Hurricane Harry and KELASA
By Graham Cox
This is the story of my good friend, ‘Hurricane’ Harry Gilbert, ocean voyaging circumnavigator and timber boatbuilder extraordinaire, whom I met on the International Jetty in Durban, South Africa, in late December 1969, when I was 17, and with whom I remained close friends until his death in Kawana Waters Marina, Mooloolaba, Queensland, on 31 August 2001. Originally from Victoria BC, in Canada, Harry took Australian citizenship in the 1990s, and Kelasa was re-registered in Hobart. Tasmania. The words below are adapted from my sailing memoir, Last Days of the Slocum Era.
Kelasa in Durban a few days after arrival, late December 1969, airing the rotten flax mainsail
Harry Gilbert, the owner-designer-builder of Kelasa, a 36’ double-ended, carvel-planked gaff cutter, from Victoria BC in Canada, certainly had a few demons lurking in his bosun's locker. Aged 45, he was one of the most unforgettable voyagers I ever met, a half-crazy, tragic hero, who desperately pursued his beautiful story to the end. Along with his Australian mate, Adrienne Matzenik, who had come aboard in Sydney, and was about the same age, they became life-long friends.
They arrived in Durban on Christmas Day, 1969, after a marathon passage from the Seychelles. Kelasa was a slow boat at the best of times, but on this passage the flax mainsail was rotten, and Adrienne had spent much of the time coming down the Mozambique Channel lashed to the boom, resewing it.
To add to their woes, the temperamental old petrol engine proved hard to start as usual, and they were nearly swept past Durban by the current. Several days after their arrival, they still looked stunned.
Kelasa in Durban, with Harry and Adrienne, Christmas Day 1969.
Kelasa had massive scantlings. The boat displaced 22 tons, almost one and a half times the displacement of Spray for the same LOA. It had 19” of freeboard amidships and 8’ draft. Harry had not intended the boat to float so deep, and the lower sponson was just inches above the waterline. He suffered from anxiety, and couldn’t help beefing everything up during construction. The ballast keel was concrete and there was more in the bilges. I have no idea what Kelasa’s ballast ratio was but suspect it was low.
Reminding me of Peter and Anne Pye’s Moonraker of Fowey, with its working boat style, long bowsprit and low freeboard, Kelasa evoked a bygone era. The varnished, keel-stepped mast dominated a saloon framed by equally massive deck beams, hanging knees, and panelled bulkheads. The sextant box was secured on a shelf alongside the mast. Joshua Slocum was Harry's hero, and Joshua would have been right at home aboard Kelasa.
Although Harry had no previous boat-building experience, he designed and built Kelasa from scratch over a period of seven years, driving taxis at night, working on the boat during the day, and catching no more than a few hours of sleep here and there. Perhaps that was why he now liked to get eleven hours sleep a night, come hell or high-water, according to Adrienne. He had sailed Kelasa across the Pacific singlehanded, before being joined by Adrienne in Sydney.
Harry said the name Kelasa was Greek for 'little ship', but some of the other voyagers jokingly nicknamed the boat, Colossal. Not to Harry's face, mind you. He was a fearsomely proud man with a flashpoint temper, and never more so than when Kelasa's honour was concerned. He had the build of a lumberjack, with square jaw and angular features, and looked like he could dismember a grizzly bear. His temper, and his ability to talk endlessly, in great detail, about all manner of obscure mechanical topics, had gained him something of an eccentric reputation.
He broke another taboo as well, enthusiastically describing the storms Kelasa had survived. Other voyagers played down heavy weather, were dismissive of heroics. Skippers in particular were expected to be laconic, it was part of the culture. They nicknamed him Hurricane Harry. But he had crossed two oceans, one of them singlehanded, and when Harry talked about seamanship they listened. I still have a treatise on navigation he wrote for me.
Adrienne was also a character, and a striking, auburn-haired beauty. When she worked on deck in her black string bikini, not much work got done on nearby boats, or the women would find errands for their partners to run. A passionate socialist in her youth, who'd grown up on the shady side of town, Adrienne had an irreverent spirit that astonished and delighted me. The affection she felt for Harry when they left Sydney had faded by the time Kelasa reached Durban.
