Then my dark time ends, as the moon overwhelms the stage. The Milky Way shrinks and fades, and only the brightest of phosphorescent stars can shine through the brash moonlight.
So, hello, Moon. You’re looking a bit squashed tonight. Looks like the old face has had a bit of a beating. Been brawling in the pub again, eh?
I look at the illuminated dial of my watch. It’s 1.20 am and we have a bird! At first I think I am hallucinating. I see a smudge in the darkness, flapping past the dodger windscreen. It can’t be, I think, so I turn away, but at the edge of my sight there it goes again. Again and again it swoops past, as if trying to land. I rush for the torch and shine it obligingly on the bow as a landing light. Sure enough the bird settles in the torch glow. It’s a noddy – what a plebeian name for one of the most graceful and elegant of all sea birds. It perches on the fender rope at the bow, staying there for most of the night, flying away with nary a thankyou during Ted’s dawn watch.
The next night, it’s there again. Ted wakes me for my 4 am watch.
‘Your friend is back. He’s sitting on top of the dodger making a hell of a racket.’
It’s true. As I sit directly beneath him, he stamps and prattles and flaps and purrs, and offers answering quarks to other noddies flying by. Just before daylight, I decide to have another look to see which part of the dodger he is inhabiting at the moment. I pop my head out and we, the bird and I, find that we are staring at each other, heads not five centimetres apart. I don’t know who gets the greater shock. We both freeze for a moment, and then he’s gone forever, flapping lazily away.
The time passes. We haven’t seen a boat, or a plane, or even the sign of a fish for six days. The daily watch-keeping, navigation, eating, cleaning, showering and sleeping fill the time. Navigation is a particular pleasure, and then there is a ‘sched’ – short for schedule – which is radio contact at prearranged times with other boats by HF radio. We read and listen to Radio Australia news broadcasts – compacted news, without the bickering of politicians. Our fairly catholic CD collection blasts into the forever – the sea birds are treated to everything from Vivaldi to Lee Guiness. We argue about the future of the world and discuss the books we’re reading. Ted fishes with his strategically placed peg to tell him when he has a fish, I write the journal. I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy converting our experiences into words.
Sunrises are usually a solo thing, but sunsets are a nightly theatrical performance during the evening meal, and we watch every evening for ‘the Green Flash’. This phenomenon, which sailors love to claim to have seen, occurs but rarely. When the cloud and sky conditions are right, as the sun’s circle falls into the horizon, the tiny yellow blaze of sunlight turns, for a matter of milliseconds, vivid green. I have now seen it twice!
For an Australian, the name Ashmore Reef conjures up newspapers’ blurry aerial images of skinny-legged silhouettes, ‘boat people’, abandoned on a desolate shore. Ashmore is much more than this. The atolls, along with the nearby Cartier Reef, are an important way station in the bird migration routes of the east Indian Ocean. In addition to the eighty-eight sighted bird varieties, there are over twenty species of nesting birds, many sea snakes and nesting turtles. On advice from marine scientists about the importance of Ashmore, a large area was declared a Wetland of International Importance in 2003. Australia keeps coastguard vessels at Ashmore to allow certain privileges to traditional Indonesian fishermen while guarding the protected wetlands and watching for ‘boat people’ trying to make their way to the Australian mainland.
On cue, according to our navigated route, three small atolls appear as smudges on a morning made in heaven. A tiny zephyr breathes us forward on a rippled sea, indigo beneath the boat, pale green ahead. The blue above is lightly spread with cotton wool. Our first offshore landing could hardly be more full of beauty. What looks like a scattering of lime-coloured butterflies on the horizon are, we guess rightly, Indonesian fishing boats, and we can hear the growing roar of a surf breaking somewhere on a windward reef. Breaking the scene, sitting high and powerful amid the soft line of the atolls, is an aluminium monster – an Australian Customs vessel.
We call them on Channel 16, and there’s a polite response.
