Coasts of Cape York (2 page)

In fact the only vessel visible was a small white yacht, which showed as a tiny speck heading south near the most northerly island in the group. Willy had an Air Chart with him and moved his finger to identify it. ‘Stanley Island,' he read. It looked barren and rugged.  Large coral reefs began to slide by below, very clear to see from above; dark blue water giving way to a fringe of brown which Willy knew as coral, with the inside area of the reef showing up as a pale blue, aquamarine and even a pale yellow shade.

Stick leaned over to try to get a better view of the chart and then nudged him and shouted, “What reef is that?”

“Corbett Reef,” Willy called back. He prided himself in being good at navigation and was sure he was right. From the altitude they were flying at the shape of the whole reef could be seen and it matched the shape on the chart.

His eyes moved back to watch the ailerons moving slightly and he wondered if the aircraft was on autopilot, or whether the pilot or co-pilot were actually flying it. ‘What a great plane!' he enthused, again sweeping his gaze over the starboard engine and the barely visible spinning disc of its propeller, then along the underside of the large high-set wing.

Then he looked down and resumed his daydreams. ‘No, we are flying north,' he told himself. ‘We couldn't be on our way back from the ‘Dutch East Indies.' It took him an effort to call Indonesia that but he knew from his reading of history that back then the Dutch had owned most of the islands to the north of Australia. ‘No,' he thought. ‘It is 1942 and we are on patrol out over the Coral Sea, searching for the Japanese invasion fleet.'

That wasn't hard to imagine as they actually were flying over the Coral Sea at that moment. ‘And plenty of coral too!' he thought, noting many more reefs, both under them and further off to the east. Here a long, broken line was showing up. It was, he knew, the ‘Outer' reef, the famous Great Barrier Reef which, as his Geography teacher Mr Conkey was always pointing out, was not a reef at all but actually thousands of reefs. Willy had seen parts of the Great Barrier Reef from the air near Cairns but this was even better.

To keep a check on where the plane was Willy twisted around and looked out to the port side past the other blister.  He actually wished he was in that one because from there he would have had a better view of the coastline and would have found it easier to identify the landmarks. As it was he could see a fair bit, the east coast of Cape York Peninsula being only about 25 kilometres away. The main capes and bays were quite easily identified but he was also keen to note the smaller reefs and islands. He was quite surprised at how many small islands and reefs there.

‘And a lot of isolated rocks,' he noted. ‘Bloody hell, look at that little one just poking out of the sea! What a nightmare for sailors in the old days!'

He then shifted his attention back to the sea below and to starboard. His mind shifted back to the WW2 daydream. He tried to imagine flying near a fleet of Japanese warships and he remembered reading an account of how ‘Catalinas' had made some famous sightings of enemy ships, sightings that had been crucial in winning Allied victories. ‘The German battleship
Bismarck,
she was found by a Cat. But that was the stormy North Atlantic, not this bright sunny day in the tropics.'

‘Was it a Cat that first sighted the Japanese aircraft carriers during the Battle of the Coral Sea?' he wondered. He dimly remembered reading about a ‘Catalina' that had discovered an enemy fleet and had then gone in to attack an aircraft carrier with bombs while radioing back, ‘Please inform Next-of-Kin.' ‘Was that at the Coral Sea? Or was it Midway?' he thought. It niggled him that he could not remember.

The idea of trying to attack fast moving and heavily armed warships in such a large and relatively slow aircraft made him shake his head. ‘They must have had guts!' he thought with admiration.

Once again he looked down, now pretending to search for enemy submarines rather than battleships. ‘The Cats did a lot of anti-sub work,' he told himself. And there was a sub! ‘No, it couldn't be,' he thought. But it was something large and dark just under the water. Willy leaned forward. Whatever it was, it was almost right under them and almost out of sight. Then he saw a larger than normal splash of white among the many tiny white wave tops. More dark shapes seemed to shimmer under the water and he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him.

‘No, I can see something,' he thought. Then it came to him and he gasped with pleasure before calling out, “Whales! Look, whales!”