Kelasa alongside the International Jetty in Durban
On the first occasion I spoke to her, I made the mistake of assuming that Harry was her husband. ‘He's not my husband!’ she retorted vigorously. ‘If he was, I'd have brained him long ago.’ She openly expressed these sentiments in front of Harry, as if to goad him.
‘Yes, Dolly,’ was all he'd say, in a resigned tone. He seemed somewhat in awe of her.
When alone with me later, he said, ‘She's not an easy woman to live with either, you know. When she's got it in for you, she's as fierce as a Bengal tiger. Don't ever cross Adrienne or you'll live to regret it.’
His stories about Adrienne were a mixture of admiration and exasperation. ‘She's as tough as nails. Once we had a rat on board, and she grabbed it with her bare hands, rushed up on deck and threw it into the sea.’ He also mentioned how she'd seen Kelasa out of the window of her Rushcutters Bay flat in Sydney, come down to take a closer look at the boat, and decided then and there that she was going to sail away with him. Harry, who came from a deeply religious family, and was painfully shy, had never even had a girlfriend.
He showed me a photo he'd taken of her when she was lashed to the boom, sewing the mainsail in the Mozambique Channel. ‘She was actually swearing at me,’ he said, ‘saying that if I had time to take bloody pictures, I could come up there and help sew the sail.’
Kelasa in the Mozambique Channel with Adrienne lashed to the boom, sewing the rotton flax mainsail.
He had chosen to retreat below and continue his struggle with the recalcitrant engine.
Some of Adrienne's stories were unrepeatable, at least publicly, and others were hair-raising. I wasn't sure whether to believe them, since it was obvious that she loved nothing better than telling an entertaining yarn, but I was to remember one, some years later, in less amusing circumstances.
‘Harry has never hurt me,’ she said, ‘but he has violent fantasies at times. Once, after we'd had a bit of an argument at sea, he called me to come up on deck. As I came up the companionway, I saw him standing on the bridge-deck, holding a hammer. It looked like he was going to hit me with it. Don't you dare! I shouted. I'd worked out by then that the way to handle him is to be extremely firm, like dealing with a five-year-old child. He immediately put the hammer down and stuttered a denial. He always stutters when he feels guilty, or is trying to hide something.’
‘Why do you stay with him, then?’ I asked.
‘Well, I feel loyal to Kelasa. I fell in love with the ship the moment I saw her. She's the real hero of this story. She's saved our lives again and again in the most appalling weather. Harry treats her badly, but she's never let us down. I promised Harry that I would help him get her back to Canada.’ Adrienne also gave me another reason, but that’s one of the unrepeatable stories.
After Kelasa had been in Durban for several months, the Port Captain requested Harry to move to Dead End Creek, in the Bayhead area, to make room for more recent arrivals. It was out past the dry docks where I had gone to visit Robin Lee Graham and Dove, and I took to riding my bicycle there once a week. I loved sitting in the magnificent ambience of Kelasa's cabin and listening to Harry's stories. He might have been a bit crazy, but he was the archetypal Old Salt, and, best of all, he welcomed me aboard with unrestrained warmth. Perhaps it was because I was the only person who never tired of his monologues.
One day, a local yachtsman moored nearby told me an amusing story. A small speedboat had appeared in the creek, buzzing the yachts. Harry came up on deck, naked, and began yelling abuse. Then he leapt into his dinghy and rowed furiously over to the yachtsman's boat. He talked animatedly to the man and his wife for some time, as was his wont, before glancing down. ‘Oh my God!’ he exclaimed, red-faced, ‘I'm naked!’ He rowed back to Kelasa as fast as he could, leapt into his cabin and slammed the hatch as if the devil was after him.
‘My wife was very impressed,’ said the man telling the story. ‘I felt somewhat inadequate when we undressed for bed that night!’
When Adrienne and Harry first met, they spent a few months sailing Kelasa on Sydney Harbour, sometimes with Adrienne’s boat-mad 17-year-old son, David, aboard, before departing for New Zealand.
