Valediction.

In mid November we know it surely cannot be long until first frost. Other nearby places have had theirs already but somehow we live on in summer country. This has been an unusually dry and sunny Autumn, the big maple leaves have turned yellow and orange and have drifted lightly down to lie as a gentle comforter upon the ground.

The recent rains when they came filled Big Pond in one pelting night and now the seasonal stream once more trickles and murmurs down the hillside. The dampened land and rotting stumps sprout delicate rose-tinted mushrooms. It is an evocative time of year.

This final flair of colour as we creep toward the shortest day of the year brings me along with it. I keep busy with my projects, working hard to complete them before winter makes outside work more limited and also to keep my mood from being pulled too far downward by the fall of autumn leaves.

It is a delicate balance: there is an obvious sadness of farewell to the ending of growth that I could wish to avoid, there is beauty and poignancy that I wish to experience to the full. A third grandchild arrived on Thanksgiving day - Clara Rose - and looking into her lovely little face has reminded me of the march of my own human season as well. No wonder this season, these falling leaves, bring thoughts of my own mortality.

I look searchingly up into the almost bare maple branches and down into their reflections in the dark pools of water and feel them calling that this time of sleep for them is a necessary part of the yearly cycle of life. This is not a time for sadness but a vivid celebration of renewal. It is Spring buds that have forced the old leaves off the trees and the sap recedes to concentrate for renewal when the sun rises higher in the sky once more. Vale, Vale.

Shiriri Saga # 71 Out into the Tasman Sea.

                                    Out into the Tasman Sea.

Aukland. N.Z.The e-mail says that we should phone our yacht broker back in Manley. A serious offer! Would n`t you know it, now we have settled into land cruising in New Zealand in our diesel van and have Gwyn visiting us from Canada for Christmas, interest finally picks up with Shiriri.

Soon she is sold, the survey passed and the deposit in the brokers hands.... and then the buyer gets ‘sick’ and backs out! We don`t know it yet, but this pattern of unusual selling fumbles will continue until we finally leave Australia. The Gods are prodding us back to sea. Even as we back out of our slip for the last time, the broker comes to say that the latest ‘sure thing’ buyer who has had his money all lined up for the last month is still saying on the phone this morning that it is too bad we are leaving, he has the money!

We are sick to death of living this high stress life in which on the one hand Shiriri will definitely sell any day and at the same time the period that we can have our boat in Australia without paying import duties is coming to an end and the right season for the trip home approaches. We polish our boat to show for sale, while at the same time we try to prepare for our long and difficult voyage home.

The plan for our voyage must allow for contrary winds and currents for two thirds of the trip. While in the southern hemisphere we must struggle to get as far east as possible before we catch the south-east trades and angle up across the equator. Somewhere past the ITCZ we will be into the north-east trades which will try to set us back toward Japan. Still further north, we will enter the westerly gales wind pattern that should blow us home to Vancouver Island. Dear Shiriri with her gaff rig and full bows does not take well to going to windward in big ocean waves and we have many thousands of miles of this kind of sailing ahead of us. Plus, this year the cyclone season is still active south of the equator and may start early to the north. Things will be tight. A cyclone could kill us.

One day a van arrives with all the food supplies we will need for four months at sea. We are glad that Shiriri has such a large amount of stowage space: we must not count on replenishing our supplies along the long lonely way home except by what we can catch with out homemade lures and perhaps a stop at a coral island along the way.

Anne has stayed longer in New Zealand when Heather and I flew home after four months exploring the north and south islands. We need extra time to haul Shiriri once more to put on a final coat of anti fouling paint so she will not add a layer of seaweed and barnacles to slow us down. On her last day in New Zealand Anne sells the van and flies back to join our final preparations.

One day in mid May we get a favorable forecast, say goodbye to all our friends on the dock and head back out through the sand bars of Morton Bay and into the darkening Tasman Sea.

What`s in a name?

In your closet...? Oh Jimmy! Don`t you know the difference yet between Monster and Mobster?

Shiriri Saga # 70. Home Again to Shiriri.

Penguin viewing on a cool evening.Phillips Island.

After saying goodby to Anne we decide to travel back to Shiriri the long way around. With Edith clinging to the roof rack again, Heather and I head south to the coast and then follow it all the way back to Manley. We visit Mornington near Melbourne where Heather`s father was born, and later dip our feet in the Southern Ocean. We visit penguins who are coming ashore on a chilly night and look south across nothing but ocean between us and Antarctica. Do we detect a bit of yearning to voyage in that direction? No, surely not, we are land voyagers at present!

A windy day crossing the Gateway Bridge.


Back at Manley Boat Harbour we resume our by now familiar life: Heather is now halfway through the third Patti story, I paint more postcard pictures of our south Pacific travels and we use the van to travel locally. Soon we hear that Anne has another school break and we arrange to drive south to meet her at the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains inland from Sidney. As we both have cell phones we keep track of each other with text messages and arrive at our campground within an hour of each other!

Camping beside the river at Jenolan Cave.


While going underground is not my favourite activity, the caves are really spectacular. We then convoy up to the top of the mountains for a few days and walk along the rim near the ‘Three Sisters’ before we head back west and bid Anne a sorrowful goodby as she drives off back to Mildura and we head back north via towns like Orange and Dubbo and Tamborine. We finally reach the coast again and stop for a visit with Keith and Nora.

A forest walk near Tamborine.


These school breaks of Anne`s have kept us hopping but it is now nearly time to hand our van back to it`s owner ( John, another very kind stranger). It is not the youngest van in the world, but has served us very well with only one fuel filter and two new tires in the six months we have had it.

Our next plan is to fly to New Zealand before we leave in May for the long trip home across the Pacific, buy another van, and explore for four months. Gwyn will holiday with us over Christmas, and then Anne will join us when she finishes her teaching contract in Mildura. It`s funny to think that several years ago when we first imagined what life could be like if we had a live aboard lifestyle our expectations were modest indeed compared to how we are living now. Almost, but not quite, we look forward to the monastic life of sailing again on the broad blue sea.

Shiriri Saga # 69. Voyage to the Interior.

Camping beside the Murray.

"Time`s up ! It`s my turn to row!" The winter wind is cool, especially for my wife Heather sitting idly in the stern of our 14' dory Edith. We have had this kind of discussion many times over the past few years: from the west coast of Canada, south along the long coastline that reaches down to Mexico, and west through the many islands that sprinkle the South Pacific across to Australia. Edith is the dinghy to our wooden gaff rig schooner Shiriri and has provided us with many intimate and interesting experiences of the lands we have visited over the last couple of years. Now, here we are rowing down the Murray River in central Australia, several day`s drive from our yacht where we left her in the care of cruising friends near Brisbane on the east coast.

Edith is a pleasure to row at any time with her long narrow canoe shaped underbody and now we appreciate her wide flared sides as well, that allow us to carry ourselves and a full cargo of camping equipment. Our boating experience was begun in little rowing and sail boats like this and as we moved up to larger and more complex boats the early skills of small boat handling have continued to be the most valuable. We had another dory in the past and camped among our own Gulf Islands, so when we finally reached the land mass of Australia and still had westering deep in our psyches it was natural for us to switch from charts of the ocean to maps of Australia. "Look!" we had said to Australia friends, "Inland, just beyond the Great Dividing Range are the headwaters of rivers that we could follow west across the interior plains." They laughed." Not enough water most of the year. Dangerous!" "Hmmm," we thought. "Now that sounds interesting!"

