Torres Strait by trimaran

Adventure Sailing

A new adventure by James Francis and friends with a home-built plywood tri; one to read but not imitate?

IT had been two years since I'd been on my "annual three-week adventure" (see Australian Sailing May 2007) and I was starting to crave one pretty badly. Unfortunately, my established adventure partner Lachie Paramor had to ‘work', in the form of cruising around the Pacific islands on the Oyster 68 he skippers. So it was looking like I'd have to wait another year, until one lunchtime when I randomly decided to send a Facebook message to my friend from 18ft skiffs, Darren McKavanagh, giving him the option of three adventures:

1) Try to figure out how to sail across Australia;

2) Buy a Caper Cat and cruise between Brisbane and the Whitsundays; or,

3) Make a plywood trimaran and sail across Torres Strait.

The reply came straight back saying "Option 3". The ‘yes' was a given.

So we came up with a plan to build a ‘stitch and glue' trimaran in Darren's kitchen factory in Brookvale, get his Toyota Hiace van trucked up to Cairns, fly up to meet it a few weeks later, drive to Cape York, sail across the Torres Strait, give the boat to some kids and fly back to the van.

Darren then cleverly suggested that we make the trimaran small enough to fit inside his van, to reduce the trucking costs. So I designed (if drawing a box can be called that) a 12ft tri that could be pulled apart.

Eighteen hours' worth of weeknights and $500 in building materials later, we had our beautiful vessel which we called Armadilla. The name referred to a taste sensation that Darren had invented on a yacht delivery earlier in the year, by combining Danish almond biscuits with vanilla Coke.

The boat featured a rig from an equally race-worthy sailing dinghy found at the Kincumber tip, a steering oar instead of a rudder to save building time, a pink Cherub symmetrical spinnaker, four-by-two treated pine crossbeams, and plywood box sections that the four-by-twos sleeved into. These box sections were attached to the boat with uni-directional carbon fibre, purely for the purpose of having something high-tech on the boat.

Heading for the Tip

Just before we finished building the boat, a friend of Darren's called Jonathan said he would drive the van to Cairns for us. He is an author of children's fiction and this would allow him to get information for a book he was writing. He would then continue on with us and wait at Cape York when we finally set off.

While this saved us the expense of putting the van on a truck, it also meant we could put the boat on the roof racks, so we now had a painfully small boat for absolutely no reason. Oh well.

So Jonathan spent a couple of weeks driving up to Cairns, and on a Sunday in July the three of us met and set off in the mighty Toyota Hiace. At this point I should mention that everyone we asked about driving to ‘the Tip' of Cape York said, "You need a 4WD". This put a big question mark over the trip, given that we only had the two-wheel drive Hiace.

However, a couple of days before Jon left, Darren sent me a message he had copy-pasted from someone's blog that said: "It is possible to drive a 2WD up in the dry season". It wasn't much and I had no idea where it came from, but it was the glimmer of hope we needed!

Our first stop was Crazy Clarke's, where we stocked up on some high quality camping equipment. We were looking at saucepans for $20 and I made the drastic call, "That's a bit expensive - we'll get a cheaper one along the way." Little did we know that every ‘town' north of Cairns is pretty much just a roadhouse that charges three dollars a litre for fuel.

So we headed north with no saucepan, and spent three days covering the approximately 900kms to the tip of Australia. We took the ‘development' road, stopping for the night at the caravan parks at Laura and Bramwell Junction.

Overall we'd have to conclude that you don't need a 4WD but we'd highly recommend it. The road has corrugations from the rain that just never end! There's about six corrugations per metre, making about 600 back jolts per kilometre and 5,400,000 for the whole drive. I'm thinking about starting a chiropractic business up there.

Back pain and boredom

After the first hour of driving on the track we realised that the middle seat in the front of the van was not going to work from a back pain perspective, so from then on we had one person lying on a mattress in the back. On the second day after we'd been driving at 15km per hour for the whole morning, I went and sat on the roof for a bit of variety. Then Darren came up as well.

Twenty minutes later we figured out that if you left the car in second gear it cruised along at the perfect speed on its own, so with a Mr Bean-style steering system in place utilising a rope and the side handles inside the van, the three of us could sit on the boat like we were on a horse with one person steering with the ‘reins'.

The other highlights of the drive were seeing a croc in the Jardine River, finding a saucepan for $8 at Coen, and watching Darren aquaplane the van across a creek that we though might end our journey.

Ignoring the sceptics

On the third night we arrived at Seisia caravan park, where we would start our sailing trip. This is possibly the most beautiful caravan park in Australian, but it certainly had some sceptical residents! In fairness this was pretty understandable. Apart from the fact that everyone thought the carbon fibre holding Armadilla's crossbeams on was gaffer tape, and the fact that every mother in the caravan park was trying to help me after I stacked it down the staircase from the shower block, I realised I'd left the Torres Strait chart in the overhead locker of the plane to Cairns!

We found out that yes, you can buy charts locally - on Thursday Island. The trouble was Thursday Island was still 20 miles away, but fortunately the fish and chip shop had a chart on the wall, so after borrowing a ruler we were able to determine our course for the following day.

So on the fourth morning we launched Armadilla for the first time and waved goodbye to Jonathan and the sceptics as we headed toward Thursday Island with the pink Cherub kite wrapped around the forestay.

The trip took five and a-half hours, our top speed was 7.9kts, but at times the tide really held us up. One massive ‘should have' we discovered during the day was that we should have bought the 7ft ($65) oars for steering instead of the 5ft oars ($55) that we chose. But at least we saved $10!

