A Yacht Called Erewhon Read Online Free PDF

no-cooking stand so early in the piece.
    I woke up to the sound of the dawn chorus. Dad had been up for some time, eager to make the most of the daylight hours. The barbie was roaring, and in the middle of the dancing flames was a billy of steaming mussels. The hotplate to one side had bacon and eggs nearly ready, and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air.
    ‘Come on, you lot, we’ve got work to do!’ he yelled.
    I grabbed a towel and a bar of soap, dashed down to the river, stripped off, and plunged in. To my surprise, Mum was close behind me and showed no qualms about following me in. Matt was a few steps behind her, and with a giant belly-flop he nearly drained the river.
    What a way to start the day, as the ice-cold river bit, making our bodies tingle all over. The three of us thrashed about like school kids until Dad bellowed, ‘Come and get it!’
    We wrapped our towels tightly around our chilled bodies and were soon tucking into the piping-hot breakfast and working on our plan of attack. The first step was to cut the track from the riverbank to the hull and then work on the gap through the puriri trees.
    While Dad and Matt cleaned up the dishes, I went over to the bulldozer and got ready to flash her into life. Agatha, named after Hepi’s cantankerous old aunt, was, in his words, a pig-headed old bitch and, just like her namesake, needed a bit of priming. In Aunt Agatha’s case, a slug of gin in the morning had got her sparking on all four, but the mechanical Aggie was more demanding, and I had to run around with the grease gun and lubricate every point. Hepi had warned me that if I missed one nipple the infernal machine wouldn’t start.
    After this ritual, Aggie kicked into life, and with the customary billow of sooty black smoke the engine roared, shattering the tranquillity and announcing to the world that the recovery mission had begun.
    I climbed into the driver’s seat and, as the usual groan came from deep within the gearbox, engaged reverse, backed off the trailer, and headed off in the direction of the riverbank. Dad and Matt grabbed some heavy ropes and leaped on the counterweight behind me. We rumbled down to the shore and headed up the riverbank to the point we’d planned for the track.
    I’d driven Aggie many times and always got a buzz from her sheer brute power. I loved the smell of diesel exhaust fumes and the freshly turned earth as the dirt squeezed through the tracks—and the satisfaction of knowing I could move a mountain if I wanted to.
    To limit damage to the bush, the track we cut was the absolute minimum and, as we were only removing manuka regrowth and other scrub, it didn’t take long. Having always driven Aggie on confined city building sites before, I revelled in the freedom of the wide-open space and had to curb my desire to go wild.
    Unlike their urban counterparts, the puriri were tall and lean. They were relatively young trees and had grown straight and branch-free for the first ten to fifteen feet.
    Matt jumped in the bucket with one end of a rope, and I hoisted him up high so he could reach the first branches. He looped the rope around the trunk and tied it off. Dad secured a snatch block to the base of the next tree, threading the heavy rope through the pulley and back to Aggie’s towing hook.
    I selected low gear and took the strain, edging forward. The rope groaned as the load came on, and I gradually dragged the trunk away from the new track. At a height of about three feet above the ground, Matt and Dad measured the gap between the two trees that stood on either side of the track.
    ‘Nineteen feet nine inches!’ Dad yelled. ‘Lash her off at that.’
    I repositioned Aggie and hoisted Matt high into the opposite tree. With the rope in place, Aggie once again took the strain. This tree was a little less keen to concede, and Aggie was working up a sweat. Matt and Dad held the tape across the gap as I kept the power on.
    ‘Nineteen ten, nineteen