake Neusiedl. The guy we met was a very friendly, bearded, bearsized guy that made a living on designing and producing custom surfboards. He had one day purchased a set of Wharram plans, started out on a Pahi 42, run out of money quickly and decided to downgrade his aspirations to the reasonable size of a Tiki 26. We were shown into a dark shed, extended to Pahi 42 size by a rough construction of wood and nylon fabric. In the middle of the room sat the lower half of a TIKI 26 hull, nicely stitched and glued and epoxied. Dietmar walked a circle around it, taking a close look. "That is the boat? Well, so what´s the fuss about it? I imagined something a bit bigger." Christoph tapped his shoulder, turned him slightly around and pointed to the huge wall of dusty plywood that filled the long side of the shed from one end to the other. "It IS a bit bigger, buddy!"
Dietmar let his eyes wander along the Pahi hull, taking in the dimension. He turned to me with unbelieving eyes: "THAT ist the boat?" -"Shure, why not?"
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A close inspection of the hull dampened my enthusiasm: Tiny black specks told tales of beginning mold on the plywood. We withdrew to Vienna for consideration. Meanwhile, a long search had come to a happy finish: In a little town half an hours´ ride from Vienna, the cousin of the best friend of my then girlfriend´s mother was considering to tear down a huge shed he had used to park his and his friends campers in. We inspected it, found it wide enough to build two PAHI hulls in a parallel position and cut a very fair deal on the rent. We had found the perfect building space.
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We decided against taking risks with tha half-finished hull and pro starting the whole project from scratch. The layout was like this: Christoph as the main skilled worker, Dietmar as skilled worker number two, main specialist in questions of electricity, electronics, water system and the likes and last, not least as the guy who dealt on the prices for wood, epoxy, screws and so on, me as project mastermind, the guy who paid the bills and last, not least, as an apprentice in woodworks. With heating the building space out of question, we planned on working from middle of April to late October every year and estimated a tree year period to launching. I gave the final "go!" in the middle of July, 1990.
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While waiting for the plywood to arrive, we studied what would become our bible in the years to come: Gougeon Brothers on Boat Building. According to the book, we laid out flat boards on the floor and checked the waterlines against the hull sections. Something strange occured: Three bulkheads where out of line! We rechecked, doublechecked, triplechecked: Still those bulkheads were lacking up to three inches in width in some places. I started a europewide phone marathon: Wharram Design had never before heard of the problem. Finally I made contact with a swiss builder: "Did you notice that some bulkheads were not wide enough in some places?" - "Oh, yes, but never mind, I simply added a few inches!"
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When November rolled around and building time was over for 1990, we had set up a functioning workshop, cut out all the bulkheads, and invented a device for stringer production: An electrical chainsaw, running along a workbench on a kind of sled, along a steel L profile, and keeping the precise angle for the 1 : 10 diagonal that had to be cut into the ends of the stringers to glue them together safely.
We arranged rows of wood on the table, ran over them first with the chainsaw, then with an electric sander - and: voila! ready to glue!
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Winter was spent with detail plannings: We had meanwhile contacted quite a bunch of Pahi builders, travelled as far as Switzerland to have a look at their projects and were now considering all the alterations that these guys (and girls, of course!) had made to Wharrams original interior design. Not many of them made it into our Pahi. The funniest we rejected was hinged doors instead of slide doors for the pantry cupboards: A young couple in eastern Austria had installed them into their otherwise very beautiful 42 in such an ingenious way that you could not open a certain door without banging your head smack into the beam trough at the pantry entrance. The most interesting alteration we copied was leaving out the pretty complicated ventilation system fore and aft, putting in medium sized Goiot windows instead for even more light and even more spacious feeling. The overhead space that became available that way in the forward bunks was partly used for a deep cupoard for T-Shirts and other personal things. Aft, one is happy for every inch of overhead space anyway, so we did not fiddle with cupboards there. Room configuration was not altered against the original design apart from leaving out the large closet Wharram drew into the bathroom area. I would have found that thing pretty practical, but on the other hand nothing beats a spacios bathroom with a nice shower, a full size mirror and room to move when it comes to selling the concept of sailing to a lady that, believe me.
