We sailed to the Great Barrier Reef on the Seahorse, a 50 foot wooden schooner, heavily built in the traditional style with teak decks and wooden masts. She was built in the Solomon Islands about 15 years ago, and later modified in Cairns with bulkheads and safety gear. The Seahorse carried a lot of rigging and a lot of sail: a mainsail, staysail, inner and outer jibs, and something or another at the stern. There is a Solomon Islands postage stamp commemorating her launch, showing the Seahorse sliding into the ocean on a beach surrounded by hanging palm trees. We sailed slowly out to sea as large noisy motor ships passed by. They puffed and pounded through the water, as we danced on the waves.
The master of the Seahorse was Captain Jon. Jon wore a disreputable knit rasta cap, teardrop sunglasses, and a graying beard, and had a soft voice and a gentle sense of humour Jon had a science degree of some sort -- biology, I think -- but in the 1960's had found himself working for the Australian Trade Commission in San Francisco. After his stint as a trade officer, he had drifted down the West Coast to Mexico, where he caught a yacht and sailed to the Carribean. Back in Australian, teaching in a high school, Jon became interested in traditional pearling boats. He travelled by Land Rover to the coast where pearling boats were built. Trading his Land Rover for a pearling boat, he sailed up the Australian coast to Cairns where, as he put it, he was shipwrecked and had never escaped. The clam farm on the reef was looking for a biologist, a boat, and a skipper, and Jon was all three, so he spent the next several years living and working on the reef. I had the feeling that if anyone had cared about the sex life of the giant clam, Jon would have been happy to expostulate on it for hours, but none of us gave him the chance. One day a cyclone blew away the clam farm, and Jon began skippering sailboats out of the Cairns harbor. The Seahorse was laying idle at dock then, a big heavy schooner-turned-houseboat, but she had a passenger-carrying license and Jon saw the possibility of taking people out to the reef the way he liked to go, so he took her on a five-year lease-purchase. There were four years still to go.
There was always great music on the Seahorse. The Doors, old Police, Mamas and Papas, blues, and a lot of Pink Floyd. Jon played most of Wish You Were Here during our sail, and we laid around discussing old Floyd albums like Atom Heart Mother and Meddle.
During our outward trip, Jon gave us a reef talk, with samples of coral and illustrated books as props. It seemed very interesting, but unfortunately Kathryn chose that moment to begin talking loudly and insistently. What little I heard through the din went something like this. There is a polyp. He looks sort of like the stinging sort of jellyfish, a little parachute drifting through the water. Perhaps he is a form of jellyfish, or perhaps he just looks like a jellyfish; those subtleties were lost on me. Eventually the polyp collects too much of something on the top of his parachute. What this stuff is, and where he gets it, is beyond me. When his balance is sufficiently upset, he turns over and plunges down into the sand. After the crash, he starts to build apartments. Some polyps build wide blocky apartments, some build tall skinny skyscrapers. Some build tall and hard, others soft and wavy. It is all a matter of taste and the rental market. Over time there are millions and millions of tiny apartments growing on the crash site. This is coral. Coral is at once animal, vegetable, and mineral. Jon explained how this could be so, but someone little was talking in my ear so I didn't hear it. The little apartments are delicate, and touching them can crush millions of tiny tenants, so don't touch the reef. I did hear that part.
The reef was quite healthy, according to Jon. Human use impacted only about four percent of the reef, since the other ninety-six percent lay inconveniently far from popular gateways like Cairns, Townsville, and Port Douglas. Even the most heavily used four percent was in pretty good condition, and we would be trying hard not to change that on our little daysail.
The all-purpose mate, dive instructor, waiter, and washing-up man on the Seahorse was Gerald, a young Englishman with spiky brown hair and a big smile. He had been a commercial diver in England, diving the English Channel and the River Thames, working in cold water and bulky drysuits. The warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef were far more hospitable diving grounds; we wore only swimsuits and our skin hardly felt any change from the ocean breeze to the 80 Farenheit water. Gerald and his girlfriend had come to Cairns to have their first baby. Romeo was just a month old, still in the sleeping stage, and Gerald was eagerly waiting for him to spend more time awake and playing. He enjoyed little Kathryn, and we spent much of the sail talking about teething remedies and nap schedules.
In his working career, Gerald had dived, dived, and dived some more. He was starting to think about doing something else, perhaps going back to school someday. Constant diving was hard on the body and the ears, and two or three dives a day, shepherding tourists down to the reef and back, seven days a week, was taking the fun out of diving. Someday he planned to stop diving completely for a few years, and then take it up again as strictly a hobby.
On the Seahorse Gerald worked hard. On the trip out, he hoisted the sails, adjusted the rigging, hauled out the heavy dive gear, and explained some basic scuba procedures. At the reef he fitted the passengers out with dive gear, adjusting vests and weight belts, and then served a nice buffet lunch, in between escorting groups of confused novice divers down to the reef. After the dives he washed and put away the dishes, and on the return trip he hauled the sails up the masts again, took them down as the wind grew, clambered over the heeling deck serving platters of wine, cheese and fruit, cleaned up the boat some more, and finally wrestled the sails into their heavy sailbags. When we left he would wash down the boat and go home to spend a few hours with his little son before turning in to rest for another early start for the next 13-hour day. Gerald and Jon had sailed the last 14 days straight, before bad weather forced a one-day break, and Gerald, especially, had needed the time off. Being a sailboat skipper and a dive instructor on a beautiful wooden boat in the Great Barrier Reef seemed like a romantic job, but I thought Jon and Gerald had to work hard to make it look so easy.
