Episode 14 of The Sailing Podcast is the second part of our interview with Jack Binder of www.jackandjude.com. Jack continues on with the story of his encounter in the Red Sea and covers some information about the situation in East Africa and what has led to some of the problems in Somalia.
Jack and Jude had an intermission in their sailing adventures – a time spent on land and enjoying nature on the Richmond River in northern New South Wales. Banyandah was up on the lawn and they constructed themselves a house. In 2007, after rebuilding the yacht they decided to head off on a sailing adventure once again – now as the 2J’s – and with a plan to circumnavigate Australia.
Next episode is a Multihull conversation with Jim Brown
Transcript of the interview with Jack Binder (Part 2)
Introduction This is The Sailing Podcast with David and Carina Anderson, episode number 14. We’d love you to come and join us on our journey. Hello everybody and welcome to the 14th episode of The Sailing Podcast.
Today we’re back with part 2 of our conversation with Jack Binder. Last week we heard how Jack and Jude’s adventures began with a honeymoon travelling across Africa, that they then travelled to Australia looking for a new home. While shopping for a bus to continue travelling in, Jack found that there were many ferro-cement yachts being constructed in people’s yards, and given his skills, he felt he could probably do just as well in construction making one himself. Once Judith gave the go-ahead, Banyandah was born, and Jack and Jude, along with their two sons, began voyaging as the Four Jays in the home-built yacht. Last week we left the interview with the Four Jays sailing up the Red Sea on their way to show the boys the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and Jack and Jude found themselves off the coast of Sudan being fired upon with machine guns by a gunship who ordered them to drop sails and allow them to come alongside. As there had been recent acts of piracy in the Red Sea, Jack declined the offer, and that’s where we pick up the interview today.
Jack: 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, and I brought the boys up on the boat with us on the deck to show them that we were just a family with children on board, thinking that they would not harm young children. I don’t know whether that’s wise or not, but it was my thought at the time, and they did still harass us, and we kept ducking in behind the boat. Every time it came bared down on us, we did a bit of trickery and jibed around their back end and headed back out to sea. Fortunately, after several hours of chase, they just pleaded with us to give us all our information and where we were registered and so on, and they let us go.
We did this basically because that same very day on the radio, I was talking to a yacht in front of us, they had dhow come up behind them, and the dhow rammed their boat and some people jumped on board, and the skipper of that boat brought a gun out, and there was gunplay and so on. It got to be rather scary, so we were already high tension, didn’t want anything like that to happen. I mean, when you’ve been around people with guns before and you’re totally under their control, mate, it’s a scary place to be.
David: Can I ask you, being with a young family, did you ever carry a gun?
Jack: Well, we did. Yes, I carried a double-barrelled 12-gauge shotgun for many years on board the Banyandah. It was originally purchased to hunt goats. The Great Barrier Reef, when first settled by the English, they loaded up those islands with goats as a means of food for any stricken sailors, and in the 70s, the islands still had plenty of goats on them. I was a hunter-gatherer. I was in charge of bringing the food to the table, and it was just another source, so that was the means of having a gun in those days. When we eventually went into Southeast Asia, well, life is not quite so precious up there. There are people there that are maybe not as well mannered as some, and we were threatened a couple of times. Just merely showing the gun was often enough to deter anyone who might think of boarding you. I wouldn’t know how to advise people, because I was with Per Tangval when he lost his wife in the Sulu Sea, and she took a pot shot at the pirates, and they blew her right off the boat. Guns do bring violence. It’s a bit of mixed bag what to do with them. I don’t have a gun anymore. We don’t carry guns. It’s not allowed by the Australian people. Some people had pistols. Other people had shotguns. They are a pretty good close quarter machine. They make a big boom, too. It’s a good deterrent. I don’t want to hurt people. I’m a bit of a pacifist to be quite frank, and I don’t really ever want to be in a position where I have to take someone’s life to protect my own. It’s not something I want to do.
David: The thing that crosses my mind with your story of sailing through the Red Sea and it being dangerous back then and it’s dangerous now, I guess at the end of the day things really haven’t changed that much. Maybe the communications are better. When something happens it gets a little bit more publicity, perhaps.
