owlrigh

I had vowed to leave Mackay. As soon as my yacht was back in the water I was going to head out the rivermouth and straight on up the coast, not to be found anywhere in the area until after the northerlies arrived -- and perhaps not even then. I found myself having to wait out strong winds instead. Leaving the Pioneer River with strong winds is written and said everywhere to be only for the brave, and so I waited at anchor while my boat sailed between tide and wind, jerking at the rode.

Ben, my boyfriend, left for Brisbane, and the strong winds continued on -- desisting only a couple of days before his arrival. I decided to stay so we could sail up the coast together. He had moved on board, having sold his catamaran the month before.

Early that morning I was to be found ashore, singing as I waited for the familiar sign of my father's van to appear around the corner and for Ben to alight. We were to leave the next day, weather most favourable, and I was looking forward to sailing again, even if I hadn't two coins to rub together. I'd once again closed my bank account, having negative funds at time of closure due to bank fees.

"Your father just offered me work in the boatyard," said Ben after the greetings were over. "It's good pay ..."

Left unsaid was that he wouldn't find good pay anywhere else, and so an extended stay in Mackay seemed to be in order. I'd find work soon enough.

I'd spent a good two weeks in the river by that point, and had gotten used to where my boat was anchored. This was directly beside the only riverfront restaurant in Mackay, and patrons could look out over to us with laundry hanging from the rigging and our throwing toilet waste out of buckets overboard. At night their spotlights would throw us into relief, to the point an anchor light was almost redundant; late night revellers called out to the boat jauntily, the same sounds of drunken men everywhere.

To get ashore we would row the dinghy up alongside the restaurant onto a rock ledge which would, at spring low tides (very low), become a quickmud slide. Navigating the perils of either rocky outcrop or oyster-encrusted, muddy submerged rocks was everyday, commonplace, but as Ben hadn't been there all that time, he found it most unsatisfactory.

The night before Ben'd arrived back I'd been having dinner with a local yachtie, and he'd made it sound as if there was a shortage of workers in the area. I grew horribly sozzled that evening on wine and port, and late in the night I rowed home, needing to wake early, ears ringing with a drunken man's instructions on diesel engines and batteries.

This whole have-a-partner thing still strikes me as odd; upon finding out I'd had dinner with someone I'd met that afternoon Ben was put out.

"Well, of course he was going to offer to give you new batteries and do your engine over," said Ben, miffed. "Did he mention what sort of engine? I go away for a while and you start having cosy dinners with men."

He still refers to the guy off that fishing boat as "your other boyfriend".

There is a whole unwritten etiquette thing about male and female interactions I never was aware of before. I used to think women were being weird when they looked at other women suspiciously for having a drink with a man not their boyfriend, not their husband. Apparently I am the one who is a bit weird for thinking nothing of it.

The morning after Ben arrived back in Mackay we hoisted the anchor and sailed over to the Marina. No worries about mud or rocks or tides, and with hot showers at the end of every day, away from the general area of the "other boyfriend".

Ben would go to work every morning and I would sit with the classifieds, or in an employment agency, or walk into places and ask for a job.

Six weeks later, I was discussing the latest job effort with my father -- cook in a takeaway by the marina, and how I thought they were going to say I wasn't what they required. He, at the same time, mentioned how he wasn't finding time to do all the work he was getting.

"Hey, hire me! $15 an hour, and I'll do all your scuddy work, sanding, all that stuff."

He didn't think about it too long; I could have brought this up eight weeks ago and have gotten pay all this time. That was the easiest job I've gotten in my whole life. Hitting one's dad up for a job, however, probably doesn't count.

I'd been working in the boatyard for a few weeks already; the guy who'd hired Ben was also hiring me (for less than what I hit my dad up for) and I'd been painting, sanding, bogging, fairing, all that sort of fun stuff which is so necessary to make a boat look good and yet so mind-numbingly boring.

In those six weeks I'd knocked back two jobs because of their piercings policy -- one after doing a "trial" of several hours -- and was on the verge of being let go from the cook's job in the takeaway. Not the best of results from a place notorious for having lots of work available!

Mackay has lots of work, if you're a miner, or an electrician, or any man -- yes, man -- with a trade. All highly paid, and then there's all the scuddy work like cooking and waitressing, all at very low award wages. Cleaning at a meatworks, which I knocked back because of the no-jewellery, was the highest paid job I could find!

These northern Queensland towns have a distinct flavour. Bundaberg was noticeable for its wide streets and easy pedestrian movements all the way through town ... and then the array of bicycles in front of any pub, from those hard-core drinkers who'd gotten their licences taken away and yet could not resist going back for another.

Mackay is different. This is not the place for the bicycle; this is the place for the car. There are car repair places, mechanics, car stores, everywhere; hardly a street goes by without some sort of vroom-vroom store. Despite this, if you want a tune-up, you have to wait until November.

This is the town of the burnouts, where if you listen at night you can hear people speeding up main streets and drifting around corners, one corner an especial favourite being right by the Mackay Boat Yard in front of where my boat was dry-docked.

"Burnout Rampage This Weekend!" cry out signs tacked to power poles into town.

"Krusty Demons This Friday And Saturday Only!" The local paper talks about it all week, with a Monday special.

"Burnouts and Grass Drifting!" another.

"Grass drifting?" I asked Ben as I rode alongside him.

"That's where they get grass clippings and put them behind cars and revv to see how far it goes," he said, bullshit artist supreme.

They meant drifting -- controlled skid -- on grass. But to advertise it?

All the miners and young men with money around here means hotted up cars, with low-profile mag wheels on the front and ordinary tyres on the back for burnout purposes, and special hotting up places busy every day of the week. I ride past one to and from work.

The prime area appears to be the road leading up to the marina, with people hitting the high numbers along that stretch, and then going for a tour of the breakwater wall along the marina. They go up to the light at the end, turn around, and ... go home? Perhaps, but at least they were seen on the Breakwater.

The time was coming up for a new payment for the marina, and we'd not had much sleep the last week there. The boat beside us had an alarm going off intermittently -- not a continuous, easily predicted beeping, but one which alternated beep count and times between them, breaking up our sleep.

I climbed aboard this boat and pinpointed where it came from inside it, then tried smothering the sounds with the bits of wood he had lying around, the kayak on the side of the boat. They did not work; I resorted to earplugs. Because of how full the marina was they could not move us -- or so they said -- and so we were out of there ... back to the river.

It was a perfect sail. Things crashed and flew everywhere as we pounded to windward and everything that could leak did so and got everything wet. Even the carpet covering the bilge, although that was from seepage down the sides of the boat and not from an overflowing bilgewater level. Worse of all, the bed got wet, with Ben threatening all kinds of dire consequences if he had to sleep on it wet. Despite this setback, the tides were timed perfectly and we sailed into the river, all of the way up to when I had to drop Ben at a disused jetty so he could retrieve the dinghy.

I dropped anchor where I had been before, in front of the restaurant, with patrons watching and to where the struggle ashore would begin anew.