ABSCONDING

---

What’ll you do with a drunken sailor
What’ll you do with a drunken sailor
What’ll you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning.

Put him in the tender till he gets sober
Put him in the tender till he gets sober
Put him in the tender till he gets sober
early in the morning

Hi ho and up she rises, Hi ho and up she rises
Hi ho and up she rises early in the morning...........

So, Luigi and Ash where about to fly back darn souf - luigi to go home and aisling to find a job and relocate to Oz for a few months (just for a bit of craic) …why not?! I on the other hand had just done the whole east coast at breakneck speed and my flight wasn’t for another 3 weeks. Tried to change the dates but instead of the usual 20 squid admin fee, this was going to cost me upwards of 300 pound…So Oz it was to drink more goone and find more roo’s to hastle…until…I caught eye of an advert on a board in a hostel.

Crew Wanted on yacht, Sailing up the coast to Cooktown, No experience needed, Just pay for food and Fuel, Contact Simon…

This sounds promising, so I jumped at the offer and phoned up this Simon dude straight away.

“Yo Simon, aye…saw your add for the boat…you still got space have ye?”

“Hi there, sorry could you repeat all that you mad irish ejit…I can’t understand a word you’re saying”

“sorry man (in a S-L-O-W-E-D down accent)…I’m enquiring about the boat can I jump on board?”

“Well, I was looking for females really”

“Well I’m a great wingman, and I’m irish…so we should be guaranteed!”

HAPPY DAYS, got myself a bed on a boat for three weeks…what’s in store nobody knows…Does it involve goone…certainly! Then lets go disco!

So met Simon early one morning and we went to get oil and stuff from the car market way outside of Cairns…Nice way to get to know him and have a chat…mainly for him to work out whether or not I was a psycopath - because we were after all spending 3 weeks on a boat together and things can get quite intimate!

So…After a night in the irish pub, getting to know Simon’s travel companion - Lex, a 52 year old legend of legends…and him picking up an English couple, Jen and Sean, to go on his boat…We had our squad set and were ready to set sail early doors the next morning…destination unknown! Well, unknown to me…but it was really out to a reef about 20 miles from cairns. At a speed of 4.5 - 5 knots it would take us 5 hours. Such is the life on a boat, absconding on the absconder, ‘No Worries - Too Easy’. We didn’t do much sailing (with wind) on the first day…The front mast was up and we were using diesel power, so I got a bit of a feel for the tiller (a long stick that steers the boat, none of this fancy steering wheel caper). Arriving at the Michaelmas Cay around 3 o’clock, whilst all the 1-day charter boats where preparing to leave, we had the island and waters to ourselves…flippers on and goggles with a wee bit of spit in the lenses…in I jumped - head first…and saw a shark! !SHIT!

But, no fear…it swam away…And was only a reef shark anyway…so harmless really! But ‘ dum-dum dum-dum ‘ goes the beat of your heart as it skips for about 10 seconds! So there was me, with Sean in the water just snorkeling around for a good hour or 2 in the middle of the ocean beside a small Cay, basically a bit of sandy land that rises above the waters edge but is too small to call an island…so it’s a Cay - well that’s what I think anyway.. It was also a bird sanctuary - I’ll go on about them in a minute! And no-one else around apart from our 2 boats. This truly was paradise!

• Although I’ve mentioned paradise a fair bit over the blogs of the previous months, I hope you understand what I’m getting at. Although there should only be one labeled ‘paradise’, I keep finding more…but that’s probably part and parcel of getting out of the rain and moving to the shore every 5 minutes. Also, it’s a lot better than portrush lets just say and the Portstewart strand could maybe beat it on a good day (although doubtful) and Newcastle is in a completely lower league altogether. Well Newcastle is just a wet turd in comparison!*

So yeah, Let me try to explain this scene to you…(and make you all jealous)…
2 boats in basically the middle of the ocean, just barely able to see the coastline of Oz, a small ‘cay’ to the side of us with about 2000 squaking birds (that never shut up, even at 4 in the morning), and every where you look you see different shades of blue and green shadows in the water. Now, everyone knows those postcards you get from the great barrier reef taken from a plane or helicopter or something, or the pictures on the front of brochures in tourist offices. There are loads of shadowy areas spanning over a huge distance, with little sandy beaches and sun shining in the distance - basically paradise. And then you look closer at the picture and you can see a wee pin prick of a boat hovering over the top of one. But there aint nothing else for miles…like…zero, nothing, zilch…just that boat…yeah?!?!? Well…I’m in that boat!
You Jealous…? I would be! Ha ha ha ha

Anywho….stayed anchored here for a good 3 nights or so…As the charter boats came in (who were paying roughly 75 quid for a 3 hour visit to the reef may I add) at 11 / 12 every morning, we’d already had our 2 hour warm up snorkel and were laid spread out on the beach gathering rays. Watching the bikinis bounce off the boat and picking targets for who was going to be victim to me sea-wavering irish charm this day. Then from nowhere came purple bikini girl…brunette…drop dead gorgeous…down dropped my jaw. “You gotta make a move on that Mark, she’s stunning” said Lex. Who was I to argue, had to show me skills. So off I ramble down the beach and pretend I’m passing by as I offer to take photo’s of her and her mates…But no, not her mates…her sisters and over in the red corner was mother and father looking on attentively at this playboy guy cracking onto their daughter. Ahh well, just a slight hiccup - carry on!...Within seconds I had arms round her posing for cute photo’s, I was jumping up n down in the air, cartwheels into the sea. Awesome craic. Then she invited me snorkeling. Not going to say no - am I?

