The run from Hope Isles to Cooktown was a short one, only 4 hours and with shallow water for the approach as well as in the Endeavour River itself we took our usual precaution of coming in on a rising tide. There is a channel that has been dredged to 2.5 metres but after our experiences with dredged channels into Lake Macquarie our levels of trust are somewhat diminished.
Captain Cook sailed these waters in the Endeavour in 1770 and the names he gave some of the places speak volumes. We survived Cape Tribulation and Cape Flattery, named after he felt he was being flattered with good conditions and terrain he didn’t trust. We avoided running up onto Endeavour Reef which still bears the name of his misadventure. He had no idea of the extent of the Great Barrier Reef and after spotting Hope Island ahead (where we anchored) he decided to shorten sail and haul offshore to deeper water overnight, and ran straight onto Endeavour Reef.
It could have been a total disaster but by throwing the ship’s ballast and cannons overboard they were light enough to get off the reef using tides and a kedge anchor. For the landlubbers, they would have lowered the anchor into a rowing boat, set it some distance off in deeper water and as the tide rose, hauled the line in pulling themselves off the reef. Sometime it works and in Cook’s case they were able to get to the shallow waters of the Endeavour River where they used the dry land at low tide to repair, clean and restock the ship.
This was the first place Aborigines were seen, as well as kangaroos. I imagine they just used the aboriginal name for them. Nobody in the known world would dream up a name like ‘kangaroo’!
As we motored across the shallows towards the Cooktown entry channel we quickly picked up the red and green marker buoys. They weren’t the fixed pile type but rather the barrel ones that get moved as sand bars move so they always have the most recent conditions for navigation. Our chart showed them to be outside the channel but it also showed a straight channel with red and green pylons which weren’t there. This isn’t the first time our charts have been out of date.
We got ourselves between the barrel buoys and were turning 90 degrees to the next green we could find over near the southern bank when we ran aground. The water went from .8 of a metre under the keel to nothing in seconds.
We could make out the dock and some foreshore buildings a short way upstream and a floating dredge operating about where the chart showed its version of the channel to be.
While we were hard in reverse against the incoming tide I called Cooktown Coastguard.
“You can’t use those markers, mate, they’re way out of place... You gotta come over near the dredge.”
That was it. He didn’t respond to further calls and I hadn’t even had the chance to abuse him yet! A few centuries ago wreckers used to light false beacons and when ships ran aground they’d row out, kill the crew and take the cargo, and get hanged when they were caught. I was just waiting for some ‘helpful’ local with a strong workboat to show up and offer to pull us off for a salvage fee. It must be illegal to mark a channel with totally normal, correctly coloured beacons where there is no channel. It’s like putting 'on' ramp signs on a freeway off ramp.
We eventually got ourselves off the bank and managed to pick our way across the shallows to the seaward side of the dredge. It was swinging on an anchor with the entire channel cordoned off where they were pumping sand to shore.
As we got nearer a workman came out in an aluminium ‘tinny’ and said “Just go round the outside the dredge. As long as you stay this side of those yellow buoys you’ll have heaps of water.”
Well, we’d just about passed the dredge when we ran hard aground again, well inside the ‘heaps of water’ area. This time between the two of us we managed to block the channel completely.
As the tinny guy came closer I shouted ever so politely “We’re hard aground again!”
“What do you draw?”
“Two metres”.
“Well you should have 4 right there”.
“Well we don’t!”
Idiot... does he think we suddenly grew another 2 metre keel!
While I was trying to swing the bow towards deeper water so when the rising tide lifted us we’d be ready to move, he went back to the dredge and started moving it closer to shore to open a space in the channel, and just as well.
Just then Sandy spotted 2 boats coming straight for the gap that was slowly opening. The incoming tide was carrying them toward us at a couple of knots, but this is not a problem because a bit of reverse would hold them in place against the current until the dredge had cleared the space.
The panicked look on the face of the first boat’s skipper will stay with me a long time. He couldn’t reverse. He was towing the second boat, a fishing trawler with a failed engine with no way of stopping in time. Boat number one was about to become the filling in a crunch sandwich.
While various dialects of piratese from all 4 boats turned the air blue the guy with the dredge used his tinny to push with a lot more desperation, I wound our wheel hard over so even though we were aground we could at least swing some to widen the gap and make ourselves a smaller target.
