Thirty-six years is a long time for a dream to sit waiting. Ben Ball was 14 when he picked up Bill Belcher's 1979 book, Shipwreck on Middleton Reef – The Story of a Tasman Survivor, read it straight through, and found the Solo Trans-Tasman Yacht Challenge lodged permanently somewhere in his thinking. Wearing race number 19, he is finally doing something about it.
The timing is deliberate. Camellia, Ben's 1976 Salthouse Cavalier 36, turns 50 this year. So does Ben. Two milestones, one ocean crossing, no more excuses.
"The Solo Trans-Tasman has been on my radar since I was a young teenager. I am very excited that this long-held dream is finally going to happen."
"I needed to do something cool for my 50th, and it doesn't get much cooler than this."
Camellia arrives at this undertaking with genuine offshore credentials. 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 the design went into production. She measures 11 metres LOA with a beam of 3.6 metres, displaces six and a half tonnes, and carries the kind of serious offshore character that Southern Ocean thinking shaped during her era. She has been part of the Ball family since Ben was five years old, and over the decades has completed at least 13 passages to the Pacific Islands, with Ben aboard for the majority of them.
She has also been upside down at least once. A big wave off Fiji rolled her during a family trip, squashing the gold rotor, washing away the storm jib, and tearing the headsail. It fell to a younger Ben to bring her home with most of the electrics dead and half a headsail to work with. That passage was his first as skipper.
His qualifying miles for this campaign were logged in characteristically understated fashion. Departing Noumea solo last September, he reached Auckland in five days, completing the required 500-mile solo passage on the very boat he will sail 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.
His message after that qualifier carried a different tone altogether.
"Back home now. Got my anchor down at 11:30 last night and some much needed rest. 7 days and 10 hours, just me, Camellia and the ocean. It was a gift that I have been looking forward to for a long time."
Ben is clear-eyed about where he stands in the race itself. Like a number of Solo Trans-Tasman sailors who spoke with Boating New Zealand, he views the event less as a competition to be won and more as something deeply personal.
"I'd be really happy if I get there before the prize-giving. [Competing is] just a personal thing, a selfish thing for me."
Camellia will cross the Tasman exactly as she is. Ben has no intention of stripping out the interior for a few extra knots. The granite benchtops are staying. A roast dinner is firmly on the at-sea menu, and he jokes that the saloon will serve as a smoking lounge, though the port and cigars are strictly reserved for arrival at Southport.
He is not, however, cavalier about safety. He holds the equivalent of Cat 1 certification, has completed survival and first aid courses, and has passed through three formal inspections. His sleep plan follows accepted solo offshore practice: a 20-minute timer, up for a scan of the horizon, then back down. AIS will alarm him if shipping traffic closes in, and he keeps channel 16 open throughout. His offshore experience tells him that other vessels will often call him up mid-passage to work out passing arrangements.
"It only takes 10 minutes from when you first see [another vessel] on the horizon to when they're on top of you, so even getting up every 20 minutes won't save your life."
That 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 vessel preparing for an ocean passage deserves.
The family dimension to this campaign runs deep. Ben's father initially tried to talk him out of the crossing but has since booked flights to the Gold Coast to be there when Ben arrives. His wife has taken a more pragmatic approach, leaving herself some flexibility in her schedule. One of his three sons plans to meet the boat in Australia for a week, and his eldest, aged 22, will crew Camellia home.
"He's Googled it and decided that July is probably the worst month to do it, but there won't be any cyclones," Ben says, with the fond exasperation of a father who knows exactly where that streak came from.
The shape of the whole adventure is quietly compelling: a man sailing out alone, returning with his son, aboard a boat that has carried three generations of the Ball family around the Pacific and home again. It would be easy to read too much into that. But sometimes a 50th birthday adventure is exactly what it looks like.
Camellia and Ben Ball leave for the Gold Coast on Friday.
Race Start — Saturday 30 May (12:00pm)
Join the crowd and give the fleet a send-off they will never forget! The best vantage points are Opua Wharf or the Opua Cruising Club.
