Episode 13 of The Sailing Podcast is an interview with Jack Binder who, along with his adventurous partner Jude has over 160,000 miles of sailing under his belt. After starting construction of his yacht in 1970 he went to sea in 1973 as part of a team called the 4 J’s. The 4 J’s clocked up over 100,000 miles together – which from memory is about the same distance as sailing 3 times around the world. During this trip the 4 J’s visited over 80 countries and sailed across 4 out of the 5 oceans. This phase ended in around 1987 but my guest relaunched his yacht in 2005 and the team headed off again, although now it was only 2 J’s – Jack and Jude.
I think that the most enjoyable part of producing the Sailing Podcast has been the opportunity to meet fantastic people who also share a passion for sailing and todays guest, Jack Binder is someone who I really enjoyed talking to and he generously gave me some of his time to let me know about the adventures he and Judith had at sea. I suggest you go straight to our guests website – www.jackandjude.com where you will find a treasure trove of information there to enjoy. They have cataloged all of their travels and made their photos, videos and stories readily available at www.jackandjude.com.
This is a 2 part interview which I did over Skype with Jack. I thought I could make this part available while I continue editing the 2nd half. There was a bit of delay in the Skype connection so I’ve been editing as much of that out of the conversation as possible. I hope that you enjoy this interview…
Next episode is Part 2 – Two’s a crew with Jack and Jude Binder
Transcript of the interview with Jack Binder
INTRODUCTION
This is the sailing podcast with David and Carina Anderson episode number 13 We would love you to come and join us on our journey Hello everyone and welcome to the 13th episode of the sailing podcast I think the most enjoyable part of producing the sailing podcast has been the opportunity to meet fantastic people who also share a passion for sailing and today’s guest, Jack Binder, is someone who I really enjoyed talking to and he generously gave me some of his time to let us know about the adventures he and Judith had at sea. I’ll jump straight to the interview today. The show notes will be at the sailing podcast.Com forward slash Jack Binder. Also, I suggest you go straight to our guests website www.Jackandjude.Com where you’ll find a treasure trove of information there to enjoy They’ve catalogued all their travels and made their photos videos and stories readily available at Jack and Jude.Com This is a two-part interview, which I did over Skype with Jack I thought I’d make this half available while I continue editing the second half. There was a bit of a delay in the Skype connection So I’ve been editing as much of that out of the conversation as possible. I hope you enjoyed the interview
David: All right. Well today I’ve got a wonderful guest with over a hundred and sixty thousand miles of sailing under his belt and after starting construction of his yacht in 1970 he went to sea around 1973 as part of a team called the four Jays. The four Jays clocked up over a hundred thousand miles together which, from memory, is about the same distance as sailing three times around the world. During this trip the four Jays visited over 80 countries and sailed across four out of the five oceans. This phase finished about 1987 but my guests relaunched his yacht in 2005 and the team headed off again. Although now it was only two Jays Jack and Jude and I’ve got Jack Binder on the line today. Hi Jack. How you going?
Jack: I’m going very well David lovely.
David: All right, great. Thanks for coming on the show and maybe you could just start us off by explaining who the four Jays are?
Jack: Well the four Jays. When Judith and I first came to Australia in 1969 we were actually traveling. We were actually on our way to Japan and Judith fell pregnant. We were young kids in those days and taken with the idea when the child was born, our first son, we were taken with the idea of naming him with the same initials as we had so we gave our first born the name of Jason Douglas Binder. A year later we produced a second child and, once we found the neck, Jerome came out, and as I’ve just said, Keeping in that trend we gave him the name of Jerome. So we’re all JDBs.
Whilst this was going on David, in the backyard. We were constructing a Ferro-cement sailing vessel and when launched and we took off it was just a cute idea we had of well sort of symbolizing us as a team with an icon with the number four and a J. Coming out the bottom, and little did we know that as the years passed and we continued our sailing life, it became well known. The four Jays became a well-known name around the around the site. So that’s that explains four Jays.
David: Oh wow And so you took off with the boys. They would have been quite young then how old were they when you started? Sailing
Jack: Mm-hmm. Well it we constructed the vessel over a three-year period and That meant devoting every free moment of our life to the construction and at the same time. We had a small business going to finance it because as you can imagine we actually arrived in Australia with Hardly a dollar in our pocket. So it was a lot of work and when the boat was launched in 1973 we had to save money we moved aboard and finished the inside. And a year later in 1974 we thought we were ready to go and we sailed out of Sydney, Australia in June midwinter of 1974 Jason would have been just oh, He would have just almost turned three. No, let’s say Jason would have almost turned four and Jerome would have been just turning three So I guess that makes them two and three when we left.
