An Antipodean Adventure

After several exciting days of diving, I couldn’t help but try to dive one of the best dive sites in the world: the SS Yongala.

Unfortunately I discovered they day before I was hoping to dive it, that the trip had been cancelled due to bad weather. Short on time, I converted my 7-hour coach ride into a 12-hour one, and just kept going to my next destination, Airlie Beach. I suppose that means I’ll have to come back to Australia some other day to do the Yongala!

Airlie is the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, a magnificent group of volcanic peaks separated from the Australian mainland by a narrow passage of a few kilometres. It is also quite a pleasant, compact town with plenty of backpacker accommodation and agencies arranging yachts for charter.

Upon presenting myself at my hostel’s booking desk my first morning to book a sailing trip, I was asked whether I wanted to join a “party boat”, “traditional boat” or “racing boat”. Having had quite enough to drink at The Woolshed in Cairns, I erred away from the “party boat” and went for the racing option even though it was considerably more expensive. “Right, well there’s a boat leaving in 45 minutes,” the agent declared. Keen to make best use of my time, I jumped into action.

One hour later a group of eleven of us, and two crew, are sailing out of the the Abel Point Marina on former America’s Cup contender the Southern Cross. Definitely a “racing boat”! Here she is.

Provided there were enough other volunteers, we could really help out as much or as little as we liked on the Southern Cross. However, with respect to one’s personal property, there are some basic precautions one should we aware of before volunteering. Unfortunately, we were not prepared and within fifteen minutes of leaving the marina, Tobias (Switzerland) and I had lost our sunglasses overboard! (And I had only bought the sunglasses in Sydney two weeks previously.) Andy the skipper, who really should know better, also had his baseball cap blown overboard, but given that this floated we were able to make a detour to pick it up.

Given the fairly tame wind conditions, the boat picked up some good speed, and we were leaning heavily away from the wind. Just a couple of minutes down below to use the loo was enough to make me quite seasick (and I rarely get motion sickness). After some time we arrived at out first destination, Whitehaven Beach, where the sand is supposedly some of the whitest and finest in the world.  We all hopped into a rib (called a tender in Australia) to be taken to the shore. It got a little cloudy as we arrived, but we enjoyed the beach (in our stinger suits given the jellyfish issue). From left to right: James (UK), Tobias (Switz), Maud (NL), Jenny and Hans (Sweden), and Rutger (NL)

After a fabulous sunset (see below) and slap-up supper on the boat, the stars came out. The moon set shortly thereafter and we had a perfect view of the stars of the southern hemisphere, including the namesake of the boat, the Southern Cross. Unfortunately the rocking deck meant there was no opportunity for long-exposure photography,  but here is the sunset I mentioned earlier.

Feeling all soppy and overwhelmed by the stars, I fell asleep on deck. When I woke in the morning, I saw James and Maud had done the same.

The next morning was quite dramatic: Rutger, who had been seasick since we left dock, started having heart palpitations, and had to get urgent medical assistance. A call was put out over the radio, and we altered course to take us to the nearest hospital on a private resort island. About half-an-hour later, we were met halfway by a high-speed boat that we transferred Rutger to to take him the rest of the way. There wasn’t much anyone could do while we were waiting, and we discussed afterwards whether we thought the response should have been quicker. I thought that given we were so far away from habited land, and yachts don’t react particularly well to helicopters, half-an-hour was as good as anyone could have expected. We heard over the radio later that afternoon that Rutger had been airlifted to the mainland from the resort island hospital.

With two members of our crew down (Maud had accompanied Rutger to the resort to help with translation) and not much else we could do, we carried on with our excursion. This included the opportunity of swimming to our own island and laying on the beach for the rest of the afternoon.

Reunited with Maud later that afternoon, we had another great meal and sunset.

We visited another island the next morning…

… and given we were covered in salt water, the private waterfall was useful.

Unfortunately it was then time to sail back to Airlie Beach, but before we could do that, there was another dramatic development: as we switched back to the motor for our final approach towards the marina, the rope supporting our mainsail got stuck within the mast i.e. we couldn’t bring the mainsail completely down. Andy, the skipper, was going to have to climb up the mast and cut the rope from the other end. N.B. The mast of the Southern Cross is 100 feet (30 metres) high!

Andy was going to need ropes, lots of ropes, to help pull him up to the top of the mast, support his weight, deliver equipment to him, and eventually bring him back down without him falling off. Although Andy was really the only one who knew which ropes were going to do what, he was over 30m away, and was going to need us to do the leg-work. We must have learnt a thing or two about how the ropes work over the three days, as everything seemed to go swimmingly (with the help of the Portuguese deputy on deck level). My role was to translate between native-speaking Andy thirty metres away, and the mainly continental group on deck.

With that drama out of the way, we were able to bring the original drama to a close when we saw Rutger greet us on the marina as we docked.

That night we celebrated with a drink or two (as demonstrated by Sandy below)