Tag: Bass Strait

Categories
Slices from Life

Kissed on Kangaroo Island

Narrative and photographs by Meredith Stephens

We are regular visitors to Kangaroo Island, a nature-lovers’ delight that lies 14 kilometres off the South Australian coast. Much of our time there is spent trying to atone for the environmental damage caused by our European forebears. Swathes of the vegetation have been cleared due to almost two centuries of European farming. Thousands of sheep have grazed on this cleared land for much of that time, and European crops have replaced much of the original flora. The crops have been fertilized for years, and now that we allow the land to remain fallow, noxious weeds take over, fueled by the remnant fertilizer in the soil. Our mission is revegetation, trying to reverse some of the damage from farming.

On our most recent visit, one of my jobs was to uproot the weeds. The task was impossible given that they sprawled across the land as far as the horizon, so we focused on a small fenced-off area. We dared not poison the weeds because they could be consumed by endangered bird species, such as the white-bellied sea eagles that nest nearby. For the same reason we never use rodent poison, but instead trap mice in buckets of water.

White-bellied sea eagle soaring above us

I donned my gardening gloves and grabbed the weeds by their roots, pitted my body weight against the plants, and uprooted them and before discarding them onto the weed pile.

Meanwhile my partner Alex was busying himself planting yet more trees. He was somewhat disgruntled because his boat was being repaired in Yaringa, near Melbourne, after being dismasted in Bass Strait. He gazed longingly out to sea, but seemed to regain a sense of contentment when he was planting trees. For him, planting trees was not a chore, but rather a consuming passion. He made deep holes in the rocky ground with his fencing crowbar, delicately coaxed the seedlings out of their containers, pushed the roots into the hole, pressed the soil back around the seedling, and made a berm around each plant to trap water. Then he drove stakes into the ground around each plant, and encircled them with either a corflute tree guard, or a wire cage, or both. These measures were necessary to protect them from marauding possums and kangaroos, which would otherwise devour the plants overnight.

The fenced-off orchard where we weeded, flanked by Investigator Strait.

There is only so much revegetation you can do without hankering for some relief. Alex was content to plant trees from dawn to dusk but I pressed him to take me on a day excursion. Besides, coming to Kangaroo Island was not just about our earnest efforts at revegetation; it was also meant to be a romantic getaway. Our first outing was to Seal Bay, where the attraction was not in fact seals but rather Australian sea lions. We drove there, now an official tourist destination, and entered through the park office. We walked along the boardwalk with the other tourists, many being international visitors, and gazed down at the sea lions enjoying lying in the sand in the sunshine.

Sea lions under the boardwalk at Seal Bay, Kangaroo Island

Back at the revegetation site, we resumed our routine of weed-whacking and planting for the next few days, by which time we felt we deserved another outing. This time we chose to visit American River (named after visiting American sealers in 1803) known for its picturesque harbour and fresh seafood. But for me, American River was less about the view and the seafood than spotting sea lions. I had spied one on a previous visit and was hoping to see some again. I walked onto the boat ramp near the shed where the reconstruction of the Independence schooner was taking place. (The Independence was the first ship constructed in South Australia, in 1803, commissioned by a visiting American shipmaster and sealer, Isaac Pendleton.) I walked past the door to the boat shed, because as much as I would like to claim interest in the history of local shipbuilding, my real interest was in finding a sea lion.

I was not disappointed. Behind a ‘Resting Seal’ sign explaining that you were required to keep a thirty metre distance from the sea lion, we found what we were looking for.

Sea lion in American River, Kangaroo Island

I glanced into the lagoon, and spied the sea lion’s mate, proudly flipping his body around in the water, before he scrambled onto the shore to demonstrate his supremacy in this territory.

An American tourist next to us asked Alex, “How far is thirty meters?”

He replied, “About one hundred feet, which is twice the distance we are now!”

We all walked backwards trying to preserve the thirty-metre distance between the sea lion and ourselves.

It was mid-afternoon and there were still hours of daylight left, so we decided to visit the nearby eucalyptus distillery. Before entering the building our attention was arrested by young kangaroos, known as joeys, hopping freely around the outside of the building. We entered the premises and purchased some eucalyptus products, and as we left, approached one of the joeys.

