I assured them that yes, I had indeed taken seasickness medication and that yes, I was as surprised as they at the sudden deterioration of my condition. No, I was not usually prone to this kind of intense motion sickness and my last couple of trips had been completely fine; and yes, of course I would still be fit to take my turn on the watch when the time came. They seemed reassured by this and I accepted their suggestion that I go below and simply lie down on the bunk.
Here, at least, was a kind of relief. If, and only if, I lay absolutely still, moving not a single muscle, the nausea would back off somewhat. But clench a fist, flex a toe or even move my eyes too suddenly, and waves of it would rush me in an instant, smothering me with the feeling that death, right now in this bunk on this boat, would not be an unwelcome visitor.
In any case, stillness was impossible. Below deck, closer to the anvil-like pounding against the hull, I was many times forced to brace myself with failing strength to prevent being tossed out of the tiny bed, only to retch still more into the bucket which was never far from my side.
That first night, I lay for hours with my eyes closed, swaying up and down as the little boat ploughed on. Sleep, which I craved, eluded me. Eventually, I faded into a kind of non-presence. Then, the sounds of men snoring, and eventually, the delicious velvet haze of sleep began to take hold, obliterating everything, even the waves of sickness, carrying me headlong into dark, delicious relief. Just as I sensed that I was at last dozing off, a hand shook my shoulder. ‘Your watch,’ said a voice.
For a moment, the sea air and spray did me some good. Gerhard was at the helm, somewhere under a large sou’wester, and we discussed briefly what was expected of me. In my condition, that was not very much. The rain began. Tiny, sharp droplets hurled by the wind, into which we forged. I stood and gripped something, but tended more to slide about, bumping into winches and bollards. Someone had found a safety harness and some wet weather gear for me, bright red pants with braces and an enormous jacket, which could have held three of me. As tight as I pulled, I could not make a proper seal around my neck. ‘You might want to find a seat for yourself, it’s a little bumpy tonight,’ said Gerhard. I needed no further encouragement.
I slumped by the door to the cabin, through which I was desperate to return and lay down again. Instead, I wedged myself into a small deck cavity, which held me snugly as the boat rocked and buffeted along. I drifted into a stupor of sickness and exhaustion, but at least the hiccups prevented me from falling asleep. And some other sensation – some irritation – also marked its presence on my barely functioning brain. I could not at first put my finger on what it was, just another element to my overall misery. I ignored it. Then we hit a larger than usual wave, and a hot pain made me start. My lolling head, I realised, had been banging against a knob on a fibreglass panel. I let out a long, slow moan. How long had this been going on? Such was the level of abjectness to which I had sunk.
It gave me some solace to occasionally half open an eye and concentrate on the barely illuminated face of Gerhard, like a spectre, in the rain, wheel in hand, guiding the boat through the night. Part of my job on the watch was, I realised, to keep him company and I would, through my suffering, occasionally attempt to honour my duty with a faltering conversation, commending him on the fine example he was setting to as yet unproven seafarers such as myself. He gruffed a little, offering a word or two, but I couldn’t really hear him, and nodded back into my soggy wretchedness, vainly trying to prevent a stream of icy rain running down my neck.
Eventually, at some hellish hour after more hellish spasms of dry-retching, like a relieving angel of mercy, Mark appeared. He couldn’t see me at first and asked Gerhard if I was still on deck. A silent nod in my direction. Mark turned to examine the slumped figure wedged into the deck, one hand still on the cable of the safety railing. He was silent for a moment. ‘Oh,’ he said.
I had sense of neither time nor space. Back below, I risked a cup of water to rinse out a little of the unspeakable taste in my mouth, stripped off and slumped back onto the bed. As my brain tried, in vain, to remember a time in my life where I had felt worse, I looked at my watch under the pillow. It was just after 1 am. Uttering another low moan, I knew I would have to be on deck again in just three hours’ time.
