‘Do you come from a land down under? Where women glow and men plunder…?’
Remember that? It was the unofficial theme song for the crew of Australia II when they lifted the America’s Cup from the New York Yacht Club in 1983 off Newport Rhode Island. As it happened, my crew and I sailed into Newport harbour in the thick of the action. We had just completed an east-west North Atlantic voyage via Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. We were bound for Mystic Connecticut where we planned to lay up for a month or two to bang the old boat back together. Our 1911 pilot cutter had taken a hammering in the Greenland Sea and we were running short of jibs. We were now in day-sailing mode and Newport looked like an ideal stopover.
It seems incredible today that we had no idea about the historic events
