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Acknowledgments
I named this book, "My Sweet
Little Epsilon", because this twenty-five-year-old, twenty-three-foot North
Wind trailer sailer pulled me through so many tight spots and dangerous
situations, and, somewhere along the way, I fell in love with her. She sailed me
out of the dark depths of despair, and into the warm light of achievement and
self-satisfaction.
I’d also like to thank my wife, Jude, not only for all the help and
support she has given me over the last forty years, but most of all because she
continued to have faith in me, even when I'd lost it in myself. My three daughters have also
always helped and supported me, not only throughout this journey, but for all of
their lives, because, when the chips were down, it was through them that I drew
my strength. As my daughter, Michelle, and her husband, Michael, waved me off at
the very beginning of the journey, I looked back and sensed the fear that they
had for my safety, but more than that, I knew that they wanted me to give this
challenge my best shot.
My youngest daughter, Linda, spent weeks of her free time deciphering and
typing four large writing pads of my scribble into this book, and without her
help, this story would not have been told.
A special thanks to all of my friends, who cheered me up, helped me along
my way, and each in their own fashion gave me reasons for carrying on.
The businesses that I'd like to thank are: The Ross Haven Marina, in
Townsville; the management of the Public Marina, in Cairns; The Gove Yacht Club,
Gove; The Tipperary Waters Marina, in Darwin; The Port Hedland Sailing Club,
Port Hedland; and The Fremantle Sailing Club. My only sponsor for the trip, The Seven Mile Cafe, in Lennox Heads, N.S.W., gave me a prepaid mobile phone, and $200 worth of calls. I still find it ironic that a small restaurant would give me a phone, when the two largest phone companies in Australia wouldn't. Thanks Tracey and Marcel Verhage. INTRODUCTION
Born in hard times, Barry Craft
was bound to face trials in his life at least equal to those of every other
child of poor parents. However, he remembers a happy childhood of boundless
warmth and love from his family. Despite losing his father at an age that forced
him to become a man much too quickly, and suffering the then unheard of handicap
of dyslexia, he grew up with the determination to make an extraordinary life for
the family that he was to raise. As an illiterate young adult,
despite confidence in his own intelligence, he was forced to use his brawn to
earn a living, taking one manual job after another, in the unending obligation
to provide for his family. His wife, Jude, inspired in him a quest to travel and
seek adventure, something that to others seemed like delusions of grandeur for a
young family of limited means. Together they found a way. Six years of
incredibly long hours, hard work and sacrifice, saw them launch their
back-yard-built yacht, and with three children in tow, set off to see the world.
A circumnavigation of the globe, and a few years later, a more intense look at
the islands fringing the Pacific Ocean, and they were once again content for a
time to become landlubbers in suburbia. Although an outwardly normal middle-aged
couple in the suburbs, there remained a restlessness within them that was
occasionally satisfied by backpacking journeys to North America, Alaska, Canada
and Europe. Up to this point in their lives
together, obstacles put before them by the outside world were challenged and
overcome, but when his body began to fail him, and consequently the manual jobs
were out of his reach, Barry saw himself as a burden this world could do
without, as no longer a contributing member of society, or an equal partner in
his marriage. He entered a period of suicidal depression that only he could
conquer. Suddenly, the other team players, Jude and their daughters, couldn’t
influence the outcome of this struggle, and he had to master his despondency
himself. Enter Epsilon, a run-down
little trailer sailer. In her, Barry began to see a way to the means of
regaining his self-respect. To complete his circumnavigation of Australia on Epsi
became the challenge that, if achieved, could see him sail from darkness to
light. “My Sweet Little Epsilon” is the story of his journey. CHAPTER 1
As
a young newly married man, and the proud father of three baby daughters, I had
promised my wife, Jude, that I would find a way to enable us to travel and see
the world. This was back in the 1960’s, in the early days of Jumbo jets, and
before cheap airfares. To accomplish this, we spent six years working several
jobs and incredibly long hours while we built a fifty-foot ferro-cement yacht in
our backyard. While I was building Arinya, I delivered milk door-to-door
for a living, which was the right job at the right time because I could deliver
the milk in the early morning from midnight to 8 a.m. and have the rest of the
day to build Arinya. It meant that I didn’t get much sleep but that
didn’t seem to matter, because building a dream seemed so much more important
than sleep.
With very limited sailing experience, we then spent two and a half years
circumnavigating the world. Those two and a half years were by far the greatest
period of my life. So many times I found myself in the middle of the ocean,
surrounded by all the people I love most, knowing that there was no one who
could hurt them, make them cry or break their hearts because I was there to
watch over them. I felt like I was king of the world. I could even harness the
wind and make it take us wherever we wanted to go. To achieve these things we
need to have the confidence and courage to get out there and do it. When we were
young those things came easy. Confidence and courage were just two of the many
things that depression had taken from my life and winning them back was anything
but easy.
