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.

We love Moreton Bay. Even now, boatless, our idea of a good time to show interstate guests is to catch the 50-cent ferry to Macleay Island, have a drink at the pub up the hill whilst waiting for the free shuttle to the bowls club. It’s a tight call whether the panoramic view of the bay back towards the mainland or the seafood is the biggest wow factor. Together they are unbeatable.

We have love sailing since buying a sailboat instead of a house in our twenties, so when I discovered the sailing grounds in our backyard, the need for a boat became an itch.

Our return to boat ownership began in 2011, when we sat down to organise our Christmas holiday. Two teenage kids take a bit of entertaining, so we were trying to think outside the square. We’d considered a houseboat on the Tweed and even 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.

It was an Aquarius 23, a 7-metre trailer sailer designed for and built in Moreton Bay, with a swing keel for the shallows, and a high freeboard for the steep waves that occasionally get up in the wider parts of the bay. It was surprisingly spacious inside, well equipped, and indeed a bargain as no one wanted to spend the extra $1,500 we spent getting it back to the water, antifouled, and on a swing mooring at Point Halloran.

We figured that we would use it over Christmas and sell it in the new year, but we ended up keeping it for over seven years, when the kids had moved onto other things.

It wasn’t entirely without drama. Its maiden sail (solo) was relocating from Manly to Point Halloran, where just clear of the wall with a strong breeze on the nose, the outboard broke the flimsy timber board it was mounted on and went for a swim. It’s a good thing I believe in tying things on, but it still made for a hairy five minutes as I dragged it out of the water, lashed it to the pushpit and very quickly raised the headsail before I was back on the rocks. At least I had more time when I made it to Point Halloran, sailing onto the mooring through the shallows in a boat I wasn’t familiar with.

Jayne had mentioned that the outboard bracket needed fixing, and boy, did I hear a few “I told you so”s afterwards.

In a nod to this great little boat, we used its name, Norse, for the turtle thieves’ boat in our guinea pig early reader, Flinders the reluctant hero.

There are family memories woven through the adventure as well. On a later Christmas holiday, I sailed my daughter and her friend to Peel Island for them to camp for the week, making much the same trip that our explorers Sandy, Spud and Flinders take when they go looking for the turtle thieves’ boat (called the Norse).

We had the idea for a guinea pig who learns to read from the newspapers in his cage back when our kids were small enough to demand pets. In Flinders the reluctant hero, Sandy adopts Flinders and takes him aboard her family’s boat on Moreton Bay. As Sandy does her schoolwork, Flinders learns to read, opening up a whole new world to him. But when he discovers a group of turtle thieves, he faces another problem: how do you warn a human when you can’t speak their language?

We wanted reading to be a gateway to adventure, and Moreton Bay gave us a world for Flinders to explore that was already full of possibilities. His next adventure will take him to the Whitsundays, with the rest of the world to follow. We hope some readers recognise the places in this first book, and that those who haven’t been here get a sense of why we kept going back. Buying Norse turned out to be rather more than a solution to that year’s Christmas holiday … although it did sort that out too.

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