Failure in the air tonight (oh lord)

February 4, 2021 by ramblingsofanextrememan 1 Comment

Perspective about failure from a professional and my mate Phil Collins

Towards the end of 2011 I bought my first Landcruiser ute. I’d spent 2011 travelling around Australia in a van and realised in the extreme of northern Australia that you were mad to live a life of adventure in anything except a 70 series Landcruiser.

I flew from Perth to Darwin with a only a swag and some basic tools to inspect and potentially buy a Landcruiser ute.

It was a 1995 FZJ75, petrol and gas Landcruiser ute with 35 inch mud tyres and a diff lock. Unbreakable.

*the van punched above her weight, but it was definitely bringing a knife to a gun fight*

I’d organised for my good mate Dave to fly up from limp wristed Melbourne and join me to fish and four wheel drive our way through the Kimberley. I’d bought a cheap tinnie (aluminium fishing boat) and some supplies in Darwin and we began our adventure.

Our first stop was just a few hours out of Darwin at Litchfield National Park. A Mecca for epic waterfalls in the tropical heat.

We continued west towards the Gibb River rd and no doubt countless fish and extreme four wheel driving.

The failure started at we nudged the 35 inch oversize muds tyres gingerly onto the Gibb River rd. As soon as the going got rough my new unbreakable Landcruiser started misfiring… This was not good. It felt like an electrical problem, so we limped back to the bitumen and the closest road house to have a look at the distributor. We pulled it all apart, went through a can or two of WD40 and crossed our fingers.

We decided to pick up the next way onto the Gibb River rd and continued down the bitumen for a little bit longer (a few hundred more kilometres). In a little while we were back on the rough stuff and again we were misfiring… We did a whole lot of troubleshooting but couldn’t work out what the problem was. We decided that we’d better take it to a mechanic to work out what was going wrong. So we drove to Broome which was several hundred kilometres away with our first failure for the trip locked in. No Gibb River rd for us due to some pesky electrical gremlin.

We made it to Broome, driving through a lot of the night, booked into the caravan park and took the ute to the mechanic. The mechanic did a lot of troubleshooting too and found the problem. There was a fusible link (a piece of skinnier wire that acts like a fuse) up near the battery, which had snapped in the middle. When the car was on a smooth road it was fine, 👉👈, however when you drove on a bumpy road, the broken bits of wire came apart 👉 / 👈, causing the car to misfire.

With that problem sorted (and after drinking a lot of Broomes finest cold beverages) we decided all was not lost, and we still had some time to head to the western part of The Kimberley to Cape Leveque which is a little north of Broome. We re-supplied, hooked up the boat and started driving north, misfire free.

Our first night was at one of my favourite places, a place called Quandong point. The last time I’d been here I’d had one of the best fishing days of my life. That rare day where the ocean is boiling with mackerel and there are tornadoes of seagulls feeding on baitfish.

I was hoping for something similar on this trip, however that all went wrong when I put the ute in 4×4, drove it and the boat down to the beach to launch the boat and we got bogged. We’d literally made it 5m onto the beach, still had 100m to go to the water and we were completely stuck. It’s OK I thought, it’s just a flesh wound, I’d bought some Maxtrax in Darwin just for this. With a little bit of help from my mate Maxtrax and we were back in business, and the boat was in the water.

On the way out through the waves, both Dave and I were at the back of the boat and we went a little too fast off one of the waves and the boat tried it’s best to impersonate a plane. It went shooting into the air, properly vertical. When it landed rear end of the boat tried to impersonate a chubby kid jumping off a diving board and the motor went under the water and turned off. Try as I might I couldn’t get the motor to start again, we were vulnerable without the assistance of a motor and we were being pounded by swell. We ended up jumping out of the boat and swimming / body surfing it back to shore.

