Kijana Page 7

  As we got closer I could make out the exposed reef at least half a mile to our right. Directly ahead was the flashing light on the left reef, which was strange, I thought, for it appeared that the reefs had shifted. Either that or we were heading on a wrong course. I decided to play it safe, asking Nicolette, who was standing near the autopilot, to change course a further 15 degrees to the right, in case we were caught in some current, which was pushing us closer to the left reef.

  We were moving fast, so I rushed down to the chart table to check our position. I had a feeling there was some current, but how long we’d been in it unnoticed I was about to find out. The GPS took a little more than a minute to provide our coordinates, which showed we were close to the left-hand side of the channel, which was a little too close for comfort.

  I was calculating all this in my head as quickly as I could, but as it turned out, not fast enough. As I headed up the companionway to change the course further to starboard I felt a subtle vibration that could have been mistaken for a normal creak or groan of a wooden boat. But it was enough to force my body into complete shock.

  My heart and limbs snapped into action. It took only seconds for me to clear the stairs and realise we hadn’t turned enough to the right and were skidding up onto the left-hand reef. Had Nicolette changed the course in the right direction, I wondered.

  ‘Get the sails down!’ I yelled. Everyone looked at me, momentarily stunned by my shouting.

  ‘Just get the FUCKING sails down as quick as you can!’ I screamed. ‘We’re in serious fucking trouble.’

  The crew sprang into action. They still hadn’t realised what I was on about until moments later the inevitable crunching of reef meeting keel got louder and Kijana ground to a halt.

  ‘We’re on a reef,’ I announced, for the benefit of anyone who didn’t know by that point. The boat felt very strange. All around us was water, but the usual movement of sailing over the waves was no longer there.

  ‘Someone check the bilge. Make sure we’re not taking on water,’ I barked.

  The sails, which were still up, were forcing the boat forward but she was obviously stuck. Each wave that approached from behind lifted up the stern slowly then dropped it onto the reef, sending a shudder through the rigging. The wave would continue its path along the boat, lifting the bow as it passed. I knew that the water ahead became shallower as the reef slanted upwards towards the surface of the water, while behind us lay the deep water. The seesaw action caused by each passing wave slowly edged Kijana further onto the reef, decreasing our chances of ever getting off.

  Josh was torn between getting the camera to film the disaster unfolding, and helping to get the sails down. I’d always told him whatever happened, he had to film it. Even if someone got hurt, I’d told him, the others could help them. His job was to film.

  He faced a difficult split-second decision. Every second the sails were up we were losing hope of ever getting off. When the tide went down Kijana would be smashed to pieces as she lay on her side on the exposed reef. If the boat was going to go down we needed to film it, but was the footage worth losing the boat over?

  Despite what I’d always told him, I was glad to see him unwrapping the mizzen halyard to drop the sail. He knew how to take orders but he also knew when to break them. Beau and Nicolette were desperately trying to pull down the mainsail, while Mika was in the cockpit letting the yankee sheet free.

  I started the engine and, without giving it time to warm up, slammed it into reverse at full revs. The motor screamed and sent white water streaming all around us, but Kijana wouldn’t budge. I tried again, to no avail. I left the wheel and grabbed a radio in each hand to send out a pan pan on HF and VHF. In the marine world this is the emergency call one step below a mayday. A mayday means ‘grave and imminent danger’ and can only be used if a boat is sinking. For all other distress, the pan pan must be used. No one answered the call, so I handed the radios to Beau for him to continue.

  ‘Try the higher frequencies,’ was all I could suggest.

  Darkness had descended and we were struggling to see anything. To add to the chaos, Nicolette saw one of our dinghies floating past. Its rope had got caught in the propeller when I’d rammed it into reverse, and snapped.

  ‘Someone get in the other dinghy and go and get it,’ I yelled. ‘Everybody else, start dumping anything heavy over the side.’ I figured that if we lightened the boat, maybe it would be enough to lift us off the reef.