Great ideas do become modified as more information is collected and digested and we began to understand that our Australian friends were right in many respects. Through much of the year the landscape of the dry interior is blistering hot and rivers are low or retreat into damp bits between the sand bars; that is, when they are not flooding from sudden heavy rains. The fascinating flora and fauna as seen in tourist photos also include a lot of other specimens that match the conditions and are anything but gentle. It really would not be wise to wander off into the bush without a lot of careful forethought.

Our daughter Anne, who had sailed across the Pacific with us, had found a teaching job in an inland town called Mildura which just happened to be on the Murray river: the biggest one in Australia. We had been loaned a van so we decided to drive across country to visit her during the mid winter break and together drive north to the Red Center to see the country around Alice Springs. Ah, we thought, remembering our river dream, we could carry Edith on the van, and after the interior trip, Anne could drop us off some way up the Murray and we could row and camp our way back down river to Mildura through a particularly interesting section that has park land on either side.

So here we are on a wintery afternoon being most solicitous that whoever is at the oars should not exhaust themselves for one more minute than permitted. We decide to camp early on a sand bar the first day, so we pull Edith well up and after setting up camp, prop her up on her side as a wind break against the cool west wind. I soon have a eucalyptus fire started as Heather cooks supper on the single burner propane camp stove. It rained today so everything is a little damp and dreary. The wind drops with the soft grey evening light and we have a strange sense of dislocation as a large shrieking flock of cockatoos settles down for the night in a tree on the next bend of the river: it feels so like tropical rivers we have floated down and yet is so cool and grey. Already, so soon on our solitary little journey into the interior we are feeling the strangeness of this landscape.

A mechanical sound buzzes on and off during the night and in the morning we see a pumping station on the far bank. The Murray River has served mankind in many ways for thousands of years and nowadays it is also a source of irrigation water for agriculture along the banks. We are about to enter the park reserves and will leave these pumps behind for a while but not their effects: the salts flushed out of the soil and back into the river will keep us drinking bottled water for the duration of our trip.

The morning sun filters through the tall red gum trees on the bank behind us, a flock of parrots fly cheerfully by and swallows flit back and forth across the river. The cool west wind is back, so we shake the dew off the tent and are soon rowing down the meandering river. Those curves require that the helmsman in the stern must act as a human compass, continually correcting the changing course with a pointing hand. The person at the oars corrects with a stronger pull on one oar, glances over the stern and finds a mark on the bank behind to steer by until the next course correction. There is plenty of time though, for us to observe this unique landscape. The winding river bends and the ancient eucalypt riverside forest have a hypnotic sameness, but also a subtle beauty. The ancient grey-green trees seem to be quietly chanting a song to themselves and at first, to be indifferent to our presence. A bird calls, "Bo Brady, Bo Brady" from the bank. A red fox trots along under the trees. We stop on a sandbar for lunch, and run around for a while to warm up and get the kinks out. Some of the red gums are enormous but the piles of sticks and fallen trees and the heavy branch that drops just behind us discourages any desire to explore away from the river bank. The river has been dammed for irrigation control in several places and this has meant there are few seasonal floods to spread over the banks and renew the riverside environment as they did in the past.

The wind is still heading us. If this keeps up we will be doubly glad that we left the now useless mast and sail in the van as being just too much extra to burden Edith with. Heather keeps well bundled up in the stern and we regularly remind ourselves how lucky we are to be on the river at this time of year instead of when it is boiling hot. "Yes," I say, "And it is not really cold, we have just been used to tropical temperatures for a couple of years". "Brrr, its still cold!" replies the wrapped figure in the stern. There is lots of interesting bird life on the river though: some big mallard-like ducks, cranes in flocks riding the wind, a red billed black swan and familiar ospreys fishing up and down the river. Serried ranks of massive trees line the banks as we pass. By day`s end we estimate we have traveled about twenty-four kilometers and are now deep into the Park.

Once again we repeat our camping routine well away from the fringe of the forest: that falling branch during our lunch stop felt suspiciously like it was "accidently done on purpose"and we joke about a sense of being observed. Sheltered beside Edith we listen to the sound of silence: no distant sound of traffic, no aircraft, just the sigh of wind in treetops, the creak of branches and the gentle gurgle of the flowing river. I wake in the night to hear the scream of something being gobbled up in the darkness.

Morning arrives at last with an evocative kookaburra chorus and we start using the wood fire for cooking our porridge and morning tea. The propane single burner is misnamed: it will burn everything! In the sandy world of the river bar we use Edith as windbreak, backrest and kitchen counter. The ribs act as dish racks. We chat about our nights sleep and find we have both had the same disturbing dream: some ancient terror, a massacre on this bend of the river. This is still definitely an alien landscape to us and we feel it fending us off even as we become more in tune with its moods. Realistically, to this landscape, we are the dangerous aliens. Back on the river again.

Civilization! We walk up from the riverbank through the trees to a little store set in an orange grove, to buy drinking water and two chocolate bars. This is the community of Nangiloc and just down the road is its mirror image, Colignan. We have slipped out of the park and into the world of irrigation pumps and intensively farmed orchards and vineyards. Once this was all scrub land until enterprising people developed machinery to rip it out and built big pumping stations to irrigate large tracts of land. It all hangs in the balance now as long droughts reduce the available water and farmers work to adapt to low water use irrigation. It`s tempting to condemn the whole concept of destroying a natural ecosystem and replacing it with this industrial farming model but we are just passers by and know that if we paused to probe the system more thoroughly things would seem less clear cut. We all benefit from this agricultural model after all and so we wish them well with adapting to making less demands on the river. It is a beautiful landscape and our farmer`s hearts respond to all that green productivity. The wind eases and Heather rows five kilometers in the next hour as we follow the river north into wilder country again. The Murray is wider now and flows more smoothly, perhaps we are nearing the long section penned up by the Mildura weir.

Camp-fire.

The air is still and the clouds are black by the time we find a beautiful campsite, free of big trees, on the south side of the river. We quickly set up camp and cover our gear with a plastic tarp as it begins to rain. Soon the storm rolls away to the east and that evening after an undercooked supper over the propane burner ( We just can not get it right with this devil.) we enjoy the quiet rain washed air, flickering firelight and a star filled southern sky. We seem to have left last night`s sense of weirdness back in the park reserve. Just perfect! It is this image of camping in the outback that we share as an ideal with all the peoples of Australia, even those who never stir beyond their city gates and bathing beaches. We all know that this is the original and essential life of all human kind. Billy tea and damper cooked over the coals are the final touch. We have a dreamless sleep interrupted slightly by a kangaroo doing speed trials behind our tent.