David: What about their grandparents? Were they a little concerned about them being out on the high seas? I think my mum probably would have had a bit of a bit of a fit if I told her I was taking her precious grandchildren out to sea
Jack: Yes, well look David. We were quite fortunate in all of this because Jude comes from the north of England and I Grew up in Los Angeles, California. We both, when we got together and were married, decided We did not want to live in either location and in fact set off on a trek across the Africa to look for a new place to live. Being down under in Australia, we were a million miles away from the grandparents and So my parents Weren’t terribly much involved. Judith’s mother was a very supportive lady. She her father had passed away, but her mother So supportive it was encouraging and she actually helped financially with a little tidbits. I can remember she purchased our barometer and said ships clock. She purchased, years later, our first two-way radio too, so It’s delightful.
David: That sounds great to have had that support. Well, I mean it not only does it sound like you’ve got a very supportive Grandma there. You’ve got a pretty amazing wife. One That’s Got the adventurous spirit. There to get up and go away and not just at the start But she’s stuck with you stuck with you and stuck with the trip the whole time. I mean, that’s amazing
Jack: Well again, this this is a step-by-step progression you don’t start off sailing across an ocean on a home with infants in tow. Judith and I met traveling and we really did cut our teeth on some dangerous situations and for a honeymoon. We were we were married in the north of England and Put together a Volkswagen van in her mother’s driveway. So her mom was sort of used to our outrageous behavior And we took that Volkswagen van which was fairly derelict to be quite frank. We never had too much money in our lives. So we’ve done things well, we’ve made do with what we could get and the Volkswagen van was pushed and driven over a year Down through Africa and that exposed Judith and I to some very dangerous and challenging Situations. So we learned to rely on each other We learned that to trust the other’s strengths and it did inspire us to try even greater things I think this is what does build, When you try you just go camping you don’t and you succeed in that you try something a bit more Or adventurous and so it goes so by the time we got to Australia we had already we’ve had already faced some major challenges in our marriage and Judith was Judith was gung-ho. She just loves Adventure. She just loves to be out involved in nature. So it seemed a wise Step to do this I should explain at this stage though, that we didn’t actually start out to build a boat.
When Judith found out, or we found out, that Judith was pregnant, We were determined to have a little bit of time with the child and went off looking for a bus in Sydney. Our idea was to fit out a bus and take that around Australia like the growing nomads do today. The only thing was that every time I went to look at a secondhand bus, I found someone building a ferro cement or other kinds of boat right next door. It seemed so, and in talking with these people, I realized that they were hardly any more talented than I was, and Didn’t have much more money than I had and all they really did have was determination to achieve a dream. So I came home one day after Talking with a couple building a boat and just said To Judith, you know, why build a bus? Why don’t we build a boat and take the family? Take our son afloat and and explore the Great Barrier Reef? Her immediate reaction. Yeah, let’s do that
David: That’s amazing. I don’t know why there’s such a sort of question mark over ferro cement boats because I had another guest on the podcast, Which was George and his boat has served him so well and probably about the same vintage as yours But yours is still going strong as well. Is it is it because you put the extra sort of effort into making sure it was built properly?
Jack: Ferro cement is a magnificent material for a cruising boat It’s a warm. It’s Exudes a comforting feeling. It doesn’t it’s not so noisy inside it just feels rock solid, if I can use that expression, and In fact, I doubt there’s much the ocean can do to the boat Itself to damage it. It may not like running up on rocks or hitting piles or being Polaxed by another boat but by golly It sure is strong when it falls off a wave or flips over any of those things that the ocean can do about.
And the trick is with ferro cement is To construct it correctly and not ensure that you have no voids at all in the cement mixed Which eventually will entrap salt water and cause the armature to corrode. They’re going to corrode. Our vessel is what? We launched in 74. That sounds to me like almost 40 years old. So yeah, it has cancer. There’s no question about it I’m every two to three years. I have to gouge out Areas that I’m very familiar with now because there’s embedded metal down in there that that has got a bit of corrosion in it and Metal once it starts a bit of corrosion, especially heavy sections. That’s impossible to get rid of. So, yep But no more.
