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72
APRIL 2012
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
On a good day, sailors competing in the
158-year-old, 50-kilometer yacht race off
South Australia navigate the River Mur-
ray’s shallow trenches, their spinnakers
pregnantwiththewindswhippingupfrom
the Indian Ocean, tacking swi and knot-
tingwell into the double digits. On the rare
badday—and judging by the sun-scorched
faces andhal earted ribbingat theawards
ceremony, this
was
a bad day—the wind’s
near-absence leaves 194 sailboatswith sails
limp as tablecloths, hulls bobbing, sailors
cooking in 97-degree heat and cracking
cans before 10 a.m. and, in a few solemn
cases, motors grumbling surrender. Today,
only a Hobie Cat filled its sails during the
first leg onLakeAlexandrina, and thatwas
because a news chopper hovered too low
and delivered a 100-mile-per-hour blast of
wind directly onto it.
It wasn’t the ideal way to welcome back
the largest freshwater sailing race in the
SouthernHemisphere, one that Australia’s
decade of drought had put on hold since
2007, when the Goolwa Channel became a
mudflat, theMurray a stream, and the soil
an acidic mess. Back then, as the drought
tightened its grip, one of Australia’s lead-
ing hydrologists came to Goolwa to tell
the community that in six months there
would be nowater, itwould be devastating
and therewas nothing to be done about it.
That gave Randal Cooper an idea—an idea
that, in time, would transform this rowdy
“bogan” (more on that in a moment, too)
into the town’s unlikely leader.
W
HEN THE RAIN FALLS ON
Victoria or Queensland or
New South Wales, it makes
its way to the caramel-colored River Mur-
ray. When Mother Nature cooperates, the
river brims. It courses past the dry plains
I could’ve caught a fish, I would’ve let it pull us,”
says Nigel Kies, exhausted and broiled a painful
shade of fuchsia. He swallows half a can of XXXX
Gold—a beer made by a brewery that could
sustain itself solely on the patronage of Kies’ fellow Goolwa
Rega a Yacht Club members—but the brew does li le to ease
the ravages of a long, long day. Kies, quick to smile and, at 33,
one of the younger guys on the scene, was among the crew
on the
Beth
, a World War II–era fishing boat, for today’s race:
the Marina Hindmarsh Island 2012 Milang Goolwa Freshwater
Classic. The
Beth
is owned by Randal Cooper, who’s usually
a man of many words (more on that in a moment), but he’s
through with them tonight. So into the breach steps Kies.
“
If