Kangaroo Island, like many parts of Australia, has dead wallabies and kangaroos alongside its roads, victims of road-kill. Because kangaroos are marsupials, some of their young may be found alive inside their pouch, even after the mother has been killed. Those finding the road-kill may drag it safely away from the road, after ensuring that no approaching cars are in sight, and then remove the joey from its mother’s pouch. The joeys we came across had been rescued in this way, and hand reared. Unlike most kangaroos, they had no fear of humans. I knelt to pat one of the joeys, and then he gently raised his pointy face to my ear and whispered in it. Then he raised his lips to mine and brushed them against me.

“Don’t let him!” urged Alex. “You’ll get germs from a wild animal.”

I let the joey tickle my lips for a few more seconds, before heeding his urgings. I had been kissed by a kangaroo!

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Muse, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, The Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, Reading in a Foreign Language, and in chapters in anthologies published by Demeter Press, Canada.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Slices from Life

A Five Hundred Nautical Mile Voyage to Tasmania

Meredith Stephens writes of sailing to Tasmania when the pandemic had just started loosening its grip

Neither the wind speed nor direction were favourable as we tacked our way upwind. It was my turn to make the soup. I headed into the kitchen, grabbing rails and fixed furniture to steady myself. With each wave the boat lurched violently. I opened the fridge and a bottle of drink torpedoed across the galley. Then, on my hands and knees, I opened a bilge compartment trying to find the root vegetables. As I stood up, another wave surged and I nearly fell into the bilge. As I was trying to find cutlery I heard Luke’s voice offering to help me. I gladly accepted and found refuge after retreating to my bed. Luke’s steady sea legs meant the soup was ready in minutes.

We were sailing from Granite Island to Robe, in South Australia, on our way south-east to Tasmania. A four-hour journey by road would turn out to be thirty-six-hours by sea. Alex and Luke took three hour shifts at the helm overnight. The waves lurched beneath us. The sails were disobedient. Alex attached the tether to his belt and the rails, and headed out to the foredeck to fix it. Luke was at the helm and I held a rope at the rear deck. They shouted directions to me to pull and then release the rope. Alex fixed the sail as the boat accelerated.

That night the bed in my cabin surged with every crashing wave. There was no relief in the morning when the harsh Australian sunshine pushed its way into the cabin and gave me a resounding migraine. Trying to find relief from the skylight above my bed I staggered up the stairs to the saloon, lay down on the sofa and hid from the sun under a hoodie and coat.

Alex entreated me to lift my gaze to the horizon and so I peeped out and reacquainted myself with the shoreline. My normally healthy appetite disappeared and I had an overwhelming desire to sleep. But Alex was an experienced sailor and never gave up on encouraging me, pushing me beyond what I imagined I could do. Rather than curling up into a ball and giving up, I heeded his encouragement, and my seasickness gradually dissipated. I was well enough by the evening to accompany Alex on the twelve am to three am shift, but noting my tired expression, Alex told me to take leave and go to bed at two thirty am. Luke took over the three to six am shift, and then Alex took over from six am. When I woke at eight the waters were calm. My seasickness had gone and my appetite returned. I enjoyed a hearty breakfast and we calmly motored on to Robe.

We had to sail continuously for two long days and nights on the voyage from Robe to King Island, Tasmania. Alex consulted the app Predict Wind for the weather forecast and assured me that there would be little wind. He, of course, was disappointed because he wanted to sail, but I was quite happy to motor on calm seas if it meant I could be spared from seasickness. He is a climate warrior and wanted to rely on natural sources of energy such as wind. I knew we shouldn’t use fossil fuels, but I decided to tease him, urging, ‘Let’s use diesel!’, knowing full well how it contradicted his principles. He put my needs first, foregoing his love of sailing to motor on calm waters instead. 

I only knew about King Island because of its specialty cheese production, and looked forward to some cheese tastings. Alex asked me to do some research on King Island, and soon I learned that it had been the site of around 800 shipwrecks. This was not what I wanted to hear. I knew Bass Strait was notorious, but not that this single island in the strait had been the site of hundreds of shipwrecks. Nevertheless, Alex had equipped himself with state-of-the-art navigational equipment, and had the assistance of sailor Luke who had once sailed across the Atlantic, and he was unperturbed. I trusted Alex, and his confidence was contagious.

“It’s pretty shallow here,” I announced to Luke from the cockpit during my shift. “Only twenty-five metres.”

