Barrier Reef By Trimaran

Would-be small boat sailors will enjoy Barrier Reef by Trimaran, which tells of the boat building and boat sailing ad ventures of Sydney author John Gunn.

rrtiRED of some of the inanities 1 of his P ublic relations business Gunn decided to build a trimaran in his Sydney backyard and sail it t 0 the Great Barrier Reef, a thousand m ii es north . A screw-by-screw description of his boat building, and a day-by-day account of his sailing expedition to the reef and back is the raw material °f the book, jt turned out to be no easy jaunt and there were times of real danger for him and his crew—which in eluded two of his sons, aged nine and seV en. Bad weather plagued them for most of the way, together wit h a motor which failed each time it was urgent i y nee ded, as when the 35-footer was perilously close to reefs on dark nights, or was at tempting to negotiate a narrow sand bar, or when the rudder was lost, As is usually the case, the best sailors turned out to be the two youngsters, who soon found their sea legs and slept through the worst of the storms and simply revelled in the adventure, * That the tn J l P. aran . emerged so well expedition is a tribute to the boat-building skill of Gunn, who had ? ot P r ? viousl y bui h so much as a * ront , but success wa * also to V unn s commonsense and to hls P revious naval experience,

NaVV Man

7 Although he had done no small boat sailing, he did serve as a navigator of an RAN destroyer in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, before finally becoming a Fleet Air Arm and this naval experience showed him some short cuts in emergencies.

The Barbara Ill’s expedition was short but Gunn is able to paint us a fascinatingly accurate picture of small boat sailing in coastal waters, with its splendid days of sailing as well as its grim days, the strain of the watch and of taking the helm for long hours in a following sea, the mess in a well occupied cockpit after days in heavy weather (“Dawn at sea was always a mixture of squalor and relief, something of the intoxication of the party and the degradation of the morning after”)

and the joys of arriving at places you planned to arrive at.

Gunn’s prose is clear and to the point, as one may expect from an author who has won awards for his children’s books and who is a well known participant in the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s children’s

programmes.

SI.

(Barrier Reef By Trimaran.

Collins. $A3.50.)