As we prepare to leave the next morning we hear a steam whistle and the chuf- chuffing of a steam engine. A train, we think and scan the river bank downstream for train tracks. Finally, around the bend, comes a paddlewheel steamboat liberally sprinkled with men in blue coveralls. They pause opposite us and one yells "Is there a good depth of water further upstream?" I spread my arms wide to indicate four feet or so and they continue puffing and splashing on their way. We read later that there is a flotilla of private steamboats attempting to reenact another use of the Murray when steamboats were the main form of transportation and roads and trains had as yet not been developed in the interior.

The cut-through.

Edith slides smoothly back into the river again and as we row we soon see a gap in the river bank through which rushes a large volume of water. Here is the cut-through we have been warned about: the meandering river has recently created a short cut that will soon completely cut off a big bend of the river. Fallen trees drape across the rapidly flowing water from both sides. We row over to have a close look, mentally map out a way through and decide to go for it! Rapidly we zig zag through the tangle of sweepers and are soon in calm water again.

We feel a pleasant adrenaline rush. We laugh, we did n`t need to do that, we are ahead of schedule, and an upset amidst all those branches could have been deadly. We have become adrenaline junkies on our sailing trip and needed a hit! A little physical risk in life makes the world shine brighter. If only it would stop the wind as well!

That last sluice ride has dropped us into the impounded waters behind the Mildura weir at last. We miss the unfettered life of the free flowing river and smile to feel how easily it speaks to us in metaphor. "This river is your life," it says, "This is how it feels to be fettered, controlled and put to work." Our sunny morning gives way to cloud and the familiar cool wind still impedes our progress. Pull, pull, pull, as we wander around curve after curve against it. We stop for a warm lunch of noodles, and then find that at last the wind has dropped and the sun is actually trying to shine. The adrenaline effect was just delayed after all! A long stretch of river is filled with fishing cormorants and as we pass the red cliffs of Red Cliff, long flights of white pelicans patrol the upper air. We had planned to stop for the night at a sand bar near the Lindeman winery but on arrival find it to be a dusty dreary place, obviously near a road. We have absorbed some of the river`s wildness ourselves and instinctively distrust this human place, so we row on and find a camping spot up on a low bank in the Gol Gol state forest. We scrape down to the clay for our fire hearth and Heather uses a stump for a kitchen. The stump explains why this is a young and vigorous forest: it had been logged off several years before. She is bitten twice by big, inch long bull ants and we get in our tent very carefully to avoid bringing any to bed with us. Later that night we hear "Thump, thump,... snurt?" A kangaroo has stumbled across our camp and is expressing... what? Surprise, anger, passion? I stick my head out and say " Get lost!" Thump, thump, thump into the distance. We hope that Skippy the bush kangaroo does n`t have a big brother.

Night encounter.

There were no return visits overnight and we are off again early in the morning. We had planned to camp one last time before we reached Mildura but after a stop at a winery where we found it only opened to booked tour groups ( no one expects stray scruffy tourists wandering up from the river at this time of year), we push on past possible camping spots on the river banks that are too beaten up and easy of access to cars and partying people. " Press on," we say. "Press on!" By late afternoon we pass under the Mildura bridge, pull into a waterside park and phone Anne for an early pick-up. While eating our last camping supper and waiting for our daughter to come home and get our message, we observe the passing scene in the gathering dusk. Just down the way a man is obviously selling drugs to young folk so they can party their Friday night away. We remember our own adrenaline high as we sluiced down the cut-through and partially understand their desire for an elevated mood. Like the river itself, they are feeling confined by this town but unlike the river they can choose an artificial, temporary escape. We think we will stick to an exciting reality though: it may be a bitter pill to swallow at times, but it does you good, leaves great memories and lasts forever.


Sidebar.
Endless cold winds, repetitive scenery, biting insects, danger! What kind of a holiday is that?

For us of course, it really was n`t so much a holiday of escape in the usual sense as it was about getting close to the deeper reality of life. This human need underlies the popularity of adventure tourism and in our case there were parallel journeys into the interior of a continent on a flowing river and in our own personal lives. The story of Edith the little rowboat meandering down an Australian river and the perspective it`s occupants gain along the way lies at the heart of what we all seek in life but often end up buying into the easier consumer version instead.

On our way across the Pacific we had stopped at the Polynesian island of Raiatea near Tahiti. It was Canada Day, we had dressed ship with all our signal flags, and I was available at dockside to welcome anyone aboard. Three retired American men off a nearby cruise ship came by to admire our big classic schooner. They were so interested in what I had created that I invited them below so they could see how the whole boat really worked as an integrated system. As they left, one said wistfully, " This is the first Real thing we have seen on this whole cruise." They had bought a fantasy luxury cruise but belatedly recognized that they were missing something essential in the process. Unfortunately it was something that money could not buy: it was the struggle of the voyage itself that gave our life meaning.



"People say that what we`re all seeking is a meaning for life....I think that what we`re really seeking is an experience of being alive ,so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive."
Joseph Campbell.


"Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten how to walk.
Chatwin."

Shiriri Saga # 68. The Inland Adventure.

On the banks of the Murrumbidgee River.

From the journal:
June 28th.
We are camping on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales. Just 15 K from the town of Hay and only one more day`s drive from Anne in Mildura. We have been driving southwest for five days.

First, over the mountains: (we had a plugged fuel filter that got fixed in Glen Innis) then we took the New England hwy. through 3000 foot high rolling hills. It was - 6 C. overnight, so we wore our fleece outfits to bed in the van. Heather spent the evening in the bathhouse immersed deep in a warm tub with only her nose out in the freezing air.

Soon we left the mountains behind and entered forest covered hills. We camped overnight in a rest area in the midst of a Eucalyptus forest.
As we drove south we found vast gently rolling farmlands -lots of cattle and sheep. The roads were very straight and very narrow. 80k. for hours on end gets a little mind numbing. Edith clung tenaciously to the roof racks.

Today we woke beside a river to the sound of a kookaburra morning chorus, saw white cockatoos and Galas and later kangaroos and emus in the desert before the town of Hay.

This is a beautiful site tonight ( a drovers camp). We are all alone, have a fire to warm us ( this is winter in Australia), the river gurgles alongside and our only worry are the overhanging branches of the enormous gum trees that could drop on us in the night. Let it be a calm, if chilly night!

.......................................................................

As this is really a boating story, I `ll simply say that we picked Anne up in Mildura, left Edith sitting alone on the grass in the backyard (very sad), and drove west and then north to Alice Springs in the ‘Red Center’ of Australia.

With Anne to spell me off with the driving it was like being back at sea keeping watches as we crept for days across the immense landscape, except that we got to ‘anchor’ every night at a campground, roadhouse, or in the bush.

We visited some spectacular places; King`s Canyon, Ularu, and the Olgas. With recent rains, the desert was in bloom. Eventually however, Anne had to be back at school, so we rescued Edith, and Anne dropped us off with our camping gear a long way upstream from Mildura. I have written of our journey back down the river in the article which follows next.

A Giant problem!

A GIANT PROBLEM!

Shiriri Saga # 67. Stepping Ashore.

Stepping ashore.