‘Welcome, Blackwattle. This is Customs Vessel Corio Bay. Just take the mooring to the east of our vessel, sir. We’ll come and visit you later in the day.’
Just take the mooring? I haven’t taken a mooring since leaving Pittwater. It seems bizarre to pick up a mooring line in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We laugh with the pleasure and ease of it, and I go forward to the bow. As we draw closer, I see a mooring line obviously designed for a 100,000-tonne ship. We won’t drag tonight!
The crew of the Corio Bay are generous and welcoming hosts. We are treated to a tour of their ship, and they tell us fascinating stories. Ashmore Reef has been a traditional fishing ground for the fishermen from the Indonesian island of Roti for hundreds of years.
‘The Roti Island tradition is for their fishermen to sail south for one day and one night,’ says Jeff, one of the customs officials, ‘and then look for a green cloud in the sky. Beneath that green cloud they know they will find Ashmore Reef. If they cannot find the green cloud, they must turn and sail back to their home village and try again another time.’
‘The green cloud?’ I say. It sounds like a fairy story.
‘Yes, the green cloud,’ Jeff grins. ‘The reef waters are so green that their colour is reflected in the sky – you should look out for the green cloud when you leave.’
I am sceptical, but let it pass . . .
We stay several blissful days, swimming and relishing the strange environment and the release from our disciplined watch-keeping. A highlight is joining the customs crew to go searching for nesting turtles at night. The air is warm, the water warmer as we wade through the long shallows to reach a moonless shore. We trudge along a beach of broken coral to circle the island. My bare feet scream with the pain of it. Five torches flash chaotically, showing scrubby bush and just two palm trees in total. We cross many fresh turtle trails, as large as tractor tracks. There are dozens of birds: egrets, with slender white bodies; frigates, large and lolloping; noddies, needle-fine and elegant; and the dear boobies, plump and comical. They all look stunned by the torchlight. On the way back in the tender, giant manta rays and turtles swim below, cleverly illuminated by Jeff’s flashing light.
When it’s time to move on we are sad – an emotion that is to haunt us in so many of our departures to come – but there is a treat in store. As we watch the low atoll sinking fast into the blur of the horizon, we see it. The green cloud. She shines high among the other white clouds, as distinct as the ugly duckling from the fairytale. We stare entranced at a phenomenon that has guided generations of Roti fishermen to their fishing zone – where they are now forbidden to fish freely by white people with guns in a big aluminium ship.
Very soon the water is a dark indigo blue with no trace of green. The depth has dropped away quickly until we’re riding on around 6000 metres of water, through the Sunda Trench, some of the deepest water on earth. I try to imagine the many levels of life that exist in the six kilometres of sea below, the deepest of which has not been yet plumbed.
But up here, on the surface, the wind behind us, the Indian Ocean is heaving and panting from some monstrous turbulence to the south. It’s like a boundless watery desert, undulating hills and valleys, gently rolling countryside, reminiscent of proper English fields, without the hedgerows. The boat rises up an almost imperceptible hill of water, until we’re on the crest of a great mountain, looking out over a long slope the length of two or three football fields. She stays there, riding along the ridge for a time, then coasts gracefully down the other side.
These are heady days. The sea is full of fascination for the watchful: flying fish and huge blubbery jellyfish, mud-coloured to orange; great dark turtles; pristine white cuttlefi
sh shells, drifting like lost feathers on the swell; a booby or two, sitting placidly on the water, looking for all the world like fat domestic ducks on a farmyard dam. Then there are the ubiquitous noddies, forever hunting, gliding just above the lip of the wave, swooping rarely, on the endless search for dinner.
Being many days at sea can take your thoughts into strange valleys. I am watching the birds and daydreaming . . .
‘Ted, do you know there are over 6000 metres of water under us now?’
‘Mmm.’ Ted is reading.
‘That’s almost three times the height of Kosciuszko.’
No response.