I was ready for it. I awoke at the right time, resigned, as Alan returned to bed from his shift at the helm. I sat on the bed, swaying like a man drunk, silently struggling once again into my waterproof overalls, tormented by alternate waves of illness and exhaustion, steeled to the three hours of hell that awaited me up top. As I stood to face the small ladder like a doomed Christian facing his entrance into the Roman arena, a voice – I still can’t recall whose – said simply, ‘We’ve got it. Go back to bed,’ I had no energy to argue, or to thank, or even to cry.
Of all the kindnesses that have been shown me during my life by friends and strangers; of all the occasions when someone has done me a favour, given me a break, carried my load, talked me up or calmed me down, given me a heads-up, a second chance or the good oil, passed on my name or let me off the hook, all of these little benevolences combined could never, in a thousand years, hope to match the gratitude I felt for the one little act of mercy shown to me that stormy night by the crew of the Sea Snake II, those good, good fellows who let me sleep through my second watch.
The light woke me a couple of hours later, trapping me in that no-man’s land between sleep and waking, wondering what these noises, these voices and this odd movement could be. The roof of my mouth felt hard and unnatural like a dry eggshell. Then I remembered. Perhaps the seasickness monster had wandered away in the night? Gingerly, I opened my eyes. The others, I could hear, were already on deck. I prayed they had forgotten all about me, and that I could hide here unnoticed for the rest of the voyage. I decided to risk movement. A flex of one arm, then another, a leg and I was halfway towards sitting up. Take it slowly. So far so good.
‘You want to see some islands? Well, we’ve got some for you,’ said Alan, shattering my befuddled world by poking his head into the hatch above.
‘Yes, I’ve been observing them for some time,' I replied quick smart, but not having the faintest idea where it had come from. I’m sure I didn’t fool him for a second, even though I rather impressed myself. Desperate for some water to splash on my face, I steeled myself to face the others and get a look at the dawn, perhaps even resurrect myself in the eyes of these professionals. As nonchalantly as I could, I sauntered on deck with an unconvincing smile – maybe even a wink – passing myself off for one of those people who couldn’t care less about sleeping in while others worked. I don’t think that ruse worked either. Then I turned and looked out to sea. ‘My God!’ This time it was genuine.
Barely a few hundred metres off the port bow, a human skull sat half submerged in the water.
15
PILLARS IN THE WATER
‘Skull Rock!’ someone shouted to me, as if it could be called anything else.
‘What is it?’ I asked idiotically, but the answer was obvious, and the sight of it had, for the moment, overwhelmed my lingering nausea. Skull Rock is really just a great granite lump in the sea but carved by nature into its unique shape. There were the eyes, the bridge of the nose, the rounded dome of the head, all as if carved deliberately. If it appeared as the backdrop to a Hollywood pirate movie, one would think it verging on the far-fetched.
‘Ever … been there?’ I asked Alan.
‘No way to get onto it,’ he replied. ‘Don’t think anyone has.’ Indeed, any attempt at landing on its sheer granite flanks looked impossible. Tantalisingly, we steered a little closer. The visual effect, far from dissipating at close quarters, became even more unsettling. ‘Actually,’ someone corrected, ‘they reckon a few people have found their way up there. It’s full of caves. Old ships would use it to range their guns. They reckon cannonballs are still up there. In the eyes.’
A strange echoing was heard as we passed, like waves crashing inside a cave.
It was an eerie sound, and the men on the boat said not a word until we had sailed well past it.
The morning had taken most of the sting out of the unexpected squall, and although still grey, the sky held at least the promise of better things to come. The hideous chop of before had eased too, replaced by a more bearable swell which rose up in glassy grey-green hillocks as we slid and cut our way through.
‘Oh and that one’s Devil’s Tower,’ said a voice. Here, at last, were some dramatically named landmarks. I swung my head around to another remarkable rock, this one resembling a partly submerged temple. Like Skull Rock, this too was surrounded by vertical cliffs, an upward thrusting of granite, like a gigantic pillar hammered into the sea. It looked almost hollow, like the flooded atrium of a ruined temple. We made another diversion close by, and again heard the hollow echo of waves surging and breaking inside. It indeed looked as if pillars of rock were supporting a massive ceiling, and one could perhaps imagine footsteps echoing long ago across its ancient floor.