Feb. 15th.
"Bill, Bill, come and join us in the cockpit!" Heather call to me as I stand at the bow watching the breakwater at Manley Harbour draw closer. We have squirmed our way back north through the ‘ditch’, passed Peel Island again and are approaching the voyage`s end. This could be our last voyage with Shiriri if she sells in Australia and I feel a need to be alone with her. One can make a sensible decision with one`s head and find that those lazy old feelings have just not kept pace.

This is the ending of a great thing, but soon we are tied alongside in the marina and learning to wear sandals to prevent our feet burning on the concrete docks. We check in with customs, get Shiriri evaluated for sale and I settle into getting the last of the painting done. We discover the commuter train to Brisbane and explore the city. The library just down the road at Wynnum provides us with free e-mail and reading material. We find all the best walks around the local community of Lota. I begin to repaint the interior cabin walls and overhead. Anne comes and goes, still waiting for the paperwork to be evaluated which will allow her to start teaching in Mildura. More rain squalls and southerly gales.

David and Lisa of the Francis vessel arrive in their car from Scarborough and we all drive off to explore the highlands behind Brisbane. Heather and I keep craning our necks to get a glimpse of the land farther west. We are still thinking of Edith`s river project.

By April, we are flying off to Canada to launch Heather`s first Patti story " Life on the Farm"and visit with the family at home, just as Anne drives off all alone to travel half way across Australia and the beginning of her teaching job in Mildura.

Walking home.

May 1st.

Back again. Heather and I get off the train from Brisbane at the Manley station and stagger back along the waterfront with our many bags - some loaded with boat parts. The break has done us good and we settle down to life at the docks. We move across the harbour to a Yacht club and gradually find a whole dock full of new, mostly Australians and New Zealanders, friends who live aboard their boats.

Our days settle into a routine. Heather starts a third Patti story and I begin a series of small postcard sized paintings of our ocean adventure as I reread my journals. I have finally made it to the essential next stage of any major life experience: the evaluation and understanding phase where I pull meaning from the experience, incorporate it into the present moment and use it to build a new foundation for the future. As his wartime stories were for Keith, so this process of painting the highlights of our voyage works to preserve important memories while they are still fresh. I have discovered that I can move forward into the present while preserving the important lessons of the past.

Waking to Lota along the seawall.

We walk the parks and waterfront trails of nearby Lota. We talk to Anne on the phone and plan a visit to Mildura during her holiday break. I read the Murray River Pilot that Carrick Road`s dad has sent to us and begin to plan. This travel plan needs a van to carry us and Edith and we finally find a little Toyota on loan that we rig up for camping. We load Edith on the roof racks and drive carefully around the boat yard to see how much we list to one side or the other with her weight on top. Hmm, she`ll be right, we say optimistically. I learn to drive on the left side of the road.

Walking in the boatyard: confronted by lapwing.

There is not a lot of interest in Shiriri from prospective buyers but really we are good for one whole year in Australia and time and adventures stretch before us!

Shiriri Saga # 66. Hard at work on the hard.

Heather leaps to my side of the saloon seat.

"Are we safe?" gasps Heather as she leaps over to my side of the saloon seat. A massive explosion! The instant flash lights our cabin which teeters high in the air. We are in the midst of the worst Southerly Buster yet with fifty knot winds and a powerful thunderstorm. It is comforting not to be back at anchor in Bum`s Bay in this, but distinctly nerve wracking to be balanced precariously on our keel on a large concrete slab with our masts pointing up into the crackling storm.

We were lifted out over a week ago at the Gold Coast City Marina and have been hard at work in 35 C. temperatures repairing and repainting the hull. The bottom now has two coats of a powerful antifouling paint and Shiriri`s topsides are a spotless white. Edith too, sparkles in a new coat of dory buff. After the storm rumbles on to the north we will launch and tie up alongside the docks here to complete any work on deck.

The Carrick Roadies, have been busy beside us repainting their concrete yacht and had the same saloon experience as us in the thunderstorm. We also talk to them about an idea we have been playing with. Those day trips we have made into the highlands have whetted our appetite for a voyage into the interior. The map of Australia shows the headwaters of a number of rivers not too far away, could we somehow haul Edith over the mountains and row and camp down river across the central plains? When we mentioned the idea to Keith he had laughed and said no, not enough water in the ‘rivers’, too hot, too many nasty snakes etc. So Rob and Michelle, what do you think? Yes, they say, it is possible on the biggest river of them all; the Murray. Rob says that his dad lives on the Murray river and will send us a cruising guide. So it is possible, sort of, and that is good enough for us to begin to plan. We really need a plan, we still itch to keep moving west, we need a replacement challenge.

The newly painted hull.

Once launched again we tie up to the docks and the next morning hear two yard workmen making a list of the boats at the dock. One spells out Shiriri`s name for the other to write down. "Es,haich,oi,arr,oi arr,oi." We smile, we are getting to enjoy a Queensland accent. Then it starts to rain in earnest; 13inches of it in 48 hours. We have plenty of discussion time as the rain drums on the cabin roof.

Anne now has a little car and is off visiting friends much of the time .She has applied for a teaching job in Mildura on the Murray River. We have found that we can stay in Australia for quite a while if we leave and come back every six months. We need to put Shiriri in a marina if we wish to travel around the country. What are our long term plans? Will we sail on around the world or sail home across the Pacific against the prevailing winds and currents? A big determiner is Heather`s health. We have set a three year limit on our voyaging and that would mean we would spend all of that time mostly at sea if we kept sailing west. The voyage here has been pretty stressful and not good for Heather`s heart. Lets take a long break and explore this big continent by land and then..... OK this is it, what are our long tem plans for Shiriri? We know that we will have to sell her sometime at the end of the voyage when we move back home so why not sell in Australia and avoid that killer trip back across the Pacific if possible? One thing Heather and I do well is plan and so by the time the rain stops we have charted out our life for the next year or so.

By the time we sail back down the Coomera river we have located a marina back north in Morton Bay at Manley Boat Harbour just south of Brisbane and, plus plus, we get a reduced price on the moorage if we have our boat listed for sale there. The Gods are smiling on us!

Shiriri Saga # 65. 'Far from the Roll of the Sea.'

Work and play at Bum`s Bay.
We are exhausted, and are just discovering that little fact. We have been running on adrenaline for over a year of travel across the Pacific and now that we are settled in Bum`s Bay with no big voyage up ahead we suddenly unravel. Days, busy days , go by at anchor. We visit with Keith and his family, get driven up into the highlands to see the back country ,walk along the Gold Coast beach and through the Casuarina pine trees alive with the deafening song of cicadas, get free ice for our ice box from the nearby hotel and begin a serious boat maintenance schedule as the weather permits.

Beach vine.

We celebrate Christmas with the Watson family out on their big veranda with parrots diving in and helping themselves to the sugar while Keith throws meat scraps to the butcher birds. A very unique experience for those of us used to snuggling up close to the wood fire at this time in December.

Electrical storm on the Broadwater.

Shiriri lies to two anchors now as thunderstorms or "southerly busters" come roaring through. Even so, I scrape and paint and varnish during the sunny times and even use the belt sander while standing alongside in Edith to grind off peeling white paint from the hull. Keep busy, keep busy, to fill the non-voyaging gap in our lives with useful activity.