‘If all the water in the sea evaporated suddenly, we would fall six kilometres before hitting the bottom.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You know what we would hit at the bottom?’
He looks up. ‘Coca-Cola cans?’
‘Fish. Thousands and thousands of fish that have fallen before us in a great rain of fish. It would be like falling through the hatch of a trawler into slithery piles of salmon.’ I pause. ‘Well, what do you think about that?’
He stares at me before replying. ‘I think you should get out more, Nance.’
Dolphins visit almost every day and often at night. They swoop and play, leaving phosphorus jet trails behind them as they shoot through the plankton-filled water, breaking the surface and then sleekly arcing back into the waves.
Luckless flying fish visit too. There’ll be a clatter in the darkness, and a noisy slapping. Then another will hit the deck, and another. Sometimes we smell them before we see them. By the morning, there will be a dozen or more found on the boat. Their scales are still scattered over deck and dodger long after their poor little bodies have rejoined the sea by Ted’s hand.
A night comes when we are surrounded by Indonesian fishing boats. The charts tell us that Bali is only around 120 nautical miles abeam. We count up to twenty at any one time, some quite near, others only a glow over the horizon. They sit stationary for a while, then take off at speed in any direction. They trail long nets, we know, and are a hazard. We need to stay alert, as we have learned from other cruising sailors that they don’t keep good watch.
The next day, with Ashmore Reef over 600 nautical miles astern, Christmas Island 400 ahead, and Indonesia around 150 miles to the north, we find we are sailing in foul garbage. There are cigarette packs, plastic milk bottles, noodle packets, bits of torn newspaper, green thongs, red thongs, polystyrene cups, plastic bags. Maybe those boats act not only as fishing trawlers, but also take the garbage from the entire village to sea and dump it. The paper will sink and dissolve after a while, but the thongs and the plastic and the polystyrene, never. For many thousands of years the only detritus humans left was organic and eventually became earth and spawned other life – until the twentieth century and the discovery of plastic.
One morning, as the chart promised, the Christmas Island skyline appears high on the horizon. The mainland of Australia is now over 2500 kilometres behind us. We’ve heard about phosphate mining on the island, about how the island grew with inducted labour, about the detention camp and about the crabs. (Every November about 100 million large red crabs make their way from their land homes to the sea, and the locals celebrate the event.)
What we didn’t know about is its beauty.
As we sail into Flying Fish Cove, we are heralded by scores of sea birds – mostly boobies – swooping and gliding like trapeze artists in the wind. For an east coaster, used to seagulls, ibis, terns and pelicans, their aerial display is breathtaking. Customs on VHF tells us to pick up a mooring – how easy. The voice is friendly and casual. ‘Just come in to shore when you’re settled, and we’ll complete formalities here.’
I had imagined it a bleak, flat place. In fact, it is the peak of an ancient volcano, with a canopy of preserved rainforest. As we get closer we see on one side high wooded cliffs and a settlement snugged into a jungle of palm trees and frangipani, and on the other side the yellow monsters of the buildings of the phosphate-loading facility.
Formalities are laughably easy. We sit under palm trees on the grass chatting amiably while two officers complete our paperwork. There’s more chatting than paperwork.
‘You’re leaving when? Saturday? Nonsense!’ chime Customs and Quarantine almost together. ‘It’s Territory Week. You can’t leave before Cove Day on Monday. It’s the best day of the year. I’m afraid neither of us will be available to stamp your papers until then, so you can’t leave!’
We laugh and shake hands. ‘Now that’s a different way to get tourists,’ I say.
We walk the seaside collection of little shops. The jungle-covered cliffs rise steep above the road. Between the shops we see crumbling stone and rusting piping from previous generations, abandoned buildings, empty workshops. Like a little Rome, each new phase of civilisation has built over the decay of the past.
And over the dilapidation and leftover junk which is strewn everywhere (is there no tip?), foliage grows, as if in apology – frangipani, wild antigonon, bougainvillea and nameless vines of all sorts, in an explosion of colours.