Luke and Alex guffawed. “That’s only because it’s too deep for the instruments to measure. It’s actually 1500 metres,” Alex explained.

I had a book ready to read for my three-hour shift but I left it unopened. I was enraptured by the milky and glassy surface and the ripples that glistened in the sun. I scanned the horizon for vessels, and tried to discover the ones that appeared in the monitor reported by Automatic Identification System (AIS). Unlike us, the other vessels on the monitor were container ships. Black birds perched on the surface of the water and took off as we approached. 

“Where are the dolphins?” I quizzed Alex.

“It’s too deep for them here.”

We repeated the shifts. As Alex’s research had predicted the waters were calm. My seasickness had disappeared altogether.

Two days after leaving Robe, the township of Currie on King Island came into view. Anchoring took a while because of the many submerged rocks. Finally, Alex was satisfied with the anchorage, and we decided to hop into the dinghy and go ashore. First, we had to register online with the Tasmanian e-travel. I completed the documentation on my laptop and finally was required to receive a verification code by SMS on my phone. I kept requesting new codes but none came. It turned out that there was no reception on this remote island for my phone provider. I gave up.

The four of us lowered ourselves into the dinghy with our bags. Alex pulled the cord to start the outboard motor, and we weaved between the other berthed boats to the shore. A police vehicle was parked on the shore facing us. A barrel chested police officer in a fluorescent orange vest motioned where we should land. At the wharf he was accompanied by a biosecurity officer.

The police officer greeted us politely and asked whether we had the necessary paperwork for entry. Luke and Alex had theirs, but Verity and I did not. Despite numerous reminders from Alex I had procrastinated and now I was paying for it. We clambered out of the dinghy to the wharf, and the officers took down Verity’s and my details. 

I had not been able to complete my application because my phone would not receive signals in this remote location. Alex tethered me to his phone, because his carrier had coverage. I fumbled around in the sunshine to download various apps to process my application. The phone screen was too small and the glare from the sunshine disturbed my vision even further. Even though I was traveling domestically, it was like trying to enter a foreign country without the right visa.

“I don’t want to hold you all up,” I said to the others. “Let me go back to the boat. I don’t care. I can read a book.”

Alex would have none of it. Then the biosecurity officer briefly disappeared, and reappeared with paper forms. 

“You can fill these out instead,” he offered. “Then you will have to take Rapid Antigen Tests back in the boat and wait fifteen minutes for the result. If it is negative you are free to travel. I’m just going to make a detour to the airport to pick up the tests for you.”

The biosecurity officer made the eleven kilometre trip to the airport and back to retrieve the Rapid Antigen Tests. Meanwhile, Luke cleverly engaged the police officer in banter, trying to find out the best places for tourists to visit on the island.

“The races are on this afternoon,” he kindly informed us. “They are held four times a year over summer.”

If it weren’t for the banter with the police officer we could never have learned this. We scrambled back into the dinghy with the Rapid Antigen Tests. Or to be more precise, the others scrambled into the dinghy. I lost my footing on the tires on the way down and collapsed in a heap into the dinghy. The mask had obscured my downward vision and I couldn’t see where I was placing my feet. I was rattled after having been greeted by a police officer and a biosecurity officer on the shore of the quiet fishing cove nestling alongside Currie. The others gasped as I fell and then fussed over me and I soon recovered. We sped back towards the boat.

“What else did the police officer tell you, Luke?” we probed, once in the dinghy.

“He said that the other day another vessel had come here from interstate. They too had had trouble getting internet access on this remote island and did not know that the entry requirements for Tasmania had changed while they were on board. They were so upset at being greeted on the shore by a police officer and a biosecurity officer that they started an altercation and had to be locked up.”

Hearing this I felt grateful that we had been treated with such civility. Again we clambered back on to the boat. Exhausted but relieved that we had been able to go on land in Tasmania, we decided to celebrate with Luke’s bottle of Chardonnay. Then, we proceeded with the tests.

As expected, we all tested negative and we took the dinghy ashore to explore Currie. We followed the police officer’s advice and walked through the town to the races. Alex and I were sitting in the stands, enjoying not only the horses but the spectacle of the local crowd in their finery. Alex abruptly looked up to the end of the aisle.

“Is that the police officer?” he asked me.

I studied him chatting to other racegoers in full regalia of his flack jacket, guns in his holster and fluorescent orange vest.