We often take Edith across the Broadwater to visit Keith in his office near the beach in Southport and he pops around the corner to buy some sticky buns to have with tea. As we munch and slurp he settles down to tell us another of his wartime stories. My family met Keith for the first time as a young pilot hitch hiking to London during WWII and it is a treat for me to hear his stories of being a bomber pilot. He has these stories down word perfect and is glad to have an audience with a connection to those far off but still important memories.

One day he describes the first time he took off with a full load of bombs and fuel in his Lancaster, wondering if the plane would lift off before the end of the airstrip. His hands reach out before us and ease back on the stick trying to get his aircraft to come unstuck from the earth and we see the relief on his face as he climbs and banks to form up with his comrades for a raid deep into Germany.

Why are these stories so vivid for me? Partly it is because Keith has always been a master story teller and partly it is because I have recently spent time in the midst of an ocean adventure and am having a difficult time leaving that world. How often have I told my sailing stories to non sailing peoples along the way and have ended up saying that really, it is like a wartime experience; only to see that this comparison does n`t really register either.

How brave, Keith says of our splashing around on the sea. I can imagine him flinging his big plane through the night sky to escape a fighter, and reply quietly that really Keith we were already safe at sea level and not 10,000 feet up in the air. We had no one gunning for us, but our crew has been through the valley of the shadow of death several times in the past year so we do share a rare bond with this old friend who still, after all this time, does not put aside the camaraderie of those defining years of his life spent caught up in the adrenaline charged atmosphere of combat.

Jan.13th.
With all the boat painting done that we can get at while afloat, it is time to haul Shiriri out at a boat yard to paint her hull and give her bottom a few coats of antifouling paint. We have been scrubbing her bottom clean all the way across the Pacific and it is time to put something back! One morning we follow some new friends, Rob and Michelle in ‘Carrick Roads’, north again and then branch off to the left and up the Coomera river to be hauled out onto the hard.

'Away from the roll of the sea.' Song, by Allistair Macgillivray.

Shiriri Saga # 64.' Running like a dog through the Everglades.'

The ditch. Morton Bay to Southport and the Gold Coast.

From the journal:
Nov.28th.
Up and off by 5am. Immediately we are swept up in the focus of the day - navigating through shallow water between markers. It is low tide turning to flood so things seem especially tight. Instead of 100`s or 1000`s we are now counting feet in less than 10`s beneath our keel. Little do we know in the hot morning sunshine how easy and generous this is compared to what is up ahead.

Heather calls out depths from the sonar when they shallow. As they count down toward our 6 foot draught her voice rises in pitch and intensity! We guess which way is the deeper channel and dodge to port or starboard. Some times we just shrug - it just is shallow. Here the islands are low: some with slightly higher ground and houses, many that are simply mangrove mud/sand islands. Ferries zoom by - the captains indicate we should favour this or that side of the channel and wave. We begin to find deep ( relatively) but very narrow channels and have to share them with car ferries from the opposite direction. Oops, that spot read 6 feet! We have strayed a few feet to the channel`s edge in an attempt to make room.

There are some places where the chart indicates less than 5 feet at low water and our chart is not a recent one so sand bars and the marker system have changed. We come to a place of very shallow water but by now the tide is close to full. We slow down and glide forward.....less than 5 feet and still we keep moving forward. Do we give more power and attempt to force our way through or keep slow so that we can back off if we get stuck? Slow and easy does it.

We have been at it for hours of acute concentration and finally sight the outer island sand dunes which tells us that we are half way. There is one more reportedly very shallow and winding passage ahead. This reminds us of our trip up the mangrove creeks at Tenakatita in Mexico in our dinghy - except this time it in Shiriri - all 58 feet of her. This is like the ‘African Queen’ as the bowsprit just avoids jamming itself into the trees as we weave along the tightly winding channel even as the transom brushes against the nearside bank.

A tight squeeze.

Now we must branch off the main route to find an anchorage before we are caught in the ebb current. If we went aground here now we would be caught on a sandbar and be heeled over for hours. The anchorage marked on the chart turns out to be too shallow for us at low tide and we can`t anchor in the channel so back south we reluctantly go: "Running like a dog through the everglades." While Anne is down below making sandwiches, Heather and I confuse the channel markers, miss seeing the closest one and steer for the next. 6'....4'....3'....we turn to port and regain the deeper water. Why did n`t we get stuck? It must be very soft mud or else we are cashing in our cruising credits from all those storms at sea.

We can see the tall buildings of the Gold Coast in the distance. A charter yacht brigantine turns up the channel towards us and a float plane takes off between us. Phew!! Civilization here we come! We are doing 5 knots with the ebb. Only one hour to go to the main anchorage near Southport. We see some yachts anchored beside an island off to port. The chart indicates an anchorage with good depth. We are hot and tired and pushing our luck. We turn and anchor in 14 feet. Shut down engine. ZZZZZZZ.

Nov. 29.
After a relaxed morning scrubbing and tidying Shiriri we pick up the top of the flood tide to carry us the last three miles to the Gold Coast with Southport on the other side of the Broadwater estuary. We anchor in a shallow bay called the Stadium, or more familiarly, Bum`s Bay. While there are plenty of scantily clad people lolling around on it`s sandy shores, we feel it is most likely named for the semi derelict live-aboard boats that grace it`s waters. Whatever, it suits us just fine.

'Running like a dog through the Everglades.' A song. Remember the Everly Brothers?

Shiriri Saga #63. 'Safe in the Harbour at Last.'

A migrant`s welcome.

Maybe it`s because I slept most of the day away, or perhaps I`m on edge about tomorrow`s passage through the shallows and mangrove islands on the last part of our journey south to Southport and the Gold Coast, but here I am up on deck in the middle of the night anxiously having a look around.

Toward the mainland I can see the glow of the lights in the suburbs of Brisbane, but everywhere else is velvety black under the stars. I know that the low mass of mangrove covered Peel Island is quite near and that it will be expanding as the tide drops and exposes more and more of the coral flats all around it. We are anchored in water only twelve feet deep but that counts for a lot of water in these regions.

There is another reason for my unease, and it has been with me ever since we arrived in Australia, I am still lost somewhere between the wild ocean and the populated land - a kind of no-man`s-land culture shock - and this anchorage brings it all together for me. I am glad to be safe in this sheltered place and yet it feels like I am in an oppressive backwater and that I have lost something vital to my life.

The stars overhead begin a high peeping sound, and I swear I can see them flicker. As the sound grows louder and swirls around me I realize that a large migrating flock of shore birds are circling around and landing on the edges of the island out in the darkness. As they settle to feed and rest they are greeted by the harsh calls of the resident swamp birds. I listen there on the deck of my boat and gradually feel my tension evaporate.

A migrant myself, what I am experiencing is a sense of being welcomed to this ancient land by wild nature itself. I stand quietly and feel that the lonesome sound of birds are calling out a greeting in the night, telling me that there is a place for me here too at this threshold of a new land.

Safe in the harbour at last - a song by Eric Bogle.

Shiriri Saga # 62. Crossing the Bar.