We decided to call it a day on fishing after that, and thought we should get the ute off the beach before the tide started coming back in (they’re 6m tides in this part of the world). We got bogged again… This time as we were trying to drive up the sand dunes it was a lot worse. Digging. Maxtraxing. Taking the trailer off. More digging. Sweating and swearing (it was about 40 degrees). It took us 4 hours of hard work to get the ute and then the boat trailer off the beach, at that point we found a shady tree to sit under and drank delicious Emu Export for the rest of the day, reflecting on our failures and our inadequacies as extreme men.

Further troubleshooting the next day revealed that my front differential was missing a lot of teeth and my unbreakable 4 wheel drive, was actually a 2 wheel drive….

What was supposed to be an epic trip through the Kimberley with my mate Dave, turned into failure after failure. Everything went wrong and when Dave went back to Melbourne I was a little unsure if I was really cut out to be an extreme bushman. From then on this trip would be known as the Trip of Failure.

So why am I writing about this tale of woe from 2011 now, almost 10 years later?

Because I’m back to failing again, the song may be different, but the tune is the same, and I can almost hear the chorus.

About 2 years ago I bought a sailboat. A plywood / fibreglass 10m catamaran from the 80s called Miss Margarita. Much like when I bought my first Landcruiser Ute I’d never driven or even been in one of them before, I’d never sailed or even been on a sail boat before. In my opinion, never let a minor thing like lack of experience or skill stop you from doing something potentially very risky.

Our first weekend away was a long weekend and we went to the big sandhills at Moreton Island. When we arrived there it was about lunchtime and there were about 6 boats anchored. We couldn’t believe our luck, a long weekend and we had the place basically to ourselves!

As the sun went down the other boats all left too so we were the only boat. I couldn’t believe it, we were so lucky…

Then about 8pm the wind started, a 25 knots straight from the west, straight into the anchorage. We were anchored in about 2m of water and soon after the swell started to build. The wind didn’t stop and within a few hours waves were breaking down the side of the boat. I kept going to the bow to make sure the anchor was holding and the forebeam (big bit of aluminium between the hulls that the anchor connects to) was still attached. With each passing wave the bows of the boat had a metre of air underneath them.

The wind and swell didn’t stop all night and no sleep was had. As soon as it was dawn and I could see enough we pulled up the anchor and motored 4 hours beating into the swell to hide behind mud island. The first nautical based failure was locked in on the first outing.

After a few months of owning the boat I realised that there was a leak in the saloon roof (saloon is a fancy word for boat loungeroom) so I removed the false ceiling to work out what was going on. After removing the false ceiling it turned out a large portion of the roof was rotten and had a very dodgy repair. To make matters worse the rot and dodgy repair was near / caused by the traveller which is the deck hardware that keeps the headsail tight while sailing. In strong winds this needs to cope with a lot of force, and had the potential to cause a lot of stressful boat breaky kind of noises while there were strong wind and wave kind of noises about. Was this something I should have known about / checked before buying (and moving onto) an old boat? Definitely. Did I? no.

It took me the better part of a week to cut out, rebuild, re-fibreglass and re-attach all the deck hardware. A week spent boat fixing, instead of boat sailing. Second nautical based failure locked in.

After fixing the roof we tested all the deck hardware by putting 20 knots on the beam through all the freshly epoxy filled and sikaflexed bolt holes.

Several months later we’d been out sailing for about a week, enjoying boat life at pristine Moreton Island. It had gradually been starting to annoy me that I couldn’t lower the starboard dagger board (big white pointy thing below) to sail better. When we got back to the marina after being out for a week I decided to investigate and gave it a few really good shoves to see if I could force it down. My thoughts were that it probably just had some barnacles stuck in there that could be forced out. Being unsuccessful in forcing it down I gave up spent the next few days binge drinking with friends.