It’s no more difficult. In fact, I think it’s far easier to repair than most other boat building materials Except maybe steel is a pretty robust and usable material itself Timber and fiberglass can be quite difficult to get a good repair job. Whereas Ferro, You know, I find it rather quick.
David: It certainly sounds like it serves you well over that time I mean even you sailed over perhaps a hundred and sixty thousand miles now. What sort of the most extreme events that you’ve been through?
Jack: My goodness gracious extreme events well in that sort of miles you’re going to. A lot of the early sailing were in the tropical belts of the world, as most cruising boats do. They They love the tropical winds the trade winds blow very consistently from pretty much one direction and Pretty much one speed or they don’t exceed 20 to 25 knots too often. And so that means you can cross an ocean by quite easily setting the sails and setting whatever steering device you’re using and basically just sit back and enjoy the ride This was our grounding and we’re until let’s say 1978.
In 1978 we were asked to take some amateur radio people out to a very remote part of the world To set up their amateur radio stations so that they could talk to as many people as they could around the world. It’s called DX in and it’s quite, it was quite exciting. I didn’t know much about it, but the fellow that I was speaking to on my own Amateur radio because I became an amateur radio operator in this period had gone past a little sand island that he wanted us to go he wanted to go to and set one up. We were on our way to taking the boat to Europe and we were pretty much out of money. We were sailing across the Indian Ocean on our way to Europe to find work and he offered me a Job, a charter you might call it. Yeah, and it was it was so enticing we turned around at Sri Lanka and And pretty much sailed well, we sailed non-stop from Sri Lanka to Fremantle, Australia. That took 38 days across the North Indian Ocean and then we had to make our way south to Fremantle. We got to Fremantle in June. Well June in Fremantle is a pretty windy cold time. And in fact we came into Fremantle sailing fishing harbor under a gale. I won’t go into the details, but it was bare poles and breaking clean over the wall there. It was quite a frightening experience and the harbor-master came down and pretty much forbid us to leave the port. I tried to explain to him that we had work and had to go and we got chatting with the meteorology people on a day-by-day basis and about ten days later He called us up and said, look if you’re going to go across the Great Southern Ocean to the East Coast of Australia, You better go straight away because there’s a big high pressure coming in.
Well cut to the chase, we rounded Cape Luan and entered the Great Southern Ocean and everything went very fine until a depression formed and overtook us and we got caught in a midwinter gale in the Great Australian Bight with 40-foot 50-foot breakers behind us and water breaking clean over the ship. There were freezing cold lightning bolts that scare the pants off you and, yeah, it was the most exciting moment of our life to see nature so powerful and to be involved in it. The boat, once we got her settled down, We got all the main off it and just led by a headsail alone. She’s tracked down the wavefronts beautifully and so I mean once we had that confidence that the boat was going to do it. It well, I think that was the most exhilarating ride. You could ever imagine and the greatest gave us great confidence in the abilities of the of the vessel itself
David: Yeah, that sounds sounds pretty amazing So you were actually you were going to set up your radio towers in the Pacific were you? Is that why you backtrack?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, I had to pick the people up in Bundaberg on the East Coast and sail out into the Coral Sea. About 700 miles out is a tiny little sand island. That is the last possession Australia has Jurisdiction over and that’s why it was a special radio spotted because it’s unique its own unique radio call sign. But the only time you’ll ever Get what’s called a QSL card a confirmation that you’ve communicated with that location As if someone takes a radio out there and sets up an antenna and broadcasts and that’s what they, that’s what they wanted to do. We took four international operators and base camp equipment and a Couple of 200 liter drums of petrol and you name it and sailed out there and set them up on a sand island For a week.
David: That that must be the furthest distance I’ve ever heard anybody going to get a job is to go from Sri Lanka, Down under Australia, and all the way up to Bundaberg. The money must have been okay, or were you that broke that any money was okay.