Jack: No, David. Don’t believe that it hasn’t gotten worse. It’s much worse today than it ever, ever has been. Much, much worse today, and the reason for that is the poverty of the people has degraded. I wrote in my last book, Where Wild Winds Blow, about the situation with the pirates today over there, and you’d have to understand the situation that has taken place in Somalia, which is where today’s pirates come from, and it’s degenerated. Look, Somalia had a government that was all right. It was a very poor country. They got hit by a devastating drought for many, many years, and the government of the day collapsed. The powers, because they are a tribal people, as many places in the world are, the Far East comes to mind, a lot of places in the world are still quite tribal. The two warlords that took power in Somalia fought tooth and nail, and while the country was so out of rule, a lot of other countries in the world took that opportunity to fish in the Somalians’ waters and to dump medical and nuclear waste in their waters. This has caused a great deal of sickness to the Somalian people. This has also caused a loss of the ability to bring food to the Somalian tables and any form of earning, even the slightest living, and so the fishermen who have traditionally fished those waters have reached breaking point and have resorted to, well, at first they just wanted to have a payment for taking their fish, and over a period of time, with the warlords backing and being armed by the warlords, this has degenerated into a hostage-taking situation, and unfortunately it just doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to it, and so even going anywhere near those waters today I think would bring great danger to a yacht.
David: I’ve had this conversation with my sons at some stage watching some of the events that happen over there, and I’ve said to them, it’s very hard to imagine what you would do. If I was in their situation and I had nothing but I had a family to provide for, how far would I go?
Jack: Well, I think one of the strongest urges that runs in the human strain is survival. It’s just, you know, we’re going to face this situation, David, maybe within your son’s generation or possibly even sooner because the resources of the world are being chewed up at an alarming rate, and when the food starts to run out and the fresh water supplies start to run out, I think you’re going to see that there’s going to be increased tensions in parts of the world which are going to create even greater firestorms than we’re seeing today, and I don’t, I wouldn’t want to predict exactly what’s going to happen, but I think we’re facing a bleak time ahead unless, unless, well, I’m a firm believer that the world is overpopulated with the human species, and unless we can actually sort of level it out or preferably reduce it through natural attrition, then we’re going to face a situation where our resources are not going to be able to stretch, and I think we’re then going to see some great, some great, some great fighting going on there.
Going back to the Somalians, we had an encounter ourselves when we sailed up that East African coast, and it’s a terrific story that I retell in Where Wild Winds Blow because we, we had to go into some islands in the Socatra. Socatra is off the Horn of Africa, and we had an encounter with the Somalians there, and it was a very, very frightening experience that turned out quite differently than that, quite differently than that. We got a great insight into the people, and they’re just like all, every human we’ve ever met. They, they just want to provide food for their children and a future. That’s all basically the people of the world want. They want to secure the food for their family and a future, and if they’re allowed to do that, we can live far more harmoniously than we do.
David: I haven’t looked that much at your book, Where Wild Winds Blow, because I’ve, I’ve seen Two’s a Crew, which is the story of you guys circumnavigating around Australia, which I was going to ask you about as well. Which one of those books did you write first, Two’s a Crew or Where Wild Winds Blow?
Jack: Right. Well, we’re going into the 2Js era now because to bring our listeners up to the present day from Egypt, which we did eventually visit, Jason was then studying the Greek Empire, so the natural’s next step was to go to Greece, and once in the Mediterranean, well, you’re halfway around the world, so we, we did continue and sailed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and oh my goodness, I’ll tell you lots more about our adventures in the Galapagos and, and Easter Island. We were extremely proficient sailors by this time, and we had a great boat that was very reliable, so we took her into the most remote, interesting parts of the world on our last hurrah with the boys and, and circumnavigated the world over a three-year period or four-year period and come back.
As we came across the South Pacific a second time, we made plans to acquire a property in Australia, and I had a great desire then to build a house. I had never built a house before, and it seemed like a great last project to have to the boys to pass on the skills that I had acquired in building interiors of boats and stuff like that, which is pretty much what we did. We acquired this small piece of ground here on the Richmond River, and it was a cane paddock when we got it, and we lived aboard the Banyandah in front of this bit of, bit of paddock, and over a period of time built a, the house that we’re living in today, living on board the boat in the front yard. We put the boat on the front yard and had a ramp going up inside of her and a plank that led to the second story of the building, and so that was our workstation, and the boys, they were involved for the first year and a half, and then they went off to school. Then Judith and I spent three years building the house and earning our living at the same time making furniture for people, so it developed into a, well, whilst we did deliver a few boats in the first few years to keep our hand in, after a while, that’s quite scary business taking on someone else’s problem, so with our own boat on the land, we basically fell in love. It came about that we wanted to practice our navigating skills. We wanted to still be totally surrounded by nature in its purest form, so we took the bush walking and wilderness walking eventually, and Judith and I would put a rucksack on our back and just go into the forest for a week or ten days and navigate as best we could in those days using a topographical map. So this became our life, building furniture, and we’d do a half a dozen, a week or two ten-day walks each year to re-energize. Jerome got married and produced a grandchild, and the whole catastrophe of getting your child on his road in life, and the years ticked by, mate, we got another circle of friends, and I think we’re celebrating our 38th anniversary in 2005, and after the party, looked at ourselves in the mirror and said, oh, we’re getting old. I’m going to be 63 already, and there’s a lot of gray hairs, and we totally rebuilt our boat in this time. Having a timber yard working shop just next door, we gutted her and rebuilt a new interior in it, reinstalled the machinery, and she was with the idea that we were going to go off and do our thing again, so sort of decided then and there that if we were going to do it, we’d better do it.