  Nicolette climbed over the safety lines to get into the small dinghy. This dinghy only had oars because, of course, the one drifting away had the motor.

  The dinghy began to disappear into the night. ‘Someone keep their eye on it,’ I said, as if we had a crew of 20 sitting around doing nothing. Nicolette began rowing into the darkness while Mika strained her eyes to see where the dinghy was.

  Josh had by now grabbed the camera and was pointing it at me. ‘Has anyone answered Beau?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah there’s some guy, but the radio’s fucking up and keeps going to channel 16 every time he replies and Beau misses what he says,’ Josh replied.

  ‘It’s an emergency. Tell Beau to talk on 16 and plot our position to exactly where we are.’

  I was frantically getting the chain ready to throw the stern anchor out to stop us from moving further up the reef when another idea struck me. I thought if we could get enough power by going forward I might be able to steer the boat around and at least point it in the direction of safety. My reasoning was that the motor was not as powerful in reverse as it was in forward, so the only movement I was going to get would be forward. It was risky, and could rip the guts out of the boat, but it was our only realistic option. It would take only 20 metres to turn around and if we weren’t fully stuck by then there was a chance we could get off the reef.

  I couldn’t wait any longer for Beau to plot our escape route, so I opened the throttle and pulled the steering wheel hard right, hoping the channel wasn’t too far away.

  The next wave picked us up and I sensed some slight movement forward. I hoped I hadn’t imagined it. The next wave definitely lifted us, with the bow starting to swing to the right.

  ‘Come on,’ I urged, sounding like Lleyton Hewitt. ‘Keep going.’

  With the whine of the motor rising and dropping with each wave, we slowly ground a path over the reef, until we were facing east and the waves were side on.

  ‘We’re moving!’ I yelled with excitement, but it proved premature. We kept turning until we were facing the open water, but I couldn’t straighten the steering because the rudder was dragging hard against the reef. With the steering on its hard right course we kept turning through south, then west, and all the way through until we were pointing north-west again, in almost the same direction we’d started from. It was painful. Not to mention the damage I knew we must have been causing by dragging the hull over the coral.

  The wind and waves were growing bigger and the shallow reef was making them very messy. Mika was up the ladder trying to find not only the lost dinghy but, more importantly, Nicolette, who had drifted from sight.

  ‘Can you see her?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought I did but now I can’t,’ she yelled back.

  ‘Does she know how to start the outboard?’

  ‘No, I doubt it.’

  I suddenly realised I had a bigger problem on my hands than a boat stuck on a reef. There was no way anyone could row both dinghies very far, especially into those rising waves. Unless she started the outboard she would be blown either onto the crashing reef at its shallowest or past it altogether and out into the Coral Sea. And that was if she had caught the bigger dinghy at all!

  With all the bad luck stacking up against us, I resigned myself to the fact that a search plane would hopefully spot her drifting up the coast and, apart from being scared and sunburnt, she’d probably still be alive.

  ‘Just keep trying to find her,’ I yelled towards the front of the boat, hoping Mika could hear me above the engine.


  ‘Josh,’ I shouted, ‘turn every light on.’ Even though we couldn’t see her, I knew that somewhere out there she could see us.

  ‘What’s going on with the radio?’ I demanded.

  No one answered. I was clinging to the hope that someone would arrive to throw us a line and drag us off. I knew it was wishful thinking, as we were about 15 miles from Cooktown, the closest settlement, and few boats would be near the reefs at night.

  ‘Josh, what’s bloody going on with the radio?’

  Josh stuck his head out of the cabin and announced that a fishing trawler was heading towards us. At last, something was going our way.

  Mika jumped into the cockpit, still searching for Nicolette. Beau was manning the radio and constantly talking while Josh passed the updates on to me. Beau had also plotted our most recent position but the reefs were so small that the charts gave no indication if there were any channels nearby for us to escape through. I really thought this was going to end in disaster.