Alex turned to me and quipped, “Maybe that is why he seemed to be in a hurry to process our entry? He wanted to be at the races.

I had been struck by the story that Luke had heard from the police officer that the other interstate visitors had acted defensively when they heard about the new complicated entry requirements to Tasmania. Why had we been treated so differently? We were simply sent back to the boat and the officers had trusted us to act appropriately on the basis of the results of the COVID test. The officers seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to let us get on our way. Now we had an inkling why.

*All the photographs have been supplied by Meredith Stephens.

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Muse, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, The Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, Reading in a Foreign Language, and in chapters in anthologies published by Demeter Press, Canada.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Essay

Discovering Books and Places: The Voyage from Eden

Meredith Stephens sails the Australian coastline, recording her experiences with words and her camera.

Maybe because I am an applied linguist, one of the pleasures of travel is the novelty of learning unfamiliar place names. Sailing north from Eden in southern New South Wales towards Wollongong, south of Sydney, provided ample opportunity to indulge this pastime.

We were relieved to arrive at the township of Eden after the long crossing of Bass Strait from Tasmania to the mainland. Too tired to disembark, we spent the evening recovering on the boat after availing ourselves of a public mooring. The next morning, we rose afresh and resolved to explore Eden. We made our way to the wharf but found that it was formidably higher than our vessel. As much as I was looking forward to Eden, I suddenly realised that climbing onto the wharf looked impossible.

“I can’t do it!” I complained, as I often did, to my sailing companions Alex, Katie and Verity. They were all taller than me and leapt up to the wharf.

“I don’t mind staying here and reading a book. You all go off and enjoy the town,” I urged, as I looked down at the green water in between the boat and the wharf. It wasn’t the first time. Whether climbing a mountain, or hiking, I just couldn’t keep up with the others. Rather than holding everyone up I would prefer to stay back and read.

“No, you have to come with us,” Alex insisted, as always.

I lifted my left foot onto the tyre and my right onto the beam, grabbed hold of the side of the wharf and somehow made it to safety, as the others encouraged me on.

We climbed up the hill and walked along the coastal road to the centre of Eden, taking in shops and the Eden Killer Whale Museum. Then we wound our way downhill back to the boat, ready to sail across the bay to the Sea Horse Inn, where we planned to dine later.

After anchoring Alex decided to attend to boat maintenance before heading across the water to the inn. Alex always attended to business before pleasure, but I was hungry and couldn’t wait for the inn to open at 6 pm. I had to be patient because Alex wanted to fix his anchor light. He climbed into his bosun’s chair. Katie and I winched him up the mast with the electronic winch. Katie released the rope steadily. We had to watch carefully because he would give a hand signal when he wanted to pause. As he moved higher and higher up the mast it became harder to crank our necks backwards to keep him in view. The only way we could keep our eyes on him without bending over backwards was to lie on the deck facing upwards. It might appear that we were lounging around but in fact we were doing our best to keep him in sight. Alex repaired the anchor light and then Katie and I slowly and carefully winched him back to the deck.

Having performed the essential maintenance, we were ready to hop into the dinghy and motor to shore.

After disembarking we dragged the dinghy as far onto the sand as we could and secured it to a branch with a rope. We walked up to the restaurant and wiped the sand off our bare feet before putting on our shoes. We were greeted by a smiling Maitre d’. His expressions changed to concern when he saw Verity.

“I need to see your ID. You can only come into the bar if you are over 18.”

We tried to suppress our giggles. Verity was 28.

“Don’t worry, She’s an adult,” I reassured him.

“We have to check. Until we don’t. Some people get upset when we stop asking them,” he quipped.

After presenting her ID we sat outside and basked in the sunset sitting on the outdoor furniture facing the bay. Then we made our way into the dining room. Although our first choice on the menu had been sold out, my second choice of smoked salmon proved to be the most delicious of the trip. Alex was just as impressed by his serving of sole.

Our destination was Shellharbour, near Wollongong and we were due to sail north along the New South Wales Coast. After having sailed through the fierce Southern Ocean to circumnavigate Tasmania, and the notorious Bass Strait, I was relieved that land would be in sight for the rest of the voyage.