So we launched the boat a year later, did some final touches for another year, and we set sail in 2007. Basically, David, we had one sail in our river, saw that things went up and down and round and round, and the next time we sailed, let go of the jetty, we went straight across the bar and out into the Tasman Sea and headed north for the first time in 17 years or some long period of time.
David: Was it like sort of putting on an old pair of shoes, or was it really nerve wracking like a beginner again?
Jack: A bit of both. It’s like putting on an old pair of shoes on an old body. That’s the truth of it. We had the systems down. We knew how to do things, but not in an old body, and old bodies get tired. It’s the balance also. You’ve got to have fairly good balance to manage a sailing ship, a small one, and that’s a critical factor, but we did a two-night sail straight up the coast because there’s not much between us and where you are, up near Fraser Island. Our main goal was to get in behind Fraser Island and put both the boat and ourselves to its paces over a couple of months and to get up to speed, you might say, before we tackle the bigger challenge. We were. We got in there. We had to learn to sort of navigate the boat again through shallow water. We had to learn how to row a dinghy again to get those muscles toned up. We had to learn to be able to leave the boat at anchor and walk away from her and do things on the land without worrying sick. Just the people who sort of become so attached to their boat, they won’t ever leave it, don’t really benefit as much as they could. We did that. Well, I won’t go into the whole thing, but I got with an appendicitis and that put us back. Some health issues came up, but eventually, by June, we were able to set sail and over the next two-year period we circumnavigated Australia, going up the Barrier Reef to Thursday Island and across Darwin into the Kimberley area, which we had never actually explored. Using our bush skills, our wilderness survival skills, we explored on the land the Kimberley area because we became absolutely entranced by the paintings that are there.
So we started exploring to try to discover as much new art as we possibly could. That just became a passion for Judith and I. Then we went down to the West Coast and in those travels we met a young couple going the other way who were thinking about going to Japan. So in sharing an anchorage with them, we unloaded all the knowledge we had ever gained in our seven-month visit of Japan and they had, oddly enough, they had sailed from Perth to Tasmania nonstop and had made a landfall on the West Coast of Tasmania, the Forbidden Coast, the one that’s racked by all the westerly gales, and hearing them say that they had entered Hales Gate after a two-week voyage across the Great Southern Ocean, I thought, well, if you can do that, we can do that. We’re going to do that ourselves. So they set off to go to Japan and we set off and sailed to, strung through Hales Gate on the West Coast of Tasmania and had a magnificent crossing of the Southern Ocean.
So when we arrived back in Ballina after a two-year trip around Australia, we sat down and wrote a book called Twos a Crew. That’s what it was, Two on Board Banyandah, and it was the 2Js now instead of the 4Js. We were very much interested in the history of Australia. It’s a fantastic, heroic deed. Our forefathers did, and there’s a lot of stories hidden in the smaller parts, remoter parts of Australia, which we discovered in going around. And so we wove some of that history into our tale of two older people taking up the challenges of the sea again. And the book, Two’s a Crew, became, well, it was also to try and encourage, I have a great desire to get the young, and young and hard, we’ve got an unquenchable need to encourage the young, and young and hard to connect with Earth and to help turn around the bleak future that Earth faces. And so that was a great part of Two’s a Crew.
David: So part of the way you’ve written the story is to find sort of a younger audience?