  Amid the absolute frenzy of activity, I couldn’t help thinking of everyone back home, especially those at the office who’d put the last two years of their lives into preparing our trip. I had let them down.

  There was no sign of the trawler so my only option was to go forward again and try once more to turn around. All it would take would be for us to land on one sharp reef outcrop and jam the keel, and we’d be stuck forever.

  This time I decided to turn left instead of right. I had no alternative. I swore and cried as I revved the motor and yanked the steering wheel to the left. I didn’t care that I was losing it. I would do anything to get off that reef in one piece. I asked Mika if she believed in God. She thought about it for a moment, and slowly replied, ‘Yes’. I yelled out to Josh: ‘I’m gonna pray Josh, and whoever or whatever it is you believe in, please pray as well.’

  I grabbed Mika’s hand despite our recent turbulent history. She stood up while I revved the motor, and looked up at the starry sky. If it hadn’t been so serious, I might have been disgusted at how corny the scene looked. But I didn’t care. I was resigned to the fact that our only hope was out of our hands.

  The next wave lifted the keel slightly off the reef. The furiously spinning propeller began to move us forward while I fought the wheel to continue turning us left. The more we moved, the more the wheel moved, until we had some momentum, passing west, then south-west, then south. I could feel the entire keel dragging on the reef as each wave moved us forward.

  I battled the wheel to straighten up our course until I could feel the rudder turn. We were facing south, directly into the wind, and on course for open water. I quietly said to Mika that this could be it. I didn’t want to raise my hopes again. All I had to do was keep the boat facing into the weather. If I veered too far to the left or right the wind would want to push the boat side on and we didn’t have enough speed to correct it. It was akin to walking a tightrope.

  I steered dead into the weather so the bow broke the waves right down the middle. I feared that any second I would feel the keel snag and stop us dead. But it never came.

  ‘I think we’re picking up speed,’ I yelled to anyone who was listening. We hobbled about 30 metres until the bumps and scrapes petered out. It was the most amazing feeling to be back in deep water. I wanted to stretch out and feel the space around us.

  ‘We’re off, Mika!’ I shouted, almost laughing. ‘We’re fucking off ... Tell Beau to get on the radio and let the trawler know.’

  It was a miracle all right. We’d been marooned for 40 minutes. We could have been smashed to pieces on the reef, or waited for the tide to go out and our lovely ship to die a slow, painful death. Someone was on our side, for we’d been given a second chance that we definitely didn’t deserve.

  Beau and Josh looked like they were about to collapse with relief, but we couldn’t relax just yet. Kijana was heading south but Nicolette was still somewhere out there being blown north. She’d be able to see our lights getting further away and either she was motoring towards us or rowing into the weather and being beaten backwards.

  I dropped the revs so we wouldn’t get too far away and began to think what to do. Beau told the trawler that Kijana was safe but we had a crew member missing and could they look for her. We had to stay in the area so she could see and catch us, but there were bits of reef lurking all around us. I didn’t fancy going through that whole ordeal again. The other option was to anchor. But I feared that if the wind got stronger and the anchor dragged, we could find ourselves back on the reef.

  As I mulled over what to do, Mika yelled out: ‘I think I can hear something’. It was hard to hear anything above the motor, wind and waves. I strained to hear if Mika was right. She was!

  ‘Get up the ladder and try to see her,’ I ordered. Josh and Beau were also peering into the dark behind us.

  ‘Yeah, it’s her,’ Mika yelled.

  ‘Is she motoring?’

  ‘I can’t see,’ she answered, but by that stage I could hear the unmistakable sound of an outboard motor. I couldn’t believe it.

  She came into view and I could see her struggling as the dinghy she was towing tugged violently with each passing wave.

  ‘Well done!’ I thought. She finally got to Kijana and coolly handed the dinghy lines to Beau.

  ‘We got off, you might have noticed,’ I said casually.

