Wrecked yachtsman was not hopeful of rescue

Press, 30 August 1979, Page 10

Wrecked yachtsman was not hopeful of rescue

“When I first hit the reef,” said Bill Belcher, aged 67, the lone yachtsman who was lost. for nearly 30 days off the Queensland coast last year, “I thought, this is the end of quite an interesting life.

“But when I got into the lagoon in my liferaft I felt better and thought I’d probably make it. From then on things got better and better, except one night in a big storm when everything on the raft got wet and I was miserable, but the next day the sun was shining and that made all the difference.” In autumn, 1978, Mr Belcher (born in Australia, educated in Britain, engineering degree from Cambridge, now living on Waiheke Island) was lost during the singlehanded Tasman yacht race from New Plymouth to Mooloolaba, northern Queensland. He was wrecked on Middleton Reef, a well-known hazzard to sailors which had seven other wrecks, including the 13,000-ton Runic and “a pretty complete Japanese tuna boat.”

After waiting for 10 days for rescue he set off on the 300-mile journey to the Australian coast in a rubber liferaft.

It. took him three days to manoeuvre himself off the reef and he drifted for a further 15 days before he was rescued by a Nauru fishing boat.

He thought he had been

well clear of the reef and was having a nap below when he was wrecked during a cyclone. Josephine, his boat, was not badly damaged, and he had about 30 days of canned : food at the rate of one 12oz can a day. ,j He stayed with the boat until he had given up hope of being rescued. , He thought it would take him 20 days to get to Aus-|] tralia, depending on the winds. During that time he caught no fish, only one sea- ] gull. You ate it?—Of course. Cooked? — You eat them warm. There’s quite a lot of meat on them actually. Mutton birds. ] ... Do you often eat birds raw? — No. I hadn’t eaten birds before. I did eat a raw sheep in a battle once, though. ; That was during the Spanish Civil War: he was on the Republican side. At the time he was aged 25, working in ] London, unmarried. (He met his Irish wife, Aileen, an ■ artist and potter, between that war and World War 11, when he flew with the ; R.A.F.) “When you’re 25 years old you have a lot of mixed motives,” he said of his vol-; unteering to fight against Franco. ] He was in Spain for two 1 years and most of the friends I he went with are still there, : buried. | “It was a tough war.” he said. “It’s easy enough to I

fight when you have plenty of gear and food but he had neither: it becomes tricky then.” Mr Belcher said he had not lost his nerve on the Middleton Reef when he had realised no rescue was coming. He does not. believe in God and never prayed. His wife did though. She had flown to MoOloolaba for the end of the race and when he did not turn up, apart from trying to have a search started and dealing with the news media, she spent most of her time in the Mooloolaba Roman Catholic church praying. She is sure her prayers were heard. Mr Belcher is unconvinced. “My wife is deeply religious: she got quite a lot of comfort from her religion at that time,” he said. Mrs Belcher was also in a difficult position financially when she arrived in Australia. “I had all the money,” said Mr Belcher and because she had expected to be living in Josephine she had no accommodation either. She sold her drawings of the competitors in the race to an Australian newspaper and lived on the proceeds. When the couple arrived back in New Zealand, Collins, the publishers “were on to me to write a book almost before I got off the plane,” said Mr Belcher. The book, “Shipwreck on Middleton Reef,” has just I

been published. It includes Mrs Belcher’s drawings of the competitors in the race, which Mr Belcher won in 1974. He did not find it too difficult to write the book. “I’d kept a log on the liferaft and the Australian Navy found a tape recording I'd made on the boat floating about at the bottom of it afterwards,” he said. “It was only a matter of knocking it into shape. Everyone can write one book. I don’t flatter myself 1 could write a second one.”

But he may write one on self-steering for yachts, which he designs and makes. In fact, he has already started it.

Since his adventure his wife has put her foot down about any more singlehanded ocean sailing but she does not object to his sailing with others and he has done a delivery trip to Suva. Apart from the wars, Mr Belcher has spent much time working as an engineer in different parts of Africa. When his father died in South Africa eight years ago the Belchers decided to come to New Zealand to live because their only child, Tony, farms at Waihi.