Jack: Yeah, the money was okay anybody as I what it turned out was like The money that they were paying because look you we were Have always lived very inexpensively on the boat. It’s only because we don’t put out me money for marina fees or anything like that way We were basically a fish and rice sort of people and we still are we do a great deal of hunter-gathering To at least bring a protein into the table. We do our own repair work as we were talking before this podcast David, I have tried to do everything I possibly could for myself or we have of Judith included. And even if it meant making mistakes and failing several times until we actually acquired the knowledge and skill to achieve you know to achieve a goal. This is a way that you end up not having to pay other people to do things for you And you can make the money go longer. In this instance the money that we earn from that would have lasted a year traveling and
I told Harry, Harry was the man who had made it all happen. Dear old Harry’s passed on now. It was such a dear man and when we got him back on shore We set off immediately and go to Japan. Oddly enough would never made it to Japan and that had been our goal for many years. And so I had this fistful of dollars and off we set sail to for Japan Heading north out of Cairns, New Guinea and so on. I’m only telling you this story because Shortly thereafter Harry started we still had our little weekly chats. And he just could not could not express to how wonderful of an experience he had and he said we had to do it again. Had to do this again. He said and I said oh yeah, no, no Harry. I’m going to Japan you know and he said and eventually he just said “look Jack name your price” You know, Can’t tell a man like me to say name your price…
So he wanted to go to a place out in the South China Sea a little sand island halfway between Borneo and Vietnam. Which is, I was a bit naive and ignorant of the area, but it’s in an area called the dangerous ground. It was, in those days, totally Unsurveyed and had a few of the charts that showed the rocks and the reefs out there was done by an aerial survey during World War two. So they were inexact. I don’t remember. We’re doing all of this by sextant. We weren’t in the GPS era there. So all of my navigating was done by swinging a sextant. And it’s a lot more inexact than this than a GPS, in fact You’d be lucky to get within two to three miles of somewhere using a sextant, but Anyway… He talked us into it we went again on another expedition out of Borneo with five People because I named my price. It was a bit more than the first time so they had to take more people on board. This one turned out to be nearly catastrophic because Although the South China Sea is a very quiet bit of water, We encountered people on an island, a little sand island, that we thought would be uninhabited and these people were wearing green uniforms and I remember the morning that we actually made landfall there.
Everyone was on deck looking and wondering what the these little men in green uniforms were and I just said well, We’ll just go ashore and talk to them. You know, they can’t use all of the island… Set up a radio station on the other end and about that time about that time a whistle blew and they started shooting mortars and Rockets over at us. Oh, that’s a nice welcome. Yeah, it really was especially when we had two drums of petrol lashed to the foredeck.
David: And children on board?
Jack: No, the boys we left The boys we left back in Brunei. There wasn’t there wasn’t enough room for the kids and It turned out that the Tunku of Brunei, the son of the of the ruler was an amateur radio operator. So the boy stated with the royal family while we went out and played amateur radio.
David: Oh nice. What did you find out who those men were in the green uniform shooting at you?
Jack: Yeah Well, yes, we did.
Two of the operators Immediately said they wanted to be taken home back to the land as quickly as possible that this was not fun and they had family. And I told Harry, Harry came along too, and I said to Harry, look I don’t know what I want to do that we’re going back when we got back to Brunei. I Had looked at the charts and thought a bit more and I’d found another little sand island about 80 miles from that the first one. And it had a sunken wreck on it and or a wreck on it which makes finding it a bit easier. I told Harry on the morning we arrived back in Brunei, I might go to this place, but I want to know who those people were.
One of the operators had said that they’d talked to the CIA had talked to them before they left America, So I suggested they call and get some answers and it turned out that they, the CIA, had Contacted one of the members and didn’t warn us because they didn’t actually think we were going to go out into the corals, Into the South China Sea.
And the people, the people turned out to be the North Vietnamese who were the greatest army in Southeast Asia at that time. It was just after the Vietnamese War and that’s a very oil and gas rich area, Which was another sort of thing that In my naivety never even thought about. But the Vietnamese were making a claim on those islands, which are Disputed area the five nations that do lay claim to them. I think they still do, the Philippines was one, Singapore is another. So Vietnam had decided well, possession is nine-tenths of the law. We’ll put some military people there.
Well, there you go Just to wrap that saga up or that segment of our life, this was the beginning of a five-year period of our life where we Took the boat to various parts of the world and took amateur radio people out the various parts and it just kept food on the table if you might say, that’s right.
David: So the first one sounded like when you went into the Pacific that was an Australian sort of Job. Was the one up near Brunei was that on behalf of someone in Australia or did you say it had something to do with the family up there?
Jack: Well, they were all organized around the world that you might say. Yep. They were didn’t have any jurisdiction. Singularly and we’re yeah.