Water tank capacity was decided with a permanent crew of seven to eight in mind and me not being ready to plan my voyages from one waterhose to another on a 48 hour-basis. I don´t mind going a week without any fresh water shower, but some of my best friends, male and female, certainly do. So we wound up with altogether 500 Litres in four 125 Liter tanks, each tucked under one of the bunks, still leaving plenty of space for luggage and the likes.
Not many alterations in the design sector remain to speak of, except maybe a windshield on the deck pod that proved to be really worth its money in heavy weather, but forced us later on to order the mast about 3 ft. longer than according to plans.
Engine was the complex that gave us the worst headaches up to the very last minute (and well after launching, but first things first!) Factor 1 was me rejcting the idea of any other fuel than diesel on board. I am a chain smoker and I wanted that pahi for sailing the seas, not flying a moon orbit. Heck, I didn´t even allow propane on board, opting for a nice paraffine-burning stove with a double cerane field instead! So it was diesel, allright. Factor 2 was the absolute necessity of twin propellers: With some seven meters in widht, even the more spacious meditarranean marinas would call for the ability to turn the cat on the spot, I figured. Factor 3 was the construction of the hull with that integrated skeg and the rudder attached to it. We did not want to alter the hull structures for the sake of in-hull engines and through-the-hull propeller shafts.
So finally we ended up with drawings for a nacelle containing diesel engine and 270 Liter diesel tanks under the mast step, two hydraulic pumps attached to the engine and hydraulic hoses leading into elements that could be lowered down into the water, each containing a hydraulic engine in a droplike extrension at the end.
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Hulls were standing upside down, glassed and sanded, in autumn 1991,were turned over next spring, beams were finished autumn 1992 and in autumn 1993 the boat was more or less ready for a few coats of paint inside and outside (experience with Tiki and other boats had cautioned me against clear varnish in mediterranean sun). The Tiki was sold for a fair price to a retired railway engineer who, as I convinced myself, would give her the loving care she certainly deserved. The money went into the Pahi´s rig. That guy took a photograph of me saying goodby to my first Wharram. I felt like crying then. I still do everytime I´m looking at that picture. But there were good times ahead: After all, we were pretty much on schedule.
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In autumn 1994 there was not talk of schedule any more:
All the wiring jobs, engine installation and a very meticulous finish (Spray gunning in a room without ventilation while August heat is trying to melt the sheet metal roof over your head gives a real beautiful glossy coat of paint, but don´t try this at home!) had eaten up weeks like Don Corleone eats up his spaghetti bolognese. We were happy, though: Getting the hulls down to Italy early next spring, assembling the whole thing in Hannibal Marina/Monfalcone and launching in early May next year would be a breeze, wouldn´t it?
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I had spent four years considering names for the boat. One day I stumbled upon a record of a guy named Jimmy Buffet. There was a boat on the cover. I bought the record, took it home and put it on my player:
"Mother, Mother Ocean, I have heard you call/ I wanted to sail upon your waters since I was three feet tall..." - "You know Jimmy Buffet, don´t you?" I asked Maria, a graphics designer that had been my girlfriend and sailing companion till another skipper had come around and taken her away from me on a Malta voyage. "You don´t want to call the boat Margaritaville, do you?" she asked doubtfully. "Nope - Mother Ocean!" She did an incredibly beautiful design incorporating two dolphins doing a perfectly synchronized jump. Ten years have gone by since we split up, but whenever I look at those dolphins, my heart breaks again.
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We arrived in Monfalcone in the middle of March, looking forward to warm sun, fine food and happy open air work.Three days later, the first raindrops fell. Launching day was July, 1st, 1995. - It happened to be the first sunny day after 14 weeks of practically nonstop rain. We love water, but that spring in Monfalcone wound up to be our private little Stalingrad. Getting up in the morning, pulling on heavy rubber gloves, shaking a litre of liquid out of the electric connections, and plugging in, waiting for the marina´s fuses to blow or not isn´t anyone´s idea of big fun boatbuilding, right? Right! On some days the huge parking lot of the marina was completely under water. We promised ourselves the intoxication of our lifetimes for the launching party and hung on. Early May? Cassandra, eat your heart out!