‘We should make Deal in about three hours,’ Alan reassured me. ‘It’s somewhere over there,’ he said, and waved his hand at a grey misty bank hovering above the sea to the south.
We were in fact following the top of a mountainous ridge stretching between Flinders Island and Wilson’s Promontory, submerged when water locked away inside the great ice sheets of the last ice age began to melt 20 000 years ago. At that time, with the sea level an astonishing 120 metres lower than it is today, one could have walked across the Bassian Plain, a broad area of rivers, trees and estuaries, looking up at a series of great granite peaks, all the way from mainland Australia to Tasmania. Eventually, the sea began to encroach, from the west at first, then rising from the east, until it finally began to lap over the lip of this great ridge, flooding the Bassian Plain and leaving its crowning peaks as today’s islands of Skull, Devil’s Tower and Deal, mere tips above the surface of Bass Strait.
Before reaching Deal, I was to be given a close-up look of another of these Bass Strait treasures, one for which Christian had already whetted my appetite, the remarkable Rodondo.
If Skull Rock had transported me to a pirate’s lair in the Caribbean, and Devil’s Tower to ancient Mesopotamia, it was the steamy jungles of South America that Rodondo brought to mind. Roughly oval-shaped and again surrounded by formidable walls of granite, Rodondo juts 350 metres from the sea at its highest point, an abrupt, asymmetrical peak, like an off-centred cupcake. Its entire surface is covered in thick vegetation of a distinctive olive green.
How did such a place come to be here, this exotic anomaly sitting off the blustery Victorian coast? Nigel Brother’s weighty island book was of little help, telling me blandly that Rodondo is 80 hectares of ‘felsic fractionated Devonian granite’.
But looking up at its impossible, inaccessible flanks towering above our very small boat on a grey and uncertain morning, it made me think more of impenetrable jungles, of lost tribes and species long vanished but waiting to be rediscovered. In short, our very own Island of Doctor Moreau, right here in the frigid waters of Bass Strait. One could almost hear the deep, throaty beat of jungle drums emanating from somewhere within its lost interior.
Flights of fancy notwithstanding, Rodondo is in fact a most unusual place and home to some striking peculiarities. The unusually hued vegetation is a mixture of several species not found anywhere else nearby. One, the Cape Leeuwin wattle (known also as Stinkbean), is classed as a weed, a strange, tropical-looking plant native to Western Australia and occurring nowhere else east of the Great Australian Bight.
There is no evidence of fire or any human habitation anywhere on the island, making Rodondo, from an ecological point of view, particularly intact. The first recorded expedition of hardy naturalists only managed to find a way onto the place in 1947. Once there, they found, among other things, a species of gigantic tea-tree with twisted trunks three feet in diameter, Melalauca pubescens, also found nowhere else in the strait.
We watched Rodondo slip behind us as we headed further south, deeper into Bass Strait. I still felt awful, but was beginning to acclimatise to the motion of boat and sea. There was a discussion about last night’s unexpected squall, of which the forecast apparently gave little indication. No one seemed surprised. Bass Strait is an ever unpredictable piece of water.
I thought it better to be on the safe side and avoid the challenging spectacle of three men devouring a breakfast of bacon and eggs, and slip below once more, where I must have managed an hour or two of decent sleep. Then Alan’s voice announcing, ‘That’s Deal over there, to the south.’ The effect was like a tonic. Up and out of my repose immediately, I forgot that I had even been ill, and for the first time since I came aboard, the air smelt fresh and my head felt clear.
The height of Deal, even at a distance, took me by surprise. From the north, it resembled the bow of a gigantic ship cutting the waves. ‘Three hours, four perhaps,’ I was told. That was all I had to wait to reach not only something that did not buck and sway under my feet, but the setting of the strange story I had carried for so long.