Jack: Well, a young enough audience, I would say teenagers, where they can see, they’re questioning where they’re going. You know, as your teenagers may be doing, David, what future is there for them? Where it lies ahead? Is there any adventure still left in life, or is it just, you know, get a job and nine to five and slog away and tell you each retirement age? Well, that’s never been the way with Judith and I. We started traveling first and didn’t think about assets or anything. You want to travel while you’ve got your health and you’ve got that energy and you’ve got that sort of courage that you don’t worry that you’re going to be facing danger because you’re probably going to bounce. It’s not like when you’re a gray nomad and fall down and break a hip and that’s all there is to it. That’s more what we face now in our lives. But when we were young and full of guts and vigor, well, that’s something you might want to consider. So we also wanted to compare the natural world with what we saw when we were younger to what we see today because we wanted to just see whether or not Earth has been suffering by this great expansion of population. And so we made sort of comparisons to the wildlife that we had seen in the younger years, back in the 70s and the 80s compared to 2008 and 2009.
David: Yeah, that would have been very interesting to see change. I mean, even just watching a town grow around you has changed, but to go back and visit places with a fresh sort of look at it, what was the, dare I ask, what was the overriding opinion there?
Jack: Well, I think you probably know it’s finally at the forefront of a lot of discussion today, man’s defect on planet Earth. I mean, I really do feel for the wildlife, but more than that, I feel for the human population because we’re losing that interaction, that great warm feeling, that amazement that we feel when we see wildlife live. We spoke about this the other day, didn’t we, David, about the numbers of whales going up the East Australian coast and the feel-good feeling we get when we see them cavort around with their young.
David: That’s right, I’ve seen them coming through this time of year here and it’s just amazing. I just can’t help stop and yell at everybody to come and have a look and yeah, it just gives you a fantastic feeling to see them, just connects you with it.
Jack: Well, yeah, well, see, and it was the exact opposite in the 70s and 80s because there were very few whales. There was not many whales at all. We’d be lucky to see one whale a year, and yet today they’re just everywhere. And that is because man has changed his way of life and nature has, in fact, recovered. Well, we find today that the bird life is much less than it was before. The porpoises are much smaller schools than they were. The fish life is decimated. We have actually, you know, our modern methods of fishing now can just doesn’t leave a lot left. And while we like to, you know, our politicians point to best practices and so on, the truth is, you know, there are economic forces here and we don’t always make good decisions. And, you know, we do kind of paint ourselves in the corner quite often and say, oops, you know, I mean, the crayfish in Tasmania are under great pressure now, and the list is long. And climate change itself, while it’s discussed at great length, and there are disbelievers, I don’t say there are not, but the East Australian current, which is a hot water current generated by the trade winds in the South Pacific, it pushes that water straight across the Pacific, that hot water, it hits the Australian coast and turns north and it turns south. Well, it always turned away from the off the Australian continent around Eden down on the South Coast. Well, today it’s not doing that. It’s crossing the Bass Strait.
That hot water is now going past Tasmania’s East Coast and waters, which were normally quite cold, which promote bull kelp and seals and all of those other creatures that live down there are now the bull kelp is dying and all the creatures that are dependent upon the bull kelp and all of that cold water, they are also being affected by it. So I have been reading just recently that there’s two other great things, ramifications that I don’t even think we’ve even thought about. And one of them is the immense amount of CO2 that is now in the atmosphere that’s causing things like the ozone holes and so on is in fact being absorbed by the oceans. And that CO2 is raising the acidic acid level, the pH, and lo and behold, we’ve now discovered that that’s having an effect on the creatures that form shells, you know, that form calcium carbonate for the shells that’s just in the minutest detail, their shells are thinning or are becoming malformed. And so even at the micro level, the creatures that the krill eat, you know, the lowest level of our food chain, we’re finding now that those creatures are not forming correctly. And so it’s going to undermine the very basic level, base level of our food chain and I shudder to think what the next decade or two is going to bring. I know it’s scary with the, yeah, I’ve heard some other reports I’ve listened to talking about the amount that the oceans are absorbing. I mean, it tends to, I think, even hide part of the long term effects because it makes a little bit harder to see. But I think that there’s a point where the ocean is going to stop even being able to absorb as much of the carbon dioxide and that could be one of those tipping points apart from the effects it’s having on the fish that it may even accelerate all of the changes that are happening.