David: Okay. Ah, that sounds pretty exciting So you’ve done all that traveling how old were the boys By the time you’d sort of finished that part of journeying, if that makes sense, you know what I mean, like Did they go to school at all?
Jack: Well, they were both schooled on the boat and that’s a very important subject to cover too because I think I’ll go and We’ll go back to the very beginning. How’s that?
David: Yeah
Jack: When we launched the Banyan and then left in 1974, our goal was really to go up to the Great Barrier Reef and To just spend a year or two years if we were fortunate to To share the beautiful wonder of nature with our children before they before they had to go to school.
David: All right.
Jack: We thought right well, we’ll put our efforts into it. We were renting a house when we built the boat we had no other property at all. So this was in fact our first home. Banyanda, which does which in the dialect of the aborigines in the northern territories, means home on the water. And if you remind me later, I’ll tell you how that came about but for right now…
Our goal when we left was to just have one year maybe two and the Great Barrier Reef and then the boys would go To school. But what happened David was that we got up to Cairns and it was still blowing southeast the trade winds on the East Australian coast just don’t let up and it probably didn’t look very inviting to turn around and bash against them. And so we took courage in hand and thought well, Why don’t we go to New Guinea across the Coral Sea? We’d never made an ocean voyage. We’d never navigated outside of land. Was a big decision and one that, Well, I had never, I hadn’t any navigating skills. Judith had to go on to night school to learn it. I learned how to navigate. She knew how to do the figures. So anyways, we said that while we’re sailing I was going through all of her school notes and practicing and well… We missed New Guinea by 50 miles, but that’s another story
David: Okay
Jack: Yeah, I have I’ve been in a bit of an engineer prior to all this. That’s what the business we had in Sydney was. The mining boom was a full tilt in those days and I had some of the equipment that I had worked on and Went over to Bougainville. So Going through New Guinea, I ended up in Bougainville and the people there, they offered me a job and ta-ta-ta-ta! Made some made some savings.
Two years after we had left we came back to Australia with the idea that we’ll put the boys in school. Yeah, so I think this is probably 1976 and Jason would have been five and Jerome would have been about four. And I went to work in Sydney to Get some more funds.
And we started talking to the teachers of Jason’s, I think it might have been kindergarten. The teachers were saying to us, all you really need to do at that age Is to read to the children. If you can read to the children, if you can teach each of them the numbers… The rest of your life is so interesting and they will gain much more than going to school. So they all encouraged us To carry on because we were unsure. I mean we were just young parents ourselves. We had no idea and we wanted to definitely do the right thing by our children But with their encouragement and they loaded us up with lots of books and so on we decided well, we’ll go off and We’ll go north to Southeast Asia this time.
David: That’s actually a really good advice from them even back then because I think you get the same advice now. When with young kids, it’s they’re sort of just trying to hammer home to parents. It’s just read to your kids. It’s so valuable.
Jack: Yeah on a boat. There is countless hours of time countless hours of time It’s something you must deal with well, it’s one of the detractions that really Put some people off sailing because they’re not able to fill those hours of crossing a body of water. Teaching your children filled all of that time for us. Lovely, between yeah, between reading to them and as we progressed we were invited, actually when we Came to America. We were invited by an amateur radio operators wife Who was the teacher, for what’s called the May Carden Academy, to join their System and they would teach Judith on how to administer it. They gave us all of their correspondence type litte books. Yeah, and that that took care of the more difficult years after teaching our children to read and to numbers and so on.
We fell into that and used the May Carden Academy for I think go four or five years. And then we took on Queensland correspondence which was very well organized and with that much time, Judith was Dedicated to the to the task of educating the boys and as a regular routine the school began. And went to if we were crossing an ocean that was that’s what filled the day was schooling
David: Excellent
Jack: Well when we got to where we were going then we dismissed school for a while and went exploring. I think you learn You learn a great deal by just observing when you’re especially if things are new and you can you can learn a great deal just by watching how other people do things or how Things are constructed or just by traveling. This is a great education. Yeah.
David: Well, I think on top of that I mean just spending so much time with your parents would just be amazing as well I mean you guys must have it just an amazing relationships out of all of that
Jack: Well, I’m very pleased to say I do actually I’ve got my our sons still live within Coo-ey of us and We’re the ones I have to go away now. They’ve produced so many grandchildren and so the family is low as rock-solid here we Communicate quite well.
