Ben Ball has been waiting half a lifetime to sail his 1976 Cavalier 36, Camellia, across the Tasman. This year, he’s out of excuses.
That was 36 years ago. This month, wearing race number 19 from the Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge, Ben Ball will point Camellia‘s bow north and go.
The timing is deliberate. Camellia, the 1976 Salthouse Cavalier 36 that has been in the Ball family since Ben was five years old, turns 50 this year. So does Ben. It felt like the right moment to stop making excuses.
Camellia is not a stranger to serious water. Her hull traces its lineage to Doug Peterson’s slightly smaller Ganbare, winner of the One Ton Cup, with the deck later redesigned by Laurie Davison before going into production. She is a proper offshore boat: 11 metres LOA, 3.6 metres wide, six and a half tonnes, built for the Southern Ocean conditions of her era.
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Over the decades she has completed at least 13 trips to the Pacific Islands, with Ben onboard for the majority of them.
She has also, on at least one occasion, been upside down. A big wave off Fiji rolled her on a family trip years ago. The gold rotor got squashed, the storm jib was lost, and the headsail was torn. It fell to a younger Ben to sail her home, with most of the electrics dead and half a headsail to work with. It was his first trip as skipper.
Ben logged the required qualification miles for this campaign in characteristically understated fashion, departing Noumea solo last September and making Auckland in five days, completing his 500-mile solo requirement on the boat that will carry him across the Tasman.
“My 500 miles is five days,” he notes, with the faint air of someone who could have gone faster if he had wanted to.
Ben knows victory is unlikely. But like many of the Solo Trans-Tasman sailors Boating New Zealand spoke to, he sees the event less as a race to win and more as a deeply personal challenge.
Camellia is as she is. Ben has no interest in stripping her bare in pursuit of speed. The granite benchtops are staying, and he fully intends to cook a roast while at sea. He jokes that Camellia’s saloon will become a smoking lounge — complete with port and cigars — though strictly reserved for arrival celebrations in Southport.
That said, he is not cavalier about the crossing. He holds the equivalent of Cat 1 certification, has completed survival and first aid courses, and has been through three formal inspections.
His sleep strategy follows the accepted solo offshore protocol: a 20-minute timer, up for a look around, back down. AIS will alarm him if shipping traffic gets close, and he keeps channel 16 open. His experience out in the deep blue is that proximate traffic will call him up mid-passage to coordinate passing arrangements.
This is simply the reality of sailing alone offshore.
By day, Ben drives a travel lift at Orams Marine in Auckland, commuting from Waiheke partly by boat. Camellia spent a month in the Orams shed before the race with the rig up, receiving the attention a 50-year-old ocean passage requires.
The family connection runs deep. His father, who originally tried to talk him out of the crossing, has since booked flights to the Gold Coast to be there when Ben arrives. His wife has taken a more pragmatic approach to scheduling, leaving herself some flexibility. One of his three sons is planning to meet the boat in Australia for a week, and his eldest, at 22, will crew the trip home.
Ben says, with the fond exasperation of a father who knows exactly where his son got that streak from.
The journey out and back, the father arriving alone and leaving with his son, and the boat that has carried three generations of the Ball family around the Pacific and home again: it is tempting to read too much into it. But sometimes a 50th birthday adventure is exactly what it looks like.
Camellia and Ben Ball leave for the Gold Coast on Friday. We will be avidly watching their progress and thinking of the port and cigar once he arrives in Southport.
