How to use the blog

Want to check where we are and what we have been doing recently? In brief? Read the blog below called SAILING LOG. The other stories are about specific incidents or thoughts.




Sunday, November 27, 2011

LIKE A REALITY TV SHOW ONLY REAL

Here is the pitch for the latest survivor reality TV program.
Take two educated middle class couples who don’t know each other well.  (Note to producer: select people successful in their own fields: we want every one of them to be a  strong personality who is used to getting their own way.) Put them on an off-shore cruising yacht (not too luxurious) for 6 weeks, allowing them to get off only occasionally, and then only via a small unstable inflatable dinghy.  Send them off-shore, making sure there are plenty of challenges like storms, tempests and gear failure. (Note to producer: make sure they can sail so they don’t kill themselves accidently by running aground or sinking...don’t want to have to close the show early.)  Make the surroundings at landfall exotic so that the viewer has something to look at. But also make sure they are denied access to phone, fax, email, public transport, shops, newspapers or any of the normal trappings of life. Don’t want them to be able to ease the pain or bail out of the show early.   Limit their fresh water intake to a few litres a day.  Limit their food supplies so they have to live partly off the land.  At the end of each half-hour show each week, hand out a gong for the ‘best survivor’:
The only catch is that it was not reality TV.  It was reality.  And here are the Best Survivor Awards and who won them.

Best Fixer Award to Andy
She's a whizz with a screw driver and a spanner.  And she's gutsy.
For being prepared to have a go at anything that wasn't working,
 of which there were many items, including inter alia: anchor winchs, water proofing
of the hatch of her cabin, auto helm.


Best Athlete to Dean
For holding the side up.
Dean was the best ever goalie in the Rally Fleet Soccer side,
which played the under 9s at Nimowa and nearly won. Roger in
the background too.

 Best Diplomat Award: Dean
For being at his social most charming in all the formalities.  See..
Those years in Canberra weren't wasted.



Best Provider Award: Andy
Dirty job?... Live off the land? No worries. 

Best Dressed Award: Dean and Sandra
Joint winners for keeping sartorial standards up.  As long as you have a good hat and a nice pair of  shoes you can go anywhere.
 
Engineering Award:  Dean
He could see imediately that the tank was higher than the roof.

Always Looking on the Bright Side Award: Roger
Its true that he can uncannily predict any disaster, even those
that don't happen. But he can also recognise a good thing
when it turns up too.
Meta-tourism Award: Dean
Dean took the photo of the rally crew taking a photo of
the fleet with locals in the foreground.
Strong Stomach Award: Andy
She's in there for another feed of boiled sweet potato.
Smaultz Award: Dean
"Sandra.. just take this photo.  She will be so disappointed
if we don't. " We got this beautiful hamper in exchange for
a few bits and pieces.  Theft.
Western Shame Award: To all rally fleet
Look at the gifts we got.
Patience Award: Dean
Waiting for Customs Clearance in Misima.
dean is renowned for his ability to sit still.
Education Consultant Award: Dean
For understanding that 10 volumes of Outcomes Statements might not be a priority in this well-resourced classroom. No desks.  No pens.  No paper. 
Cultural Appreciation Award:  Sandra
No thats not me.  That's the young warrior I was culturally appreciating.
Best Mechanic: Dean
This is a picture of Dean's love of his life:
A fuel polisher, which saved our fuel from
gunk.

Best Baker Award to Roger
He bakes a mean loaf of bread and scones and understand
that bread is the staff of life.  Plus champagne as well.

Life wasn't meant to be easy.


MY GREAT BIG FAT LOUISIADES EXPERIENCE

As a 70th birthday gift for Dean, I agreed (not all that graciously) to spend 2011 living on our boat, cruising the east coast of Australia, including an offshore adventure on the 2011 Louisiades Rally.  We have just returned from the Rally, having covered 1200 thrilling miles round trip between Australia and PNG, across the Coral Sea.
People ask me what the Rally was like. I produce sound bites. For foodies:  “We got heartily sick of fresh crayfish”.  For sailors: “Got hit by squalls and very rough seas in the Coral Sea.” For people stuck in cities; “It’s a pristine tropical paradise, untouched by western pollution.  Crystalline water, delicate coral, beautiful grass-hut villages.”  For academics, lefties and political economists: “Money is not the common currency. And it is sad to see malnourished, sometimes dying children and know that western medicine could save them,” 
The truth is that it was a great, big, fat, unmatchable experience. The six weeks tested body, equipment, expertise and stamina. There were assaults on our consciences and our understandings of how the world works. The seafood and the physical beauty of the islands and bays were superb. We participated in exotic sing-sings, mu-mus and regattas put on by the locals and received matchless camaraderie from fellow yachties.