I Remember my own youth and that troublesome time of 18, or 17, 16. You know where you’re a bit rebellious. When I saw it happening to my own boys I just backed off and I didn’t want to push them away and let my kids go I didn’t want to push them away and let well I Said yeah, but if you wanted in my advice come and ask me otherwise I’ll just stand back and watch you go for it and it’s worked very well day. That they’re both the hard-working. They’re very well adjusted that they haven’t they didn’t acquire any bad habits. Say around talking and observing life and they don’t smoke. They don’t do drugs. They’re not terrible excessive in the alcohol. They’re Very friendly outgoing people who are pretty confident who they are. So I personally think raising children in this manner as a terrific way It’s an adventure, you know, and what does a child love most in life and that’s adventure, you know, it’s just every day There’s a new thing to do and a new horizon and it’s very physical. So the boys were not these little butter balls we see so much too often today. They were very muscular and very lean and that gives them a great zest for life.
David: So how old were the boys when, I mean they went to university in the end. How old were they when you Stopped sailing or not stop sailing. So we you brought them back to school eventually didn’t you?
Jack: Yeah, we did we We are sailing, We’re in ever-increasing circles and I mean by that we sailed First time around the Coral Sea up the East Coast New Guinea Solomon’s and back. We sailed then around the Indian Ocean by going up through Southeast Asia out Sri Lanka and then back under Australia to Sydney again. The third voyage was up the East Coast to the South China Sea. We eventually got to Japan from there. Yeah, we then sailed across the North Pacific to America and come back through the South Pacific. So each circle was ever increasing. Oh when we came back after coming back through the Pacific We ended up in Cairns in North Queensland and I became a master.
I took my Examination and became a master of small ships and became an engineer a second-grade engineer and started running a charter ship actually. The go the boys went to Cairns grammar school and I started running fishing boats and Mother shipping and all the other charter work. It lasted, Busy as bees for about a year and a half, and I was at sea a fair bit and the boys were grumbling because well, we weren’t seeing much of each other.
Did say explain that our honeymoon Judith and I spent our honeymoon Traveling over land through Africa and that was a pretty mind-blowing Experience and exposed us to nature exposed us to the real natural world and and so I always I always had promised the boys That we’d take them there and to go on Safari. Whenever I’d come back from a voyage in Cairns they’d hammer me with you know dad, We don’t see him much anymore, and you promised you’d take us to Africa and so one day, You know we had enough money in the bank, and I said right Let’s do it. Let’s go off to Africa and go on Safari.
David: Wow
Jack: Also at the same time David, before we set sail I had gone home to America. Gone home to America, gone back to my family in America, and whilst I was there I purchased what Was one of the very first PCs. I think six suitcase.
David: This is 1980?
Jack: 1984 Yep 1983 – 1984. I went back to America come back with one of these Was called a Kaypro, but it was there was a few of a microbe’s was another one. They were very, very basic computers. Only alpha numerical keyboard, it’s very small though, three or four inch monitor. And did only basic things, but it came with a huge volume of books to teach That what how a computer works. Assembly language lots of different languages and programming tools, so each Morning we organize our shipboard life.
When we cross an ocean, Judith and I pretty much split our watchkeeping down the middle Judith was a nurse so she was used to standing long hours of on the night shift. Yeah, and I don’t sleep terribly well at sea, so Once I get to sleep. It’s not good if I some people should have two-hour shifts some people have three-hour shifts. We’ve just found that it works good for us Said if we shift we just split the night in two and that means that I can get five or six hours in the cot Yeah, it might take me a couple hours to fall asleep it might take longer, but at least I some rest that way and So Judith then after I wake up at daybreak. She goes back to bed and gets a catch-up sleep It’s during that quiet period the boys are up, and I’m up, and that’s when I taught them computing Mathematics and we did the chemistry and the computing part of things. It turned out to be a Terrific subject because I’d spend the daytime hours learning it, reading the books practicing it and then the next morning I’d teach the boys what I’d learned. We undertook a lot of computing programming skills and they They loved it they loved the challenge and what they could do with that little toy and today They’re up to their eyebrows in it. They both have they have their own businesses. One of them is the largest computer retail Repair here in the North Coast, the other ones got a magic business going around keeping all the businesses online and their networks going. So it’s turned out to be Their bread ticket and their method of achieving their goals. Oh, it’s perfect because everything was so basic then that they had to learn the fundamentals of computing back then these days. You sort of you don’t see what’s going on in the background So you tend to just sort of work off somebody else’s software and that have this Huge sort of wide wide-angle view of what’s going on in the background to sort of get from point a to point B. It’s a very solid foundation. Yeah, and in the meantime, They’re on the biggest school excursion never heard of yeah.
