Page 260 - harryDEC12_clean.iba

The pilot seemed to know what he was doing. He steered toward a wall of cloud and thought we had enough height to fly over it, and he did so. The feeling of sitting in a small, even tiny, machine at a great height is utterly different from the feeling in a commercial aircraft. I felt a tingling in my soles. I felt anything but comfortable. Fred on the other hand looked through the window with pleasure and spoke with the pilot.
Then the weather turned good and so after a 5 1/2 hours of flying we reached Port du Sud near Noumea, the landing place for flying boats. The landing was gentle. John and Harry crawled on shaky legs out of the machine. Whatever we would see there, there was the oppressive prospect of the return flight that Harry could not suppress. Fred was ecstatic:
„Now we’re going to the marina at Port du Sud’. „Everything’s is French here,“
Harry said to John, and John answered that that was no wonder because we were on French territory. There was no checking of passports. (Later Harry would understand that the jurisdiction played an important role in Fred’s planning.) The taxi trip lasted about five minutes, and then we were standing in front of an oval, surrounded by protective stonewalls, filled with boats. There were permanent anchorages, seasonal anchorages, and moorings used by people sailing around the world. Fred steered toward the front end of the marina. There six yachts of the Swan type 36 foot in mint condition were lying at anchor, each of them worth at least AUD 500,000.
“We’re all as good as new, two years old, we’ll all be insured by you, mate. Each one pays a premium of at least AUD 6,000 a year".
“Who owns the yachts?”
John asked.
“Noumea Yacht Charter - one of my enterprises”.
Was Fred laconic answer. I had inkling; from the condition of the yachts I could
see that they were practically unused, in the second season! Investments that had to be amortized. Something was going to happen, I was persuaded of that-it was a pre-cognition, as it turned out later. Later we would learn that those yachts were a pre-programmed insurance loss that was waiting only for the chance to be put into action, but the ‚timeline‘ was not yet right. That chance came up a few years later as could be read in the Sydney Herald Tribune. Fred proudly led us past the yachts. Lovely yachts, was my prevailing thought at the time. Maybe someday I would be able to charter one of them - in ignorance of coming events and my uneasy feeling. After lunch we went back to the marina and had ourselves taken over to the seaplane that was waiting for us rocking and freshly tanked up in the roadstead.
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