A big commitment

The Rally was a big commitment for us. You can’t just book a Qantas jet to Pana Pompom or Nimowa. You need time, an ocean-going cruising yacht capable of withstanding an extended pounding by wave and wind, plus the knowhow for handling seas and weather, safety, communications and navigation equipment, provisioning food, water, fuel, spares and medical supplies and boat maintenance.  As late entrants to the cruising life, we spent 12 months on coast between Sydney and Cairns before the rally on a vertical learning curve, graduating from being mere sailors to being ready for ocean cruising.
In the week before departure, the rally fleet was hectored by Guy Chester, the multi-talented rally impresario and eco-sustainability warrior who is the moving force behind the rally. In the Louisiades, he warned, there are no shipwrights, no chandlers, no mechanics, no doctors, few nurses, no sea rescue services, no supermarkets or shops, no cafes, no pubs, no public transport, no phones, little water.  Tales of previous rallies, all apparently true, were laced with horror stories about shipwreck, unreliable charts and uncharted reefs, groundings, coral that eats boats, 50 knot squalls, infection and illness. (Thanks for that Guy). By the time we got the boat to the ‘starting line‘ at Yorkeys Knob, second thoughts sprouted. It was only pride and innate stubbornness that made me press on.
During the rally, as Guy had foretold, poor preparation was rewarded. It was heartbreaking to hear the piteous cries for help from Rally skippers fronting mutinous crews because their coffee ran out, or the champagne had been left on the dock, or the forward berth leaked, or their anchor chain was too short to escape the coral snags.
Also, diligent preparation aside, sometimes you are lucky in cruising and sometimes you are not.   On our first day in the Louisiades, bad luck targeted Moonraker, specifically aiming at the starter motor. Thank God (i.e. Guy) that we had somewhat petulantly packed a spare, despite our doubts that the starter motor was a big risk.

Additions to the crew: younger and browner than usual.
We had drawn the line, however, at packing a spare windlass. That decision resulted in four weeks of manually pulling the 60lb anchor on its heavy chain, usually from depths of 20m. Our three-person chain gang worked hard at every anchor lift, causing unkind merriment from the rest of the fleet. We cheated on a couple of occasions by hiring young village men to do it for us. It was a joy watching rippling brown muscles on our boat, which is crewed by older, paler persons. Still, no-one had a heart attack, and I have been known to pay gyms to lift weights like that.

