When is a blog not a blog...

This blog is suffering from a lack of sailing. When I began it, I thought it would be more of a writing project than a sailing log, but seeing as this is the first post since last November, it's not managing to be either! To tell truth, I've been too busy writing.

The Secret of the Lonely Isles, my new children's novel, was published on the 1st of February this year. It's off to a good start with 3500 copies already pre-ordered by a national school bookclub list. This book is a slight departure from the style of Brumby Plains and Castaway. It starts off in a town setting rather than the bush and then heads out to sea, but continues to put kids in situations where they have to make decisions and take actions independently of adults. I love writing these books, but I'm taking a break from them for a bit, and writing some adult fiction. That is, fiction aimed at adult readers, not eroticism! Every time I've said I was writing adult fiction, I get raised eyebrows and knowing grins. My husband has already offered to write any sex scenes but I have politely declined...

Coming up with a title is harder than writing the book, I reckon, and this current work in progress is no exception. It's about a forensic anthropologist who is engaged to identify the missing Australian soldiers at Fromelles, northern France, scene of Australia's first battle on the 1916 Western Front. In the process she discovers a lot more about her own - slightly dysfunctional - family, and herself. It spans a hundred years and four generations, and I still like it so that's a good sign! (My agent likes it too so that's an even better sign) I'm about three quarters of the way through, and I hope to get it finished before the end of the year. Along the way I've learnt a lot about police procedures, forensics, identifying dead bodies, the process of decomposition, and World War One, amongst a host of other miscellaneous bits of information. Researching is one of the great joys of writing, except that it can be hard to stop reading and start writing.

Tramontana gets her feet wet again

One of the best things about our recent week sailing to Port Essington, was that we were actually sailing. We bought Tramontana in November last year, then had to return to Darwin in mid December before we'd had a chance to sail her anywhere. Stuie McPherson brought her down to Darwin for us the following March, and we moved back on board in early May, but various things had got in the way of any sailing till now.

The run out to Port Essington was slow rather than rough. We left an hour before sundown, and had a comfortable ride on the outgoing tide before it turned and started working against us, so much so that by daylight we'd only reached Abbot Shoal. We then hammered into a headwind the whole way to Port Essington.

We arrived at Black Point at about midnight after a 30 hour passage. It takes a few nights of watches on a long passage to get used to interrupted sleep, so when we dropped the anchor and made the boat secure, we were asleep in minutes. Next morning we sailed down to Record Point and stopped for a few more hours. Lex and Mark headed off in the dinghy for some fishing, while I happily stayed on board and read to my heart's content.

The blokes caught some mud crab and sand whiting which made a gourmet lunch feast, and managed to snag barramundi and mangrove jack for the evening meal as well. A storm came belting in, and we decided to up anchor and move somewhere deeper. Mark has the incriminating photos of me on the foredeck in the blinding rain, raising the anchor like a good crewman. Evidence for the divorce judge, he reckons! But I had to agree it was better than dragging the anchor and banging into the sand bar nearby.

The time here at Victoria Settlement was wonderful - see previous blog - and we both loved coming back to this special place. The last time we were here we had Ali with us, and she spent as much time as she could with a fishing rod in her hand too.

The sail home was fast and furious - the boat speed reached 15.8 knots at one point. Listening to Lex and Mark whooping you'd have thought we'd broken the water speed record, but it was pretty fast. The wind was in the right place for most of the way home. We made it to Darwin in about 22 hours, and had a peaceful day reading and napping at anchor until there was enough tide for us to go through the lock at Tipperary again.

Keep an eye out for the next ""Weekend Australian or two for Mark's article about Port Essington!

Disturbing Old Ghosts

Lex and Mark casting for whiting at Record Point, Port Essington

Once in a while you have an opportunity to be part of something truly wonderful. Lex and I were invited to join an expedition organized by retired Darwin architect Peter Dermoudy to Victoria Settlement, Port Essington, to locate unmarked graves and to rescue the four existing grave monuments from the encroaching bush. Peter had recruited Geoff Annear and his 60 ft motor yacht Seacret to provide transport and accommodation for themselves and a dozen very keen expeditioners, including the Northern Territory Administrator Tom Pauling.