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You cannot plan on getting drunk. I had a modest three bottles of beer in the course of a launch party that lasted till five in the morning. Christoph and Dietmar were more or less clean, as well. One week later, when nobody was there, we spontaneously filled up to the brim, got thrown out of a dance bar, tried out powersliding my BMW on a wet meadow (it had started raining again) and finally jumped into the slimy waters of Hannibal Marina with a big "Yippie!"
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Mother Ocean made her first test run one evening into the crammed old port of Grado, up a canal with little more than boatswidth space between rows and rows of fishing vessels. The two propellers did an incredibly beautiful job. When people got up next morning, they looked at Mother Ocean as if she had fallen out of the sky because nobody could imagine a vessel that wide coming up the canal.
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The first big voyage took place three weeks later. Crew was me, my girlfriend and cat Hobbes as a navigator and fish finder. We made it to Corfu running up to 15 knots before a gale 8, found out the hard way that the rudder wires were not exactly the right dimension (On Mother Ocean they are attached to a prolongated rudder head extending about one foot backward from the rudder axis to keep the central walkway back clear of wires one could stumble over: This amounts to about 4 times the leverage compared to attaching to the tip of the rudder post - a fact we simply overlooked when choosing the wire.) and I had a nice lesson in steering the pahi from the back, attached to two lifelines and just about tearing my arms out. - The pressure is incredible, even when you reef her down so speed does not excced 6 or 7 knots!
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On the way back up, the engine showed first symptoms of malfunctioning, running for about four hours straight, then packing up and taking about 8 hours to be ready again for a four hours run. I practised on steering Mother Ocean into unknown ports and going alongside under sails alone. It can be done, but if you aren´t a chainsmoker up to then, you will be after your first try.
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For the next 12 months, six different engine specialists went over the installation. Filters were changed, tanks were emptied and meticulously cleaned, the injection pump was taken apart and put together again. Mother Oceans engine took the repairs with a smile, purred like a little kitten for four hours and packed up again.
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In spring 1997 I went down to Monfalcone with a carload full of tools, tore out the engine, dismantled the whole hydraulic installation, transferred the stuff to a diesel and hydraulics specialist in Vienna for further testing an diagnosis and mounted two brand new Johnson 15 HP fourstroke outboard engines on lifting devices pretty much according to Jim Wharram´s design. They worked fine all the way down to Ancona. Then the port engine packed up. The Johnson workshop in Ancona changed a few spares, got the thing running again on warranty and I set off for the sunny south. I finished a circumnavigation of Sicily without any major events, apart from running into a few tunny nets and being happy about my 80cm draft. Setting out again from Reggio di Calabria I noticed beginning engine malfunctioning again. I left the Messina Strait with one dead engine, sailed down the coast and made port at San Agata in Militello, when engine two packed up, too. Frantic phonecalls to Johnson in Vienna got me an adress of a very good Johnson shop in Messina. I took the engines there. The boss walked around the two outboards like a cat around a hot dish. Two assistans stopped working and started doing the same. Three apprentices added to the group. A lively discussion started until the boss turend around, faced me and with all the sicilian grandezza he could muster he uttered said these two words: "Quattrotempi! Merda!" - For those not fluent in Italian: "Fourstroke! Shit!"
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He finally got the engines going. Same as the guy I had to consult in Corsica, the guy I had to consult in Sardinia and the guy I had to consult in southern France. When I finished the season in a little riverside marina I found in the Hyeres area, I put the engines into a rented car, drove them up to Vienna and walked into my dealers office. It took uns two days to find out that Johnson had delivered a whole series of fourstrokes with wrong valve settings, causing the engines to pack up after a certain running time. They promised me a free repair. I rejected the offer and handed the fourstrokes back. The gave me two brand new twostrokes in exchange. So now I have precisely the engines I wanted to avoid from the start: Explosives on board, two stroke oil to fiddle with - but on the other hand every workshop round the planet knows its way with these things. So much about gravitation and other laws of nature.
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A few days ago I talked to that diesel specialist again. He has taken my diesel apart and found no apparent cause why it should not be running till the end of time or the end of fuel. Well. It doesn´t bother me anymore. I´m getting used to either outboarding or boathandling without engines at all.
I´m really looking forward to the day when nobody is waiting for me anymore. That will be the day when I will sell those two twostrokes. Mother Ocean will get along nicely without them. Once around the planet. At least once.