Lying down once again, I was convinced that the worst was behind me, and that I could now start this trip, as it were, from the top. The wind had dropped, the day was warming up, my stomach seemed to be healing, and even the first murmurs of an appetite were returning, allowing me to keep down a couple of dry biscuits and a sip of orange juice. Even the dreaded hiccups seemed to have at last left me alone.
Yes, it had been a rough start, certainly, and the seasickness and squall had come as a nasty surprise, but now it was time to get to work, to rediscover the spirit and purpose of my quest, and get a sense of this spectacular and little-known part of the country. It was the happiest moment of the trip, but it was not to last.
I’m uncertain if my memory has tampered slightly with my recollection of what occurred next, but I still cling to the idea that precisely as the words ‘there is nothing now that can go wrong’ passed across my mind, a series of events began to punish me for so foolishly tempting fate.
It began with a noise – like a gunshot – followed by a shuddering crash, then, more startlingly, everything went dark. It all took place in a second, and whatever was happening I knew it was not good. I glanced at the hull, expecting water to start pouring in and drown me. Were we about to capsize? Was a rock or a container ship about to saw us in two? Would someone at my funeral a week or so from now be delivering a eulogy, mumbling ‘… he died doing what he loved’? If I was already doomed, was there even any point in getting up off this bed? All these scenarios exploded in my head in a second.
What on earth was happening? We still seemed to be moving but the boat had adopted a decidedly disabled quality, as if an arm was dragging in the water on one side, pulling us in a slow circle. Footsteps, frantic running up top and the urgent but controlled voices of the three men: ‘Right, cut it away,’ ‘Get a knife,’ ‘I’ll take one end,’ and among them, unmistakably, Alan uttering the heart-sinking words, ‘That’s it for Deal.’
Poking my head up, all was chaos. The previously tidy deck had become a mass of tangled rigging, sail and cable, and three men trying to clear it all up. Knowing myself to be of no use whatsoever, I adopted a concerned expression and kept out of the way. In bits and pieces, it was explained to me what had happened.
The mast of a yacht, transferring the power of the wind through the sail, is under enormous pressure. Steel cables or ‘shrouds’ are therefore attached at various points along its length, secured to the deck to prevent it being pulled over. This is exactly what happened to our boat when the starboard main shroud – a steel cable the width of a baby’s finger – failed. Popping out of its steel tube housing on the deck like a rifle shot, it waved about in the air uselessly for a second before the now unsupported mast folded in the middle like a snapping matchstick and came down with a crash that could easily have collected any one of us. The sail covering the small cabin windows blocked out the light, and, in an instant, ou
r hopes of reaching our destination were gone.
Desperate attempts were made by Mark and Gerhard to save the mast, which had fallen diagonally across the deck, part of it dragging in the water. The two men did their best with knives and cable cutters to free it and haul it back onboard. Gerhard was virtually in the water.
After much hacking, hauling and quiet but serious cursing, they pulled up the broken arm of the mast and lashed it to the deck, a sad, forlorn, dead-looking thing, strangled in a mess of sail and wire.
With the ‘roof’ provided by the sail above our heads suddenly gone, the sky looked bare and open and threatening.
Alan was apologetic, crestfallen, but firm. As a skipper who exuded a natural authority, he had no need to explain anything to anyone, but was glad of the opportunity to spell out his reasoning nonetheless, with me as his sounding board. ‘The boat’s lame,’ he explained. ‘With no mast… it just doesn’t handle the same. Even if we make it to Deal, like this, in that tide,’ he glanced towards the big island, now just a few miles off as, with tragic irony, the sun began to break on it for the first time that day. ‘I don’t know if we’d get off again. I’m sorry,’ he said, shrugged his shoulders, and started up the noisy diesel engine. The boat swung around and pointed to the north.
Like a monster believed dead in a scary movie, then returning to terrorise its victim, the familiar ‘crump, crump’ of the waves began once again to pound against the hull. Only this time, badly balanced and unstable as she was, it was far worse. I knew it was only a matter of time before the seasickness, the hiccups and my meagre breakfast returned.
The Forgotten Islands Page 11