A little help from our friends

There were 15 boats and 42 humans (plus the superhuman Guy) who made it to the Louisiades on the rally, The boats came in all shapes and sizes, multi- million dollar yachts, to small 30 year-old keelers and even a large luxury motor launch. The people came from all walks of life: rich, poor, young (8 years old, hi Della) and old (two 69 year-olds, no names), families, backpackers, singles, marrieds, business people, tradies and academics (hi Andy and Roger). There were experienced and novice sailors.
This polyglot crew had a yachty attitude in common however: fierce independence, self-confidence, determination to be self-sufficient, and a can-do attitude that comes from facing down those eternal and infernal cruising contingencies such as gear breakage, bad weather and bad luck. And optimism that the world is a wonderful place.
The skippers and crew also had in common endless generosity to others. In Moonraker’s case, every boat in the fleet helped us in some way without hesitation and without expectation of reward. Attitude gave us about 10 hours of backbreaking labour from two skilled, lunatic work-a-holics (Alan and Dave) to fit our spare starter motor and bleed the engine.  Without that we would have sailed home on the first day in the Louisiades. Reliance (thanks Bill) lent us their beautiful big, specially-designed fuel polisher, without which we would not have had useable fuel. Finesse gave us 3 pawl springs for our anchor winch, together with the benefit of the presence of their two children as rally-slaves.  Leyla (thanks Mort) lent us a fridge when our compressor burned out. The Sanctuary crew fed us cheese, took us on the race at Nirvana, and critically, maintained the indefatigable Guy in apparently peak condition during the rally. Desire took our crew skindiving; Little One acted as our Lode Star, her nav. lights providing a cheerful reference point in the Palm Passage on a dark night when we had to steer by hand. Tinker supplied a canister of gas and an adapter when our gas ran low. Honeywind’s sharp look-out noticed that we were heading for a reef at Blue Lagoon. Mustang Sally supplied good humour, advice and encouragement when things were low and took over the scheds. when Sanctuary was in the marina. Rex topped up our water supply from their water maker and Greg kindly gave me a guided tour of his impressive propeller; Love of Gaia was always to the ready to relay messages, supply tools or labour. Boats towed each other, rescued each other’s dinghies, freed each other’s anchors from coral, supplied each other with spares, food and drink, advice… the giving went on and on. There were very few boats (perhaps none) that did not get a little help from their friends.

Getting there and back again

Passage-making on the Coral Sea was …. exciting.
For some of it, picture very rough seas, water crashing over the deck, the dodger and the bimini, the wind howling, lightening flashing, the bow carving its way through, over or under chaotic waves. Moonraker, the boat, loves it, but her crew feels like it is in a washing machine. The constant agitation and occasional rinse was physically tiring. Sea sickness struck. Bumps and bruises emerged. The three-hour- on three-off watch schedule was draining, especially for the first couple of days of the passage, before the body acclimatises (code for ‘becomes too numb to notice’).
We never felt alone, however, as each yacht called in on the twice-daily HF scheds, Guy The Cheerleader was relentlessly positive and managed to imply that this was a perfectly calm Coral Sea crossing.  As good as it gets, he said.  And, how to explain his determination to talk about rich food on the sched., undeterred by references from other skippers to the nutritional value of  dry biscuits and Quells?
On Moonraker, as on other boats, there were also periods of high adrenalin, the crew doing battle with the boat or the elements.  Reefing the main by head torch a bit too late for the 40 knot squall caused shouting and feats of daring-do. Fixing a sheered bolt in the auto helm at the height of a squall calls for ability to put hope over despair. Big ships converging on you from the Jomard Strait in the pitch black of a stormy night calls for sangfroid, screaming, or both, even with AIS. Fuel filters that gunk-up are spine chilling when you are approaching narrow coral-filled channels. Feeling the skin shred as the loaded spinnaker halyard rips through a hand caught against a jam cleat is, well…confronting. Thank God, (i.e. Guy Chester) for pressing us to get a fully stocked medical kit.
But, by and large, as yachties do, we accepted the drama as part of the fun. Probably it is character-building.  And even if it’s not, we knew that it would stop soon enough.  And, because we have done it all before, we knew that the ‘adventure’ part of cruising is like the pain of childbirth: eventually, you forget how awful it is and only remember the good bits.
And there were plenty of them.

Paradise Poster

Beautiful land, sea and people
Once we crossed the Coral Sea and began to island-hop in the Louisiades, we transformed from doughty sailors to bikini-clad (some of us anyway) poster people for tropical paradise.  Balmy weather, calm seas, cooling trade winds, white sails, waving palms, sparkling clear water, champagne at the ready, beach parties and lobster.  It was impossibly beautiful, remote, unspoiled.  No money, no shops, no pollution, no crowds, no electricity.
It was also exotic. Grass-hut villages and their friendly inhabitants are still living a subsistence life, getting necessities from gardens and the sea. Guy’s organisational and political brilliance netted us cultural displays from the athletic local warriors who danced welcome sing sings, and from the children’s choirs, which  moved some of us to tears with their church-music harmonies about their island homes. The horizon was always dotted with sailaus, and children in dugout canoes.  A highlight was the opportunity to make tourist-style trips from one island to another on the dramatic sailing canoes and on the local long boats.
How romantic can you get?