David: Yeah,
Jack: I don’t think our scientists can really accurately predict what’s going to happen or, at the rate it is going to happen. It may be one of those exponential things that one thing affects another and so on. And the devil will be in the small detail, the things that we don’t see. And we’re constantly being surprised. So yes, there’s some powerful forces amongst the people to counteract that. But the greatest thing that’s happening now is that every person on this planet needs a house, needs shelter of some sort, and every human on this planet needs food on their table. And so we are gobbling up the resources and using the energy. And if I could say we’re reducing the quality of life. To me, I’ve had such great joy in mingling with the natural world. It has just brought such satisfaction that my journey through Earth life has been so full and so satisfying that I feel sorry that others are not going to be able to have that. We have this base instinct of hunter-gatherer that probably dates back to caveman days.
And I mean, there’s a lot of people who love fishing. But I personally am a bit saddened when I fish because it’s decimating the fish population even more. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. Or my family in America, they’re hunters. They like to go and hunt antelopes. It’s not my thing, but I was a hunter. It’s a certain, I don’t know, satisfaction of bringing food to the table. It’s satisfying a basic instinct. It’s a fine thing to do that when there’s a prolific amount of life around that where it regenerates. It’s like logging the forest. Logging the forest is fine as long as the forests keep regenerating. It’s only the fact that we have now is having such a huge effect on the natural resources of the world that they’re not regenerating. And so that’s when we are saddened by our effect.
David: It’s a bit out of whack now. It’s the same way you were saying. Consuming the natural resources, it’s sort of out of control in relationship to the population.
Jack: Indeed it is. And it’s only going to get worse, mate. But we don’t make things that last because that won’t mean that the people will be out of a job. It’s a simple fact. We have to keep making and using and disposing and buying more so that the factories can keep knocking them out and so on. The whole system needs to be studied and I think the young people will do that. They’re very intelligent and they’re aware of what’s going on. And Judith and I, we’re just wholeheartedly committed to at least make them aware that it’s a major problem. It is the problem facing planet Earth.
David: Jack, on the subject of your books, I’ve seen them on your website. That’s www.Jackandjude.Com. And people can find Two’s a Crew there. And what’s the background on where wild winds blow?
Jack: Right. Well, look, after we circumnavigated Australia and ended up back in our hometown here, I actually celebrated my 65th birthday with the family here and sat down and said, where to now? I mean, we’ve done, we achieved the goal we set out to do and we had to come up with another plan. And the plan that we eventually decided on was to go around Australia the other way. We thought we’ll pick up on the places that we did not see. There were still parts of Australia and parts of the Great Southern Ocean and the Australian Bight that we just have never visited. And that’s the most interesting. And there were a few things that we did not achieve on that circumnavigation that we wanted to, like became quite involved in the decimation of the Aborigines in Tasmania. And they were taken to a particular location where they were all, the last of them were herded onto a very remote part of Flinders Island. We wanted to go there and we never did get a chance to do that. We also attempted to climb one of the tallest peaks in Tasmania, Mount Sorrell that overlooks Macquarie Harbor. We didn’t quite get to the top and we thought, well, if we went back, we’d attack it from a different direction and we would reach the summit. So off we went. Well, we did do those things. We did get to visit Wybalenna, and we had a very emotional visit to where these people were housed and contained and where they finally, most of them died actually. And we did, I won’t give too much away, we did actually get to the very top of Mount Sorrell. We’re probably one of just a dozen people that have ever been, actually made it to the very top of that very difficult trip.
We explored the top of the Bight. There are a group of islands there that were first discovered by the Dutch in 1628 at the top of my head. I might be wrong on that number, but some of the first Dutch ships that got lost actually got that far and discovered a group of islands at the very top end of the Bight and we wanted to go there because they’re very remote and so on. Anyways, we did that journey. We got to the west coast of Australia and decided we don’t really want to go back up the coast just now. We want to go back to Tasmania. We had such a great trip across the Great Southern Ocean. So we, well, when you own your own boat, you go where you like and we turned Banyandah around at Albany and we sent that sail across the Great Southern Ocean for the third time and headed back towards Tasmania with the idea of sailing underneath and heading for Hobart, but things happened. It wasn’t quite as good a journey. That’s a very difficult part of the world and can be tempestuous and stormy at any time. Well, the title of the book is Where Wild Winds Blow and that entire trip, I tell you, we had some very strong winds and they tested our skills and our physical stamina and there was one other goal that I had always wanted to do and I still do, David, and that’s to write about the time that we spent with our children exploring the earth while float.
