The real Moreton Bay
behind Flinders

When Jayne and I started writing about a guinea pig who lives aboard a yacht sailing the world, deciding where to set his first adventure was probably the easiest part. We’d spent years exploring Moreton Bay by then, and could picture the islands, beaches and anchorages without having to make them up …which left us free to concentrate on the slightly less plausible business of teaching a guinea pig to read.

Our return to boat ownership began in October 2011, when we sat down to organise a Christmas holiday. We’d looked at the usual getaways, considered a houseboat on the Tweed and worked our way up to chartering a yacht in the Whitsundays, before Jayne found a boat on eBay for roughly the same money as a week’s charter. It was sitting in a backyard in Logan, had no trailer and weighed about two tonnes, but these were details we could worry about after bidding. Apparently.

We weren’t entirely new to this. Before Norse II, we’d lived aboard Laafin and had been saying for years that we would get another boat. This one was an Aquarius 23, which meant we were going to fit our family of four into considerably less space than we’d once occupied as a couple, but it had five berths according to the description. Having inspected the fifth, I suspect whoever counted them was considerably more flexible than me.

By the time we won the auction, we’d convinced ourselves that we could sail her for a while, get our money’s worth and then sell her again. The boat cost $4,000, with another $1,500 going towards getting her into the water and sorting out the things we needed, including a tender to reach the mooring we’d found at Point Halloran, near Coochiemudlo Island. Norse II travelled from Logan by crane and truck to a Manly marina, where I antifouled her bottom before taking her out for our first sail together.

That trip involved a 15–20 knot breeze on the nose, an outboard coming off its mount and a hurried effort to catch it before it disappeared, followed by the challenge of sailing onto a busy mooring without power in a boat I didn’t yet know. She sailed beautifully, which was fortunate given the circumstances, and we soon moved on to the more enjoyable business of finding out what lay beyond the mooring.

Over the following years, aboard Norse II and other boats, we became besotted with the islands, bays and wildlife of Moreton Bay. We anchored, explored and swam in the places that would eventually find their way into Flinders’ story, so when Sandy adopts him and takes him aboard her family’s yacht, we knew exactly what he was looking at as he tried to make sense of his new life.

There are family memories woven through the adventure as well. One Christmas holiday, I sailed my daughter and her friend to Peel Island to camp for the week between Christmas and New Year, making much the same trip that Sandy, Spud and Flinders take when the children go looking for the turtle thieves’ boat. We called that boat Norse, borrowing the name from our own rather than implying anything about the previous owner’s interest in turtles.

Flinders’ particular contribution is his ability to read, developed with a little help from Sandy’s home-schooling and the newspaper lining his cage. We wanted reading to be a gateway to adventure, and Moreton Bay gave us a world for him to explore that was already full of possibilities, without needing to give him a boat of his own or send him somewhere imaginary.

We hope some readers recognise the places as they follow him around the bay, and that those who haven’t been here get a sense of why we kept going back. Buying Norse II turned out to be rather more than a solution to that year’s Christmas holiday …although it did sort that out too.

Our original boat-buying story