I’m afraid of heights, and Graham keeps big-noting himself as the authority on everything sailing. It didn’t matter how much experience we had; his stories were always bigger and better than ours.
I said, “If you’re so good at it, you f*cking go up and change that f*cking light.”
My tri-light was busted and needed replacing. Until the repair was made, I couldn’t sail at night. I needed someone to climb the mast and change it so I could.
Graham and I stared up at it many times. We talked about the work to fix it, and he was adamant that the job was “a piece of pie” and “everyone does it at some point.”
I sometimes hated Graham’s casual enthusiasm and sailing logic.
There are several reasons why someone might have to go up a yacht’s mast. A broken navigation light is one. A jammed halyard is another. A line can disappear inside the mast, a wind instrument can stop working, an aerial can break, or some essential piece of rigging can loosen itself in a place deliberately designed to be as far from human hands as possible.
Birds also enjoy interfering with things at the masthead. They sit on the equipment, bend delicate parts and deposit their opinions over everything.
Most yachties don’t go aloft often. It might happen once every few years.
The mast on an ordinary cruising yacht can rise twelve to twenty metres above the deck.
From below, it looks like a simple aluminium pole. From the top, it’s a twig, and the ground never stops moving.
Graham is my yachtie mate at the marina. He’s forgotten more about sailing than I’ll ever know. He won’t say it, but I know the one thing he won’t want to do is get his ass into a bosun’s chair and go aloft. He knows better than to leave the deck’s safety and climb to the top of a giant swaying stick!
The movement is the part people on the ground don’t appreciate. A yacht can appear to rock only slightly at deck level, but every movement is magnified at the masthead.
A fifteen-metre mast rolling ten degrees moves its tip roughly two and a half metres away from the centreline. If the yacht rolls through the same angle in the opposite direction, the person at the top travels through an arc of more than five metres.
That is not a gentle sway. That is an amusement-park ride without the amusement component.
There is one problem: Graham boasts too much. When he says something is easy to do, that’s the perfect time to say, “Show me!”
He can’t back down. Pride makes him commit to it, even if it goes against fear.
Getting someone up the mast takes more skill than simply attaching a rope to a chair and hauling until the screaming changes pitch. The person aloft needs a proper bosun’s chair or climbing harness, preferably with a second independent safety line.
The person operating the winch must understand what they’re doing, keep the line controlled and communicate clearly with the person above.
The climber also needs to carry tools without dropping them.
A screwdriver falling from fifteen metres stops being a screwdriver and becomes a weapon of indiscriminate destruction, a small metal announcement from God.
The job is easier in a marina on a calm day, but even then, wash from a passing boat can move the masthead suddenly.
At sea, every roll and wave is magnified. The person aloft must work with one hand while hanging on with the other, all while trusting the person below not to become distracted by a telephone, a sandwich or another yachtie offering advice.
Falling is not a theoretical risk.
In 2018, a man fell approximately twelve metres from the mast of a yacht on Queensland’s Broadwater near Southport. He landed back on the boat. Remarkably, he suffered no broken bones and was reported to have escaped with bruising and lacerations before being taken to hospital in a stable condition.
That man should have purchased a lottery ticket right away.
A yachtie who can no longer walk faces more than the loss of mobility. Boats are awkward places for able-bodied people on a good day.
It’s a sad day when a yachtie can sail no more, and it’s quite a price to pay for changing a light bulb.
Fortunately for Graham, none of this actually happened.
After completing my book SEETHINGS II, I contacted him to let him know that I had written him into my novel and had him go up a mast to change the fictional broken tri-light. He laughed and reminded me that he’d never do such a ridiculous thing.
“What were you thinking?” he asked.
“It’s fiction,” I replied. “I can have you do anything. You fixed a navigational light. Thanks.”
“Oh? What else did you have me do?”
I ran into that one, didn’t I?
That’s the problem writers face when they base their characters on real-life people and then tell one of them they’re in a book. They immediately want to know whether they are brave, intelligent and handsome.
Oops.
Graham would’ve found out anyway. He loves reading my material and has plenty of time to read it in his cabin during sea voyages. When there’s no internet or phone coverage on the ocean, all that’s left is to read and listen to the odd scratchy radio broadcast from nearby ports.
He’s headed for the Red Sea right now, but pirate activity has stopped sea traffic in the area. He tells me he has six months of food supplies on board. He’ll try again when that activity has slowed.
That should give him enough time to read SEETHINGS II and discover what else I made his character do.
I think he and his wife will get a good chuckle out of it.
At least, I hope they will.
Let the story of discovery begin—but be careful; this one has teeth.
–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay, igniting fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some have escaped.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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