What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet!
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid
YOU CAN’T SAIL any real distance at sea without getting wet. It just doesn’t happen. At the least opportune moment the helmsman will lose concentration for a second and allow the combined motion of the boat and the next wave to dump half a ton of sea in the cockpit.
‘Sorry, fellas. Never mind, it’s only water!’ is the customary lame attempt at mollification.
‘Sure, mate. Care to empty my boots?’
Worse is the effect of steady rain. Despite the most careful raising of your hood, the deluge will inevitably find some way of depositing an annoying little trickle of cold water down your neck. Gradually, over a three-hour watch, this steady stream will completely soak your thermals and underwear. Old hands like to wrap a towel around their necks, but that eventually becomes saturated as well. As you finally go below the options are clear: either sleep in wet clothes, or spend an exhausting half hour slowly stripping off your sodden garments while you try to find some dry replacements at the bottom of your sea-bag. Nice choice.
But let me be the first to acknowledge that there have been huge advances in the science of protecting sailors against the elements. It’s interesting to follow the development of wet-weather clothing and the way it has been influenced by changes in the sport of ocean racing. When the crusty Norwegian sea captain Helly Juell Hansen swallowed the anchor back in 1877 he turned his hand to making oiled canvas jackets for the thousands of square-rigger crews whose courage kept the wheels of world trade turning. These heavy, stiff ‘oilies’ made Captain Hansen a fortune, and were the first recognised clothing designed and sold specifically for use in wet weather at sea.
The generic nickname ‘oilie’ stuck. Before my first Sydney– Hobart forty years ago the skipper quite sensibly told me he wasn’t interested in taking any crew south who didn’t have their own wet-weather gear. Dale Munro, a member of the crew on Russell Slade’s famous Janzoon II, sewed me a bespoke jacket and pants at his dusty upstairs workroom in the inner-city suburb of Chippendale. I can remember Dale carefully taking my measurements like a Savile Row tailor and then transferring those dimensions onto a graded set of cardboard patterns. Each component of the jacket and pants was then marked out on the bright orange rubberised cloth that he eventually cut and stitched together to make my oilies. That gear weighed a ton, but it did me proud for the next ten years – until the metal press-studs and buckles all slowly rusted holes through the bib and straps. Back then the offshore community in Sydney was so small it could be serviced by one or two small manufacturers. Today, many thousands of sets of wet-weather clobber are sold each year in Australia, and they’re no longer called ‘oilies’, or even ‘wet-weather gear’. The distributors will settle for nothing less than calling them ‘technical clothing’.
Those of us with grey hair (if any at all) remember a simple test we used a generation ago to determine whether a boat was doing serious offshore work. All anyone needed to do was open a hatch and take a deep whiff. If you were greeted by that unmistakably pungent odour of stale sweat mixed with ripening mould then you could be sure the yacht had been ocean racing. That test no longer works. Modern high-tech gear doesn’t retain perspiration or saltwater, and rarely gives off the distinctive pong of old-time bluewater sailing. But it’s taken a generation of development in cloth and design to achieve that level of efficiency, and the progress has come at a price. What we outlay these days for a good-quality jacket, pants and thermals might otherwise buy most yachties a decent second-hand car.
A no-nonsense little local manufacturer named Marlin released the first Australian line of ‘off the rack’ wet-weather gear for serious offshore sailing back in the 1960s, followed soon after by Taft. (The clothing from Taft tended to be lighter in construction, mainly bright yellow spray jackets that were popular with centreboard sailors.) Those early Marlin jackets were more durable, but the price we paid for heavier construction was that they were absolute sweat-boxes. They kept the water off fairly well, but retained almost as much inside.
For ocean-racing crew, perspiration is as much the enemy as wind, waves and rain. When a body is working hard and constantly, it loses moisture at a rate of up to one litre per hour. The early generations of wet-weather gear were made from PVC and unlined. The cloth didn’t ‘breathe’. After 20 minutes of intense physical work on deck or packing a spinnaker below it felt as if you’d been wrapped in a plastic bag. Skin often chafed raw around the most common pressure points at the elbows and knees (let alone the unmentionable agonies of the dreaded ‘gunnel bum’). The other great disadvantage of PVC was that as the air and water temperature dropped, it would stiffen. By the time we’d reached Tasman Island in the Sydney–Hobart, our Marlin trousers were so rigid they’d just about stand up by themselves.
The first real technical breakthrough in off-the-rack gear came in the late 1970s when Line 7, a New Zealand company, entered the market with what it described as ‘high-performance offshore wear’. The cloth was bullet-proof, the jacket zipper truly heavy-duty, and there were robust Velcro closures at the ankles and wrists. A customer could order this snazzy new Line 7 gear in any colour they liked, as long as it was white.
The first range was unlined, but the Kiwis then blitzed their competition by adding a nylon/taffeta inner skin to the jackets and pants. This distinctive blue lining reduced the perspiration problem significantly, but there was one small difficulty: the colour ran. The manufacturers and retailers had to cope with hundreds of angry yachties who’d seen their best white crew T-shirts ruined by deep blue stains around the armpits. Responding to this shortcoming, Line 7 advised everyone to just chuck their gear into the tide for a while, claiming the saltwater would seal in the dye.
