I have always liked ships. It started early with books like "The Coral Island" and later “The Cruel Sea” and with stories of pirates, and ports and breadfruit trees and it never really abated. After all, what could possibly be better than being away from everything to do with your normal life, and even with the land on which normal life is lived, for weeks, perhaps even months on end? As far as I was concerned back then, ships were fascinating, hypnotic.
Leaving West Australia, heading north
I grew up. Well, sort of. I realised that the only thing better than getting away from it all on a ship would be getting away from it all on a spaceship. After all, what could be better than being away from everything to do with your normal life, and even with the planet on which normal life is lived, for weeks, perhaps even months, or years, on end? I started reading science fiction. Authors, particularly Arthur C. Clarke made the point that ships were just like spaceships. In fact, the whole spaceship thing was a literary way of understanding the great age of steamships and the expansion of Western "civilisation."(1). I split my reading between science fiction, and books on ships and weird, poetic trips around Sydney Harbour on the Manly ferry in bad weather. I got to know other people with the same bug by sight. They were usually the ones outdoors in the thick of it. The ones who weren’t green.
Then, as you may have guessed, I left Melbourne on the “Spirit of Tasmania” and I was utterly and irrevocably hooked. I realised that the ocean was actually more like the real world than the real world was. I came back from Devonport on the “Spirit” as well. I came at night and it was rougher, and I enjoyed it so much that I went to bed at about three in the morning having stood at the gunwale with another mad ship freak ranting on about the swell, and the wind, and the way that the stars wheeled above us. The ship got into dock at six. I was a grey-faced zombie. There were two things I was utterly sure of. One, I needed a cup of coffee. Two, a ten hour voyage was not long enough.
A couple of months after I got back to Sydney I embarked on a forty day voyage to Europe on the “Contship Nobility” container vessel. It was, and will always be, one of the high points of my life.
The Contship Nobility south of India
Sadly, I flew back to Sydney months later, economy class. The trip took twenty hours. I remained hooked on ships. Hell, the “romance of flight” does not include economy class. That kind of flight just makes me suicidal. If I had been younger, I would have joined the merchant marine. Sydney was grey and crap, and addictive.
Finally, then on the 13th of November 2005 I left Sydney on the “Spirit of Tasmania III” headed south. It was another ambition fulfilled. I had always wanted to leave Sydney by sailing out from under the Harbour Bridge and away. Sure, it was only a twenty-hour trip but hell, an ambition is an ambition and beggars can’t be choosers. Nowadays, not many ships leave Sydney from under the Harbour Bridge, and back in 2005 it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Sydney-Devonport ferry service was on borrowed time. This time when I left Sydney I was prepared. I had a still camera, a video camera, and my trusty twelve-inch Apple Powerbook. I felt scared by how much tech I was lugging around.
Still, it made a glorious change from sitting around on the dock watching other people leave or arrive and taking pictures. This image is taken from the kitchen window of one of Sydney’s more wonderful houses in this case, a beautiful terrace in the Rocks as the Spirit comes in to dock at Darling Harbour.
Spirit III arriving back in Sydney 2004
Spirit III leaving Sydney on grey winter day. 2004
On the next page, a ten minute video of the voyage south, a few pictures and the full technical specifications of the "Spirit of Tasmania III"
Note (1) Well, I like Gandhi