Monday 11 October we collected our friend Mark Day, a journalist with The Australian, from the airport and headed Tramontana out of the harbour. We slogged through strong headwinds and opposing tides, and with great relief dropped the anchor off Black Point, just inside Port Essington harbour, at midnight thirty hours later.

The settlement was the site of the third attempt at establishing a British presence on the north coast. The Dutch, French and Americans were perceived as a potential threat to the security of British ownership of northern Australia, so in 1838 a couple of boat loads of Royal Marines were despatched to remedy the situation. They formed a garrison about ten miles down the long, wide bay of Port Essington, at Adam Head, and called it Victoria, after the young Queen.

Yachts anchored off Adam Head

To put this in perspective, Melbourne had only been founded three years earlier,  Adelaide just the year before, and Darwin would not be surveyed until 1869. The landing of the First Fleet had only occurred 50 years before. There was essentially nothing comforting or familiar to Europeans in all the distance from the Swan River penal colony in the far south west, to the Moreton Bay convicts in the east.

Cemetery, with Emma Lambrick's monument at the rear

Victoria Settlement lasted for eleven years, during which some 58 people died – mostly from malaria - and were buried in what must be the loneliest cemetery in Australia.  In 1849 it was abandoned, and the garrison packed up and went home to England, taking with it Captain John MacArthur, nephew to his uncle of the same name who years earlier had kick-started the Merino sheep industry at Camden NSW, in between various duels and banishments. John MacArthur had not left Victoria in the entire eleven years, and barely escaped becoming a resident of the cemetery himself.

Apart from a short-lived attempt at a cattle business at the site in the 1870s, little has disturbed the ghosts of Victoria Settlement since then, apart from the odd visit by adventurous tourists. It’s too far off the track to become a regular destination, and difficult to get to without a boat.

The Cornish style chimneys, all that's left of the married quarters

Today, it’s as hot and lonely as it was in 1838. Breezes don’t seem to reach the cliff-top, and the light is stark and sharp. At the top of Adam Head, the white chalky cliff from which the settlement spreads out, a row of black stone chimneys is all that remains of the five cottages built for the married couples. It’s not difficult to imagine what a young English wife must have felt, coming ashore for the first time.

We set about disturbing the ghosts pretty quickly. Peter had a copy of a painting that showed the graves in relation to Mrs Lambrick’s monument, so rough sight lines were cleared through the tangled growth by hand to try to fix the positions where the unmarked graves might lie. Wayne then went to work with his non-invasive, ground penetrating radar machine, which looks a lot like a lawn mower, only silent. By the end of the day all 54 graves had been located. Furthermore, archaeologist Steve Sutton was able to confirm that the brick kiln was used to make charcoal and not lime as originally thought.
 

The ghosts were even more discomfited by the roar of chain saws the next day when the Black Point rangers joined the shore party. Several trees overhung the stone monuments, and these were cut down and removed, and the immediate area cleared. A search across the harbour the following day for the site of a boat building operation wasn’t so successful, although several stands of very old Tamarind trees were noted, evidence of the Macassan trepang fishermen who came regularly to trade with the Aboriginal people along the coast.

The last evening we held a play-reading of the play Cheap Living, a 1797 farce last performed at Victoria in October 1839, when Sir Owen Stanley called in and decided the troops needed entertaining. Peter Dermoudy had a copy of a painting of the original performance night, showing a rough stage draped with old ships’ ensigns. Old ships’ ensigns being hard to come by, Peter hand-painted some large sheets with Union Jacks, and hung them above the ruins of the hospital kitchen on bamboo poles. Lights were strung beneath, wired to a 12 volt battery. No noisy generator was going to remind us it wasn’t really 1839. Tom Pauling, a famous Darwin thespian as well as our current Administrator, directed the action.