David, who was now 19, came to Durban to join Kelasa, but left on another yacht because Harry was particularly difficult with him. Once, when David criticised Harry to Ken Furley, skipper of the Australian yacht, Fortuna (a famous, Percy Coverdale design), Ken said, ‘The thing you need to appreciate about Harry is that he got out from under.’
Adrienne waves goodbye to Sydney Heads, April 1967.
And that he did. He lived on Kelasa for the next 30 years and sailed the boat around 100,000 miles, two-thirds of which were singlehanded. Apart from the anchor winch, all other gear was handled with purchases or tackles, including the tiller in rough seas. Self-steering was achieved by taking the staysail sheet to the tiller. Harry had refined this system, by fitting tracks to both sides of the tiller, to easily adjust the position to which the sheet was attached, and also tracks for the turning blocks on either side of the boom gallows. For light winds, the sheet was moved towards the inboard end of the tiller, progressively coming aft towards the rudder-head as the wind increased in strength. Rubber shock-cords on the other side of the tiller balanced the forces.
Kelasa sailing on Sydney Harbour, January 1967.
Kelasa’s ancient petrol engine was a character in itself. Harry had rescued it from a paddock, where it had lain for many years, rebuilt it and called it Vivienne. It had exposed valve springs and rockers, if I remember correctly, and was notoriously unreliable. In Honolulu, a few years later, he replaced it with a large, heavy, slow-revving, single-cylinder 15hp Yanmar diesel, which had a huge flywheel. Designed for fishing boats, it was not available to the recreational market, and Harry got it from a Japanese Hawaiian fisherman. It swung a large propeller and was more reliable than Vivienne, but significantly underpowered for a 22-ton vessel. As far as I know, it didn’t have a name, unless it was one of the swear words Harry used when swinging that huge flywheel, since it had no electric starter motor. As always, Kelasa remained without battery or electricity.
In 1976, I sailed from Sydney to Rabaul in 35 days, serving as navigator aboard the famous sloop, Ice Bird, which David Lewis had previously taken to Antarctica. I then returned via Port Moresby, Cairns and Mooloolaba. From Mooloolaba, I travelled south to Brisbane, where Harry Gilbert had arrived from Hawaii on Kelasa, and was moored at the pile berths adjacent to the Botanical Gardens. After receiving a letter from Adrienne informing him that she was not returning, he’d sailed from Honolulu to Brisbane, with one brief stop in Vavau, Tonga, a marathon, singlehanded passage. He intended talking sense to Dolly, but Adrienne moved before he arrived. He was keen to hear if I knew where she was. I lied, hoping I didn't look too guilty. Life, which had seemed so simple to my naive boyhood self in Durban, was proving to be far messier.
It was great to be back in Kelasa’s cabin, with its huge timber deck beams, hanging knees and varnished mast dominating the saloon. It always reminded me of the Slocum era. The following summer, Harry sailed down to visit me, anchoring in McCarrs Creek, Broken Bay, 18 miles north of Sydney Harbour. The creek is behind Scotland Island, and in those days was a magnificent anchorage, sheltered from all wind directions. Visiting yachts often anchored there for the summer. Harry based himself here for several summers, sailing back out to Tonga in the winter months.
Kelasa motoring down the Hawkesbury River, 1978.
I developed a habit of visiting Harry every Wednesday night, taking a basket of food and wine. We’d have a feast and talk about voyaging until the early hours. I never tired of listening to his stories, even if they tended to go on a bit. Then I'd get on my small motorcycle and weave my uncertain way back to my shack along the back roads of the Kuringai Chase. I only crashed the bike once. One Wednesday, Kelasa was on the slipway at Cottage Point, getting a fresh coat of antifouling paint, but we’d agreed to meet as usual. Early that morning, Harry rang me at the boatyard I worked in, asking if I'd like to come down and help paint.
‘Gee, I'd like to, Harry,’ I said, ‘but I can't just take a day off work without notice.’