We got back to the boat on a Saturday night, medium drunk and I heard a noise I’d never heard before. It was a persistent buzzing for a while and then it would stop. Then after a few minutes it would start again. I stumbled down into the hull where the weird noise was originating from and found out it was a bilge pump. The bilge was full of water. Our trusty 1980s catamaran was trying to turn into a trusty 1980s submarine. In my drunken state I tried to find the leak, I couldn’t really work out where it was coming from, so I did what any half drunk extreme man would do in a similar situation, I reached for my jigsaw and started cutting up the floor.

Cutting up the floor didn’t help to find the source of the outside water turning into inside water, so eventually I just found all the spare bilge pumps in the boat yard and put them in the hull and tried unsuccessfully to get some sleep.

A few days later we managed to get the boat onto a trolley and out of the water to try and work out what was going on.

To explain what happened I need to explain a little about daggerboards. Basically daggerboards are like keels. They help a boat to move forward straight through the water at an angle to the wind. They slide up and down inside of a daggerboard case, which is like a tube between the bottom of the hull and the deck that’s only open at the top and the bottom and is full of water up the waterline of the boat. It turned out the back of my daggerboard case was completely rotten and by giving it a good nudge to try and force the daggerboard down the back of the case had split open to welcome water into the inside of my boat. Come right in, make yourself at home.

The awkward thing is that to get to the back of the case requires a lot of cutting in places that there’s not much room for power tools. Here’s a photo that shows the moist stinky rotten timber core:

After close to a week of being in a confined space cutting, chiselling, swearing, sweating and fibreglassing, I’d finally fixed it, better than new:

That was my third major nautical failure. Over a period of about 18 months the failures had been consistent and spectacular.

We recently we were out sailing for the Xmas / New Years break, and had some friends come aboard for new years eve. While we were all getting drunk for new years eve the worst thing that can happen on a boat happened. The toilet blocked up and started filling up. Brown nutty liquid mere centimetres from the rim of the bowl. No margin of safety. After a few hours of drunkenly trying to unblock it unsuccessfully we gave up and made it a problem for 2021, happy new year!

As I was hungover, pulling apart a full, blocked, more nutty than usual toilet, (make sure to chew 30 times before you swallow everyone..) I started doing what anyone in a similar situation would do. I started pondering the decisions I’d made in my life that led up to being in this situation. I started reflecting upon the consistent spectacular failures that had happened since I became the captain of an old boat, and I realised something, it felt familiar, the song may be different, but the tune is the same. This felt and sounded exactly like the Trip of Failure with Dave. The tune was exactly the same, and I can almost hear the chorus. This familiar tune of failure in my head sounds similar to the tune in that song by Phil Collins – In the air tonight, seriously click this link and listen to this song. There’s a long winded intro, the scene is set slowly, but then the drums solo starts and the song completely changes.

Just as that overly long intro can’t go on forever, at some point the failing reaches its crescendo, and then the drum solo kicks in. Just as the trip of failure failed spectacularly on so many levels, at some point it stopped and the combination of man, machine and bush shenanigans kicked it up a notch and we were unable to be defeated by even the most extreme Australian outback conditions.

Every extreme place in Australia felt like a warm snuggly blanket that we’d comfortably wrap ourselves up in. People driving Hilux’s and Ford Rangers would be quivering with excitement and nervous fear while we’d casually roll through extreme places and situations with the ready-to-go half chub that comes from being a seasoned old rooter.

Make no mistake, I can still hear the intro. This sailing endeavour is still just vocals and synthesisers, there’s no drum solo yet, but there will be. There’s still nerves, I still stink of fear and there’s no ready-to-go half chub yet, but the more I think about it, the more I can feel the blood starting to draw to my penile area… I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord.

Here’s the lyrics to In the air tonight by Phil Collins, what a great song:

In the Air Tonight – Phil Collins

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, (Oh lord)

And I’ve been waiting for this moment, for all my life, (Oh lord)

Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord, (Oh lord)

Well, if you told me you were drowning

I would not lend a hand

I’ve seen your face before my friend

But I don’t know if you know who I am

Well, I was there and I saw what you did

I saw it with my own two eyes

So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been