Some place south of Cairns we took on board two reef pilots to guide us through the intricate lanes of the Great Barrier Reef. They were having lunch at the same time I was yesterday , and when one walked by, my lunch companion asked about the insignia on his shirt, which looked official, but not crisp, Dutch Holland America official.
For that matter, he himself didn't look very Holland America. He was kind of scruffy in a benign way, bearded, with the rolling gait of a sailor and a breezy confidence that recalled Paul Hogan ("Crocodile Dundee") or Steve Irwin, the late crocodile hunter.
"That's insignia's for reef pilots," he said with a warm smile, leaning just a tad too close to my friend, who blushed. "We're helping your captain get your ship through the reef." I don't think he actually said, "Darlin'", but it was clearly implied.
He and his partner -- we figured they needed two to cover 24 hours of continuous sailing through reefs that could tear the ship apart -- have just disembarked the ship, clambering out a doorway low on the side of the Amsterdam onto a little boat that would carry them to a big container ship outlined against the rain a couple miles south of us. They scrambled across the deck of the small boat, gave us a jaunty wave goodbye, and turned to their next assignment.
I have no idea where the little boat came from. It had been over an hour since we had seen land, and even then it was an island so small it seemed insufficient to support a palm tree, let alone a government agency.
Bereft of the guidance of the reef pilots, we sailed onward from the Coral Sea into the Arafura Sea, whose name was completely unknown to me before today, but whose complexities apparently are sufficiently under control with charts and electronic navigation equipment. If you want to see where we are, just look north of Australia. We're south and just west of Papua New Guinea, 10 degrees 43 minutes South and 139 degrees 17 minutes East.
Since it was surprisingly difficult to get Google Maps to show this location, I thought I'd share the URL for others who might want to see where exaclty Roberta is :-)
ReplyDeletehttp://maps.google.com/?q=loc:Arafura+Sea+(Arafura+Sea)&sll=-8.77629,136.209155
I wonder if the reef pilots were perhaps guiding the ship so the ship wouldn't get harmed, but also very interested in keeping anything from harming the Great Barrier Reef. As I understand, it's highly protected to try to keep it from contamination or disturbance.
ReplyDeleteI remember knowing some of the pilots who worked Puget Sound ship traffic, and I know one guy retired as a Columbia River pilot, bringing ships over the bar. Those guys are the elite among seamen, very highly paid, very esteemed even if looking somewhat ragged all the time.
Interestingly, my dad had a book at one time written in England in the 1600's, about maritime law. At that time, if a Thames River pilot allowed a ship to hit one of the bridges or barges or other watercraft, the pilot was to be hanged, then drawn & quartered, then the pieces of his body burned and scattered to the wind so no man would know where they were buried. Good Grief, who would have wanted to be a river pilot back then! True fact.