Left: Sean Langman has his game face on competing in the latest JJ Giltinan skiff world championships with regular crew Ed Powys and Josh Porebski. There are really very few boat types that at one time or another have not graced the ways at Noakes in Sydney; Duyfken (above) is a replica of the first European ship to have safely reached Australia. Usually on display in Darling Harbour – she recently dropped in for a bit of a freshen up
It is nice to win and Maluka has won
her division, and she has had other moments of glory at the pointy end of that fleet, but how fantastic would it be one day if she did win the whole thing… My son is taking her with his mates this year, then next year I would dearly, dearly love to race Maluka two-handed. That will just be the icing on the cake for me and her, for our connection with the race. I don’t know how you feel about boats,
SL: I continue to look at the ‘now’ to understand the ‘back then’. Just last week- end we were racing the International Canoes at Lake Macquarie. My son Pete was with us and he said, ‘Dad – I surf three times a week but I will never surf competi- tively, but I love this sailing alongside high-level athletes… even Olympians.’ So you have to remember why you do
the things you do. I could never find a way in my mind to cheat – and to my mind stored power was cheating; and I haven’t been able to get past that, to be honest. I don’t walk up to people and say that,
but the ethos and the beauty of what we do, driven by nature, that doesn’t entail running an engine the whole time. SH: This motivated a shift towards the little Maluka, which the Hobart race has really embraced. SL: For sure, and this is all part of the passage-making in a small craft story, plus my love for Tasmania. And that feeling of freedom when leaving your home, and then sailing to someone else’s.
Blue, but I think the reason I have so many and find it hard to let them go is they are not inanimate to me. I grew up with horses and boats; horses always go fast on the way home, and Maluka in the Hobart race, when you unleash her, she is obsessed! She just flies home… SH: Bolting back to the barn! SL: I have now done seven Hobarts on Maluka. Pete is planning to do this year’s race and so we all hope that goes well for number eight. SH: You were born in Sydney but you call Tasmania your spiritual home? SL: That’s right… and I am glad I finally realised it. When we were in Townsville I was the only white kid in year 9. I sailed out to Great Palm Island on a Hobie cata- maran during school holidays, and that really wasn’t white-fella territory. So when I arrived I used the line, ‘I was drawn here…’ And they said that was their line, and I never really got that until I discov- ered it with Tasmania. That place speaks to me for some reason. I don’t know why, but I am so pleased it does. SH: You also chose to go down the multi- hull path with the Orma 60. Extraordi- nary boats… the French have known that freedom and lightness and speed for years! SL: It is the greatest, greatest sailing I have ever done. And the purity of it. If you are interested in science and physics and try to
push the boundaries, that is where the Orma was for me. This was pre full-foiling but we pushed the C-foil envelope, with a strong understanding of lift and drag. We understood the trim-tabs and all these appendages and their movements – and the seamanship implications of what you could do and what you had to do… When we delivered it to David Witt’s
programme in the Philippines we sailed it with four crew, and had to lie a’hull four times around two typhoons’! Talking to Roger ‘Clouds’ Badham, with two storms converging he said he didn’t know how he was going to get us out of it, and that meant we had to go very fast to get away. And we really did have to think and
plan it all, then be prepared to stop and lie a’hull as I said. Multihulls are not bad rafts when you pull all the parts up! We also hove-to traditionally without great diffi- culty. In all my life it is the most wonderful sailing that I have done. But it was also important to me to walk away with my reputation intact… that we didn’t turn it over and then have to be rescued! But we know the balance between being
foolhardy and being a hero – that it is a very fine line. When we set the Sydney to Hobart record that was in an east coast low, and we didn’t really tell too many people. We obviously had to tell the Speed Records Committee, we had John Brooks with the timing and Clouds did the weather. It was the back end of the GFC and I felt fairly disenfranchised with a few things, and so that was another way of getting some freedom with my son and some mates. We had no pro-sailors onboard, we just had a crack and when we got to the other end we said wow – we just set a world record! But had we tipped it in during that east coast low we would have been totally vilified…
SEAHORSE 43
FRANK QUEALEY
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