For a couple of hours that night, Victoria came alive again as the stage lights glowed on weathered, crumbling brickwork and human voices drifted out across the silent bush. Ten people performed in the play, watched by another eighteen or twenty who leaned in through the window and door openings, the audience bolstered by three or four lucky yachts serendipitously visiting Victoria Settlement and receiving a once in a lifetime experience.

It was a weird and wonderful thing to do, to recreate an event like this at such a remote and isolated place. I'm sure the old ghosts heartily approved.

Writing: 1 Sailing: 0

Looks like the Fates are making me wait a while longer to find out if I can write under sail. On the day we were due to leave the marina about three weeks ago, we discovered a major engine/shaft issue and have been occupied ever since sorting it out. Why it chose that moment to announce its presence, we don't know, as there was no sign of trouble in the previous few months. However we're very glad it appeared here inside the marina, and not a few hundred miles offshore in a gale...

Those Fates have been busy in other areas though, and it looks like we won't leave Darwin before the wet season begins.  It's a more than a year since we've done any serious sailing, and we're getting a bit desperate, but on the plus side a layover for the wet will mean time to write, and we'll be near some of our kids and grandbabies. We can do a lot of sailing along the NT coast, weather permitting, and that's something to look forward to. But it's so hard watching other cruising yachts come into the marina, and a lot harder watching them leave for places north and west of here.

The new book is slowly evolving. I find I can write comfortably in the saloon, even with husband and marine engineers rumbling around close by. But it's warm - the boat's air conditioner really struggles with Darwin's unusually hot build up. The prediction is for a staggering 37C by the end of this week. Find myself wanting to change the book's setting to somewhere with snow. I'll tell a bit more about the book when it's grown a bit more - if I do that too soon, it'll evaporate!

Catching up

Just to fill in the gaps...

Last November in Phuket, we traded our old boat Malaika for a younger, larger yacht, designed and built by Phil Atkinson, and sailed by Phil and his wife Fay for the last 9 years. She is a 54 ft centre cockpit monohull, built of strip-planked western red cedar and composites, and is beautifully finished. Light and fast, she's a head turner of a boat, and one that people are constantly coming up to look at more closely. She won the "Wow factor" prize in the recent Dragons Abreast charity yacht race in Darwin.

We had intended cruising in Malaysia this year, but Lex ruptured a disc in his back in December, just before the Hart family arrived for a three week sail with us. The Harts opted for a driving holiday in Thailand instead, while we left Tramontana in Phuket and returned home. We decided to stay in Darwin for a while and Lex went back to work at his old Chambers. By March he was too busy for us to sail the yacht back ourselves, so Stuart McPherson brought her down from Thailand for us. We moved back on board in early May, and have been living in Tipperary Marina ever since, gradually getting her ready for another long voyage.

Now the list is almost completed, and we're down to the provisioning and saying goodbye stage. We hope to cast off the mooring lines in a few days, perhaps the 8th September, and head east to Cape York, stopping off at New Year and other islands near Coburg Peninsula, then the Wessells, and maybe Gove along the way. Hopefully the north easterlies will kick in on time to take us down the east coast.

It feels strange leaving without Ali this time, but once we get out to sea again it should all fall into place. In 2008 we were planning a circumnavigation, via the Ambon rally. This time we have much less of a plan - well, we're not even making plans any more, just cruising and seeing where we feel like going at the time. The general vague intention (GVI) is to head to Tasmania by early February for the Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart, and then perhaps New Zealand for starters. We'll let you know.

2009 was a pretty confused and aimless year for us as we tried to come to terms with losing our girl. But we had unflagging support from our family and our friends, and the Darwin community generally, and we are very humbly grateful for it all. Now it's time for us to climb back on the horse and have another go.

Life in storage, or how I moved out of my study and onto a boat...

I really had no idea what I was getting into when we bought our yacht. The only sailing experience I had was a damp afternoon on Albert Park Lake in Melbourne, in a little wooden boat with a boyfriend who was a Sea Scout. All I remember was dodging the boom (not always successfully) at the shout of "prepare to come about!", and trying not to think about the slimy weed waiting for me in the shallow water if I fell over the side. If this was sailing, I'd stick to land lubbing, thanks. For a few months, my friend and I planned to build a yacht and sail off into the sunset, but then the relationship did that instead, and I stopped thinking about boats.

Fast forward 35 years, and here I am, living on board a yacht, with my husband Lex. This is it, this is our home. We don't have a house we rent out while we sail, a cosy little bit of terra firma awaiting our return. Just our yacht. That boom must have connected with my head harder than I remember all those years ago on the lake.

On that notion of terra firma:  do you ever stop to consider just how solid a floor is? How it doesn't move under your feet? How the desk doesn't tilt and lurch beneath your laptop or your notebook, and the cup of tea stays in one spot? You can forget all that when you go sailing. And include long showers, high ceilings, wardrobes, beds that are easy to make, and space.

Showers are short (on water and on room) and relatively uncomfortable. Ceilings: if you're over 6 ft you're in for a bent neck on most boats. Wardrobes? For starters they're called "hanging lockers", and if there's any room left over from the wet weather gear, you're welcome to it, but shorts and Tshirts don't need hanging space. Beds: this is something you discover about boats the morning after your first night. Most of the bed is generally jammed against the walls and you have to climb onto the bed to make it.  And space?  According to my husband, space is for spare parts and tools. Somehow I’ve managed to steal a couple of cupboards - sorry, lockers - for my writing gear, clothes and sundries. Oh, and food. Men regard food on yachts as something that takes up minimal space, but can feed multitudes. The loaves and fishes story is obviously missing a boat in there somewhere.

So here I am, the hoarder of the family, the keeper of the family archives, the archaeologist's Nirvana, forced to render my life's accumulation of fascinating historical....stuff, into three lockers with about the total capacity of half a 44 gallon drum. But archaeologists of the future can relax. Luckily someone invented storage units. I made sure I packed up the house when Lex was at work, so I managed to salvage a lot of my life and squirrel it away. I DID chuck out, oh, at least a whole bag full of stuff in the process. Even I can make mistakes in the hoarding business.

I managed to whittle down the truly important stuff of my life into a very small pile. And I am embarrassed to say, I found the experience quite liberating. For example, getting rid of a wardrobe full of bad choices, kept out of guilt, was cathartic. Now I have 10 tops, half a dozen shorts, 3 pairs of jeans and a couple of jumpers, and that's it. The fact that they are still bad choices seems less of a worry out of sight of land. Fashion's not my strong point.

Books, on the other hand, caused me a lot of angst. There must be 30 boxes of books in storage. I took only 25 books on board with me when we first left Darwin, and it was agony choosing between old favourites (too many), books not yet read, and references for the current book in progress. (Lord of the Rings comes with me, no matter how often I've read it). The real drama for a book lover however, is that when you sail, you arrive in ports where other yachties are desperately looking for new books to read, and they want you to swap. Giving away a book I love is like giving away a child. Impossible! So I have to make room for temporary residents on the book shelf, I mean locker, so that there’s something to trade for something not yet read.

At this point I have to confess, that in 8 months of constant sailing I didn't actually read very many books. When we're sailing, reading can make me sea-sick. If it's too rough, I'm busy hanging on. And there's often so much to look out for, like dolphins, whales, floating logs, submerged rocks, supertankers… And then when you get somewhere, there are things to fix, maintenance to do, provisions to buy, sights to see and sleep to catch up on.

So here I am, about to head out again, only this time Lex has relented, and we have some new purpose built book lockers in the forward cabin – book shelves to the uninitiated. Now I have the heady prospect of finding books to put on the shelves. The economy is about to get another boost.