The most memorable stop was South Durras, because as soon as we arrived on the shore we were greeted by a kangaroo grazing and scratching her belly with her forearm.  We walked through the caravan park to a rainforest lined with ferns underfoot which led to the shore. We circled back to the shore, treading over rock pools on our way to the beach leading back to the boat.

The next stop had an enchanting name – Ulladulla. If somewhere was named Ulladulla, I simply had to stop there. I kept practising the pronunciation as we sailed into the bay. We anchored, and as usual, took the dinghy to a wharf. As we approached the wharf, we noticed barnacles. The sharp barnacles could easily cause a puncture and it was too late to turn it around.

“Push back as hard as you can!” urged Alex.

We pushed the dinghy away from the barnacles. Then we motored to the wharf on the other side of the bay and disembarked. We walked up the hill into Ulladulla, and unexpectedly Alex announced, “Let’s visit the secondhand bookstore. There’s a sign over there.”

We followed a narrow arcade to the end and spotted the bookstore. My attention was immediately drawn to a signed copy by Heather Morris, a bestselling author.

Sailing often entails many hours of crossing vast distances at the slow rate of 6 knots. When the seas are rough there is nothing for me to do but take an anti-seasickness pill and sleep in the cabin while Alex, who doesn’t suffer from seasickness, takes the helm.

But when the seas are calm there is ample time for reading, if you have enough crew to take turns at the helm. Thankfully Alex’s boat library takes pride of place. Even so, the addition of Heather Morris’ book was welcome and the long hours at sea passed quickly as I read this.

The seas were calm as we headed to Shellharbour, a new marina south of Wollongong, another city with a mellifluous name. We sailed through the many empty berths to the heart of the marina and located our assigned berth. Katie put out the fenders, and then we leapt onto the dock to tie the boat to the cleats. Relieved to have made this long sail to Wollongong, Alex cracked open some of our sparkling Tasmanian wine, with which we celebrate the completion of each leg.

Next, we had to clean up the boat before our flight back to Adelaide. We still had plenty of unopened food in the fridge, so Alex went to offer it to our friendly French Canadian boat neighbours, Gerard and Heloise. They happily received it. Then we asked them the easiest way to get to Sydney airport, after which they offered to drive us to Wollongong station. It was our first time to see Wollongong, and we were astounded to see the lush vegetation so unlike our home state of South Australia. We caught the train from Wollongong to the airport, passing all too quickly through the temperate rainforest. We then flew back to Adelaide to unlimited hot water and clean sheets, as we slowly discarded our sea legs. Not least, I was proud to have learnt beautiful place names such as Ulladulla and Shellharbour, although I still couldn’t manage to spell Wollongong without a spellchecker.

* All the photographs are courtesy Meredith Stephens.

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Muse, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, The Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, Reading in a Foreign Language, and in chapters in anthologies published by Demeter Press, Canada.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Essay

The Good, the Bad, and the Benign: Back across Bass Strait

Photography and Narrative by Meredith Stephens

“What! A text message at this hour,” exclaimed Alex, reluctantly looking at his phone.

Then his expression turned to concern.

“Gregory, our boat neighbour in George Town, says the boat hatch is open.”

George Town, Tasmania, was a two-hour flight and a one-hour bus ride away from Adelaide. Who could have entered the boat from the hatch? They would have to be both slim and lithe. What could they have taken? Could they have taken the chartplotter – used to navigate, the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) – used to aid search and rescue or the Automatic Identification System (AIS) – used to track other vessels? We couldn’t sail without them.

“I can’t really bring our flight to Hobart forward because all the seats are gone during the Easter break. We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

Meanwhile, Alex decided to text Gregory back and ask him to take a look through the hatch to determine what might have been stolen. Gregory kindly obliged, and sent Alex a photo of the interior of the boat. The equipment appeared to be in place.

Alex checked the location of the boat on the AIS. It should have been updated daily, but it had been inactive for a few days. That did not bode well.

We spent the next day packing our bags as carefully as possible to avoid excess charges. On Friday Alex, Verity, Katie and I caught the plane from Adelaide to Hobart, and then picked up our rental car. We drove north through the centre of the island to the lush agricultural lands of the Tamar River, passing through towns lined with Georgian buildings constructed with convict labour.

Sculpture at Evandale

We were particularly looking forward to partaking of the best vanilla slices in the world, located in the township of Ross, and I confess that this distracted us from our concern for the safety of the boat equipment.

