SAILING HOME TO AUSTRALIAnovember/december 2016cruisingworld.com53revealed soulless vacation towns, the kind
of places we clearly hadn’t left Alaska
to see. But then we found Iluka, and it
was there that we began to see what our
Australia might look like.
Our planned two-week visit to Iluka
had blown out to four months. But now it
was time to move again, and we wanted to
use the cyclone-free season to sail north
in the tropics to Townsville, where I was
born. Yet as any traveling sailor knows,
the goal of a cruise is less important than
how you get there. Our real hope was that
the slow travel and out-of-the-way places
that are the hallmarks of coastal cruising
would be an ideal way to discover more of
the country.E
lias woke me a little before
dawn, calling out from his
bunk, “I’m all done in here!”
The family gathered in the
cockpit for the sunrise, and we were
reminded of the magic progression of
dawn at sea. We watched the waves
slowly change from leaden shapes tobrilliant beaten metal as the light grew,
and then we ate breakfast in the cockpit
with the knowledge that we had ahead
of us a whole day at sea to enjoy.
After just one night of sailing, Iluka
seemed completely removed from us.
We were falling back into the habits of
being underway — habits that had been
tough to learn during our first few months
afloat, but which were now second nature
after sailing across the Pacific.
When outsiders think of eastern
Australia, they think of the Great Barrier
Reef. But the reef isn’t part of the picture
for sailors; it’s too far ofshore, with few
usable anchorages. Instead, the next few
weeks found us exploring a low coast-
line of sandy straits and mud- bottomed
creeks with eucalyptus-fringed anchor-
ages where kookaburras cackled and
parrots screamed. The little towns we
passed had bucolic names — Seventeen
Seventy, Yeppoon — and the anchorages
had a restrained beauty. My 41st birthday
caught us at Pancake Creek, a little tidal
estuary surrounded by low sandy banks
on one side and a high point, Bustard
Head, on the other, complete with walk-
ing paths and a lighthouse to visit — our
kind of place.
Alisa produced a cake for the event, of
course, and when it came time to make a
wish, I thought to myself, “There’s noth-
ing else I want.”M
ost foreign yachts had left
Oz for the cyclone-free
season in the tropics, so we
were without the company
of other voyaging sailors, a group of people
who are always surprising us with sudden
good friendship. We missed the state of
belonging to some sort of community, even
if it was the ever-so-loose community of
vagabonding sailors. So it was good that
we had a goal for our travels: meeting our
Iluka friends Miles Holmes and Melissa