On May 8 we entered the wide southern mouth of the Great Barrier Reef. Here the seas were calm, as quiet as any we have ever experienced, yet we were twenty miles offshore and well out of sight of land. The wind died away and for the next two days, by going absolutely nowhere, we managed to get back to our usual long-term average of four knots. Actually, we were drifting slowly northward, for here the current goes up the coast rather than down as it had to the south.
By May 10 we could see the five high islands of the Percy group, with grassy, wooded slopes, brilliant white beaches, and inviting bays. Jessica and Clare, who had laboriously made a pirate flag, complete with skull and crossbones, wanted to land and take over an uninhabited island. Barbara, too, had land fever and the islands looked so tempting that we yielded to their lure. Picking one from the charts at random, we cast anchor in a lovely bay off the west side of Middle Island.
A mile away, Pine Islet has a lighthouse and, through the binoculars, we could see a number of houses grouped about it. On Middle Percy, however, the only sign of civilization was an apparently deserted shack set well back from the beach with a big sign: TELEPHONE. This, we assumed, was connected in some way with the lighthouse settlement.
The surf was too high to carry four in Flattypus, so I rowed Barbara ashore first, promising to return for the excited girls. First, however, I decided to take a look at the shack. Inside was the telephone, looking as tempting as Alice’s cake marked: “Eat me!” How could I resist following the directions: “Wind crank and lift handset.”
At once I found myself talking to the sole family on the island, a Canadian sister and two brothers who lived high in the interior. They knew all about the Phoenix, as soon as I mentioned my name, having read my series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post.
At their invitation, and under the guidance of Claude and Percy White, who came down to the shore to meet us, we all trooped up to the White home, a good stiff hike. There we were able to send off a message of reassurance to Clare’s parents by the interesting expedient of flashing a message in Morse to the lighthouse of Pine Islet, from whence it was relayed by radio to Mackay on the mainland and thence overland to Melbourne!
This taken care of, we settled down to enjoy three days of wonderful hospitality, climaxed by a wild-goat hunt—or I might say a wild wild-goat hunt—which ended successfully with a barbecue on the beach.
Now began a new and delightful stage in our travels, island hopping, with a different anchorage every night. Our first call after the Percy Islands was at Lindeman, a resort island where Clare’s father “shouted us” by means of a cable to the management instructing them to entertain the entire crew of the Phoenix in style. They did, and Clare took great pleasure in her role as hostess at a sumptuous dinner in the hotel.
From Lindeman we made our way gradually north, with occasional stops to explore scattered and mostly uninhabited islands. Barbara, especially, took great pleasure in “fossicking” on the reefs at low tide and invariably returned to the Phoenix with pailfuls of live shells which we had no convenient way of cleaning while underway, since the approved method is to bury them for a week or two and allow ants and nature to do the job. As a result, we sailed always with a more or less pervasive odor of decaying animal life and, try as she would to keep her trophies downwind of our living quarters, she insists that many of them were given the deep-six by unnamed members of the crew.
Our next major stop was Townsville, on the mainland, where we spent four days, catching up on baths, laundry, fresh vegetables, and the news of mutual friends.