So off we swam into the depths with her advanced underwater camera (seeing she does photography at home)...and there was me, the ´spotter´ and kinda like reef guide, as I´d already spent about 2 days hanging around the reef and blagged I was some sort of expert rhyming off silly names for multi-coloured fish and how I knew the best spots...aye, dead on mark! So, a good few hours pass and I even got extra bonus points from lex (the guru) because I got her to swim out to the yacht with me (mother and father now out with binoculars in the red corner puffing with steam) ...wee bit of a fish feeding frenzy, and a chase of a stingray...until she told me it probably wasn´t a good idea because she didn´t want to die...! good point...I´ll return you back to your family before your dad chases me down the beach with a stick. But not before you make sure to get my name, memorise it and add me on facebook 2 days later..bearing in mind there are about 6 pages of Mark Byrne from Ireland...! good girl...Beth is her name, she´s from toronto. And I´m definitely planning a trip there in the near future...

So from Michaelmas Cay and in a direction kinda back on ourselves to Cairns, but Lex wanted to chill at ' double island ' for a couple of nights to try and get some fishing in. And so it passed, 2 nights / 3 days reading a book (yep the whole book) and drinking a small volume of wine. We did nothing, there was nothing to do...boredom had kinda surpassed by this stage, I was warned there would be quiet times on the boat and you just have to get used to them...there´s nothing else out there...no walls like in your room, but the walls are just endless vastness of water...and even that can get boring at times...he he he - but only a wee bit! So quiet time for the first time in a good few months was getting used to me, well I was getting used to it - and I liked it!

From Double Island, we popped up to Port Douglas (for the second visit)...Our main aim here was to pick up girls and whisk them onto our boat for 2 weeks for fun in the sun (or at least that´s how we put it!)...Simon and I ended up making the posters by the first day, well overdue laundry in to get washed, posters posted...and then hang around the bar waiting for laundry to finish. Hours later we were still at the pub, and one of our posters was on the community board beside us, so we got chatting to loads of different backpackers who were interested. Worked out well, but we did sit there for a good 8 hours...And the results. 1 English girl from posh end fancy hunting area of England somewhere, and a whacky Ozzie dude from Freemantle (Western Austrailia) called Stu, well Kangaroo Stew...he´d just spent 7 months travelling around oz in his jeep and a caravan...This guy was loose but soooo sound and cool. And honestly, it was over the next 2 weeks that I´d finally met (or had the chance to get to know) the true Ozzie personality, the one that people tell you about and you go out expecting, that Billy Connelly raved about years ago during his ozzie tour... but I´d only seen this attitude in Peter (Aislings mate). Bear in mind that we were living on a boat, but here sat 3 (Simon, Lex and Stu) of the most relaxed, carefree, generous, interesting guys I have ever met. We had no T.V., we had no radio, we just had each other to entertain ourselves for 2 weeks. And we just kinda ended up together through fate. An I wouldn't change a minute of it...

Over the next week and a half we visited another reef for 2 nights then made our way up the 'Daintree River' - "Crocodile Country"...This was cool...saw a good few crocs in the wild which has an eerier kinda stench to it, but to be fair as soon as they hear the noises from the boats they all retreat into the water and you just see them slide off... So you get the torch our at night and follow the red eyes floating up and down along the river bed - also really eery and scary. (I'm a little girl - I've come to live with this now!!) The coolest thing we did do was take the tenders up into a mangrove stream, like something out of crocodile dundee, with bushes coming out of the water and bouncing of trees off the bottom of the boat... and the water cloaked with a thin limy green oily layer. All of us were bracing ourselves for the instant those big gaping jaws would come piercing out of the water and through our skin...but they didn't - DAMN!...And out we motored as quickly as we'd motored in. You don't get that on a charter trip!!!
And after the volley ball over a roadsign for 2 hours, or the chasing down Simon's kicks on a cultivated farm field, or just lazily watching as the river ferry loaded, floated, unloaded...loaded, floated, unloaded....time was a running out and I had to be back in Cairns. For this flight, time had caught up. I'd just spent the same amount of time on the boat as I had with Luigi and Ash...but it felt like a week! What an experience...definitely getting me a skipper hat and a yacht if I ever go through depression! It was an awesome time that I couldn´t ever have planned or paid for. Good memories..Good memories...

Sooo....the 'Down Under' experience finished....definitely not for good, just a small dent taken out of it - plenty of time to make up...! So then Jumbo Jet Plane Jimbo Bob...where we off to Asia...sweeet...let's do this...

---

Photos

Crazy big fish
he was getting fed on by loads of wee small fish, like a car wash...he wasn bothered at all about me circling him - so coool!

Batfish
duh duh duh duh duh d d d...batfishhhh batfishhhh batfishhhhh

Lex and Jenn
On a sandbank, bearing in mind there could be crocodiles about

untitled13
Told you she was lovely

untitled
hooking up some bait!

untitled1
woop woop