# Sailing to Nowhere.



## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

At 0900 hours, on 8th October, 1986, we started the main engine of Début and got underway. Although I'd given our next destination as Fiji for our outward clearance, we had no intentions of going anywhere.
During my last conversation with Lloyd Phillips in Auckland, he'd confirmed that he still wanted to use my ship as the Rainbow Warrior in a feature film about her sinking in Auckland Harbour, but it would take several months to rewrite the script for the film to satisfy the financial backers. I'd arranged with him to anchor in International Waters inside The Great Barrier Reef, until he was ready for Début to return to Cairns to be refitted at the local shipyard.
The week before leaving Cairns , I'd been in contact by telephone with the Marine Surveyor's office in Canberra. After putting my case to him, the surveyor told me the places that I could legally anchor inside The Great Barrier Reef. 

We headed north to anchor in the best anchorage we could find, within the range of diesel fuel still remaining in our tanks. After taking Début through the channel markers, we headed north up the main shipping channel inside the reef. Scraping together every drop of fuel we could get out of the main fuel tanks, I reckoned we had enough to make eighty or ninety miles at six knots. The weather was sunny and the sea calm, with a brisk wind from the south-east.
Seven hours later, at four o'clock in the afternoon , I anchored Début off the north side of Low Islets . We were very tired from the all-night party we'd thrown for our friends, and wanted to catch up on our sleep before heading further up the coast .
I also wanted to examine close up our main anchor, after being anchored off False Cape for fifteen months without it being raised. As I was intending to anchor in deep water, I wanted to make sure of its condition. On diving down, the flukes were tangled with lengths of rope and other assorted junk, and the lead plug holding the pin in place had to be replaced with a bolt.
Début remained at anchor at Low Islets for five nights, until we were ready to leave. A police launch came out from Port Douglas, after the lighthouse keeper reported our strange ship , but they waved as they went past when realising who we were.

On Monday, 13th October, we got underway again at 1000 hours, feeling relaxed and well rested after our brief stop-over . The sun was shining, with a stiff south-easily wind, and we were both looking forward to the unknown adventure awaiting us.
The anchor had taken some time breaking out from the sandy bottom, despite it only being thirty feet deep and using just one shackle of chain . The gypsy was so worn, that I doubted it would ever be able to recover the anchor again when dropped in deep water. I would have to cut through the chain aft of the devil's claw, then lift it on the main salvage winch with a wire.
As we headed north, we passed the remarkable mountains and tropical rain forest of the Cape Tribulation National Park. It had been dark when we were on our way south to Cairns, over a year before, and now we could see its wonders for the first time. There was the conspicuous overhanging crag of Mount Peter Botte, rearing up into the air over a thousand metres, like the crooked finger of an irate schoolmaster beckoning for some malcontent to come to the front of the class.
When I sighted Pickersgill Reef dead ahead of the ship, I turned her to starboard on a north-easterly course to pass through the passage between the breakers and Evening Reef. Timing my distance-run to place me in the centre of the deep water between these reefs and the outer barrier reef, I anchored Début at 1600 hours in a hundred and forty feet of water, with six shackles of chain. I wondered if I'd ever see that anchor again.

Début now corkscrewed into the swell , more than five miles from the nearest drying reef, placing her outside Australian jurisdiction... in International Waters . She was twenty miles due east from the nearest land at Rattlesnake Point, and some forty miles south-east of Cooktown.
A strange, eerie silence descended over the ship, after I'd shut down all the machinery. There wasn't even the slosh of fuel in the tanks, as they were now completely dry. What little fuel remained was in the small header-tank that I'd rigged over the fuel filters on the main engine . This would be used to charge our batteries twice a week with a small diesel generator .
When I dived down the next day to check the anchor, I came against a thick layer of white, floating sediment at eighty feet down . It was as if there was a layer of full-cream milk at that depth, and there was still another sixty feet to go before the seabed.
A twelve foot long tiger shark swam over the surface of this creamy layer and showed some interest in me. As I was having trouble equalizing my sinuses, and my facemask was half-full of blood, I decided it was time for me to leave. I surfaced, puzzled at what I'd found. All the best, Cpt Dick Brooks.


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## Hugh Wilson (Aug 18, 2005)

And??


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## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

*For Hugh Wilson.*

Hi, Hugh, good to receive your reply. Over the next few weeks, I will write a series of short stories detailing how I was shipwrecked in the Coral Sea, and spent three years castaway on Emily Reef. These will be intermixed with short stories from when I was a police officer in Ipswich, England, back in the late 1960's, to give more variety to my readers.
If you would like to read the story in full detail, go to the Books Forum to access the Kindle code for my book, 'The Black Ship's Odyssey, Book Two'. There are three books under that heading, and Book Two starts in Page Pago, in American Samoa in 1981. It ends with me returning to Page Pago in 1990 to collect my young Samoan wife and our two young children, after I'd been castaway for three years, then taking them to England.
I have written and published eight books about my 26 years at sea as captain of my own ships, all over the world. They are all published by Amazon on their Kindle website, and are detailed in the Books Forum. I hope you enjoy the read, Cpt Dick Brooks.


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