Despite this story being about the bright space of a yes, it starts with a no. This no was back in 2016, not long after we’d moved from Melbourne to Sydney. The kids were little - seven, four and one - and nothing was easy. Within a week of arriving in Sydney, my husband Guy had bought a dinghy - a cheap inflatable with a good engine - and we used it to explore the harbour most weekends. But what he really wanted, what he’d always wanted, was a sailboat. Which is where the no comes in.
‘The kids are too young; there’s too much maintenance; we don’t have the time or the money at the moment.’ The reasons were sensible, practical, sound.
But a week or so later, when Guy looked up from his computer with an exuberant, ‘Yes!’, within moments I knew what had happened.
‘Did you just buy a boat on eBay?
For the grand sum of $500, he’d bought what would become Jimmy Donuts, a bright yellow 22 foot Swanston Dart, a little day sailor with a small cabin containing a random assortment of sails and straw hats, and no engine. Within a week we had a mooring off Beauty Point in Mosman, an outboard, a makeshift bed for the cabin that just fit three little kids and an assortment of fairy lights to bring light and festive fun.
For the next few years, that boat was a floating platform for adventure. The five of us slept on it numerous times: off Taronga Zoo, waking to the sound of lions roaring; at Quarantine Station near Manly, where sleep was disturbed by the yapping of fairy penguins, the bright light of the full moon and a gentle drizzle falling on my face. Guy sailed it up to Pittwater, and we took it out to watch the start of the Sydney to Hobart boat race, the tiny Jimmy dwarfed by a flotilla of bigger boats.
The kids squeezed in down below to sleep, while Guy and I balanced precariously on the narrow benches on deck. There was an Esky and a rather impractical coal barbecue, and you peed overboard or waited til shore. No one slept much, and in the morning the bigger boats around us (the ones with beds and kitchens, water and lights) would look at us eating croissants in our sleeping bags, the deck crammed with stuff, and wonder how we all fit.
It wasn’t always (or even often) smooth sailing. Memorable moments were many. One Easter Friday we took it over to Vaucluse and scored a mooring with a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, only ten metres off beautiful Milk Beach. Just as the words, ‘How good is this?’ left Guy’s mouth, there was a splash from the back of the boat. It took us a second to realise what it was: the outboard had fallen off, disappearing into the Harbour’s murky depths. Spit Bridge only opens once an hour, and in the rush to make it, we hadn’t secured the motor as tightly as we should, nor the backup line. As we talked about what to do, there was a sudden loud hissing, exactly the sound of air rushing from a punctured inflatable. Guy leapt onto the tender and used his hand to cover the hole, made by the bolt from the engine mount exposed when the engine dropped into the sea.
‘Grab what you need for the day, and hop in, quickly!’
We zipped ashore, air leaking audibly, astonished that within five minutes we’d incapacitated two vessels. The kids and I walked round to Nielsen Park and spent the morning eating ice creams and swimming while Guy got high on the fumes of the puncture repair kit. That afternoon our lovely friend Mat delivered us a new engine, bought 15 minutes before the shops shut for three days. That evening we watched the sun set behind the Bridge, waving at the people on the shore who were trying to tell us that our boat was on fire as we barbecued dinner.
There are so many other stories. The time Guy tied the tender to Jimmy with a ‘That’ll do’ and we woke up and it was gone, wedged high on the only rocks between us and floating through the heads and out to sea. There was a splash: this time it was Guy, swimming ashore in his undies. Fifteen minutes later he was back, after running barefoot around the coast path, picking his way across the rocks and dragging the dinghy (miraculously unscathed) into the water.
The fastest Jimmy ever travelled was when it got towed back to its mooring by Marine Rescue when the engine mount failed after a long lunch at a friends’ place in Rose Bay. And there were plenty more times, good and bad, wonderful and a wee bit terrifying.
We sold Jimmy a few years ago, after we learnt a lot - knots and sailing; safety and basic boat maintenance; how to avoid the most obvious pitfalls of boats - all in the safety of the Harbour. But also how to make it fun and safe for the kids; what was a comfortable challenge and what was likely to be whingey misery. And how to make even the crappiest day into a great memory, one ending with games and chocolate and reflections on the good bits and our resilience instead of mosquito bites and lack of sleep.
Without Jimmy, I doubt whether this sailing trip in the Caribbean would have happened. We wouldn’t have had the skills, the knowledge, the long lead time needed to have confidence that it’d be a great adventure rather than a disaster.
And it all started with a yes. (Or a no that morphed into a yes, anyway.)