Mark Baker

Issue 96 : May/Jun 2014 Like most sailors, I hold a healthy respect for Mother Nature and accept most of what she has to offer as an interesting challenge. Storms, tides, and headwinds are all part of a sailor’s day. There is one exception — the midnight mosquito attack. I’m a light sleeper and, by spending most nights on the hook while cruising, I already sacrifice enough precious hours of sleep to checking our position or responding to boat movements in shifting winds in the night.

They called it the “Mini Tet” offensive. In late April 1968 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched a second wave of audacious attacks on Saigon and across the south in what would become the deadliest month of the Vietnam war for the United States and its allies. In early May, the 1st Australian Task Force deployed two battalions to an area twenty kilometres north of Bien Hoa city to intercept and disrupt the enemy forces withdrawing from Saigon.

Eighty years ago, 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and far from home, the greatest battleship ever built — and the pride of Adolf Hitler’s fleet — met an inglorious end, blown apart and capsized in the shallows of a remote Norwegian fjord near the fishing port of Tromsø.