Fishing trawlers have booms attached to their sides to drag nets, even pulled in and up high they still add a lot to the width of the vessel. The first boat got through easily and I have no idea how much space there was between the trawler and the dredge. It wouldn’t have been much, but between the trawler and Wind Wanderer there was no more than a couple of feet, which seemed like inches.
This was turning into a long day.
While we waited for a bit more water and got ourselves pointed back to the deeper area of the channel in front of the public jetty, we could see more boats anchored just a little further upstream. Most were catamarans and smaller yachts than us, and a few trawlers. We saw the lame duck trawler get towed a little nearer and its anchor down.
Twenty minutes later we were free and soon had 3.5 metres under the keel, for 2 minutes! As we passed the jetty I swung the boat to the edge of the channel and we went straight onto a sand bank. We weren’t even out of the channel yet.
The current swung us beam on with a small yacht close to our transom. A little more tide and we’d be free, again! “This time I’m dropping the anchor in that deep spot right there in the channel. If anyone wants to come or go they can wait ‘til we get out of here on the top of the tide in the morning!” I got no argument from Sandy.
But our day wasn’t over yet.
The dead trawler was anchored just a short distance up current from our spot on the sandbank. Even though it was late afternoon, the trawlerman decided to take it elsewhere. This time he had recruited a couple of mates with tinnies and outboard motors to do the job. The one up front pulling and the back one pushing. We heard a strange noise and looked over to see the back boat had engine failure. The guy had the cover off and was frantically trying to get his outboard motor started again, while the front boat fought a losing battle against the weight of the trawler and the tide.
Slowly the flotilla drifted, straight for our bow. We were aground with nowhere to go. The back guy just abandoned the whole game, let go and fended his boat off our bow as he ducked under the bowsprit. The trawlermman lost his cool completely giving us a few sign language signals that indicated he was way out of his depth, and supply of grey cells. If anyone should have been howling for blood it should have been us!
At the last minute 2 of his synapses shorted and ‘drop anchor’ got through. It pulled him up about 20 metres from our boat. The remaining tinny took the trawlerman and they went ashore.
We’re just on 18 metres tip to tip. We had a moored yacht off our stern and a trawler 20 metres up current and in the direction we needed to turn to clear the sandbank.
Some days $10,000 for a bow thruster sounds cheap.
But we did it. As we floated free we reversed to within inches of the yacht and swung clear of the trawler, just. Some call it back and fill, some call it prop walk, but it’s a manoeuvre that has saved us, usually getting in and out of marinas, but never more so than in Cooktown.
As we hovered in the one known deep spot off the jetty a local boat came over and he confirmed we were in the deepest spot. I set the anchor and the waypoints of the chart plotter show the extremes of our swing both on incoming and outgoing tides. I still felt the trawler was too close and let out enough chain so we’d swing well away when the tide turned. I just didn’t trust his anchoring.
We breathed a lot easier when half an hour later the boat that had towed him into Cooktown initially was back on the job and towed him well away from us.
Cooktown is the last town until Thursday Island at the very top of Australia and at least 10 days away. It’s very much a frontier town with the usual mix of colourful characters, many of them working the prawn industry. When I was here 33 years ago the industry was bigger and vibrant. A typical crew was a skipper and deck hand, or two. A fair percentage of the deck hands were young women, as rough and tough as the guys. The skippers claimed they were better workers than the guys because they were out to prove they were as good. Maybe so, but I suspect their skills offered wider variety too.
Some skippers would bring in their catch, hand it in, refuel and take on food water etc and park the trawler, ready to go again. Then they’d head to the hotel, hand over the rest of the money and tell the hotelier to kick them out when the money was gone. They’d stumble back to their boat, head out trawling for a week or so and come back to do it all again.
We had planned to take on some fresh fruit and veg, but all we wanted to do was get out of there, particularly as we were in their miserable channel. I went ashore just on high tide in the early morning and got some boat bits. I asked who was responsible for the buoys and was told Queensland Marine Safety knows about it but they don’t have the budget to come this far north. It’s been like that since the last cyclone and people run aground there regularly.
It seems if you’re a government you can’t be guilty of hanging offences.
Until next time...