And so in Where Wild Winds Blow, I started to include some stories that took place back in the 70s and 80s, our most scary encounter, our longest journeys and things like that, and I wove them into that book. And again, the same thing contains historical antecedents woven into the, you know, the adventures of a couple of aging veterans. It’s capped off by a very lovely story of a couple that we met and made friends with and how they shared part of that journey with us and how that turned out. But I won’t give too much away. It’s too good of a read to tell you all of it here online.
David: Jack, it’s just amazing to sort of, in my mind, I’m trying to picture all these different places that you’ve sailed and even just then when you’re recounting going back up into the Great Australian Bight from Tasmania, you sort of under understates some of the amazing sailing journeys you’ve done. I mean, even just circumnavigating Australia, it’s not an easy task. You’ve done some, there’s some pretty major achievements.
Jack: Well, it’s step by step and ever increasing circles. That’s the way it goes. And you don’t start off by taking giant steps first. And I would advise anyone listening to this podcast not to jump off too much to begin with. I would suggest that you just take it easy, step by step, and build upon it because extraordinary things can happen. And if you don’t have the skills and the systems, the routines, they’re going to be quite scary. They’re going to be life threatening. And so you just must take things step by step. And fortunately, as I’ve said a few times now, I’ve got the lady. We have the skills. We’ve got the boat that can do it. And so we have set ourselves these tasks that are quite challenging. We don’t often see many other vessels doing this. The circumnavigation, yes, there were four or five other vessels at that time. It’s quite dangerous in the Kimberley. The tides are huge. The currents are great. The water’s quite turbid. There are some parts of Western Australia, that north part that’s very remote. And again, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get into a lot of trouble. And I don’t want anyone to be getting into trouble and have to call for assistance because not only are you putting other people’s lives at risk, but you will be restricting our freedoms of the sea.
So be prepared. Have your ship as well prepared as you possibly can. And take baby steps until you really know what you’re doing. You’ll enjoy it a lot more.
David: And Jack, you’ve done a lot of recording of your journeys as well. And people can go to your website, jackandjude.Com, and have a look there because you’ve kept some videos of the trips as well.
Jack: Aye, that we have. Something we failed to do when we were younger and we thought we’d try and make up for it now, and that is record in video form our adventures. And so we set off with a good quality video camera and shot about, I think, 125 hours of videotapes when we circumnavigated. One of the major tasks was to convert that and edit it down into a three-hour video, which was quite successful. But when we started, when we wanted to publicize our book, we thought we’d do it by putting on free film shows around Australia. And that meant putting the video down to 90 minutes into 45-minute segments that an audience can actually sit down and get through. And so it’s now, that Two’s a Crew video is available on our website, jackandjude.Com. And we’ve been taking videos every time we go out. So there are now four different videos. There, you won’t see too much life and death activity on these things, but you’re going to see some magnificent scenery. You’re going to see a bit how we do manage the boat and how we manage our life. And you will be taken into places that you don’t, you would not normally get to. We’ve now got a kayak on board. So we’ve been taking that kayak up the rivers of West Coast Tasmania into some beautiful country. And we’ve made a lovely video of the gulfs of South Australia, which is far more beautiful than I ever imagined. It’s a fantastic part of the country, the gulfs of South Australia. So we did a one-hour video, we call that South Australian Holiday, and it was really a holiday. It was just unfortunate, it was winter time, so the seas were a bit big in places. But by golly, it’s some beautiful and great fishing there too.
David: It’s amazing the amount of content you’ve got on your site and that you’ve got available. I mean, there’s a lot of free stuff there. I’ve been having a look through the wonderful pictures of your earlier trips. You’ve got some webpages with the trips out, putting up your antennas and things, and all the way through to these trips as well. And there’s a lot of free stuff there too, isn’t there, Jack? A lot of stuff that people can just go and have a look at.
Jack: Oh, absolutely, yeah. This is not really a money-making operation. The prices are of the books and the videos, cover the cost, and keep the website going, and that’s it. Judith and I are retirees. We’ve made the magic numbers, and thankfully we live in such a wonderful country. And let me just tell you that we do live in such a magic, wonderful country. In so far as that we can travel anywhere. We are an island continent, and we have no borders to cross. So there’s nothing stopping us from just setting sail from wherever we are and going completely around, not having to tell anybody, not having to report in, not having any police on our doorstep or anything like that. So this is a magnificent country, and it’s set up on some great values of looking after the population. And so we do get a small retirement fee, which, because we are very frugal in our life, is enough to keep us going. We do, we built the house, so we own the house. So we’re very fortunate in our present situation. So look, it’s not to make money. It’s actually, we’re committed to sharing the knowledge that we gained in our lifetime and to encourage everyone, young and young at heart, to have a go at it.