We hire a car and set off to explore. The settlement is in three tiers – the Malay village at sea level, complete with mosque, then the European enclave called Silver City, and at the top of the hill is Chinatown. A national park occupies around sixty-five per cent of the island and we learn that this is the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean, with many unique species of plant and animal life.
‘Did you know that?’ I ask Ted.
‘Nup!’ says Ted, and I wonder at the nature of the Australian education system. I remember that we learned about the Galapagos, drew the animals in primary school, wondered about Darwin’s discoveries in secondary school, but were never told that Australia had its very own equivalent.
With doubled interest we drive the island and walk the rainforests. We could be on an alien planet, so different are they from any forest I have ever seen. We are surrounded by the strangely plaited limbs of unique stinging trees, pandanus, chestnuts, ferns and coconut trees. The light in here is blue and ghostly, the tall plants tower above eerily. The dark floor is a slush of brown leaves, caused by the presence of millions of large blue and red crabs, which scuttle over each other with alarm or lie comatose in the half-light.
We stay, of course, until Cove Day, to watch the locals celebrate Christmas Island becoming an Australian territory. The entire island turns out – the men set up a temporary bar which becomes ever noisier as the afternoon progresses, the women watch the small children, and the shore is alive with swimming races, raft races, three-legged races and tugs-of-war, with participants of all ages. Another yacht has arrived, a solo American called Bill on a boat called Saltair. An ex-university lecturer, he tells us of his love for his Thai fiancée, how she will join him soon, and the book he has been commissioned to write on steering vanes. Nothing is ‘normal’ in our new life, every new meeting has a freshness and a surprise. Our formal customs clearance is done on the back of a boat trailer with beer in hand, while the raft races use Blackwattle as the windward mark.
The next morning we’re in water of depth over 1000 metres within about ten minutes of leaving Flying Fish Cove, and set course for Cocos Keeling. The conditions remain idyllic. The sun shines heavy with heat, and a few lumps of whitest cotton wool break the monotony of the blue. The wind is just aft of the beam and there is a steady current pushing us along.
Soon after I take over at 0400 for my dawn watch one morning I notice the change. I stare woodenly, a prickle of alarm turns into an ache of consternation and becomes a flashing anger in my chest. Ted is already asleep, and I will not see him now until I wake him at 0700 for shared breakfast and the next watch change. I fume and fret through the three hours, checking the horizon too often, adrenaline building as the dawn stains the sky with grainy yellow ochre behind me. Placing two dishes on the bench,
I fill them with muesli which I then drown in soy milk. I cut bananas precisely, like throats, splaying them across the cereal. The yoghurt is spread like soil on a grave. At seven precisely I enter the log for the last time that day, my pen scratching as on cold stone. Then I wake Ted and wait for him to come on deck.
Ted picks up his cereal dish and starts eating the muesli.
‘Bon appétit,’ he says sleepily.
‘You took the pole down.’
‘What?’ The question is drowsy.
‘You heard me. You went onto the foredeck and took the pole down.’
There’s a pause while he munches. ‘Yep,’ he says, staring at something in his muesli bowl. ‘I did. It was very calm out there.’
So he knows what I am talking about. ‘I was not in the cockpit when you did it. We have an agreement.’
‘Yes, Nance,’ he says.
‘Don’t “Yes, Nance” me. Did you hear me? You cannot do that!’
‘Look, it’s all right, Nance – it was very calm. There was no trouble and you know I’m sure-footed.’
‘I don’t care how sure-footed you are, or how calm it was. I’ll bet you weren’t even clipped on.’
His transparently honest hint of a grin tells me that I am right.
‘Dammit, Ted, we have an agreement. We don’t go out of the cockpit unless the other crew is present!’
‘Calm down, Nance . . .’
‘Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t you realise that if I think for one second that you are leaving this cockpit when I’m not here I will not sleep at all?’
Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas Page 6