Jabbing down with his finger he attracted the attention of the others. Marjorie took the opportunity to lean right on him, pressing herself on his shoulder as she looked. “Where? Oh yes! I see them!” she cried.

Willy attracted the attention of Flying Officer Turnbull, one of the officers on board, and he looked down and then spoke into his intercom. Willy felt the plane slow and then tilt. He saw the ailerons move and then the big rudder close behind him on his right. The ‘Catalina' went into a wide circle, slowly losing height. During the turn and descent Willy savoured the sensations of being pressed down against his seat by the centrifugal force and then of relative weightlessness as the nose was put down. ‘This is real flying,' he thought happily.

Other cadets crowded into the blisters and at the portholes as they all tried to see the whales. By the time they came around again they had lost a couple of thousand feet and the whales were clearly visible. To Willy it was a revelation.

‘I can even see their tails, their flukes,' he corrected.

They circled again, slowly so that all the passengers could see the whales clearly. Then the pilot straightened back on course and the nose tilted up slightly. ‘He's going to climb back to cruising altitude again,' Willy deduced, this being confirmed when the engine note took on a deeper roar as power was increased.

“Time to swap places,” Flying Officer Turnbull called pointing forward and indicating to them to move back into the cabin.  Willy did not want to go but knew it was only fair so he nodded and nudged Marjorie. She and Stick began moving forward. Willy got up from his uncomfortable crouching position and prepared to follow. As he did he cast a last glance astern at the whales.

To his surprise they were no longer visible, were in fact many miles astern. But his eye did pick up an odd shape in the waves below. ‘What is that?' he wondered. He squinted against the sun's glare and peered down.

Flying Officer Turnbull called again and so did his personal rival, Leading Cadet Patricia Finlay. “Come on Williams, you've had your go,” she shouted.

But Willy just shook his head and waved to wait. His eyes had suddenly made sense of the shape in a way that made his heart seem to stop. That tiny, ant-sized thing in the sea was a man! ‘A man,' he thought. ‘Or are my eyes playing tricks on me?'

“Come on Cadet Williams, move forward,” Flying Officer Turnbull ordered.

But now Willy did not want to lose sight of the almost microscopic shape. Was it a man, or just a trick of the light? Or maybe just blurred vision from staring out for so long? ‘No, they look like legs and that is an arm,' he decided. “Sir, come and look!” he called, gesturing urgently.

“What?” Flying Officer Turnbull called back irritably, but he moved to look. His gaze followed Willy's pointing finger.

By now Willy was getting anxious. The tiny shape was becoming very hard to see and he still wasn't sure it actually was man. “Sir, I can see a man swimming in the sea.”

“Swimming in the sea!” Flying Officer Turnbull cried, half incredulously.

“Yes sir. A man. Back there.” Willy pointed but now felt very anxious because he could no longer see the tiny shape. It was, he knew, slipping astern of them at a rate of about a mile and half a minute and was now at least three miles back and invisible to his eyes.

“Way out here? Are you sure?”

Willy was feeling torn and upset by this. The thought of a person being out there in the sea, that far from land, made him feel sick. ‘A person would only be there if something had gone wrong,' he thought. The coast was fifteen miles away and the nearest island at least five. “Yes sir. Oh please sir, tell the pilot. We must go back and look.”

Flying Officer Turnbull frowned and hesitated. Willy felt so anxious that he overcame his normal reticence in the presence of an officer. “Please sir! I did see something. If I am wrong then we will only waste some petrol, but if it is a person and we leave them to drown I will never sleep again.”

“Oh alright,” Flying Officer Turnbull replied reluctantly. He spoke into the intercom. The conversation seemed to take forever and all the time Willy kept staring back trying to fix the point in his mind in relation to some big coral reefs he could see off astern to starboard.  After looking doubtfully at Willy and nodding Flying Officer Turnbull turned to him and said, “The pilot said go to the cockpit.”

“Yes sir,” Willy replied, almost gasping his relief. That meant he had to take his eyes off the area of now distant ocean but he thought he could locate it again. As quickly as he could he scrambled past Finlay and the others who were waiting and made his way along the central aisle to the working part of the plane. The cadets and officers seated there all looked at him curiously, not knowing what was happening. Stick raised an eyebrow in query and Marjorie asked what was wrong but he just shook his head and went on.