And so, yes, the videos are there. The photographs, we’ve put up every photograph that we can imagine. What else is there? There’s a screen saver system. Judith is a magnificent photographer. She’s gifted at taking wonderful pictures, and some of the better ones we’ve put online to either use the screen saver. What we do, there’s some larger files there, too, which we print out and post size and just give them away as Christmas gifts, put them in a picture frame, and they make a very inexpensive, lovely Christmas gift.
David: You were saying to me that even the books are available as downloadable sort of e-books as well. They’re not very expensive, are they? Well, that’s right. We’re into the modern age again, and Two’s a Crew has been converted into electronic format. Into several different versions that’ll fit any e-reader, be it a Kindle or a PDF to use on your computer or any of the devices, the Nooks and the Sonys and all of those, even the iPhones. There’s a format there. You can download it. It’ll fit on your iPhone, and $3. That will get you a book of, oh, it was 312 pages in the printed form.
And even more than that, in the electronic form, I went back and I put 200 photographs in, in color, which is cost prohibitive in the printed industry, but in the electronic industry, I went back and put 200 photographs in there, more than 200, and more maps and so on, so that you really do take the journey with us. Where’s the best place to pick up the e-copies, the electronic formats of the books? Well, again, you can get them right off of our website. We’re a do-it-yourself mom-and-pop organization, and you can get them at iBook, if you want to buy them from the American iBook. They sell them. Nook has them online now, too, and I think Amazon.Com will very shortly, but not just yet. But for sure, you can get them directly off of our website, jackandjude.Com.
David: I’ll just divert here, too, all the sailors listening to this.
Jack: I have been trying to get an online cruising guide up and running, because when you’re wondering where you might go with this wonderful adventure machine, this magic carpet, often the thing that is hardest to do is to find information. So I have been generating cruising guide information for the places that we’ve been. So far, all of Queensland, all of Tasmania, South Australia, and the southern coast of Western Australia is online with details and so on, maps and color photographs, and where to anchor, GPS positions. And so if you’re looking for that sort of information, you’ll find it there. You can download it. I met someone in Tasmania, printed it all out, and was going up the Gordon River using our guide.
David: And that’s on your website as well, is it?
Jack: Yep, that’s on the website as well. Because I think we’re sailing from Cairns back down to Noosa in a couple of months’ time. Is there anything there to help me out?
Jack: A couple of months’ time. You’re going to be bashing into it, buddy. Yeah, I know. A friend of ours has got a boat in Darwin, and he’s going to bring it around. He wants to get it back down to Noosa. So we sort of volunteered to just help him, just the Cairns down to Noosa section in the school holidays for a couple of weeks.
Jack: School holidays are in September?
David: Yeah, late September.
Jack: Late September. It might be easy enough by then. October’s probably a better time, but you might be lucky. Yes, you’ll find information. That was courtesy of another yacht. Ocelot documented that area. Judith and I have been up that barrier reef many, many times, but Ocelot had already compiled some lovely and factual webpages for it. And I would invite any cruising yachts person listening to this, that if they’ve got information, this is a collective effort. The idea is to get online free for the boating public, a very factual cruising guide. Because for one thing, there’s bookstores just at every anchorage, but often you can get connected to the net. So our idea of having a free online cruising guide for Australia is a wonderful thing. I’d like to see it happen.
David: That sounds exciting. I’ll have to look into those parts of your site. I’ll have to go back and check it out.
Jack: Yeah. Well, also, look, there’s a lot of short stories, too. If people aren’t interested in buying the book, that’s fine and dandy. There’s quite a number of short stories that I have written over the years, and you can go off to Easter Island with you. Easter Island, that’s one story I wrote about the boys’ adventure on Easter Island. We were there for quite a few weeks and became involved with the locals there. There’s the one that I’ve just put up, Tears in Paradise, and that’s another one dating back to the 80s when we almost lost our lives. I made a very big blunder and it turned out to be catastrophic. I won’t give anything more away than that. You can go and get online right now, so you can go and read it. It’s a real tear-jerker, I’d say. I’m scared at Spratly. I see that listed there. That will give you a bit of an insight. That had to do with being shelled by the Vietnamese in the South China Sea. To the naval of the world is visiting Easter Island, which is way out in the far reaches of the Pacific. Hardly anyone goes there. There is no safe anchorage, but it’s the one that’s got all the statues. We got taken in by the most amazing man, and you should read his story, too.