We have our fingers crossed in the morning as we climb on deck but the south-east wind still blows. At least we have our washing dry! Should we attempt the bar or wait for the wind to ease? We must cross at high water turning to ebb when the depth of water over the bar and the size of the waves will be least and that cannot be had on demand. "Ummm , errr... OK, lets go out and try it!" we decide, even though we can see through the binoculars the white of the waves breaking on the bar. At first progress is very slow as we stem the last of the flood tide and struggle against the wind. Not for the first time do we wish we had a more powerful engine.

The deepest channel follows an angle across the entrance and at first we line up two range markers over the stern located on the point we anchored behind last night ( Inskip Point). To the right the ocean waves crash on the bar and then form up again over the shallows on our left. We creep forward at first and then more easily as the tide reaches high water slack. Now we have the next range on the southern end of Fraser Island (Hook Point) in the white sector and turn out toward the big waves. We watch the depth sounder, keep the white light in line astern and after some wild pitching in the steep waves we are out in deeper water and turning toward the south. At last!

The wind eases and goes more easterly as predicted and we continue to motor-sail parallel to a long sandy beach backed by vegetation covered dunes. As we round Double Island Point, behind which Rassamond spent an uncomfortable night rolling in the waves, we see the wreck of a ship on the beach and it seems to be surrounded by scuttling cockroaches. Only when we get our sense of scale worked out do we realize that we are seeing dozens of vehicles driving up and down the long beach. Wow, what all that salt water and sand must be doing to those expensive metal bodies! We have been in poorer countries for so long that we have not yet adjusted back to this level of ‘just for fun’ conspicuous consumption.

By nightfall we are just off the entrance to Morton Bay with it`s mass of sand bars when the fishing boat we have been steadily overtaking suddenly turns right across our bows. Bad manners in anyone else, but we must assume that they are actually fishing and therefore have right of way, so we make a big circle away from them and continue to where the first of the shipping channel markers will lead us deeper into the bay. Perhaps we should have stopped like Rassamond at Maloolaba harbour for the night ,but we are eager to make the most of the unusually gentle winds
and not be wind bound again for days as we were in Tin Can Bay.

We are a mighty tired crew by the time dawn finds us deep in the bay and zooming along on the flood tide through the last of the channel markers. We have needed two on watch all night to do the pilotage but now we can anchor near the town of Manley behind St. Helena Island, just south of Brisbane.

Now, at 3:30 pm we have slept, eaten a pancake lunch and showered. Ah, fantastic! Soon we will pick up a new flood tide and travel a further ten miles up the bay to be in a good position for travelling south through the complex waterways en route to Southport and our friend Keith Watson.

A viking we will go.

Coming ashore.

Vikings have a bad name in the early historical writings. A knife in the side of Europe, twisting away. It`s just my luck that my British ancestors on both sides of the family tree were of that stock who eventually took a wife and settled down to farm on someone else`s land. A thousand years later some are quite genteel: that must be my lot.

Then some of us moved on to North America, brought a wife, took some land. There is a repetitive quality to all this. Imagine some future world in a far corner of space: same crowd, same scenario. Am I proud?

Proud? Of all that nastiness, brutality and wholesale expropriation? It would be silly to say yes, but it would also be too easy to reject all my history, all the history of humans in general, and participate in the sanitization of modern society. The thing is, if we just close the door to our ancestors we can not learn who we really are. We need to know who we are and what our human capacities can be again.

Somewhere in the past and in the present, amid the grinding together of peoples in conflict is a saving grace. Those Vikings who slipped up a coastal creek somewhere in Europe, hide their longship, marched across country to attack an isolated farm or church were taking great risks while in search of wealth, whether as gold, or cattle, or slaves. They could be caught ashore away from their ship by a larger force of irate locals, and themselves be killed in a very nasty manner. Those were brutal times. The possibility of this outcome must have sharpened their minds wonderfully. Living on the edge of disaster is a recipe for rapid and creative thinking. Creative thinking has survival value.

I listen to the radio about the price of fuel, food shortages, climate change and problems with the economy. After a few generations of existing in wealth and luxury, (for some) it looks like we will have to adjust to a new reality. A old kind of imperative is waiting to start pairing us down and sharpening us up. Lets not quietly and passively wait for events to carry us off. There is another option to being sheep, we can embrace the coming storm and get creative.

Shiriri Saga #61. Tin Can Bay.

At 11.30 the next morning we judge that on the rising tide we will soon have enough water in the shallow passage ahead of us so we hoist our spinnaker and start sailing south on a light NE breeze that quickly increases to 20 knots so that we are soon down to stays`l only; to pull us along and yet try to keep our speed down. When we arrive at the shallowest part that will only float us at close to high water we stop and anchor and wait for the tide to rise - we have been going too fast.

Finally, along come Rassamond, Running Tide, Gandalf and Prana and they continue right through so we quickly raise our anchor and follow them. If they can make it, so can we! A thunder storm roars through as we follow the leader and check off the beacons. We pass low mangrove islands framed in a fantastic rainbow. We worry about what would happen if we went aground on a falling tide and as we turn into a narrow mangrove lined channel (Garry`s Anchorage) to anchor for the night we cut the corner too tight and touch a mud bank. Luckily we get off again quickly and anchor further up the narrow channel in 12 feet. Glad to be here. We can see lightening in the distance. The mosquitoes are visiting.

Next morning we are off following the leader but are soon left behind as we are uncomfortable just powering along at full speed on the falling tide and trusting to the leaders navigation. We have our chart and can do this for ourselves. Last night`s storm was the sign that the wind was switching back to the south-east so that soon we find ourselves travelling quickly with the tidal current under us and butting into rip-tide choppy waves and a 20 knot wind on the nose. Shiriri is more or less stopped by the waves but carried forward on the current. Effectively there is no water passing the rudder and we cannot steer. We finally have to zig zag back and forth in the now broad passage until we turn the corner and head slowly up a more sheltered inlet to Tin Can Bay. We find Rassamond and the other boats anchored off the town and get our own anchor down just as our diesel gags and dies. All that bouncing in the choppy waves has stirred up sediment in the fuel tanks and plugged the fuel filter. Replacing that is the first order of business before I can look around at this place we have been so determined to see since a friend`s yacht (Vahana) was here a few years before.

We wait at anchor for several days as the wind is still strong south-east and will stop Shiriri from going south. Yes, we could go out and bash into the waves and wind but much better to wait for the wind to change, especially as this is an interesting place. We row ashore, pulling hard against wind and current only to find that there are shallows far out from shore. We step out of Edith and walk to shore with me pulling on the painter. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I am being taken for a walk by my dinghy.

On the leash.

This is a neat little town with wood and brick bungalows, a community pool and trees filled with parrots of various sorts and colours. Ah, that big noisy white one is a cockatoo! We find the post office and then a real estate office with " e-mail" in the window. The lady says yes we can e-mail and leaves us for a few minutes while we check for messages from home. Back she comes and says, "What! You still on my computer?"in an aggrieved manner. We are experiencing our first Australian humour, as it turn out. "Taking the mickey out"takes some getting used to, but once understood and the technique mastered it will become the source of much innocent amusement in the months ahead. She then offers us her car keys so we can drive her car to a shopping center some way down the road. We don`t do that, but appreciate the gesture and feel that this has got to be the best introduction to Tin Can Bay we could have had!

