138 Boating New Zealand
‘Spare Provisions’ was her name and there has never been a
better name for a boat dog since.
By all accounts Spare Provisions was quite a character of a
dog. She saved Erling’s life on one occasion and was indirectly
responsible for the admirable story of a wharf-side dogfight on
the quay, into which Erling waded with fists flying to rescue its
victim, only to find she was not Spare Provisions. For days after
the crew of the Teddy could not look at him without laughing.
At Las Palmas in the Canary Islands the Teddy ’s crew was
increased again by the birth of Tony. At six weeks old he was
heading to sea as the honorary first mate. If Julie Tambs was
the silent heroine, it was Tony who was the hero of the book.
His tales of lost buckets, big fish and an ability to endear
himself to all races and creeds are a lesson on how world peace
might be achieved.
Occasionally luck would desert the crew of the Teddy and
they would engage in a form of mortal combat. For some reason
they would nearly always get away with it. With a grossly
swollen and infected arm, the end looked near on a voyage from
Samoa to New Zealand.
Erling lay in a delirious fever in his bunk and casually
mentioned to his wife that the Teddy was about to ‘sack the
skipper.’ He followed this statement with simple instructions to
Julie on how to bring the fore-halyard tackle into the cabin, attachit to his body, hoist away and at the appropriate moment, let go!
It is the humanity and not seamanship that is responsible for
this book’s success. There is no-one the Tambs family meets on the
four-year voyage that looks at them in anything other than level
terms. That is saying a lot of the 1930s where the class system
proliferated by the British Empire was rife. Itinerant and mostly
unemployed, they would have been dismissed on land, yet their
courage and likability seem to have won them only friendship.
This ability of the crew of the Teddy to bring out the best
in those they came across is finely summed up in the tale of
the Governor of American Samoa who visited the Teddy in his
immaculate white ducks. On finding Teddy alongside the wharf
at low tide with no ladder handy, he proceeded, to his own
delight, to slide down the newly-tarred shrouds to the deck,
much to the horror of the crew.
This book is full of hard-won lessons. It is not just about
sailing an old double-ender halfway around the world or how not
to approach navigation. Its spirit is bigger than that. It is about
family, adversity, humour and a knack of getting away with it.
Although near disaster was a constant in their voyage, the crew
of the Teddy never appeared to worry much before heading to sea,
and once disaster had been averted they never seemed to dwell on
it. Their life at sea had anchored them firmly in the ‘now’ which is
something modern folk pay a fortune in therapist’s fees to fail at. BNZRIGHT The start of the
trans-Tasman race.
BELOW Julie and Tony
Tambs in the Marquesas.
BELOW RIGHT Teddy drying
out in the Bay of IslandsYou put the book down feeling you have found a
new daggy friend and can’t wait to relay his stories...