102. Seven Swallows

I’m not crazy about tattoos. At least not on my own body. I can appreciate them on others but getting one sounds painful and I’m not sure a tattoo and my skin will age at the same rate. If I’m going to make my body into a painting I’d like know that the canvass remains tight and that the paint won’t fade.

Sailors have always been known to get tattoos. And many of my cruising buddies have been decorated with turtles, mantas, boats, compasses and in some cases their entire life stories in Polynesian symbols. If I was to go for a tattoo I would go for one with seven swallows. A swallow traditionally symbolises 5,000 nautical miles sailed and Saoirse and I have earned seven to date. Most of them just the two of us on our own. The problem with a tattoo like that though is that it constantly has to be expanded and that I might run out of skin before I’m done sailing. So I’ve decided to pass on the body art and to just document my travels in this blog instead.

I’m back in Brisbane now, waiting for a local front to pass and keeping an eye on any low pressure systems further north. The cyclone season is technically over at the end of this month and I’m eager to get to Indonesia. I have well over 2,000 Nm to Darwin where I plan to leave Australia, most of it through no man’s land. A quick look at Google Earth shows that there’s pretty much nothing in the form of civilisation after Cairns or Cooktown. No paved roads, no dwellings or farms and certainly no grocery stores or gas stations. It actually looks more remote than some of the small island nations that I’ve visited in the Pacific. But that doesn’t mean that North Queensland and most of Northern Territory is empty. In fact there is a whole section in my pilot book about the animals that live there and telling me to be really careful when getting in the water. It talks about stingers, water serpents, sharks, and worst of all, ‘salties’. Crocodiles. The six meter ones that lurk in salt water, not the cute two meter ones in fresh water. Before I got here I thought most of the stories about everything in Australia wanting to kill you were exaggerated, but my pilot book certainly suggests differently.

As a long distance sailor you often have to get in the water, even when you don’t want to. Sometimes just to make sure everything is OK below the surface but more often to clean the bottom. It’s only ten months or so since Saoirse had three layers of industrial strength anti-fouling painted on her bottom but there is no bottom paint available (anymore) that can fully handle the barnacle and sea grass growth in the tropics. Not without some manual labour. You just have to get down there and scrape it off and I prefer to do that here in the south where I ‘only’ have sharks to worry about. Now, I’m not talking about the Black Tips or Reef Sharks that I’ve swam with numerous time, I’m talking about Great Whites, Tigers and Bull Sharks. I am aware of that locals swim and surf all around me and I’m told I need to be really unlucky to get attacked, that they don’t like our taste and that an attack will probably stop at a nibble. So I bight the bullet and put on a black wet suite, stay close to the black hull and stop when the food I scrape off the bottom starts to attract smaller fish. And at the end of the day I feel good about manning up and not being a chicken Swede. Until I turn on the news and see that some surfer died from a shark attack in Western Australia and that a woman lost a piece of her body just around the corner. I guess they were just unlucky.

With that, I hope to really get going sometime next week. Towards the famous Whitsunday Islands first. Some 500 Nm north of here. A tenth of a swallow. Then another three tenths of a swallow to Darwin and two to Indonesia. Who knows, I may even earn another two full ones before the year is over.