‘Oh, that's OK,’ he replied, sounding relaxed. ‘I just thought I'd ask.’
I never thought any more about it. When I arrived, he sat me down in my usual place, wedged in beside the mast, the same spot I used to sit in all those years ago in Dead End Creek in Durban. I’d seen pictures of David Matzenik sitting there too, aged 17 in 1967. It was where, it seems, Harry always placed his visitors. It was also where he sat when he was alone on the boat, so I suppose I was the guest of honour.
Harry stood by the stove, preparing the meal. ‘Tell me,’ he said, stuttering, ‘Do you ever have bad thoughts?’
Oh no, I thought, not another middle-aged seducer. There had been others, some quite unlikely, married friends and the like, in recent times. My little-boy-lost persona was irresistible, it seemed. I'd begun to wonder about Harry, who was showing signs of emotional dependency.
‘What sort of bad thoughts?’ I asked reluctantly.
‘You k...k...know,’ he stuttered, ‘r...r...really bad thoughts.’
‘If you can't be more specific, I can't say.’ I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. My scalp began to prickle as I remembered Adrienne's stories. Harry's position by the stove blocked access to the companionway. There was no other quick exit. He had a strange look on his face.
‘Well, just to give you an example,’ he said, ‘you ring a friend up and ask him to help you paint your boat, and he says he can't, and you know he has a perfectly reasonable excuse, but you spend the rest of the day thinking about cutting his head off with your axe.’ His axe, intended for cutting the mast away in a hurricane, was just behind him, strapped to the bulkhead.
David Matzenik, aged 17, sitting in Kelasa's saloon, in the same place Harry always placed me
I’d never known whether to believe Adrienne’s stories. She loved a good yarn, especially over a glass of wine or two, it was an old sailor’s tradition, shades of Moby Dick, but now I suddenly remembered something she’d told me. You have to be firm with Harry, she’d said, show superior mental strength, stare him down and shout.
‘No, I don't have thought like that, Harry!’ I shouted. ‘It's totally unreasonable!’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said meekly. ‘Now, would you like a glass of wine?’ And the evening proceeded as normal.
Kelasa in Rabaul, PNG, Harry loading stores for the Indian Ocean crossing.
Harry sailed back to Vavau that autumn. Saving the cost of a winter overcoat, he said with a knowing smile, quoting our mutual hero, Joshua Slocum. From there, he returned to Sydney in the summer months, repeating the voyage the following year. That became the pattern of his existence for several years. Some summers he went to New Zealand or Tasmania instead, but always stayed in touch and eventually returned to McCarrs Creek. If he had once found Kelasa difficult to manage alone, as he told Adrienne when they first met, he seemed to have worked things out.
His passages were outrageously slow, especially after he was caught by a squall with full sail up one night south of Tonga. He’d come up on deck for a pee in the middle of the night, he told me afterwards. The weather was quiet, with moderate seas, a sky full of stars, and a lovely following breeze. Kelasa was broad-reaching with the mainsail squared right out, the boom preventer snugged up, the boomed staysail sheeted to the tiller, keeping the boat on course, and the jib, at the end of the 12’ bowsprit, sheeted in tight. He saw a tiny cloud to windward, but apart from noting it was a peculiar brown colour in the moonlight, looking like a stone, he thought little of it.
He went back to sleep and woke to a screaming squall, with Kelasa hove down to a crazy angle. Rushing on deck in his underpants, he took the tiller and drove the ship downwind for several hours, soaked and freezing, despite the tropical latitude. Then, in a lull, he cast off the halyards, climbed the ratlines, and jumped up and down on the gaff to bring the mainsail down. After that, he rolled up the jib and double-reefed the mainsail before retiring in the evenings. Kelasa, effectively hove-to, jogged through the night while Harry got his famous eleven hours in the bunk. It was not unknown for Kelasa to take 50 days to sail 1000 miles.
Kelasa running before the SE tradewinds in the Indian Ocean.