The other side of the coin

The Paradise Poster has another side.
You can see, if you choose, the malnourished, scabies-ridden children, the slight frames of the adults with rotten teeth from betel nut, the lack of water in many villages, the very low life expectancy, the decay of the traditional life style, the high maternal and neo-natal death rates, the despair arising from future uncertainty, the lack of employment opportunities for the young, and the poverty that precludes good education and even rudimentary health care.
The locals are very articulate about their
development challenges
The people are very polite, but also, if you want to listen, very articulate about their community development challenges.  

One reason they are pleased to see us is that traditional ways are being lost.  Community leaders grasp opportunities to keep the traditional culture alive for the kids. When the Fleet arrived in a number of villages, the whole community turned out for the sing-sing or regatta, school closed, gardens emptied and the ceremonies began. The locals have a whale of a time, singing and dancing and exercising their lively sense of the ridiculous. Occasionally a pig was killed in honour of our arrival and a mu mu (feast) was put on.

Their interest in the fleet has a practical side too, evident in the stream of canoes that visit each yacht in each anchorage.  Though they are principally subsistence farmers and still use shell ‘money’ for exchange of big items like brides and pigs, they seek donations of books and pens for the schools, medicine for the clinics and clothes for families. They want help with building or maintaining tanks for fresh rainwater catchment. They want to sell their handiworks and produce, sometime for money but often for items like fish hooks, tools or clothing.  Individuals beg donations to help defray education fees, as PNG does not yet have free universal education. They want the beche de mer fishing to start up again after it was closed due to over fishing and they worry about falling fish stocks.  They want to receive the government money that is supposed to trickle down from mining royalties from Port Moresby.  They want their children to get a modern education, in English, with associated economic opportunities, in their own island communities, so kids are not spirited away to western-style poverty and possibly crime elsewhere. 
Are you any judge of the quality of the grass skirt?

Sometimes proceedings challenged my western liberal sensibilities. At ceremonies, rally people sat on chairs in the shade, the locals stood in the sun. We ate first at mu-mus, the locals following after we had finished. We westerners constituted half the judging panel for the Miss Misima bare-breasted beauty pageant. One rally participant was shocked to see that the annual budget for schooling Nimowa elementary school’s 150 students equalled the sum he spend on fees for his son’s schooling each semester.

It is hard to untangle the contradictions, which became most evident in the pem-pewa ceremony. Each person on the rally came equipped with pre-packed gift bags for local women. They contained items such as  plastic cups and bowls, ropes, pegs, soap, tee shirts all stuffed into a Coles zip-up cold items bag. These bags were exchanged at a formal pem pewa (gift sharing) ceremony for a gift from a local woman, typically a stunning, carefully arrayed hamper of pawpaws, pineapples, passionfruit, citrus, often including handmade bowls or baskets. One woman had bought hers from her village a 4-hour bus trip away. The ceremony was valued by the locals, but to me it seemed unequal: a cornucopia of hand-grown produce and handmade crafts in exchange for some Chinese plastic frippery. It felt like theft.

Guy Chester with good for donation to Nimowa Clinic

Guy the Cultural Warrior had briefed us that the Rally, though not a charity, provides opportunities for yachties to help the communities we visit. And we did. This year, a few boats contributed tens of thousands of dollars each.  Others donated a range of items collected according to their means from their home communities and yet others contributed what they had on board to spare.

No-one on the rally could go away thinking anything else but that we are an obscenely wealthy group, and that we were privileged to participate in the lives of these communities.

Without a doubt I would suggest that anyone who can get their boat ready should go on the Louisiades rally. 
Call Guy today.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

