Ann Britton - 'Dolly on Deck'

• Ann Britton, a yachtswoman of the 60s and 70s was a figure who like many women of her time lived in a world where a man’s story was worth telling but a woman’s story went untold or was scoffed at. A world and a time when the media, and sailing clubs were run by beer swilling, Penthouse reading, cigar-smoking men. I want to tell her story, or at least what little I know of Ann Britton, yachtswoman. 

• Ann’s story, as first woman to skipper her yacht around the world stands alongside famous yachting figures such as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (first solo nonstop) and Sir Francis Chichester who had their circumnavigations made famous. Whilst at the very same time she was circumnavigating, Ann’s story was relegated to a series of articles, “Dolly on Deck” in yachting magazines. Stories about men of valor and their adventures, whilst yachtswoman where what? Dolly deckhands? She wrote those articles I suppose, but it was probably the only way to be read in those days. Anyway, the word Dolly definitely doesn’t spring to mind when remembering Ann.
  
  
  
• When I first met Ann, she had on a man’s shirt, unbuttoned to the waist, exposing a huge cleavage and half of her unharnessed breasts. Her hair was dull and matted and the shirt was filthy. On her right voluptuary she proudly displayed a button portraying the character 'Pig Pen' from the Charlie Brown comic-strip of the day. Warm, charming, funny, uncouth, but definitely not a Dolly in the seventies, playboy sense.
• I can't remember the exact circumstances that led me to buy a sixty-one-foot ketch, or what I paid for Valhalla, I think it was the madness of the times, or the antics of the then owner Ann. I do remember the night we signed the contract though. Nineteen-seventy-two, sitting, totally pissed on the beer-soaked carpet, back-to-back, with the broker in an old pub, where the Ship Inn on Circular Quay, Sydney now stands. The broker and I propping each other up like old mates whilst Ann, still compos mentis, sat on a bar stool, at the bar, throwing back beers with run chasers, guffawing and roaring with laughter, telling her tales to the local-yokals.  
• I first saw Valhalla swinging on a mooring in Cammeray Bay and from the jetty even I, with no sailing experience saw at first glance that the yacht was a thoroughbred. I climbed onboard her with Allan, my sales manager, an experienced sailor. As we helped each other out of the brokers tender and climbed over the rusty galvanized stern rail I wondered what he was getting me into. I was taken aback at both their states of disorder, the yacht and the owner. Ann, who appeared to have just climbed out of the bilges, wiped her huge greasy paws on her skimpy, torn denim-shorts and thrust one at me.
• "G'day mate" she beamed warmly down from the deck, and in her Canadian twang, "welcome aboard Valhalla".
• The yacht looked a project. Nothing about it looked ship-shape. The beach timber doghouse was a shocking dirty grey, nothing remained of the varnish. The old-school pitched deck seams exposed the Oakum caulking where the cracked black tar had been broken out of the seams and ground into the teak deck under heal. The galvanized rigging-screws had left trails of rust down the topsides from gunwale to waterline. Inside there was rubbish and dirty clothes everywhere. The saloon floor had been pulled up displaying a rusty old Bedford diesel engine and a giant tampon, still in its wrapper floated in the greasy bilge water around the bottom of the engine bay. But I was told the boat was going cheap! And a Dutchman can’t resist a bargain, right? Even at the risk of loss of life it seems.

• It was some time in 1972 when I met Ann. Her father had bought her the boat when she was 21. She told us that she was a journalist. That her adventures, in a series of articles entitled 'Dolly on Deck', about her eight-year circumnavigation had been published in yachting magazines. In those times it was an extraordinary achievement. Her voyage overlapped with the time when Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (first solo nonstop) and Sir Francis Chichester made their famous circumnavigations. And although Ann’s wasn’t solo, nor non-stop, she told us that she had sailed into enough ports, spoken to enough yachties and drunk in enough waterfront-bars, during those eight years, to convince her that she was indeed the first woman ever to skipper and circumnavigate her own yacht around the world.
• Valhalla had arrived in Sydney a few weeks earlier and like Ann herself there appeared to have been no attempt to present the ketch in a respectable light. Allan was the one who convinced me to buy her, insisting that the yacht was a bargain and that a young Sydney businessman like myself should not miss such an opportunity. Maybe even enter her into the celebrated Sydney to Hobart Yacht race. He assured me that he had the skill to skipper her.  I had owned a couple of speed boats and grown up around Sydney Harbour, but I wasn't a sailor, but there was no doubt about the beauty of the hull, sleek, long, low counter stern. Even a novice like me, who knew nothing about yacht designs could see that she had a pedigree. It was only later that I realized who the esteemed Robert Clark, her designer was. Clark had also designed Chichester’s earlier yacht, the Gipsy Moth III, forerunner of the famous Gipsy Moth IV in which he circumnavigated, during the time of Ann’s voyage.
• The second and only other time I met Ann was with her new husband, Herman, or maybe Wolfgang. I always get these two names mixed-up and it was fifty years ago, a mismatched couple if ever there was. It was a few days later, to settle the purchase with the broker.
• We met in an apartment they had rented in Elizabeth Bay, if I recall right. It was the seventies and there was booze and grass and lots of yarns. She told us she was selling Valhalla because she had fallen in love with the Seychelles. A group of islands in the Somali Sea, a part of the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar. She wanted to return in a steel bilge-keeler, a boat with two keels, so that she could park it on the beach and live there permanently. A catamaran would have been ideal, but big sailing cats were still a thing of the future.
  
   
• Wolfgang, as the name implies was German. A stocky German seaman, who had worked on live-cattle ships as a cow-puncher.  From memory he was half Ann’s size. Maybe not in stature but definitely in presence and as the afternoon went on and we all got a little drunker and they, quite stoned, he, began to tell us apologetically with a wave of the hand towards Ann, why he married her.
• “It was out of gratitude.” They both laughed. “I’d signed on as crew” he continued. “We were out in the middle of the ocean somewhere in light winds, at dusk. I was hanging off the stern rail, taking a crap, when my lifeline broke and I found myself literally, in the shit.” We all roared with laughter.
• “I didn’t know he was missing at first,” Ann interrupted. “Fortunately, the sea was flat, I put the boat about and sailed up and down all night, following the slick, looking for him.” We all roared with laughter again at the irreverent way it was told.
• “I saw the lights,” Wolf chipped in but I didn’t give up hope. I swore to God that if she found and rescued me, I’d marry the woman. And here we are.” He blew her a kiss.
• Later he took me aside, “Don’t say anything, I haven’t told her yet, but I’ve just signed on again. Going back to my cattle,” and with a wink, “she’s insatiable, I need a break”.
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• It’s interesting how a person you meet only once or twice can become such an unforgettable  memory. She was larger than life, a true adventurer an unknown forerunner to Australia’s Jessica Watson, who was the youngest person to sail solo and unassisted around the world.
•  Unfortunately, Ann never got to write her book, or return to the Seychelles. I heard years later, that a few years after selling Valhalla she died, from a brain-tumor. There are numerous Ann Britton stories I encountered with Valhalla, from people who met her and recognized the boat, as I sailed into ports she had visited before me. My hope is that others who knew her and read my account of Ann, will contact me to add to her legendary story.