We make many trip ashore, now with the outboard mounted on Edith`s stern to carry us around the shallows and up the usual boat channel. We pass fishing boats and rental house boats.(" Rent me! Luxury afloat.") suited to exploring these shallow waters and one day arrive to find some dolphins close to the beach being fed with fish for the tourists to watch. They are not penned or tamed, but have just worked out that there is a handy source of fish at this time of day. Each time we come to shore we fill up jerry cans of diesel and of water to top up Shiriri`s tanks.

Luxury afloat!

The forecast is favorable, so Rassamond and Shiriri head back down channel to where there is a pass through the sand bars out into the open sea. We are drying our wash in the rigging as we motor along, so let Rassamond go ahead through the pass. They radio that it is pretty rough still and that they will have to anchor behind the partial protection of a cape. We decide to finish our drying and anchor for the night in shelter and try the pass in the morning at slack water if the wind has eased as predicted.

Shiriri Saga #60. Sailing in Thin Water.

Kingfisher Lodge. Fraser Island.

If we were on edge sailing up to the sandy shores of Australia in what seemed like frighteningly shallow water (30 Feet deep) after the ocean depths, then squirming down Sandy Strait has our eyes on the depth finder as we dodge from buoy to buoy along the channel between the mainland and Fraser Island. When we reach Kingfisher Resort and our anchor goes down at the end of the day we heave a sigh of relief. After dark, two more yachts arrive and make a lot of noise as they circle and shout back and forth. Pony of Rassamond, in the center of it all, is not one to suffer in silence. " Go away! You`ve woken me up!" Do not tangle with an ex London bobby!

Ashore the next morning, we walk up a boardwalk from the beach to the resort through a eucalypt forest. There are no farm fields here, no flocks of people, and we can look and listen to the natural sounds of this new continent. Trees we do not know, bird calls we can not identify.... this is terrific! We stop at the little resort store and buy half a dozen eggs for $ 2.50. Ouch! -there are some problems with the wilderness. We buy Heather a tee-shirt with a dingo on the front, one of the Fraser Island attractions.

The dingo is the wild dog of Australia and arrived thousands of years ago with the first Aboriginal peoples who had migrated here from out of Africa.
The dingo is a mixed blessing. While it`s nice to have a wild population on the island, they are wild and do not mix well with campers with food supplies and children. There have been attacks on people and reprisals by the park staff. We are looking at a variation of our pacific island experiences and are back on the interface between competing groups and priorities - in this case the use of a park for recreation competing with leaving a wild population of other creatures completely alone to pursue their own destiny. It`s complicated; the dingo and the aboriginal peoples have, over time, themselves impacted the Australian flora and fauna. How many species of plants and animals have disappeared since their arrival? If all humans were kept off the island, would they care to maintain it`s status if it had no human value? On this sandy island we have met a big philosophical problem. Do things have intrinsic worth outside of our human oriented world view?

Of course we would say yes, but we have just come out of the ocean wilderness where we have been mere fly specks of humanity within an immense world of life going about it`s affairs. We are still mentally in that apart world and cherish that perspective even as we feel alienated still from our own tribe. What we do know, is that these interfaces between different human populations and between humans and the rest of the natural world are a place where change is happening and that makes it a very interesting place to be. The world has always been in a dynamic balance of constant change and adjustment. That`s how it was formed and it is no wonder if that is still how it behaves.

As we gradually adjust to Australia, we are ourselves swept up in this current of change and adjustment. The pain of the alienation we feel tells us we are alive and a vital part of the world.

Shiriri Saga # 59 Strangers in the land of Oz.

There is not much here at Burnet Head: the marina on the river, a few fishing boats, a dock for loading sugar and big storage tanks for molasses waiting for shipment. Oh yes, and miles and miles of sugar cane fields.
We sign up for a week at the marina, are welcomed with gifts of fruit and vegetables from other yachties and a set of charts of the passage south from an Australian yacht docked beside us. We go for a little morning walk and find our joints stiff and sore after two weeks at sea. "What are those birds?" we wonder after deciding that they are not pigeons after all. Galas, we find later. On the road are many very flat squashed toads. How unusual! We are experiencing our first taste of a foreign land when all is fresh and new and vivid.

The Marina provides a free shuttle bus to the town of Bundaberg several miles into the interior so we hop on board that first afternoon to visit the Saturday farmer`s market, just like we have at home. It is our first contact with a large crowd of Australians busily selling and buying their produce in a way that we have become familiar with among the islands ever since Mexico. The shock for us is that all these people are white! We have been among brown and black people for so long that these ghostly pallid folk seem very weird indeed! How sickly they look, like a flock of wooly sheep in a paddock, all bleating away.

On another day we shuttle into downtown Bundaberg with a long shopping list. We only have an hour before the bus returns to the marina so we divide up our list and go off at full tilt in different directions just as we have done across the Pacific where things were difficult to find and language barriers made communication difficult. Imagine our surprise to meet twenty minutes later with all our needed items. Sooo easy!

Language is a bit of a problem though, as our North American vowel sounds are difficult for local Queenslanders to get. " Excuse me." says Heather to a grocery store clerk, Could you tell me where the ice is?" "You mean oyce?" he puzzles. "Yes, Ice." "Oyce?" "Yes, Oyce!"We begin the process of picking up a modified Australian accent so we may communicate but will always be aware of our accent and our Canadian effusive thank-you`s and euphemisms in a culture that is refreshingly straight and to the point. "Where is the washroom?" " You mean the toilet!"

Heather picks up the proofs for her first Patti book at the post office and we settle down to read for corrections while the wind continues to howl in the rigging in the strong S.E. trade winds. We meet Pony and Sylvia of Rassamond who arrived before us and also Kemal who is on a circumnavigation. We invite them for supper and generally learn to relax, eat good food and be sociable. This is just as important as the voyaging part of our travels which can be so wild and remote. Life is not all about being part of the herd, but neither is it all about being storm bound in the Coral Sea. We need this adjustment time.

I spend some time with our new charts, going over the coastal passage among the shallows between here and Brisbane through the passage between the mainland and Fraser Island with it`s narrow shallow channels among the sandbars. A "bank holiday" is the local term for running aground and spending hours waiting for the tide to float you again. We are headed south because we have phoned a wartime friend of my family (Keith Watson) who lives just south of Brisbane and they are expecting us!

Cast ashore on the Berberry Coast. The horror, the horror!

The shipwrecked sailor is cast ashore on the dreaded Berberry Coast. A life of slavery awaits: a house in the suburbs, a wife and one and a half children, a commute to work. Oh the horror, the horror!

Shiriri Saga #58. Gales in the Coral Sea.

                                   Waiting out the gale.


Our time in New Caledonia has felt like we are living on borrowed time. The steady procession of rain squalls while we tried to see as much of the festival as possible was telling us we were taking chances with the weather. Summer is here in the southern hemisphere and with it the cyclone season. We still have to cross the Coral Sea to Australia.

