WE ARE about 10km north-west of Endeavour Reef. These days with electronic navigation, GPS, EPIRB and the like, it is no big deal. I am even writing this aboard SV Biringari and will send it back to The Canberra Times by internet from an aerial 15m up the mast.
We have plenty of food, water and even electricity aboard. All is well.
We are at Hope Island. This is a quintessentially picturesque tropical island — sand (well, crushed coral) all around and some palm trees and other larger trees are home to terns, osprey, imperial pigeon and the like. It, and places like it, make sail cruising the joy it is.
Wonderful diving and snorkelling. All is good. One of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s two buoyed moorings is vacant. But the wind is a little too strong to pick it up with the boat hook and we decide to anchor instead.
If only.
Rather, someone from one of the two other yachts at the islands offers to help. They are in their tender with an 8hp engine and say throw us a rope and we will loop it through the mooring eye and pass it back to you.
From that moment, the perfect storm of a confluence of events could have spelled doom.
Usually, I use a big black double-braided rope for mooring and double or treble it through the loop on the mooring rope back to cleats at the bow of the yacht.
But there are also two other black ropes on deck, each part of the rigging, so I stupidly say to my wife Louise give them the blue rope, so our helpers are not passed the wrong rope.
The blue rope is slightly smaller, but still double braided and very strong. Our helpers pass it through the mooring eye – ONCE—and hand the two ends back to me.
I attach each end to the bow cleats. We are secure. Strong 20 to 25 knot winds. (1knot equals 1.85kms). Dinner. Bed.
Then at 1am there is a violent rocking of the boat. I am awake and race to the deck. We have come adrift. We are one, perhaps two, nautical miles from the island. The blue rope has been torn apart. Mercifully, we have not struck any number of rocky reef outcrops that surround the island – the bommies that make the place a diver’s or snorkeller’s delights but which could spell doom for a yacht.
What to do? Head for Cooktown (at least we know the safe haven is there) 40kms away or head back Hope Island?
We start the engine, turn on the electronic navigation system, and motor back in the black against the wind and the waves and drop anchor as close to Hope island as the night would permit – relieved and nervously exhausted.
Trivial, of course, compared to Cook’s encounter on the reef. See Robert Mundle’s harrowing description in the opening of his biography of Cook, for example.
But there are some similarities.
You would like to think, for example, that humans faced with potential calamity would use the best of scientific instruments and knowledge about them to make a decision to best ensure survival, or at least to avoid catastrophe.
Cook’s main mission was scientific. It was to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun, and the Pacific was the best place to do that.
So here we are in this nation continent which would have not been a single English-tradition nation but for the resilience of the great explorer and scientist’s actions on Endeavour reef in June 1770. Who knows what the French and Dutch might have done in the absence of Cook returning to England with his documented claim.
But what are we doing? Turning our back on the science which tells us that no man is an island. That the best use of whatever science we have – however imperfect – is better than an irrational hope that all will be well or a stubborn denial of the obvious.
Conservatives in Europe are bemoaning the Abbott Government’s determination to do nothing about Australia’s carbon emissions and to do nothing to help prevent the planet from smashing on to an environmental reef.
A lot of face saving would be needed for Tony Abbott and the Government to change tack on the carbon tax. But it could do it in two ways. One would be to allow the carbon tax repeal legislation to be defeated in the Senate and just shrug and say we tried, so please, miners, do not take out a self-serving advertising campaign against us.
The other is to adhere to strictly economically rational principle and say that our trading partners demand action on carbon and that without it we will be penalsied. It will be cheaper to keep the carbon tax than repeal it.
But no, the Government seems determined to ignore the science and economics and founder us upon the reef.
DOT DOT DOT
Well, the evening after the reef escape we had a bottle of “Grand Vin de Bourgogne” with the words “Appellation Saint-Veran Controlee”.
All very well, but there was nothing on the label to tell me the grape varieties that went into the wine. Another bottle of the mixed French dozen did not even have the year the grapes were grown. (And yes, after the reef experience we did not restrict ourselves to the first bottle. I’m sure that Cook’s crew got extra rations of whatever rum was saved, too.)
I’m not a big fan of French wine, but the high Australian dollar can make it attractive. What is not attractive, though, is the assumption that if you know the wine was made in La Petite Valley de Ego Premierement that one is assumed to know the grape variety.
The French hounded us in our own courts, followed by the Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards to deny us the right to use words like champagne, burgundy, chablis, port or even sherry to market Australian wines because they were misdescriptions.
And quite right, too. The upshot was to discipline Australian wine makers into labeling wines at least fairly accurately according to grape variety, region and year.
Time to fight back and to insist that all imported wine provides the same information.
Anyway, after the other night’s experience, it’s time to move on to the red.
CRISPIN HULL. This article first appeared in the Canberra Times on 19 July 2014.