Kelasa had no electrics, and most nights the ship was unlit, though near shipping lanes he hung a kerosene hurricane lamp off the boom gallows, for what it was worth. In gales, he took all sail down and drifted. The boat had Dacron sails now, at least, so he was not interminably stitching them. In Hawaii, the unreliable old petrol engine had been replaced with a slow-revving, hand-cranked, single-cylinder 15hp Yanmar diesel designed for fishing boats. It had an alternator but he chose not to install a battery or electrics. He navigated by sextant to the end. Naturally, there was no safety gear on the boat, no radio, flares or liferaft, not even a harness to tether himself. Mind you, Kelasa sailed so slowly most of the time that he could have swum back to the boat.
I think I was his only friend in those days. He wrote me letters while at sea, 30-40-page missives of interminable detail. I remember their beautiful stamps. The Tongan stamps were shaped like bananas. Once, 42 days out of Sydney, while beating painfully to windward off the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, en route to Nelson, he somewhat outrageously wrote that he was starting to like ocean sailing. He’d sailed more than 70,000 miles at that point. You just have to stick at it, he said. In all, he sailed over 100,000 miles and never got into any sort of trouble at sea. He may have been half-crazy, but he was also a superb seaman. He never claimed a love of the sea, saying he was an escapologist, and that he voyaged in the hope of finding something, somewhere, though he wasn't sure what. In his last years, firstly in Hobart and then Mooloolaba, he was lucky to meet people who cared for him.
Kelasa ashore for maintenance at Lawries Hardstand, Mooloolaba, 1994.
I caught up with Harry and Kelasa again in 1994, when I sailed my strip-planked Tasman 22, Mudshark, north from Sydney, and spent time in Mooloolaba. The boat was registered in Hobart by then, and Harry had become an Australian citizen. He was only 69 years old but was not well. He'd lost half his stomach to ulceration, had both hips replaced, and was overweight. His hair was long, tangled and grey. He looked a bit like somebody's granny, and his voice, always high, strengthened this impression. There was no resemblance to the ramrod-tall, muscular and angular-faced lumberjack type I first met in 1969. Kelasa was 28 years old now and looking a bit tired, but Harry worked on maintenance projects every day. I wondered whether, after all these years of roaming the oceans, this was the end of the long sea-road for them.
In 1996, I visited Mooloolaba again, on my way to Far North Queensland aboard my new yacht, the Tom Thumb 24, Arion. Harry, now 71, was looking frailer than ever. ‘I'm not sure if I'm strong enough to hoist the mainsail anymore,’ he confided, ‘but I need to keep Kelasa seaworthy, need to keep my escape route open.’ There was something sad and defeated in his eyes. I wondered if he had given up on life, if loneliness and lost dreams had worn him down. It was as if all the amazing adventures he and Kelasa had shared meant nothing, and perhaps they hadn’t. The heart is a lonely hunter.
Kelasa was looking the worse for wear, despite Harry’s efforts to keep up with maintenance. Built with Canadian softwoods, often unseasoned, fastened with iron and ballasted with concrete, including quite a bit in the bilges, the heat and humidity of a life spent largely in warm climates had taken its toll. Even the saloon looked neglected, with thick dust lying everywhere and stuff all over the place. There were no more shared dinners and long conversations over a bottle of wine. We talked often, usually on the dock, but our conversations were brief.
I sailed away for the north a couple of weeks later. It was the last time I saw Harry. He died on 31 August 2001, suffering a stroke shortly after slipping Kelasa to replace a plank. The work had been strenuous but he'd refused all help, and, truth be known, he would have been impossible to work with. Glenda, who ran the marina office at Lawrie's, was kind enough to write me a letter describing his last days. He had been unsettled at the end, she wrote, not wanting visitors to leave. Lonely to the last, he was lucky nonetheless to have the support of some wonderful people. I wish I could have been there. His ashes are buried next to the BBQ area in Kawana Waters Marina.
Kelasa in Whangarei, NZ, 1967
Graham Cox has been appointed as guest race commentator for Don McIntyre’s Mini Globe Race This article is adapted from his sailing memoir, Last Days of the Slocum Era. The paperback edition can be purchased from Amazon, and the ebook editions from either Amazon or Kobo.