Oct. 29th.
We have skipped the last few days of the festival and headed out to sea for the eight hundred mile crossing on a forecast of regular trade winds, just a few days after another group of yachts left bound for Brisbane and Bundaberg. I bought a small autopilot off another yacht while in Fiji and installed it in Noemea: it performs brilliantly for a while as we rack up well over one hundred mile runs for a couple of days. Then we hear the bad news: a big unseasonably early low has moved off the Australian coast and is predicted to deepen rapidly. Still, no worries, we are 250 miles away from the center. We edge farther north just in case and then resume our course.

The low deepens and is now producing gale to storm force winds as it turns and travels due east. Hey, that`s aimed just south of us! When our local winds head us we heave to in twenty-five knots and big easy swells. So far so good. Then Heather and Anne are yelling for me as a forty knot squall heels Shiriri way over. I ease off on the storm trys`l and furl the forestays`l while also deploying the drogue off the weather bow. Now we have a kind of balance with the trys`l driving us forward and the drogue slowing our progress and dragging the bow partially up into the wind. We are now hove to under only one small sail and back in control as we drift slowly back toward New Caledonia. The waves are now twelve feet high but still big and broad. Shiriri fits into them nicely.

The yachts a few days ahead of us are not so lucky: they are in the thick of it. Rassamond comes on the radio and describes gale force winds with thunder and lightening. They are also in the strong south setting current off the coast of Australia so the waves must be horrendous. Sylvia adds a little postscript, “I`d just got up from my two hours sleep, - two hours mind. I said, what kind of a mess have you got us into this time Pony?” It was a much needed bit of humour. We stay on the drogue for another day as the wind first eases and then goes back to thirty-five knots from the south-west creating nasty steep waves that has Shiriri`s transom getting some bone shaking wacks as she no longer fits into the wave forms. While we are uncomfortable, we are safe, with plenty of sea room and are fairly relaxed, especially when the storm center drifts south-east away from us and towards New Zealand.

The fleet of Yachts back in Noemea Harbour have put in an uncomfortable few days too as they all crowd into the shelter of the windward side of the harbour in twenty-five to thirty knot winds. A tricky situation to be so tightly hemmed in by other boats.

It takes us two days of light winds and motoring to regain the miles we lost while drifting back on the drogue. We continue to make slow progress against contrary currents. One night I sail us through a front we have been expecting: rain falling like cats and dogs and a wind shift from south to north-east and then sailing in the moonlight in fifteen knots, all within a two hour`s span.

This was to have been a nine day crossing and our food supplies are getting rather basic. As Australian quarantine will confiscate most foods, we have given away what we had thought to be extraneous to our needs. We threw away the last of our weevily flour from Mexico and did not replace it. No more fruit and vegetables. Anne bakes mud-ball cookies. We eat pate on rusks, antipasta on stale crackers, and Heather sifts the worms out of the rice to make rice pudding. We all have showers and recover in the light winds and smooth seas.

One dark night on watch I feel a terrific wack on my forehead and dizzily discover that I have been hit by a flying fish. Lucky it was n`t my face! The next day the trades are back in force and Heather is sailing Shiriri at seven knots - a dizzying speed after our frustratingly slow crawl of the last several days. It begins to look like we may have enough supplies after all. With the wind comes trade wind waves as well and on one big roll, out from a crevice pops a ripe tomato. We fall upon it with gnashing teeth! This morning we are visited by a vast school of dolphins. It is interesting to see them swimming in the transparent wave crests at eyeball level.

November 10.

We are in Australian waters; there is the Breaksea beacon off the north end of Fraser Island. The water is terribly shallow ( 30 feet) and we are still 48 miles from Burnet Head near Bundaburg. We motor sail all day and only when we are close in do we see the low land and the marked channel. We are too late to check in so we anchor in the river until the next morning. We are sitting in the saloon eating scraps of nuts and dried fruit, listening to Australia radio and drinking coffee. This is the destination we have been working toward for over a year. I guess this is finally the place we break out the champagne.

Shiriri Saga # 57.Noemea. The Arts: A Universal Language

The wind is gusting over Artillery Point and setting all the anchored yachts a jiggle. There are a lot of us, over two hundred, and we crowd every bay and bit of sheltered shoreline in this big harbour. We are all here for the Festival of the Arts which features dancers, musicians, and writers from all across the Pacific. For us it will be a reprise of all the islands we have visited plus a glimpse at many we slipped past.

One little yacht anchored near the breakwater looks familiar. It is the little boat I last saw about to leave Bora Bora with a young French couple on board. It looks like they made it despite my misgivings about their preparedness. Only later do we learn that the man has died at sea, not on his own yacht, but later, while delivering a yacht from New Zealand. His body was later recovered from the sea. The news, picked up so casually, still gives us a shiver: going overboard and being left behind as the boat keeps sailing on, is everyone`s nightmare. I am developing a sense of fate: the Gods will take you when they wish and they have a sardonic sense of humor. First they let this poorly equipped cockleshell survive against the odds to reach it`s goal, then end his life when he began to thing of himself as favoured by the gods.

Noemea seems like a Mediterranean city with its slopes neatly covered in white and colourful houses, but New Caledonia has a sad past as a penal colony: that lovely cathedral on the hill top was built by convicts. There is another sadness here we notice right away: the local Melanesian population (Kanaks) look down or away or through us as we pass by. We represent for them the dominant population that keeps them under control. Just a few years before, a rebellion was put down fiercely by French Special Forces. New Caledonia has valuable nickel mines and while the locals are needed to work in the mines and the refining plant they must not think of ownership for themselves. There has been a big influx of French citizens from other places so that the indigenous peoples will never be in a majority position. This is a tourist destination as well, so the big waterfront resorts increase the feeling of bright tinsel hung across dark shadows.

We go to see the beginning ceremonies and the opening of the Festival Village where big local Kanak men in grass skirts dance in a threatening way before the French administration officials. Down on the beach a couple from Hawaii dance the sexiest hula I have ever seen! At other times we see dancers from various islands including New Zealand, Easter Island and Wallis and Fortuna. Most of the performances are group singing and dancing sometimes accompanied by graceful hand gestures.

The group from Wallis and Fortuna is terrific, and I am particularly attracted to one girl in the middle. The group is telling a traditional story of a night fishing party on a coral reef. The men gesture with their spears and the women move their arms in evocative fluid motions as they sing in beautiful harmonies. The girl smiles shyly out at the large crowd on the library lawn which is situated in the middle of town. This is most likely her first journey away from her isolated island home and yet she remains immersed still in the midst of her companions and her culture. This Festival takes place only once every four years in a different location each time and provides an affirmation of the linked cultures of the Pacific Islanders.

As we prepare to leave on our last voyage across the Coral Sea to Australia we feel a pang of regret to be leaving these island cultures behind. There is something very beguiling about them. It has been thus since the first European explorers arrived; a sense that this was Eden. Certainly as we have seen, after they arrived it became less so and every new hotel built in an "unspoiled" place immediately spoils it. That girl though, singing and signing her story so beautifully: I feel she is telling our story too and describing all the mountain peaks, lagoons, starry nights and swaying palms that have attempted to whisper us their secret. Here is a translator with a long cultural history among these islands to transmit their message in a musical language closer to our own human understanding.