A day or two beyond Townsville we made one of our most interesting stops in the Barrier Reef, at Great Palm Island, the largest aboriginal settlement in Queensland. Great Palm is strictly not for the tourist. There are no accommodations for overnight guests and no public services. Only those who, like ourselves, come in by boat and are self-sufficient—and who are able to obtain the permission of the superintendent—are allowed to remain after dark.
During our stay at Great Palm, we gave an evening of slides and movies in the outdoor theater, a program which was an outstanding success. For the first time, we ran the movies we had taken of the Bastille Day fete in Tahiti and the response of the Australian aborigines to the Tahitian belles and their vibrant hula was such that we had to run that particular reel three times! I made a special trip out to the Phoenix at anchor to bring back the slit drum from Uturoa and the cowrie-trimmed grass skirts from Bora Bora, and these exhibits were passed around and tried out by every man, woman, and child in the settlement, to the accompaniment of much giggling and many gibes.
By the way of return, the native population put on a “corraboree” for our benefit. A great deal of care and elaborate preparation had gone into the costuming and make-up of the aborigines, whose black faces, ribs, arms, and pipestem legs were outlined in strange patterns of white paint. At the last minute, however, and when all was in readiness for the dance, it seemed that a native drum and drummer were not to be found. A plea for one, repeated several times over the loud speaker, finally turned up a volunteer who used, as his drum, that universal instrument—an empty kerosene tin!
From Great Palm Island to Cairns, the next mainland port on our itinerary, was only a day’s sail. My log notes that the seas were short and choppy after we had left the shelter of the island and we rolled considerably with the resultant sound of numerous crashes from below, “particularly,” as I remark smugly, “in the ladies’ cabin.” A couple of weeks of quiet sailing, plus sheltered anchorages, had made us all a bit careless in stowing.
We reached the outer lights of Cairns channel at 2:30 in the morning, but I refused to transit the narrow passage, five miles long, until daylight, especially with a balky engine. Again, my possibly overcautious decision to anchor and wait out the night was at odds with the ideas of my Japanese companions, who were all for going right on in. They grumbled a bit about waiting, and even more over my insistence on the ever-unpopular anchor watch, but I remained adamant. The Phoenix, with 30 tons displacement and a 25-horsepower engine (18 when using kerosene), is sluggish under power and coming in to a strange anchorage is always tense under the best of conditions. Channel markers, docks, and shore lines may be well marked on the charts, but neither chart nor pilot book can give advice about such imponderables as weather, poor visibility, the movements of shipping, or the vagaries of our own engine.
Since I was engineer as well as skipper, and since the engine is under the floor of the after cabin with no remote controls, coming in to a dock or mooring demanded a high degree of cooperation between the lookout forward, the man at the tiller, and myself.
The next morning, with the wind dead ahead, and the engine still acting up, we limped down the long corridor to town, stopping once to make a quick spark plug change. I think that even Nick was grateful for good visibility as he helped pick out and guide us past the intricate system of buoys that marked the channel.
As we entered the harbor we had another of those experiences which can only sound routine in the telling but was nerve-racking in the extreme. In Cairns there was a solid line of docks and warehouses along the shore to starboard, but nothing to indicate where we should go. Barely crawling, we moved down the channel, scanning the land. At last we saw a man in uniform emerge from one of the buildings. Waving a paper in one hand, he signaled to us to come in. I dived down the afterhatch, put the engine in reverse, ordered the helmsman to put the tiller over, and we began to maneuver our way alongside the dock. The current was strong, but we finally succeeded in bringing our boat up neatly, almost abeam of the uniformed official.
Moto made ready to throw a line.
“Phoenix?” The official demanded. At my affirmative, he leaned over and handed me a letter. For Jessica. No greeting. No word of explanation. Just a letter.