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17:59 23/02/97
Up the Coast
Day 1: The previous two weeks have would have made a good script for a gritty, working class British comedy; "Bread" perhaps. You see, my mate Tony, owner of a 1953 ex mine sweeper, waste oil recycler, and true adventurer, was having a breakup with his lady.
If you wonder how that effects things you don't know our Tony. The fact is, Tony's domestic breakups are quite famous, being more on the scale of nuclear war. They always involve feuds between the respective parties hanger's on, many visits from the police, and at some point various sides sounding off on television and in the papers.
I kid you not. I hear that the local cops all try to be on vacation, or at least take a sickie, when they hear Tony's current relationship is shaky.
He averages about one such episode every ten years, which is plenty for everyone. Anyway, it takes at least that long for his finances to recover.
You see, Australian family law (that's what they call divorce law here) favours neither sex, rather, it favours the slimiest. This is hardly surprising as it was set up by a left-wing lawyer turned Supreme Court Justice who openly boasted that his aim was to destroy the Judio-Christian system (traditional family values).
Suffice it to say that my mate Tony is never the slimiest, despite putting in an honest effort. That also says about all that needs to be said about his taste in women.
Incidentally, if you wonder why Tony and I, the most conservative of creatures, are such old and good friends, well, he has many good points and has always been a good and true friend to me, and to others. Besides, with Tony around I don't have to go and have all these risky adventures myself. I get quite enough excitement just watching him.
Naturally it's pretty difficult to prepare a ship for a major voyage amid all this low farce. Anyway, a week and two days late the Curlew finally cast off, at 1PM Thursday morning.
Day 2: 1PM as we tried to pull away from the Rockhampton river wharf it became apparent that the steering was not working properly. Typical of my mate Tony. He had done some work on the steering but not tested it to see if it actually worked. Eternal optimist that bloke.
We nearly ran over a house boat, but thanks to Captain Rob Rae's cool thinking and action no great damage was done. Hiring Captain Rob was a wise move.
Captain Rae, incidentally, is a retired captain and marine surveyor who now delivers vessels part time. He has led a life right out of an adventure novel while retaining a very pleasant personality.
There were twenty eight people on board, the most useful being a few aging ship's engine enthusiasts (thank God for them), Tony, Tony's hanger on Mark, the captain and myself. The remainder of the crew, if it could be called that, was a bunch of backpackers and young unemployed who were soon universally known as "The Ferals".
Mark, incidentally, was also having a little trouble with the law and spent the days before departure worrying that he might not be allowed leave town. He need not have worried, the impression I received was that the last thing on earth the the police wanted was for either he or Tony not to leave.
I might be mistaken, but I could have sworn I saw three car loads of cops cheering and jumping up and down as we left.
Tony, who is quite a brilliant shady tree mechanic, and the engine guys did a sterling job of keeping the engines running. Problem was that the only one who could even plot a course on a chart apart from the Captain was me.
That gave us a competent command and navigation crew of one and a half; the Captain being the one and yours truly the half. There was little time for luxuries like sleep.
On the bright side working with a professional captain and having to accept that much responsibility taught me a lot, fast.
The most useful of the backpackers were two Cornish girls, Elly and Helen, out here on holidays. They and a cook handled the catering, doing a good job in difficult circumstances.
Mark was doing ok with Elly, pity he was on the rebound from a freshly failed marriage. Still, I gather the impression the Elly had left a few problems back home, so maybe they could offer each other a shoulder to cry on.
Anyway, back to the plot. It took us until after dawn to negotiate the twisting Fitzroy to its mouth. Everyone was eagerly watching for crocodiles but they must have seen us coming and quietly disappeared.
Morning found us stuck on shoal. Pretty normal occurrence when navigating the mouth of the mighty Fitzroy. Like most Australian rivers it has serious problems with silt build up; a legacy of the increased erosion caused by agriculture.
By mid morning the tide had come in enough to float the Curlew off and we were on our way up the coast.
It's about a thousand kilometres to Cairns from the mouth of the Fitzroy. We should have covered that in about 40 hours cruising at the Curlew's normal 12 knots (22 kph). Alas! It was not to be.
We passed Emu Park, Yeppoon and Great Keppel Island (Rockhampton’s seaside resorts) and were heading towards the army training area at Shoalwater Bay when darkness and very rough conditions set in along with Tony’s endemic seasickness
Tony, you see, suffers from the most miserable and persistent seasickness I have ever seen. What causes anyone who gets that sick, that easily, to have anything to do with boats quite eludes me.