Darren agreed with me when I admitted the ‘steering oar' wasn't my best idea ever, but after thinking about it more he remarked: "It looks so cool, but...".

Anyway, we landed and set up camp beside a slipway right in front of the town. We had dinner that night at Roosters pizza place, and managed to sneak in to use a shower that we found in the toilets of the restaurant.

Pessimistic prediction

The next morning Stan from Aero Tropics rode his bike past and told us we had a ten per cent chance of making it across the Torres Strait and if we did make it, savages from Papua New Guinea would eat us. Other than that we just spent the day gathering info for the remainder of the trip across.

Despite his pessimism, Stan arranged for one of his friends to give us a tour of the island, which was very cool. Customs also came to visit us, which made us nervous, but the officer said, "Go for it! We're only an hour away if you run into problems..."

We also met a young couple called Ben and Michelle, who said they had ended up at Thursday Island after paddling there from Townsville! They gave us advice, and confidence.

The following day (day six), Ben and Michelle helped us carry the boat into the water and we set off at 8am for Moa, which was about 30 miles away. Unfortunately three miles into the trip our GPS became waterlogged. So we made a detour into Wednesday Island and Darren dried it with the stove, which brought it back to life.

We set off again and after spending an hour making zero progress into the tide, bailing continuously and having the GPS become waterlogged again, we headed back to our old campsite on Thursday Island, where Michelle lent us their GPS.

Straight-lining it

On day seven we made our second attempt to reach Moa. We sailed straight past Wednesday Island and made the decision to straight-line it across instead of around a reef to Moa. Unfortunately the reef was a little more exposed than we thought, and we had to turn around and land at Hammond Island for a few hours until the tide turned. We had to take a gamble and head back out before high tide to avoid working against it (it flows at 7kts in places!).

We found a track through the reefs in half-metre water, which saved us a lot of time but at 4pm we were still only half way to Moa so we pulled in to a deserted island called Hawkesbury Island which was only slightly off track. The eastern side was rugged and rocky, but we found paradise on the north side, with a sandy beach and palm trees everywhere. If I wasn't absolutely s&*#ting myself about crocodiles it would have been quite an enjoyable night!

To Moa and Mabuiag

The following morning we had a very good run to Moa, which was 15 miles away. At 9:30am we landed at Kubin, one of the two towns on the island. The general store wasn't open and there was no pay phone, which we needed since we'd had no phone reception and no-one south of Moa actually knew we were alive! But a young guy and girl drove down to the wharf and kindly gave us soft drink and fruit.

We then set off, using our trusty 2hp Honda to motor against the tide up the channel between Badu and Moa, and then made the eight mile dash across to Mabuiag. It was quite embarrassing to turn up just before sundown without having told them we were coming (we'd intended to call from the pay phone on Moa), but the small community of 200 people welcomed us extremely well. The island's Councillor Keith (pretty much the king) said, "when you reach our shores, you are part of our community". I reckon that the Torres Strait must have the highest percentage of "nice people" in the world. We camped next to the community centre and were allowed to use all the facilities.

We took a rest day on the island the next day. We did a few jobs on the boat, bought some fuel, visited the island's pet crocodile Dami Dami, and a local kid called Simi gave us a bit of a tour of the island. Despite the fact it had taken us three days to sail to Mubuiag, distance-wise it was only halfway across the Strait and there was nothing between it and the other side, so we made sure everything was sorted that afternoon for a big day to come.

Out of sight of land

We intended to wake up at 4:30am, but my phone ran out of battery during the night so my alarm never went off. But we managed to get out of there by 6:00am for the 50 mile crossing.

We landed on the PNG side of Boigu Island at 7:30pm. Boigu is about three miles off the PNG coast, so naturally we considered dashing across so that we could ‘properly' cross the Torres Strait, but we didn't want to fulfill Stan's prophesy and get eaten by savages so we decided not to!

The final stint between the two islands had gone smoothly, but it is quite unnerving to be out of sight of land for nine hours in a boat constructed in 18 hours with $500 of materials. It was one of those occasions where we thought, "We got away with it this time...but let's not do it again!".

Naturally the Boigu residents were very sceptical about us, given that most of their unannounced-visitors are of the illegal variety from PNG. But after we overcame that barrier they were very welcoming. We stayed in the guesthouse that night, and in the morning gave the Armadilla to the local primary school along with a quick sailing lesson. We didn't think anything of it because the boat was no use to us any more, but the kids and teachers were absolutely stoked since none of them had ever seen a sailing boat before. That was probably the most memorable part of the trip.

Later in the day we chartered a single engine plane to take all our gear and us back to Thursday Island (the airport is actually on Horn island, and then a short ferry trip across). By a freaky coincidence I knew the charter plane pilot, Will Tomasetti who I used to work with at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia!

Back on Thursday Island

When we arrived back to Thursday Island, the first thing we did was tell Stan from Aero Tropics that we'd made it and his ten per cent chance wasn't very accurate!

I set up my tent in the same spot as before which felt weird since we still had all our gear but didn't have the boat. We then had an awesome dinner at Ben and Michelle's house and listened to reggae as it rained heavily for the first time in weeks, which I thought was very enjoyable since I had a dry tent to go back to. Unfortunately Darren hadn't put his up, and when I woke up in the morning I had to look for him sheltering in a nearby construction site.

Anyway, we caught a ferry back to the mainland at 6:00am, re-united with Jon and congratulated him on the baby he'd just found out (via email, due to lack of reception) he'd be having! We started the drive back and got into Cairns and on a flight back to Sydney on the following night (day 12 of the trip).

Overall, it was an awesome two-week holiday and I couldn't recommend visiting the Torres Strait more highly.