Narrative by Meredith Stephens & photographs by Alan Noble
I donned my fluffy hooded jacket on a wintery June morning in Adelaide, desperately trying to insulate myself against the cold. Today, Alex and I were due to fly four hours north to Darwin in order to complete the first leg of sailing his new boat back to Adelaide along the northern and western coasts of Australia. Darwin was in the same country, so I couldn’t conceive of it being much warmer than Adelaide. It was just over 2600 kilometres away.
What I was most looking forward to was dropping into the airport lounge before the flight. Later, there would be all sorts of deprivations and challenges, but in the lounge, I could put these thoughts out of my mind. For thirty minutes or so, I could savour being pampered. I could drink as much chai latte as I wanted and help myself to thinly sliced watermelon and cantaloupe. When I was in the lounge the prospect of being the only vessel on rough and unpredictable seas was unimaginable. But eventually, I was summoned from my indulgences when our flight to Darwin was called. Alex and I made our way to our economy seats, and relaxed in-flight for the next four hours. When we exited the airport in Darwin, the heat was tropical and the sunshine seared. Instead of using my fluffy jacket for warmth I held it over my head for sun protection. Was I really still in the same country?
I had declined the offer of sailing previous blue water passages. When Alex crossed the Great Australian Bight, over the Southern Ocean, I had insisted he be accompanied by a qualified sailor. How could I rescue him if something untoward happened? He had been accompanied by a much younger sailor, Sven, whose ancestry could be traced back to the Vikings. One day when they were twenty nautical miles offshore in the Blight, Alex had noticed that one of the lines had become tangled in the propeller. He tied one end of a rope around his middle and handed the other end to Sven, instructing him to hold it. Then he dived under the boat to untangle the rope from the propeller.
Sven was flabbergasted to have been asked to do this, but relieved when Alex emerged having untied the line. Hearing this anecdote, I felt vindicated in having insisted that Alex sail with a qualified sailor instead of me. Surely, I would never be put in the same position as Sven. But this time in the north of Australia it was just the two of us.
Alex is a qualified sailor, but I am not. I had thought I could manage because the seas would be calmer in the dry season of northern Australia than the Southern Ocean.
We made our way from the airport to the marina and spent the next morning provisioning the boat for the next three weeks. We didn’t make time for swimming because we were afraid of encountering crocodiles, Box jellyfish and Irukandji jellyfish. The following morning, we departed. The first step was exiting the marina through the lock. We booked our passage through the lock at 11 am and cautiously motored past the other boats to get there. The passage through the lock was narrow, so Alex reduced the width of the boat by folding the starboard hull. “Stand on the port bow so you can make sure we don’t scrape against the side of the lock,” he urged me.
I carefully walked along the narrow hull, so I could hold the lockside rope in order to create distance between the boat and the lock. I worried about losing balance. What if I fell into the gap between the lock and the boat and got crushed? I gave it my full concentration and maintained my balance. The attendant opened the barriers of the locks one by one, and the water in the lock levelled with the ocean. We called out our thanks to the attendant, as he heartily wished us a good day. I carefully turned around and retraced my steps back to the middle of the boat.
The sail to the Berkeley River across the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf took us three days. There would be no marinas and no shops along this long coastline until Port Hedland, over 2,000 km away, so every stop would be at anchor. The first two days of sailing and anchoring were uneventful.
The third day, aiming for the Berkeley River, was to be a very long day. Alex rose at three am and departed. The waters were rough, although not as rough as the Southern Ocean. In my case, seasickness takes the form of extreme drowsiness and minor nausea. I spent most of the day sleeping and relieved the nausea with dry ginger. Every now and then I would try to walk around the boat, steadying myself as I grasped furniture.
Then, as the sun was low in the sky I heard Alex gasp. “Oh no! The furling line has gone overboard! I can’t furl the reacher without it.”
Then he looked under the netting of the trampoline to the water below. “There it is! It’s twisted around the port propeller.”
“Excellent!” I replied. At least we hadn’t lost it.
“Not excellent,” he countered. “I have to dive in and get it.”
“No! Don’t put me through this. You know I can’t rescue you.”
“It’ll be fine.”
He had already tied one end of the rope around his waist. The other end was tied to a pole. Then it was twisted several times around a winch for extra safety.
“You just have to pay out the rope from the winch. You don’t have to hold it,” he explained.
After all my protestations, I was being placed in the same position as Sven. Only I wasn’t of Viking stock, and I was quite a bit older. I could feel my heart pounding. I couldn’t meet Alex’s eyes. This was the predicament I most wanted to avoid, being responsible for the physical safety of my irrepressible husband. But he wasn’t entering into discussion. Dismissing my objections, he slid into the water. I wasn’t even sure when to pull in the line, or when to pay it out. I was too scared to look over the edge of the boat. What if I fell into the water? But within a couple of minutes, I heard Alex’s triumphant voice.
“Success!” he shouted, clutching the line. Then he quickly pulled himself onto the boat.
“At least you weren’t eaten by a crocodile.”
‘We are too far away from the coast for that,” he explained.
“What about the Irukandji jellyfish?”
“That’s more of a possibility, but I was only in for a couple of minutes.”
Finally, Alex accepted the beach towel I proffered him. He was too exhilarated by the success of his mission to be sensitive to the cold you would normally feel after emerging from the ocean. The sun was setting.
“I would have been unable to do this in the dark,” he added cheerily.
There were five hours of sailing left to get to the Berkeley River. Night sailing is anathema to me, but there was nowhere to anchor at such depths. Alex used his chart plotter and radar to guide him into the bay. The moon was yet to rise. As we glanced upwards, we saw the Milky Way with a clarity we had never seen before. The level of the tides varied by about six metres every day, so he had to ensure the tide was right not just for when we anchored but also the next morning. Eventually the instruments told us we were in 3.9 metres and Alex decided to anchor, just after midnight. We celebrated with a gin and tonic and Toblerone. The waters were choppy, so that night it was not unlike lying in a sleeper car of an overnight train.
The next morning, we rose to the sight of waves crashing over a nearby beach.
“If I had known we were this close to the beach I wouldn’t have anchored here!” exclaimed Alex.
We had survived the first two hundred nautical miles of our voyage. Now only eleven hundred more lay between us and our destination on the west coast, Port Hedland.
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Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her recent work has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, Continue the Voice, Micking Owl Roost blog, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, and Mind, Brain & Education Think Tank. In 2024, her story Safari was chosen as the Editor’s Choice for the June edition of All Your Stories.
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