We sat outside the bakery savouring the vanilla slices as slowly as possible. Who knew whether we would ever be able to come back to Ross?

Then we continued our drive northward to George Town, Australia’s third-oldest settlement, meandering through other towns lined with Georgian buildings. As night fell, we arrived at George Town to our boat home. My fellow crew members were able to climb on the boat from the wharf unaided but I wasn’t tall enough to do this. Alex positioned an upside-down bucket on the wharf so that I could clamber on board. With trepidation we opened the door, now unlocked, and ventured inside. The equipment was still there but it had been unplugged. The lid of the clear plastic box under the monitor was open.

“They’ve taken the spare keys. The gold coins have gone too!” Alex observed.

Alex had prepared a collection of one and two dollar coins in a plastic bag in the clear box to be used for laundromats on shore. So this is what the thieves had been after!

Next Alex checked his wine collection in one of the bilges, “the boat cellar”. This was untouched. The thieves must have entered through the hatch and left through the door. Other than the keys, the only goods that had been stolen were the gold coins for the laundromat – or so we thought. Perhaps they were planning to return, next time through the door.

The theft of gold coins reminded me of advice I had received at the beginning of my teaching career in the 1980s in the city of Whyalla in South Australia. I had been assigned teacher housing by the education department. I was advised by a colleague that when I was away from home, I should leave gold coins in obvious places for youngsters who might break in.

Alex was relieved that they had not taken any navigational or safety equipment, and I was relieved that they had not taken my boat slippers. We were well into autumn and it was cold underfoot.

Despite the break-in we were very fond of George Town, not least due to the camaraderie of our boat neighbours.

On the day of departure, as always, Alex got up before the rest of us to commence the day’s sailing. We were due to head north across Bass Strait towards the mainland. The harbour was generously lit up by the lights in the supermarket carpark on the other side, facilitating the safe exit to the Tamar River.

One of our favourite boat meals was freshly caught fish. Only when looking for a rod one evening did we discover yet another item had been stolen — a heavy-duty tuna fishing rod. This time, rather than using the rod we trolled with a hand reel, and had no trouble catching smaller fish.

Meanwhile someone in George Town was enjoying spending our gold coins and fishing with Alex’s special rod. At least we had our technology to guide our decisions as we crossed Bass Strait, where identifying marine traffic and the right weather conditions was critical. We followed the course Alex had plotted, stopping at the offshore island of Badger Island overnight, East Kangaroo Island and Whitemark for a few hours the following day, then anchoring at Settlement Point for our second night. Based on the Predict Wind forecast, we decided to tuck in for shelter at Outer Sister Island for two nights to wait out a front bringing strong winds. The shore looked tantalisingly close. I asked Alex if we could take the dinghy ashore but, pointing to the shore break, he told me that if we did we would likely capsize. We stayed indoors for the day, reading, writing and longingly looking at the forbidden shore. My preferred pastime is writing, but every now and then I had to force myself to stop and fix my eyes on the horizon as the boat danced over the anchor, to recover from bouts of seasickness.

The forecast was for calmer conditions the following morning. We were ready for the long stint to the mainland, during which there would be no more coves in which to shelter. Alex got up first and departed Outer Sister Island at 6.38 am. We persevered sailing through both day and night. During the day we were rewarded by dolphin sightings as they played alongside and in front of us for about ten minutes a time, before suddenly veering away. During the night Alex and I roused ourselves at midnight to take our turn on the three hour shift until 3 am. Well, to be fair, Alex did the night watch while I forced myself to keep my eyes open.

We arrived at Eden, New South Wales, at 4.20 pm, and secured the boat on a public mooring. Too tired to venture ashore that evening, we relaxed on the boat, ready to explore Eden the following morning.

We had crossed Bass Strait availing ourselves of the technological support of the chartplotter and the AIS. Although the equipment did not spare us the trials of the night watch, it did help us avoid commercial trawlers and container ships in the shipping lanes. If it weren’t for our boat neighbour Gregory back in George Town, the thieves may have returned to steal the crucial equipment which made our crossing of Bass Strait safer. No less importantly, the notorious Bass Strait had been kind to us.

Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her work has appeared in Transnational Literature, The Muse, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, The Writers’ and Readers’ Magazine, Reading in a Foreign Language, and in chapters in anthologies published by Demeter Press, Canada.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL