I shoved it into my pocket while I prepared to cut the engine and make fast to the dock.
“You can’t tie up here!” the official told us, shocked. “This is the main dock!”
“Where then?” I asked.
He looked amazed and nonplused. At last he suggested that we had “best move right on down.” He gestured down the harbor into infinity.
I put the engine in gear once more and we headed away from the dock and on up the channel. At last, almost at the end of the harbor, we found an old jetty that seemed to be sufficiently out of anyone’s way. A couple of bystanders helped us come alongside, but we had barely made the lines fast and put the engine to bed when our friend the official arrived, panting.
“You’ll have to move on back,” he told us. “You can tie up where you first came in, for a few hours. Then you’ll have to move along, because there’s a big ship coming in.”
He also said we would be charged “regular docking rates” while there. I was a little annoyed by then and retorted that, if this were the case, I would have to charge admission to come aboard the Phoenix. (I had a wonderful precedent for that action: old Joshua Slocum himself did it, when officials tried to gouge him.)
After we had moved back to our original spot, I visited the dockmaster, who decided that if other ports in Australia had not charged the Phoenix a docking fee, neither would Cairns. I then graciously invited him to come aboard at any time—no charge. He hardly seemed to know what to do with a yacht, and was concerned because we might interfere with the berthing of two big ships that were due in at the same time. I assured him that if they came close enough to interfere with us, they would be too dangerously close to each other. He finally agreed to permit us to remain where we were, which would put us right between them. And so it worked out very nicely—our forward lines shared the same bollard with the after lines of Manunda, while our after lines kept company with the bowlines of Taiping.
We spent ten days at Cairns, which was Clare’s last port of call before flying home to her family. Just before leaving us, she confessed that she had been “a little bit scared” when she started off with an unknown family—the first Americans she had ever known.
“I’d heard a lot about Yankees,” she admitted, “and I just didn’t know what you’d be like.”