Sailing the hard

way —in an open boat

When Mike and Mai Ley land and their friend Trevor set out to make the longest ever open boat journey in Australian waters, from Darwin to Sydney, they had just about no experience. When they arrived in Sydney Harbour some 174 days later they could well claim to be hardened seamen.

The story of how the trip was made (it was given less than a 50-50 chance of survival) makes very in teresting reading. Untamed Coast doesn’t attempt any literary gym nastics — the brothers are both photographers—but it makes gritty reading.

The brothers and their friend set sail in their 18 foot boat with every expectation of adventure on their 5,000 mile journey. And they got it.

A few days out their dinghy capsized, they filmed a turtle laying eggs, a man who made a living lasooing wild buffalo and an Aboriginal corroboree.

Besides the waves, the worst things they had to bear were the endless “mozzies”, the tide which went out from their moorings leaving them stranded in deep, slimy, mud, and the endless problem of staying dry in an open boat.

The trip began when the brothers were doing research into the naval pioneer Lt. Matthew Flinders.

Flinders was the first man to explore the full length of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Leylands decided to retrace his historic voyage of 1802, not in a 334-ton sloop but in an 18-foot aluminium boat.

The advantages of sailing around a coast instead of the open sea are numerous although it is not necessarily any safer. The northern parts of Australia are covered in thick mangroves and if the Leylands had been wrecked, they would have had a good chance of never being found.

But staying in constant touch with the mainland meant that they were able to meet stranger people than anywhere else in Australia, the real Aboriginals, and have some wild

adventures.-

Jse.

(UNTAMED COAST. Lansdowne Press. $5.50.)