When we were young, Jude and I firmly believed that we were bulletproof,
and could do anything we set our minds to. In fact, in all honesty, the thought
of not being able to build a boat and sail it around the world never entered my
head, but that was a family adventure and I was always surrounded by very
capable people. On the world
circumnavigation, there was Jude, my wife, who can’t swim, hates salt water
and was never comfortable handling large sails, but her celestial navigation was
outstanding and since we did the trip with just a sextant, a compass and a log
to record speed and distance travelled, Jude was very much an essential part of
the crew. My children were
all-rounders with any job on board. Tracey
could fold sails better than her two sisters. Michelle excelled when working up
the mast because she loved it more than anyone else, and in fact she would have
gone up the mast every day of the trip if she could have found someone willing
to winch her up. Linda was by far
the best helmsperson on board, even though the wind vane steering system did
ninety-nine per cent of the steering. When she was needed, she could steer a
better course than anyone else on board, and in any conditions. Then there was Peter Picket who came on board as a complete
stranger. He knew more about
sailing and had more sailing experience than I did, and if he had tried to
dominate in these affairs, he could have made life miserable, but he didn’t.
He was content to just be a part of our family and was an exceptional
teacher, who not only gave our children a great education but, I believe, a far
better understanding of life than they would have ever learned through a normal
secondary school education. When the weather was rough, Peter was always the
first one on deck to help keep things under control. The bottom line was that
there were no passengers on board; everyone was an essential part of the crew.
Surrounded by all these competent people and sailing in a yacht that I had built
super strong, and had complete faith in, how could I not feel confident under
those conditions?
Sailing on Arinya meant that I always had people around me but for
this trip on Epsilon I would be alone and loneliness was something that I
just don’t handle well, so I would have to reach back into my past and bring
back all the great memories that I had shared with my family and relive them. By
doing that I could combat my loneliness. Most of the memories I brought back
were from the time we all lived on Arinya because that was such a very
special time in my life, but our children are all grown up now, with their own
lives to live and their own families to raise.
This is the story of my last sea voyage, and by far my greatest
challenge. My confidence was at an all time low. I had never been so afraid, so
uncertain, so insecure, and so terrified of failure, as I was through the
planning and the early stages of this trip.
All I wanted to do was to complete my circumnavigation of Australia. To
do that, I had to sail north from the Gold Coast in Queensland, to Geraldton in
West Australia. Fremantle was my ultimate destination, as Peter Pickett, the
teacher who had sailed around the world with my family back in 1979-80, lives
there. Because of the bonds forged in that two years of close-quarters living,
Peter will always be a part of our family - the son I never had. When I first
decided to embark on this last voyage, I asked Peter if he would like to come
with me, but as much as he wanted to, he had other commitments, and that was
that.
When I was a young man and full of confidence, a journey like this would
have seemed easy. After all, I only had to keep Australia on the left in order
to be on track. But at sixty-two years of age, I was living in a worn-out body,
with an entire catalogue of bits and pieces that didn’t work the way they used
to. This was related to forty-five years of sustained hard labour, and the sort
of short-term memory problems that catch up with most of us with time, and in my
case were exaggerated by severe depression. All too often over the previous
three years, I found myself driving along in a car or in a truck and suddenly
realising that I had no idea where I was supposed to be going. Believe me, that
is not a good feeling. So a great adventure such as this seemed almost out of
reach, if not impossible.
Jude was once again the instigator of what was to become my dream and, I
believe, my greatest challenge. But when she first suggested the trip, I
wondered if she'd secretly taken out an obscenely large life insurance policy on
me. Her motivating factor turned out to be the genuine desire to see me dig
myself out of a cycle of midlife depression that had started three years
earlier, when my body and mind had really started letting me down. I had a
shoulder reconstruction that had gone horribly wrong, and found myself unable to
hold down a job that I could physically manage. Consequently, my self-esteem
plummeted, and I felt more and more over this period of time, that my worth as a
man, a husband, and a father, was rapidly diminishing. By far, the hardest cross
to bear was the fact that I could no longer pay my way, and that I felt like a
burden on the lives of all the people I loved most. Jude had the insight to
recognize that, without an achievable challenge, I would continue to feel that I
had little to live for.
For more than three years, I had been telling the C.E.S. that my body was
worn out and I need their help to find a job that my body would let me do. In
all that time, they had been telling me that, because my wife was employed, I
wasn’t eligible for a pension and until I was on a pension, I wasn’t
eligible for Job start assistance so they told me to find something suitable on
the job board and apply for work that way. What they omitted to tell me was that
all the jobs that were easy enough for me to do were put aside for pensioners,
so in three years they had not given me one interview for any job that I could
do.
