Arriving to the town of Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula around 2pm on the 26th, the crew were keen to get their wobbly sea legs ashore and become grounded again for a short while. Silver Fern well and truly smoked us in the night by putting their spinnaker up, gaining an impressive 2 hour lead to the anchorage(not that it’s a race…).

On arrival we quickly pumped up our giant tender once again and I received no complaints this time probably due to fear of their taxi driver(me) dropping them off with border force again.

Karen had some inside knowledge as she used to work in Nhulunbuy and the Gove Yacht Club was her local haunt. We had a drink at the yacht club with our fellow Silver Fern crew and a much needed shower at the campground next door.

Having never been to the Northern Territories or much of Australia in general, the red dirt roads and layered rocky coastline was what I’d always envisioned a lot of Australia to be. Aside from watching episodes of Bondi Rescue of course.

Dave had kindly booked a couple of minibuses into town for us to go for a fancy meal and a boogie at the local Music Festival. As we drove into town I spotted a burn off in the bush for the first time. The Aboriginals do what’s called a Mosaic Burn: burning off smaller areas with ‘cool burns’ when the grassy undergrowth is still green, to avoid uncontrolled ‘hot burns’ later in the year.

Returning to the anchorage, everyone was in high spirits after a lovely meal and what I think was a mixture of dancing and people trying to not sway around after being at sea for 3 days. Earlier I’d been relieved to tie our dinghy to the floating jetty when we’d arrived. Hearing warnings of crocodile sightings in the area I had not been so keen to drag our tender up onto the beach for a few hours.

Had I checked what the tide was doing when we’d tied off to the floating jetty? No of course not! It was a floating jetty…….emphasis on FLOATING which I thought would always be the case. As we arrived back in the dark we were confronted with the sight of our tender well and truly beached on the sand due to the outgoing tide. After much discussion of the easiest way to enter the croc infested waters the crew got stuck in and dragged the dinghy straight into the water while someone with a torch looked for any beady red croc eyes looking back at us. As there were plenty of people to help with the lift I heeded the words of my 4 year old nephew to ‘stay away from those salty croccys Aunty Jess!’ and stood far back to keep watch for any unusual movement. Much to the delight of my Aussie crew I was well and truly freaked out at this point but happy to say that we all made it safely back to the boat with all our limbs still attached.

Tune in tomorrow for more intrepid journeys from Salt Lines!

Jess :)