SISTERS

Ever optimimistic.  Karen is sure the engine
will start next pull.
Karen is the eldest of my three siblings and is two years younger than me.  Over the years we have done lots of things together.  As often as not, this has involved me in following her into hair-raising adventures or physical endeavours.  She is blessed with an adventurous spirit, determination, and great physical coordination, grace and courage. In her time she has been a champion squash player, world champion speed wind surfing champion, and intrepid four-wheel driver. She surfed seriously for many years, and thought nothing of co-habiting with snakes and sharks while in search of the perfect wave. She was always the best in the family at water skiing. She was Australian champion rock and roll dancer at the age of 40. She became a biker in middle age.  She has always been the life and soul of any camping trip, with her legendary story telling, imagination and organisation skills.  At one family Xmas, she issued water cannon. Everyone, from grandparents to kiddies spend hours on that hot day chasing each other around bushes having a whale of a time.   Her current passions are scuba diving and saving the marine environment, and her favourite dive sites are deep, deep dives in the cold waters off Esperance, home of the great White Pointers.
Gary has the knack that eludes Dean and I for fishing
So, what joy to have Karen and her husband Gary on Moonraker for two weeks, sharing our sailing adventure.  They arrived with heaps of diving gear and off we went, cruising the coast from Townsville to Cairns.  In ten days we packed in many dives, a fair bit of sailing with our new parachute, fishing, exploring five islands and gracing three resorts.
Karen hasn’t changed much over the last 50 years.  She is still energetic, game, adventurous, organised and fun. She is still ultra-responsible, getting up more frequently than I did to check the anchor. She is still the best person to have an adventure with.
Moonraker is not a good dive platform, but where there
is a will there is a way.  And Karen never lacks will.
 She also has terrific taste in husbands.  Gary is the most accommodating and likeable guy you could imagine, with the same commitment to intrepid adventure as Karen. He also has the good grace to laugh at all my jokes (very gratifying) and appreciates Dean's cooking. Nothing is a problem for Gary, unless you run out of lemon for his Corona.

No Karen.  its not a crocodile.  It is a log.
You can go in. ... Well, I'm pretty sure its a log.

I learned a couple of things about Karen I did not know. First, she has developed a worrying addiction to coffee and massage, which needed to be fed by constantly dropping into resorts as we passed them by.  I fear she is getting soft.  Second, I have discovered something that she is afraid off. I didn’t think such as thing existed.  It turns out that, she doesn’t like swimming with crocodiles.  Sea snakes or sharks are OK, but she draws a line at crocs.  Strange.


Devestated Dunk Island resort.  Yassi did for it.
 Even the coral was all dead. No coffee either.


Thursday, August 18, 2011

MAYDAY MAYDAY

Ever since I did my marine radio operators course I have wondered if I would ever receive (or issue) a Mayday, Pan Pan or Securite call.  Mayday is for when your vessel is sinking.  Pan pan if for any other critical event for which you need urgent assistance (like crew overboard, serious injury, or you are drifting hopelessly away from civilisation.)  Securite is a message advising other ships of hazard (like a beacon missing or a floating obstruction).  As master of the vessel, I am well versed in my responsibilities and stand constantly vigilant and keen to execute my responsibilities.
Well it didn’t happen as I imagined it would.
For a start the mayday did not come through the radio.  It came as a thin, faint yell, which we first mistook for people partying on a nearby cat. Dean heard it first. “ Is that a cry for help?  What’s that in the water out there?”  He was pointing at a small splash of colour almost obscured by the chop about half a mile out to sea. It was in the broad channel between Mission Beach on the mainland and Dunk island, where we were tucked up out of way of a solid 25 kt south easterly.  Whipping out the binoculars*  we could see a yellow and red blob in the water being blown away from the island.  A notable feature of the blob, discernable through the binoculars, was a set of frantically waving arms.  Must be some divers who have lost their tender, I thought, just having spent a couple of days anxiously searching the ocean surface for Karen and Gary to pop up from their dives so I could pick them up in our dingy.
Dean and I clambered into our small dingy and proceeded to investigate. Soon we could see it clearly.  Three men, clad in shorts tee-shirts and life jackets were clinging desperately to a very small, flat bottomed, upturned tinny which was mostly submerged.  The chop was washing over them and they had to hook their fingers on the small ridges in the bottom of the tinny to stop sliding off.  With three of them spread-eagled , the bottom of the boat was completely covered. The youngest of them (perhaps 16 yrs old) was shivering violently.  The engine and a canopy were underneath the dinghy, making it impossible to right.  To put it mildly, they appeared pleased to see us.
The Moonraker Tender is very small and we could only take two of them off in the first go. We selected the two lightest men, to avoid overloading our dinghy.  We gingerly came along side, the older and younger of the men slid awkwardly on board.  The middle-aged one was left on the dinghy, struggling to find a new position, his balance was upset by the absence of the others.
A windy day
 I felt terrible, leaving one, even if only temporarily.  I knew there was no mortal danger, but I felt that if it was me I would have felt scared, lonely and abandoned.  We headed for the island beach where they had mobile phones to call the hire company. By the time we beached them, two other tenders from the ‘party cat’ had arrived, after also noticing the drama.  Luckily, they had tenders better suited to rescue (longer with more powerful engines than ours). Indeed they were later able to tow the upturned dinghy to shore, a feat well beyond our engine capacity. They quickly retrieved the other man, so the whole sunken crew were pretty well on ashore at the same time.
Without further ado, we landed them, and turned our tender back towards our boat.  The older man came over as I was pushing off the beach. He wanted to thank us, and I could see it was important to him.  His emotion spilled out in a very manly way: he grabbed my hand in both of his and shook it till my arm nearly fell off. I assured him that we were pleased to have helped, and that mutual assistance is expected of people at sea. But he wanted to express more.  Finally he said gruffly, “That was the three generations of my family on that boat. Me, my son and grandson. “ I think, when he was on that upturned tinnie, he had seen visions of  an alternative future.
As we returned  to Moonraker, we passed a tiny tinnie identical to the over-turned one, from the same hire company, with four people on board, about to cross the wind-swept, choppy channel to Mission Beach.  They were not wearing life jackets.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