It would have been easy to blame the C.E.S. because they were the people
who were causing so much frustration in my life. The real culprit was the
government of the day because, while they were creating so many perks, pension
and superannuation payouts for themselves, they created a system where each
individual employment office received a subsidy scaled on how many people they
got off pensions and back into the workforce. By doing that they threw me, and
thousands like me, onto a human scrapheap.
The thought that I might end my life without embarrassing my family
seemed to make sense at the time. After all, I had already lived twenty-odd
years longer than my father, and had achieved far more than I had ever dreamed
of as a boy, so why ride my life down to the incredible lows that I was going
through? The questions I kept
asking myself were: how low should I go? Why not move on and make space for
someone behind me? Why not leave this world with dignity?
These all seemed like reasonable questions at the time.
Throughout the preparation stage for this trip, the major stumbling
blocks were, first of all, whether I had the confidence to pull it off, and
secondly, whether I could actually afford it. If I had been able to work and pay
my way, the cost would not have been an issue, and in real terms, we had enough
money in the bank to cover it. But emotionally, for me, every cent spent on this
voyage would be one that I hadn't earned.
Back I went to the C.E.S. to plead for help in getting a job that my body
and my state of mind would let me do. It wasn’t only my strength and agility
that had faded through the ageing process, my reflexes, and the ability to think
on the run, had also suffered. The frustrating part about this was that the more
these things depressed me, the worse the symptoms of depression became. I
realized much further down the track that my depression was not just a symptom
of my old age and midlife crisis; but it was in fact speeding up the whole
ageing process prematurely.
For the first time the caseworker assigned to me was crushingly realistic
about my chances of finding a suitable job, and suggested instead that I apply
for an invalid pension. It was only then I realized that I had been hiding –
or conveniently not mentioning - to employers for the last twenty years, that I
did in fact have physical limitations. Like so many men my age, hiding these
problems and pretending that they didn’t exist had become my way of life –
and an almost inconceivable habit to change. I had previously been through this
application process, and had been rejected on the basis of Jude's earnings but
this caseworker assured me that I would stand a chance of receiving a part
pension if I applied again, and included a more comprehensive assessment of my
physical limitations.
Over the next few months, while complying with the application process of
interviews and medical assessments, I continued to visit C.E.S. every morning,
to search the job board for work. After my morning rounds, I'd then come home
and work on Epsilon, our twenty-three foot trailer sailer that we'd
bought a few years before. Within a few months, I'd built a wind vane steering
system, a roller reefing system for the headsail, and an awning to go over the
hatch and the front half of the cockpit. I also painted two blackboards inside
the cabin – one on which to write the compass course, and the other to write
my next destination. These boards were essential, because as silly as it might
sound, a real fear for me was that I might get out there and forget where I was
going.
Further down the track, these blackboards proved indispensable. I also
designed a way to keep the pop-top permanently up while sailing. This was a
must, because my back is very vulnerable when I bend over, so I had to create
standing headroom inside a very small boat. Although this was all preparation
for the trip, I never really thought of it in that light because this was all
work I could do on the cheap, with the help of a very friendly scrap metal yard,
and with materials found in my own workshop. I also needed to keep busy to feel
useful and to hold my depression at bay.
When I was called into the C.E.S. to receive the results of my pension
application, I really wasn't very hopeful, as over the last three years as an
on-off client of theirs, I’d felt let down by the system. As I saw it, I
didn't really fit into any of their niches. As I sat down in front of the pretty
young girl who was to give me the news, my mind was focused on the thought that
whatever happens, I'd find a way to make it. I focused on her mouth as she
opened it to speak, but I really didn't hear anything more after she said,
"Mr. Craft, you are entitled to a part pension that will start this
week."
Tears welled up in my eyes, and I could feel them running down my cheeks.
After a while, I think she asked me if I needed some time to compose myself, and
when I nodded, she picked up some papers from her desk, and discreetly slipped
away. When she returned some time later, I'd pulled myself together enough to
ask her to go over the details again. I learned that my part pension would be
$29 a week, and that I was to apply for the Job start program as well, which was
crazy because I had been asking them to put me on a Job start programme for
three years and they were adamant that I didn’t need Job start. Three years
ago it would have worked, but I was past the stage where I just needed a job and
was now at the stage where I had to overcome my depression, not just learn to
live with it, but of course they didn’t realize that.
It was while leaving the CES office that I realised I needed a challenge
more than I needed a job. I needed to complete the circumnavigation of my island
to win back the thing I needed the most - my self-respect. So, on the 4th of
January 2001, with the princely budget of $58 a fortnight, my journey really
began.
In these times, $58 is barely half a day’s wages, but it made all the
difference to me because I knew that if I scrimped and saved and ate enough
noodle dinners, I just might be able to live on it for the duration of this
trip. That made the thought of sailing around to Fremantle so much more
appealing. In fact, the thought of paying my way shone a whole new light on my
life.
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