Burn-out

Avast, lubbers! I'm back on dry land at Airlie Beach after my first week at sea. I certainly won't stick the full term with Barefoot Cruises, a quick decision made on the back of inside information that at least two of my six weeks were to be spent washing dishes on a motor boat. No issue with the hard work - lord alone knows I've scrubbed my fair share of toilets in the last seven days - but you buy the ticket, take the ride - and I agreed to the sailing. And what sailing we've done has been fantastic. The Coral Trekker is an old Norwegian fishing trawler that has been through a dozen incarnations on an eighty-year journey from the fjords to the reef. She is now kitted out for fourteen passengers and six-day trips around the Whitsundays, a cluster of seventy-four idyllic islands thick with coral sand and crystal seas. Sea eagles snatch at fish and our breakfast in Tongue Bay is interrupted by the gentle old turtles that come to have a look at the boat. Stingrays fizz in the shallows of blinding silica sand at Whitehaven Beach. At the Pinnacles there are white-tipped reef sharks and metre-wide giant clams. Sea worms, brainless transparent tubes punctuated with orange spheres... Groupers and wrasse the size of Graeme Marshall... the snorkelling is good, even without my glasses.

I sleep on the deck, trying to stare out the rabbit in the moon. The mindless satellites, the rock'n'roll shooting stars, Elliot Smith... crash and burn, you poor crazy bastard. My day starts at 6, or earlier if woken by Captain Bob, who dangles an oily rag in my face until I spit into consciousness. Bob is a Whitsunday legend with a thick grey beard down to his navel. He has sailed these islands for thirty years and skippered Coral Trekker for the last nine. He is surly, mean and balding under his sailors cap. He insists that I fold paper towels four times, and unfold each dirty face to gain a possible thirty-six uses from each towel. His wisdom is a fount - "Simon," he growls through his whiskers, "there ain't nothin' worse than a fuckin' jellyfish." Except, I presume, the other things which nothing is worse than, a list that swells every day and to date includes "...a fuckin' shark... a fuckin' saltie... an Irishman on the fuckin' ocean... a warm fuckin' tinny... a hose on the fuckin' pontoon... a fuckin' mouse in the fuckin' drain pipe...". And a 'mouse' is not what you're thinking. He refers to morning and afternoon tea as morning and afternoon "Smoke-o", which is actually totally irrelevant because he smokes foul roll-ups incessantly and reeks of tobacco. The smell is so strong that it has different characteristics be he sailing, sleeping, or indeed smoking. A blunt knife can be "ridden all the way to China" and a good meal would "wake a brown dog". I no longer make any attempt to decipher or even pretend to understand these cryptic asides which he refuses to repeat and on occasion denies ever having said at all. He knows an awful lot about the sea, takes good care of the toilet pumps and seems to find the passengers physically nauseating.

The other deck hand is Spencer, a genial Canadian planning quick escape to university while working under the subterfuge of staying with Barefoot for the next two years. He and I and the ship's cook Amy ready breakfast, heating huge kettles on the gas stove. After a couple of coffees, Spence and me weigh the anchor - all sixty metres of it - swab the deck, scrub the heads (toilets), polish the day's brass, vinegar the varnish and fill the fridges. All this is done around the day's activites, which depend totally on the weather. Snorkelling, or walks on Hook Island - some of the passengers might go scuba-diving. On the good days I get to clamber up in the rigging, unfurling the square sails. There are three yards across the mast - the tallest, the t'gallant, is about thirty-odd metres from the sea. Or rather more pertinently, from the deck: Spencer spent last summer crewing a tallship round the Pacific, and usually waits until we are hard at work in the rigging before telling me the horror story about the girl who slipped, fell, and broke 60% of the bones in her skeleton. I'm well over the fear now. The course and the topsail don't even feel that high anymore, and if we stop for a swim I jump in from the course yard. The square sails are quite pleasing. I like the immediacy of pulling a rope and having something happen at the other end. Coral Trekker is riddled with ropes - after six days I'm only just getting the hang of them all.


The Coral Trekker - we jump in from the first and second yards.


This is me hard at work on the t'gallant. Bob wouldn't let us take a radio up.

The passengers so far have been a mixed bag. We've had squabbling, whining English honeymooners, four German scuba divers who had accidentally booked the wrong boat and spoke no English and a Jehovah's Witness minister who did not laugh at all when he told me that before he was ordained he used to work in Futures and I said it sounded to me like he still did.

Deathly, endless silence...

..check out The Veils 'Advice for your mothers to be': "No man alive has earned the right to save me..."

I think another week here and I'll push on to Byron Bay.

The Greyhound from Noosa to Airlie Beach was pretty grim. The suspension was badly broken and I didn't sleep for more than two hours on the seventeen-hour overnight trip. To put that into perspective, if Ruaridh and I were driving for seventeen hours, we could drive from London to Inverness and back and halfway back again. Assuming, of course, that either of us had the money for petrol. Did you ever pay me back for that? I can't remember. Noosa itself was pretty much what I've come to expect from the Sunshine Coast - amazing beaches, beautiful forest, koalas getting high on the gum leaves, girls sunbathing, mango smoothies, and this same inescapable feeling that I'm on a conveyor belt.

The hostel at Noosa was nothing short of astonishing. There was a guy in my dorm, camper than a row of tents... he insisted on showing everyone in the room individually just how badly he'd burned his arse at the nudist beach. The South Korean couple were horrified and left immediately in shocked silence. The evening entertainment for the two nights I was there was almost beyond belief. For reasons that remain unclear, the bar is a haven for the local hip-hop burnouts who were, at their nadir, breakdancing without irony to 'Eye Of The Tiger'. I couldn't believe my eyes. 'Eight Mile' in the 80s, and the other backpackers stood in a baying circle, cheering for the blood. I felt like I was in 'The Office: Down Under'. The locals were wearing bandanas. They took pity on me and tried to drag me over to their table, but no fear, my friends! I fought them off! I made hissing noises and grabbed at their ankles. They soon let me be with my book and my beer, and glared at me with wounded distrust from across the dancefloor. I left the next morning, and I won't go back.

I read pretty much everywhere - at the bar, on the beach, on the bus... what goes around comes around: in the great karma of the backpacker book exchange, I swapped 'Grapes Of Wrath' (in which I found uncanny parallels between picking fruit in California and working as a camera assistant in London) for 'Ghostwritten' by David Mitchell. The woman in the shop was dismissive. The fool read the first half of 'Cloud Atlas' but gave up without finishing the best book of this century. I raced through 'Ghostwritten' which is superb and swapped it back for 'Bonfire Of The Vanities' which is OK - Wolfe is far better a journalist than a novelist - and swapped it for 'Lullaby' by Chuck Palahniuk which is so-far rather irritating. I think it'll take him a long, long time to write his way out of 'Fight Club'.

"No shirts, no shoes..."