The high seas and faulty steering made the ship a nightmare to handle, but Mark put in a superhuman effort.
We thought we were doing ok until the small hours of the morning when strange lights started showing up to Port and Starboard. Had us stumped as there are no towns where we were supposed to be.
Eventually, we realised to our horror that we were seeing the lights of Yeppoon and Great Keppel Island. We were back where we had started that morning!
Sometime during the night the gyrocompass has flipped 180 degrees and sent us back exactly (thank God) along our old track.
With that Captain Rob decided to drop anchor and call it a night, a decision made easier by the engines packing up. Actually, a bit easier said than done off an exposed lee shore in a storm. We nearly pulled the anchors out of her, but finally they held.
Day 3: Come the morning we decided to go back up the coast to Port Clinton. This is a shallow, sheltered area in the Shoalwater Army Training area. It is chiefly famous for its sea turtles and dugongs.
We were effecting repairs when an army helicopter turned up. They flew round and round us holding up sheets of paper on which they had scrawled messages. Not that there was much point, they were quite unreadable even with good binoculars.
Not that we had to read them, it was pretty obvious that a live firing exercise was under way and they wanted us to leave. We did, but not until we had fixed a few things.
By mid morning we were out. We continued around Cape Townshend and up past Mackay.
Day 4: By the next morning we were navigating the Whitsundys.
I really must take a yacht back one day and explore that area properly. It is beautiful; a perfect yachting area.
Then began the long, fast haul up the coast past Bowen and Townsville. Clear water all the way to the next group of islands off Ingham.
You have no idea how much I enjoy being out in the deep ocean in a good, fast ship.
It was then that we discovered that the electronic chart for the complex knot of islands and reefs around Hinchinbrook Island off Ingham was missing. Without that to load into our satellite navigation system we would be back to plotting our position on paper charts, though admittedly the GPS would give us the latitude and longitude.
We hit it in dark of the night, along with, it seemed, every oil tanker, container ship, and trawler, all trying to force their way up the one, none too wide shipping channel at once. As if that wasn't enough they were all determined to make the passage at the highest possible speed.
Incidentally, ships move much faster than you might imagine. We were sitting on 12 knots, which interprets out to 22.2 kilometres or 13.8 miles per hour. This might not seem much, but when you are trying to navigate a ship as big as a block of flats through a maze of reefs it is terrifyingly fast.
When we reached the bad part I gave up and called Captain Rob.
Day 5: Come the morning we reckoned we were almost there; how little we knew. Just as we were feeling cocky the funnel caught fire. That is when I discovered that, for some insane reason known only to British engineering, the funnel consisted of a labyrinth of aluminium pipes and baffles, over a pair of two stroke Napier diesels.
The problem is that the Napier's produce a lot of carbon in their exhausts, which is pretty typical of two strokes. This builds up in the funnels, then catches fire. Carbon burns hot enough to start the aluminium burning.
I found out later that the navy just kept a warehouse full of spare funnels and bolted a new one on every time one burnt. These funnel, mind you weigh 7 tons and cost a lot of money. No wonder our defence forces manage to achieve so little with such a lot of money.
Anyway, once it starts, aluminium burns with great heat, as do most metals. You should have seen Tony swinging from the aft mast like a monkey; struggling to direct the stream of water from a fire hose down the funnel.
You have to give it to the boy, when the chips are down he gets the job done. More surprisingly, our retired sea captain was hardly less active.
After some excitement the fire was put out and emergency repairs were effected. All this gave me the opportunity to spend some time in the steering compartment. Once I worked out how the steering was supposed to work I was able to partially repair the steering indicators. Even half a steering indicator made things a lot easier.
Actually, what surprised me was that it ever worked. It must be the world's worst, most complex, most expensive, most fragile steering system. This on a war ship where you would think the designers would be trying for simplicity and reliability.
Once the excitement was over we had a fairly clear run to Cairns.
We arrived at the wharf in Cairns about 2PM and were just congratulating ourselves on a job well done when the steering gear quit altogether, a few meters out.
Only time I saw Captain Rob lose his temper. We glided in, hit the wharf a bit hard, then frantically put lines and people over before the Curlew drifted out again.
Once that was achieved we used the winches to drag her up the wharf to her proper berth.
As soon as she could, Helen, our little Cornish tourist, rang her mum. She told us her mum just could not believe that she had such a big adventure on her holiday.
I must admit, we did have enough adventures to fill a bumper quarterly issue of "Boy's Own".
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No representation is made regarding the accuracy or even sanity of
the events and opinions expressed in this story. Even I don't really believe
everything and I was there.
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