David: That’s terrific. Jack, thank you so much for your time. We’re up to a couple of hours here, and I really appreciate you giving your time. Also, you must spend a lot of time putting all that stuff on your websites as well. As a finishing thing, just tell me, what’s the plan now? You’re talking to us from your home, Richmond River, and the boat’s in Hobart. What’s on the list things to do now?
Jack: Well, we’ve got this wonderful machine that can go anywhere in the world, and we’ve got the skills to take it. Look, I’m 68 years of age, and it has crossed my mind that if we don’t do some of the things that we’ve always dreamt about doing, we probably may not get the opportunity to ever again. So on the list of things to do is to go to New Zealand and to go to the fjords on the South Island at the bottom. We often talked about doing a long trade wind sail once again so that we can just have that warm, balmy breeze in the sail set and not have to touch them for several weeks and just sit back and immerse ourselves in the wonders of nature and so on. And so there is the ghost of the plan of going from Tasmania around the bottom of South Island to New Zealand, visit the fjords and go up to the top into the North Island during the summer months, and then as winter approaches, sail for somewhere like Vanuatu. I haven’t been to the tropics for a while and enjoy the paradise of clear water and tropical fish. We’ve got it in mind of going across the top of Australia again and to see that wonderful rock art and again to touch the places that we sort of missed the first time and to maybe make it a different, you know, another bite at it. So that’s one option right there.
David: That’s awesome. I just like listening to you. It’s so inspirational to sort of hear. It’s inspirational to hear about all the adventures that you’ve had and also to know that it’s not over yet. There’s plenty more to do and you’ve still got that spirit to get out there and keep on soldiering on. That’s fantastic.
Jack: We are just ordinary people. There’s no two ways about it. Just like everyone that’s listening to this podcast right now. If you’ve had a dream and truly if you stick to your dream and don’t mind hard work, that’s what it takes. Just never giving up and hard work. And we’ve had that lovely blessing of good health. Without good health, things just will not happen. The other thing I encourage all the young people to gain as many skills as you possibly can and to try things. Even if you fail, you’re going to fail every new thing you try. You learn what doesn’t work by trying and failing. Just pick yourself up and you will eventually succeed. And by succeeding, you just added another skill. And as I told you in the earlier part of our conversation, every skill you gain is a stepping stone to more and to greater ones. So I’m very fortunate, Judith, too, that at our time of life we have a whole quiver filled with different skills. So it’s served us well. I commend all the young people to go for it. To take life by the short and curlies, as we say, and to go for it. It’s a lovely, lovely experience.
David: That’s lovely advice as well. It’s a terrific way to finish up with that and hopefully it will inspire people to get out and go and have an adventure and go and enjoy the world, and the environment while it’s still in the state that it’s in and just get out and have a great life.
Jack: Yes, indeed. Well, I think that’s a good advice, David, because then they will become connected to Earth and they will appreciate this lovely planet all the far greater and they’ll be making the rules in the near future. So that’s the way we will end up with a wonderful future here. And I want to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak today and I do hope that your listeners have gained and enjoyed the conversation as well. If there ever is any way I can help any one of them, well, you’ll find a way of contacting us there on the website jackandjude.Com. Just send us an email and we’ll be very happy to communicate.
David: Excellent. I hope everybody goes there to have a look, Jack. It’s a wonderful website.
Jack: Well, thank you very much, David.
David: All right. Thanks, Jack. We’ll talk to you later.
Jack: Cheers, mate.
Well, thanks, Jack, for all your time and your wonderful advice. I can assure everyone that Jack’s 100% genuine in his offer to give assistance to anyone out there who’d like to contact him through their website, jackandjude.Com. Try and find some time to have a look at their photos. And those prices for a digital copy of his books? Just a few dollars. That’s less than a coffee. That’s a bargain. And e-readers really seem to be prompting a second life for sailing books. We interviewed Pam Bidderman in episode 10, and Pam emailed me the other day to say that her book, Sailing to the Far Horizons, is now available in digital format. And next week I have an interview with designer Jim Brown, who’s released some of his books in digital format, including his Sea Runner construction manual. I’ll have the show notes for this episode at our website, www.Thesailingpodcast.Com forward slash TwosaCrew. That’s the name of Jack’s book about circumnavigating Australia. If you’d like to support the show, please take a minute to leave me a review on iTunes. This will help others to find us and share our podcast. Thanks for listening. 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.