David: That sounds great. So you’re on this journey. Yeah, it’s a great way to fill in your time. Did you make it to Africa and get to go on Safari?
Jack: Well, we did absolutely we went down through the southern Indian Ocean through Mauritius and Madagascar and into Tanzania. We hired we hired a four-wheel drive Suzuki one of those little wind-up four-wheel drives and loaded the kids into the back and Put all our camping gear and we had it for a month and took off all through Kenya and into Tanzania the Gora, and Gora crater, Masai Maru, Serengeti, and we camped. I’m not sure how it is arranged today but back in the 80s you were you could actually camp in the game parks. It was a pretty scary experience to be in a tent and hear lions roaring just over the you know over the next hill.
Well that’s that’s exactly what we did. So when we finished with East Africa, One of the boys was studying Egyptian history early Egyptian history and instead of returning to Australia as we’d planned, We had planned just to go over to Africa and come back. Maybe do it and do it in a year or 18 months at that junction. We said well, you know Jason’s studying Egyptian history and it’s just right up here. Why don’t we go up there and visit and see it first-hand see the pyramids and go down into the Valley of the Kings and See the tombs? So we continued up the East African coast.
David: Back in the boat.
Jack: Yeah,
David: So you sail back up the East Coast and into the Red Sea, which not too many people are doing at the moment
Jack: I don’t blame them either. It’s a pretty scary place. Even back then. The Red Sea is a very difficult part of the world. Lots of things are happening. So and it’s also a very hard day about your water to sail to the Red Sea is a valley Mountains on both sides and that means the wind, Is either coming behind or you are dead ahead, and generally if you’re going north It’s coming down straight into your teeth with all those ships. There’s a lot of ships coming down the middle. It’s further encumbered with a what are the most prolific number of reefs anyone’s ever seen So it’s got all the dangers and hostile shores.
Now that Relations have deteriorated so poorly, It’s a very dangerous place to be indeed. We were attacked there ourselves. I Wouldn’t suggest you take a boat up the Red Sea at this time.
David: Whereabouts were you when you got attacked?
Jack: Near Sudan up near the top in there and our attack was, We were trying to maximize the wind was against us. So we were we were tacking across the Red Sea, crossing the shipping channel each tack and, That’s a scary scary event. It’s an amazing amount of ships coming down dead center of the Red Sea and you’ve got to get it through them. So we made our tack as long as possible and I made the mistake of forgetting that the ships that are protecting those shores Would not notice us and we were picked up on the radar of a ship, a Gunship in the middle of the night and they fired machine guns at us. They didn’t know who we were. It was a frightening experience because we were right in their searchlight and, I don’t know how your listeners are going to take to this, but They wanted us to drop our sails and come alongside. That’s the command. They gave us drop your sails and come alongside.
Well, I Just wasn’t about to put ourselves in the control of something like that. I didn’t know what would happen and I refused I refused to do that. Then I brought the boys up on boat on the boat with us on the deck to show them that we were just a family with Children on board. Yeah, thinking that they would not harm young children…
I’ll have the rest of that encounter in the Red Sea in episode 14 of the sailing podcast as we continue with our interview with Jack Binder. Also in the next episode Jack lets us know about their later journeys after the children have grown up and left home. I heard about Jack and Jude because of their writings about their circumnavigation of Australia and Jack will let us know how that came about. We’ll also hear about some of the environmental changes that Jack has noticed just from comparing their earlier voyaging to their travels today. If you’d like to see photos from the sailing trips that we heard about you’ll find them at www.Jackandjude.Com If you’d like to visit our website, it’s the sailing podcast.Com. You could join our newsletter for regular updates on when episodes are released. Just visit the sailing podcast.Com forward slash newsletter Thanks for listening and I hope you have a great day and thank you for joining us on our journey You’ve been listening to David and Carina Anderson of the sailing podcast. And in the introduction that was Midas our golden retriever who likes to bark in the background while I’m recording 🙂