We moored off a tiny sand island in a shallow section of the reef. The water was clear, briliant turquoise blue under a warm sky and puffy white clouds. Our little island needed only a palm tree, a grass hut, and a castaway dressed in ragged clothes to fit right into a South Sea movie set. It was unlikely that a potted palm or a pre-fabricated hut would be placed there for the benefit of tourists, though, because this area had recently been designated a National Marine Park and mooring rights were restricted to the Seahorse and a few other boats. The Park was trying to encourage trips to the reef by small vessels like the Seahorse, and exclusive mooring rights were supposed to turn boat owners into guardians of the reef, watching out for its health and reporting abuses. Jon and Gerald guarded their bit of reef carefully, making sure that passengers' cigarette butts and chicken bones were returned to shore and that only a select few reef creatures were stroked by their divers. 
I counted only five or six wooden sailboats running dive trips to the reef. Most of the dive/sightseeing boats were large motor vessels packed with hundreds of tourists crammed into bars and lounge rooms, peering through safety glass windows or clinging to rails as their ship rammed through the waves. They moored at big artificial floating platforms complete with beach chairs and sunbathers and -- I imagined -- lots of cigarette butts. On the return trip television screens in each room played a video of the day's activities, with copies conveniently available for sale on the lower deck. We sailed to the reef with seven passengers, Jon, and Gerald, listening to Pink Floyd and watching the ocean turn clear and blue with our sails full overhead.
My first dive ever was from the Seahorse in about 6 meters (20 feet) of water. I consider myself a pretty rational person, so after we had jumped off the boat and were bobbing around like corks on the waves, with our dive vests blown up like ballons, I was surprised at how much my body fought my brain over inhaling whenever my eyes saw waves rising over my nose. My instincts said -- shouted, really -- that the next breath would bring suffocating seawater, not the dry tank air my poor deluded brain was expecting. I found that the best thing to do was get underwater as soon as possible, where my instincts gave up and simply let me swim happily along.
Diving the reef was wonderful and astonishing. There were so many colorful, swimming, and waving things down there that I was constantly turning to the right and left to photograph something new, and then catching up with the others. We saw anemones and clown fish, surrealistic trigger fish with their huge noses and little fins, clouds of tiny silver mini-fishes, and all sorts and hues of fat, skinny, tall, short, waving, and prickly things. I wished Kathryn had been quieter during Jon's lecture so I could know what I was seeing, but instead I simply took a lot of pictures. Many of them turned out to be off-kilter snatches of half a fish, someone's fin, and a cloud of bubbles, but here are a few that came out. If anyone knows what these things are, let me know!
As we sailed back to Cairns, the wind increased a little and Jon and Gerald raised more sail -- the mainsail, staysail, and a jib, if I have the names right. The wind increased a little more and the Seahorse rode heeled over hard on her side. We sat on the storage boxes and benches, clutching the nearest rail or stay, watching water splash over the starboard deck when the Seahorse hit a trough or was pushed over harder by a wind gust. Jon lounged in a low folding chair, steering with his feet and chatting with us, between glances at the bow. Gerald popped up with now and again, clambering around the slanting deck, pouring wine and handing around fruit platters. He looked worried. Our grapes jumped out of their plates and rolled across the deck.
As we had our "wine and cheese at forty-five degrees", as the Seahorse crew called it, Jon was telling stories about the different styles of being seasick. There was the technique of throwing up over the uphill, and therefore upwind, railing and thus receiving most of the recently disgorged back in airborne form. There was also the method of hanging too far over the downwind rail, and possibly being pitched overboard. There was a point to these stories, of course, and when one of the passengers, a young Italian man, eventually did resort to the rail he took the recommended middle course.
Eventually our mate prevailed on our captain to lower a sail, and we made the rest of the trip in a less exciting manner. When we said goodbye to Jon and Gerald, they were looking forward to a few more days off. A cyclone was moving into the Cairns area, and few boats would be sailing in the next day, or three. The fishes of the reef would get a vacation from the divers, Gerald would get some more time with little Romeo, and we would beat the rain and fly to sunny, dry Victoria for the last part of our Australian trip. Goodbye, Seahorse.
Traveling on a Budget: A sail to the Great Barrier Reef on the Seahorse cost $A50 (about $US37) and a 40-minute dive another $A45 (about $US30). This was one of the least expensive trips we saw advertised, and one of the few sailing trips offered to the reef.
Staying Connected: The Seahorse had a fair bit of electronics crammed in below-decks, but no obvious telephone jack, so I had to conclude the Internet does not yet extend to the typical sailing ship, two hours out to sea.
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