  She had a beaming smile. ‘Yeah, I guessed that.’

  I had no idea how she managed to start the motor in those conditions, but she deserved the highest praise. She was so proud that she’d actually pulled it off. In fact, we all were.

  We were all safe, the boat was safe and everything was almost back to normal. Except for the keel. Who knew what damage had been done. There was water in the bilge, but not enough to indicate whether we’d split a plank and were in danger of sinking. But the kind of crunching and shuddering we’d been through could not have been good. We urgently needed to know what damage we were faced with and how much it would cost to fix.

  We motored through the dark for an hour before anchoring on the protected side of a small island. The wind was much stronger by then so Josh stayed up to make sure we weren’t dragging. The rest of us went to bed, exhausted from the evening’s ordeal. If it was adventure we were after, we’d just been served a big fat slice of it.

  The following morning, Beau, Josh and I got the underwater camera and snorkel gear and plunged over the side to inspect the damage. The lead along the bottom of the keel had been gouged and scraped, but it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed at the next major port. There was no obvious damage to the hull, which was another miracle. I remembered how many times I’d cringed as the boat came off a wave and slammed onto the reef. I knew she was a sturdy vessel, but she’d proven herself well beyond my expectations.

  We got out of the water and had something to eat in the cockpit. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds and everyone began to recount the previous night’s events. Beau told how he was so full of adrenaline from talking on the radio that when he realised we were off the reef and the panic was over he felt as if he’d been out at an all-night rave.

  Josh told Nicolette we had been praying for her. I glanced at Mika but didn’t say anything. Holding her hand and praying out loud had been an experience we shared but would probably never talk about. Still, it was a special moment, and whatever we’d said together it had worked.

  After breakfast we weighed anchor and continued on to Lizard Island.

  Lizard Island is a complete contradiction. It is uninhabited and virtually untouched for much of the island, but tucked away in one small bay is one of the most exclusive five-star resorts in the world. Few Australians have heard of this small patch of paradise that caters to the world’s biggest celebrities. The rumour sweeping the resort when we arrived was that film stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were due in a couple of months. It’s the sort of place that offers private beaches and the best in fine dining and service.

  After we
arrived, alas not at the resort but anchored in a nearby bay, Josh compiled an audio grab from the footage he had shot the previous night. We emailed the file to the office as soon as possible so school kids and the public could hear about our near disaster. But the office didn’t want to release it. They argued that we should keep the good stuff for the documentary at the end of the trip. Plus, they were also concerned about the impact on current and potential sponsors if we showed how close we had come to going belly-up.

  I understood the reasons, but nevertheless it cheapened what I had always felt was the very point of the journey. Also, it was annoying, considering how Josh had risked plenty to film what had happened so we could show those following us the most interesting parts of the journey. We ended up writing an update for the web, which sorely lacked the impact of the audio and our moment of drama passed by unnoticed.

  The office then delivered a bolt from the blue. For a long time we’d been trying to get American interest in our journey. And our efforts had paid off beyond our wildest dreams. The Late Show with David Letterman, America’s highest rating variety show, wanted me to be a guest on the show. It meant I had to leave the boat and fly to the United States for a week. It seemed a bit strange to leave the trip for the sake of publicity, but it was an opportunity we couldn’t afford to pass up. We desperately needed money to pay for our expenses and we were certain we could clinch the book deal with the American publisher if they saw we could attract that sort of publicity.

  As a bonus, I would have to fly to Melbourne for a night before flying on to New York, which meant I could spend time with Maya. The bad news was that the airstrip on Lizard Island was the only one for miles. With my appearance on the show not due for another two weeks, it meant Kijana would have to stay anchored at the island for a further few weeks – just as we were getting some momentum.

  The effect this delay had on us was devastating. The disharmony among the crew soon returned. Somehow there seemed to be an association between being held back from getting on with the adventure and the guys’ unhappiness with the girls. Maybe it was frustration at having to wait around.