Another problem emerged after the New Zealand oilies had been stored away in lockers during the first off-season. The cloth was supposed to have been specially treated against mould, but if you left your Line 7s anywhere near damp the inside surface of the fabric would soon be covered in nasty black splotches. I still have my old white Line 7 jacket from 1982. The zipper seized with saltwater corrosion years ago, the hood has some mould spots and the lining still runs. But the cloth itself doesn’t look like wearing out. It was amazingly tough gear.
The next evolutionary step in ‘oilie’ development was prompted by specialist demands from within the sport. The rise of professional trans-oceanic racing undoubtedly supercharged the development of more durable and user-friendly clothing to match the athleticism of the crews and the terrible punishment they took. Hundreds of sailors were now racing through the extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean every year. Their exploits were regularly featured in the international media and those marketing opportunities were too good to miss.
Henri Lloyd created a range of special gear for the Whitbread Round-the-World teams that featured a new system of coated nylon fabrics with linings. These were much tougher and more flexible than standard wear, but very expensive. During this period a loophole in the law allowed foreign-made wet-weather gear to be imported into Australia as ‘rainwear’, a category that didn’t attract sales tax. But the import duty was still substantial. Any yachtie going overseas was sure to be asked by his mates to bring back a set of Henri Lloyd gear, duty free. A new Australian firm, Burke, spotted this retail niche and soon established a strong foothold at the budget end of the market with locally manufactured clothing. (They continue to offer a good range of wet-weather gear that tends to be more popular with day-sailers and coastal cruisers than among the offshore community.)
And then along came Musto. In the mid-1980s their signature red and white gear suddenly seemed to be on every boat. The Musto company is English, but it was Ian Treleaven’s marketing skill and energy in New Zealand that propelled the brand to such ubiquity in the Southern Hemisphere. The gear was strongly built in coated nylon, with Cordura reinforcement in the seats and knees of the trousers. Musto soon gained a reputation for durability and was also quick to spot that ‘offshore’ and ‘ocean’ grades of the gear could sell side by side, aimed at different levels of use. This differentiation is now an accepted aspect of the market with most manufacturers supplying at least three grades of clothing. The rise of Musto inevitably put huge pressure on the older brands. Line 7, once the undisputed market leader, now had difficulty moving with the times and was still manufacturing in PVC. The company also tended to sell its familiar old lines too cheaply in an attempt to compete with Musto. It’s always a serious marketing error to under-value your own products, and Line 7 eventually retreated from the wet-weather business altogether.
But nobody stays at the top of the tree forever. By the time of the fiftieth Sydney–Hobart in 1994 Musto had resurgent manufacturers Henri Lloyd and Helly Hansen snapping at their heels. They knew that to challenge for market dominance they would need to deliver a reliable product that featured the latest breakthrough – breathable cloth. A company in the UK that specialised in supplying material for outdoor apparel had devised Gore-Tex, and a new generation of yachting gear was born. The gold/yellow cloth that signalled the patented wonder fabric burst onto the scene like sunshine. If you didn’t have that Gore-Tex logo on your oilies then you just weren’t competitive. At the same time, Helly Hansen was developing its own alternative breathable fabric.
Early versions of that cloth were not without their problems. Salt dried onto the exterior surface and stopped the jacket from breathing. A heavy crewmember sitting in a puddle of deck water could exert so much compression on the fabric that water would be forced back up through the micropores that allowed the cloth to ‘breathe’. It’s no fun discovering you’ve got a wet rear-end after just paying out more than a week’s wages for new gear. In Australia, competition between the Henri Lloyd and Helly Hansen brands for the ‘breathable’ market was so fierce that local prices dipped below overseas levels. When some competitors in the second half of the 2000/01 Volvo race switched to a new style of slightly lighter clothing manufactured by the British company Gill, the battle for market share broadened even more.
The contemporary trend is for lighter, simpler, more flexible clothing. Separate linings are gone – that function is now built in as the inside layer of the multi-laminated cloth. Jackets have been stripped down and streamlined to the point where they are now no more than a racing ‘shell’. The new Slam clothing from Italy has made quick gains in the high-performance market and features an advantage close to the hearts of all distance sailors: a genuinely waterproof zipper. External pockets – not long ago the hallmark of quality gear – are now largely dispensed with, replaced by sleek hand-warmers. Some manufacturers are now releasing styles cut specially for the female figure and there’s a heightened awareness of specialised applications, and of building clothing to a range of price points. While real quality is never cheap, competition between brands means that the local dollar price of top-end gear has remained virtually static for the past four years. This has largely been achieved by manufacturing in China, where labour is cheap.
Consumers are now also protected against exaggerated performance claims by an agreed set of standards. ‘Waterproofing’ is accurately rated by resistance to millimetres of mercury pressure. ‘Breathability’ is tested in grams of absorption per 24 hours. You can check this information on the swing tags attached to all new gear. But never be fooled into thinking the latest high-tech clothing will guarantee perfect dryness. Sometime soon you’re going to get wet through. Trust me.