A Captain called Fatty

Sailors have always been on the periphery of society. Periodically buggering off over the horizon puts them in league with bad debtors and jailbirds in the eyes of landlubber society.

One of the international cruising fraternity’s most inspiring couples, ‘Fatty’ and wife Carolyn Goodlander are living life the way it should be lived.

In the sailing world, these people are revered rather than scorned. They allow us to live vicariously through their adventures and doff our caps to those who seemed to have mastered the elusive art of freedom in a world that wants you to be anything but. It is rare to meet the perpetual cruiser these days, as affluence has made popular the opt-in-opt-out kind of cruising that goes with large property portfolios or successful business. But in the quiet reaches of the Whangarei River, waiting out the Pacific cyclone season, are two of the best perpetual cruisers you’re ever likely to meet.

Gary ‘Fatty’ Goodlander and his wife Carolyn are moored only metres from the hustling downtown of Whangarei, but about a million miles from the edge of western capitalist society.

They have been around long enough to have seen it all, from the sextant to GPS, carvel planks to GRP, and from kerosene to solar panels. As sailors who write about it, they have inherited a salty lineage from Eric and Susan Hiscock and Lin and Larry Pardey and have made it their quirky own.

I once heard Fatty’s writing described as “like the Hiscocks without pants.” His style is as unique as it is honest, but comes from unlikely beginnings. Fatty’s father Jim was a WWII veteran who returned to a world gone mad.

He became a beatnik, a fine sailor and raised his family on a 52-foot, Alden-designed schooner, which they sailed around the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. This delightfully bohemian upbringing gave his family a unique grounding in the sea and the art of self-reliance in a post-war world hell-bent on commerce, convenience and stability.

Fatty accumulated only five years of schooling and at the age of 15 purchased Corina, a 22-foot double-ender yacht built in 1932 that he parked behind a factory in a rough section of Chicago’s South Side.

It was there that he got the nickname that would later become his nom de plume (only police officers call him Gary). He’d been doing some acting work, and once the neighbourhood kids found out about it, they jokingly started calling him “Fat,” teasing that he’d soon be a rich actor who got all the girls.

They were close. Instead of getting all the girls he got the best girl: “I have had some luck in my time and marrying Carolyn was one of my best strokes of luck. We have been sailing together offshore for 50 years and I am still totally infatuated with her. Without her, I would not be me,” says Fatty.

Fatty likes to talk. Better than that he likes to yarn. The stories are engaging and full of the absurdity of life. Carolyn is more reclusive, yet you can tell she is the engine room of the operation; quietly achieving among all the confusion and laughter of Fatty’s cyclonic personality.

“I had always wanted to write, yet I was told that was something only people of vast education could do,” says Fatty. “Luckily, I rapidly learned that good writing has little to do with intelligence and almost nothing to do