AN HONOURED GUEST

Dad came on board Moonraker for a few days. We were in Townsville.  I'd been wanting him to come for ages, since it was his influence that set me on the path to sailing and so in some ways Moonraker was his fault (or to his credit). 
"Where is that damn jetty? I built it to last."
At Horseshoe Bay, 2011.
Townsville was appropriate, as it was in Townsville 52 years ago that he (and therefore I) began sailing.  With a young family in tow, and a professional reputation to build, he had been transferred from Melbourne by John Holland to manage the building of the new Townsville sugar jetty and a few other jetties. So, being back in Townsville was like coming back to the scene of the crime !

The Nonpareil on a mooring in Ross Creek
late 50s. 

Nice boat!

In the 50s, in Townsville he purchased the first in a long string of boats. She was a Herreshoff 24 named Nonpareil. The Nonny was the site of many an adventure about which family stories are still told. Dad was able to identify the exact spot on Ross Creek where the Nonny was moored so long ago.

Coincidentally, Townsville was also site of the success of the most ambitious of the range of yachts he has owned.  In Perth in the 70’s he (with the help of his son Boyd and various tradesmen in his employ) built a 33 ft Crowther-design Kraken racing trimaran, named after my sister Karen L. He raced it in Perth, mainly shorthanded, as Boyd will attest,  and occasionally with me and my mother as crew. But he but always felt it was underutilised.  Imagine his pleasure to find that it had gone on to great things. Rebadged “The Sting” and with a crew of 5 hefty blokes, it became a notable ‘go-fast’ racer in the 80s in Townsville. A picture showing it with spray flying, doing 30 knots and with its lee float almost buried is said to still grace the walls of the local yacht club. Dad spent a while on Moonraker chatting to Colin, the son of The Sting’s former owner (now deceased.) Colin was his dad's key crew member in The Sting's heyday. Endless detail was learned about how and why she went so fast (other than the excellent build, of course) and stories swapped of her glorious career.

The Great Helmsman, 50 years on,
but still at the helm off
Magnetic Island in a stiff 20 knot SE.

The yard-arm is still the most
useful time-keeping device.  Thanks
Helen!

Townsville is also now home to Helen Murdoch, Dad’s niece and my cousin. She with husband Ian not only put us in touch with The Sting connections but hosted us generously while we were there.  With their boat as yet half-built, the cruising light is in their eye.









