Cruising World - November - December 2016

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aitait T

SAILING HOME TO AUSTRALIA

november/december 2016

cruisingworld.com

55

Beit, and their two kids, at the Whitsunday

Islands. Of all the Australians we’d met so

far, Miles and Melissa were most clearly

our people — an anthropologist and a writ-

er, respectively, who were happier to live

the Australian dream in an out-of-the-way

beach town than in one of the cities where

most Australian cultural life takes place.

Miles and Melissa had wrangled special

permission from the national park to

camp on Haslewood Island, normally a

no- camping area. We had agreed to rendez-

vous at a bay that appeared on the chart to

of er them a fi ne beach for camping and us

a good anchorage for Pelagic. Sure enough,

when we approached Haslewood and

glassed the beach, there was their camp,

right where a water taxi had left them.

After we had dropped the hook and

shut down the engine, Alisa and I looked

at the colors of the anchorage and real-

ized, “Ah, we’re back in the tropics!” The

Whitsundays are the premier tropical

sailing destination in Australia, and like

so many famous places, they suf er from

the crowded anchorages to which our

Alaskan sensibilities have never adapted.

But Haslewood wasn’t on the must-see list,

and it gave us a break from the crowds.

Throughout our 10-day stay, we shared the

bay with only one other boat and a handful

of green sea turtles.

Our camping experience in Alaska was

mostly of the winter variety, so it was a

treat to compare how Australians camped

in the sand with our memories of camp-

ing in the snow. Miles gave us lessons in

aboriginal uses of plants on the island,

and we felt a tiny bit of understanding of

Australian ecosystems begin to dribble into

our brains. We all took turns snorkeling the

reef and watching the kids on the beach.

The stop at Haslewood was a nice

break from our friends’ hectic routine of

working and child-rearing in Iluka. At fi rst

it seemed like a vacation for us, too, a nice

break from our routine — none of my

biology work that pays our way, no boat

jobs, no work on my book about the trip

from Alaska. But then I thought about it,

and I realized that these 10 days weren’t

really a break from our routine; this was

the sort of routine that we try to get into,

the purest sort of cruising. We had lots of

leisure time each day, in a fairly wonder-

ful spot, and we were doing it with local

friends whom we never would have met if

we hadn’t chucked it all to go sailing.

A

fter we said goodbye to Miles

and Melissa, we continued

north to Townsville. Instead of

the southeast trades that we

might reasonably have expected, we found

northwesterlies that made the few anchor-

ages along the coast unusable and kept us

tacking back and forth day and night. We

passed a humpback whale cow and calf that

breached and slapped the water with their

pectoral fi ns. We passed fl ocks of pied

imperial pigeons, striking black-and-white

birds, fl ying over the water on their migra-

tion south from New Guinea. We made a

trip inland to see a platypus in the wild.

Townsville itself was the completion

of a grand circle for me, of course, but it

was also a muted homecoming. I

had no family still in Townsville,

and no ties to the place. We set

aside a month to stay there while

I worked on my book every

day. Alisa took advantage of the

chance to get swimming lessons

for Elias, and to enjoy the great

playgrounds that are the heart of public

places in Australia.

And during this time we began to answer

some really big questions about our sailing

future. A trip to the ultrasound lab gave us

our fi rst view of what we had long known

to be the reason for Alisa’s recent vulner-

ability to seasickness: A new cabin boy

would be signing on the following April.

We needed to fi gure out how to handle

this crew change. We wanted to stop some-

where in Australia for a year to let the new

crew get to a certain age before we started

traveling again. And we were rethinking

the open-plan layout of dear old Pelagic

for a family of four. We had years of sailing

ahead of us, we hoped, and a kids cabin and

an adult cabin seemed a good way to parti-

tion all the family togetherness that would

entail. But where? Where would we park it

for a year and contemplate that fearsome

event, a boat swap?

People had often mentioned Hobart,

Tasmania, as a jewel of Australia. I had

been there only briefl y 12 years before,

and we knew no one there. More infor-

mation would be welcome before we

committed to a full year in the place.

So when we found ourselves sharing the

anchorage of Horseshoe Bay, on Magnetic

Island, with Kukka, a smart-looking Malo

39 with Hobart as her hailing port, Alisa

and Elias rowed over to say hello.

They came back an hour later with gold

— a fresh stack of New Yorker magazines,

unread by us, and news. Kukka, it turned

out, belonged to Alex Nemeth and Diana

Bagnall, and Hobart was merely a port of

convenience; they were from Sydney. But

Alisa had gone looking for news of Hobart

and found something better: our people.

The crew of Kukka were on their fi rst

extended sail from home, with an eye

toward longer trips in the future. Alex and

Diana were both retired, he from being

a pharmacist, she from journalism, and

their children were young adults. Alisa

and I were from the other side of the

world, in the middle of our young- family

years, with very dif erent professional

backgrounds. Yet we all hit it of immedi-

ately. Alex and Diana were two more good

friends we never would have met if we

hadn’t left home.

Kukka was soon of to pick up a visiting

son at the Townsville Airport. But they

left us with a warm invitation to visit them

whenever we might fi nd ourselves in Sydney.

S

ummer was on its way back in, and

with it the cyclone season. It was

time to fi nd our way south, and to

sail our way into the answers to all

those questions about the future.

We had been cavalier about the chance

of getting caught with a long sail against

the southeast trades while getting out of

AUSTRALIA

QUEENSLAND

TASMANIAASMANIAASMANIA

NEW SOUTH WALES

GGGGrre

atB

arrie

rR

Reeeff

Maggnetic Islandnetic I

Whitsunday Islands

Bundaberg

Iluka

SydneySydney

Bass StraitBass S

Hobart

Townsville

20 ̊ S

24 ̊ S

28 ̊ S

32 ̊ S

36 ̊ S

38 ̊ S

140 ̊ E 144 ̊ E 148 ̊ E

0 100 200

Nautical Miles

TTa

sm

an

SSe

a

152 ̊ E

MIKE LITZOW; MAP BY SHANNON CAIN TUMINO