‘No time for explanations,' Willy told himself. As he made his way forward Willy began to have severe doubts about whether he actually had seen a person. Memories of how hard it had been to identify the whales rose to make him uncertain. ‘They are huge,' he thought, ‘much larger than a human being.'

“But we must check,” he muttered.

He made his way along the narrow corridor past the crew's sleeping accommodation, galley and radio room and then up the short set of steps to the flight deck. As he reached a position just behind and between the two pilot's seats Willy paused. This was where he really wanted to be. His burning ambition was to be a pilot and for a few seconds his eyes ran over the controls and instruments, taking in the whole scene. Then his eyes met those of the pilot.

Mr Southall was in his sixties, short grey hair and a firm, tanned face with bright blue eyes. He lifted one earphone free of his right ear and leaned back. “Tell me what you saw,” he said.

Willy swallowed out of nervousness. “Sir, I thought I saw a man in the sea.”

“Are you sure?”

Willy wanted to say yes but shook his head. “No sir. It might not have been a man, but I thought I saw legs and arms.”

For a few seconds Mr Southall looked thoughtful. “OK, that's good enough for me. Take her back Frank.”

Frank, Mr Lacey, the co-pilot, Willy remembered: middle-aged and black hair, nodded and at once set the aircraft into a descending turn. As the plane came round Willy felt even more relieved. But he was still scared, afraid they might not find the person in all that sea, and also anxious it might all be a wild goose chase.

Mr Southall held up his chart. “Any idea where you saw him?”

Willy nodded and moved closer, holding up his own chart on which his left thumb was firmly gripping the place. The navigator leaned over his right shoulder to look. Willy put his finger on the chart. “Just west of this un-named reef between Hedge Reef and Lytton Reef,” he said.

Mr Southall nodded and met the navigator's eyes. “Give us a fix George, and the magnetic reciprocal bearing,” he said. Next he turned to the co-pilot and said, “Take her down to a thousand feet Frank.” He then began to push buttons on an instrument.

Willy thought this was a GPS but wasn't sure. The navigator did a quick calculation using a pencil on his chart and said, “Reciprocal is one five three degrees magnetic.”

“Roger, one five three degrees magnetic,” the co-pilot echoed.

As the pilot's hands moved the control column Willy watched. He knew which instrument was the compass and he could see the figures moving around as the plane turned. Having been an air cadet for over a year he could also identify some of the other gauges and instruments. As the plane settled on a reciprocal bearing he looked these over. Even with his limited experience he sensed that the instruments were a curious mix of old and new. It wasn't one of the new computerized ‘glass cockpits' but there were a few little gadgets with quartz crystal displays that looked very modern.

Then he moved his gaze upwards and looked out through the front windows. At first he was disoriented and had to make a conscious effort to find things that he could identify on the chart. A couple of small islands helped. ‘That must be Fife Island,' he decided. ‘And the one over to the south west of it is Hay Island.' That got him looking in the right direction and he quickly made out the large brownish shape of Noddy Reef and then the even bigger Magpie Reef.

Willy was appalled at how far they had traveled since he first thought he had seen the man. ‘More than thirty kilometers!' he calculated. Then he shook his head. ‘I am in an aircraft, and old American one at that. I should be calculating distance in Nautical Miles. Let's see, that would be about… Hmm….about fifteen nautical miles.'

From that he worked out they would be back in the area in about seven minutes. ‘Not long,' he thought, until he remembered how hard it was to swim for any length of time. ‘I hope he's got a lifejacket,' he thought, before adding, ‘if I really did see a man!'

Even as he worked all this out the ‘Catalina' covered the distance from Noddy Reef to Magpie Reef and Willy clearly identified Lytton Reef ahead. ‘Not far now,' he thought anxiously.

Mr Southall turned from scanning ahead with binoculars and said, “What's your name son?”

“Willy sir, Willy Williams, I mean Leading Cadet Williams.”