Wednesday, July 6, 2011

MEDICAL EMERGENCY

It was well after dark.  We were snug on a mooring in Cateran Bay.  The gourmet meat pies to which I had been looking forward were ready for serving.   Then we heard a muffled hail.  From the cockpit I could make out a dinghy with outboard rumbling, standing off our stern, two people dimly discernable. 
Over the sound of the outboard motor I couldn’t make out all the words, but a youthful female voice with a marked English accent shouted. “Muffle muffle …you have any … muffle muffle muffle ….bandages? My sister has cut herself”.
A medical emergency!  I shout: “We have a first aid kit. Come and get what you need.”
The young woman clambers out of her dinghy, picks her way around hanging wetsuits and into the cockpit and thence into the saloon. I dig out our largish first aid kit, of which I am proud.   I indicate that she can take what she needs from it.  She dives in.  “My sister has cut herself on the coral and we are worried about scarring”.  Visions of horrific coral cuts flash to mind.  I hope it’s not on the face. 
There is a touch of hysteria in the way she quickly pulls out and discards item after item, and our lounge is soon covered by the things she doesn’t want. “Do you need antiseptic or antibiotic ”?  I ask.  Short response: “No we have that”.  “Do you need bandages?” I ask,  ineffectually watching as our substantial stock of sterile bandages and tapes hits the lounge. Impatient now, she said: “No. We need butterfly clips that pull the wound together so there is no scarring”.
I am doubtful now.  I don’t think we have any. I feel as though I have let the side down. I ask how bad the cut is.  “It’s about a centimetre long, on her foot”, she explains. 
A centimetre? The sister must be a famous foot model? I hold my tongue.
Having rooted through the whole medical kit and confirmed that there are no butterfly clips, she heads off, the contents of our kit by now fairly well distributed.  “I’m sorry,” I apologise abjectly as she clambers into her dinghy.  She turns back and mutters “It’ll probably scar now”.  Do I detect an accusatory tone?
I respond mildly: “Perhaps she can wear the scar as a badge of honour? ” The girl pauses:  “That’s what Dad said”. Then I notice Dad sitting patiently in the dingy. I can’t see him clearly but he is quite hunched, probably a sensible man but unequal to asserting control over his self-absorbed offspring.
As I go back down to pack away my wonderful first aid kit, I realise that there are two items I need to add to it.
First addition will be butterfly clips, in case another foot model stubs her toe.
But more importantly I need a bottle of those pills the army dole out to the injured and sick.   They go by the trade name TTFU Pills, and apparently work wonders when dispensed to young recruits when they feel that they just can’t go on. The recruits open the bottle to find no pills, but on close inspection the label is more helpful: TTFU (Toughen-The-Fuck-Up)*.  I need some of those pills, again in case another foot model hoves into view.
*I am indebted to Carmel and Nick from Thistle who introduced me to the concept of TTFU Pills, which were indeed dispensed to their son in his initial training. He went on to become the winning skipper of the Round the World Clipper Race, so I suspect they really work!

Monday, June 27, 2011

ODE TO PANCREEK CREEK

Only the yacht gives a backward glance
Dragged from the toss and tumble of play
Still aching for the thrust of sail or screw
Still thirsting for the rain of foam of spray
Why seek sanctuary from such sport?

Mangroves and palms fringe a welcoming beach
Wattles and gums press hard to the sand
Far hills tipped mauve as the sun dips low
Swift darkness falls to blanket the land
How velvety can silence be?

Comptroller of all is the moon with her tides
Industry permitted on banks newly made
Passage allowed through channels wrought deep
Fish swimming hard just to stay in our shade
How orderly these rhythms?

Woodlands hum with colour and song
The grey-stone  headland juts proud to be seen
The old iron lighthouse stands white and erect
Red rust held at bay by government green
Who sustains the stoic lighthouse?

Silence in the glade allows the graves to speak
Of lives lost too soon or endured in pain
Grey tombstones are weathered but flowers are fresh
A century passed but the emotions remain
Are older ghosts grieving here too?

The Creek is a haven from trade winds and waves
Playground for cruisers and tinnies and tents
Bountiful waters and feasts for the eyes
Wealth for the dreaming not measured in cents
Stolen from those our invasion displaced.

S Milligan
June 2011







Inspired by J Keats’ Ode to Autumn
(Sorry Mr Keats)