TI Time

There’s island time, and then there’s TI time.  We’ve been anchored off Thursday Island, known in these parts as TI, for a week now, and we’ve adjusted.  The narrow strait that lies between the northern tip of Australia and Papua New Guinea – the Torres Strait, named for the Spanish explorer Luis Valdez de Torres – is home to dozens of continental islands, coral cays, and volcanic islands, with TI being their administrative and commercial center.  It’s a tiny island, dwarfed by the larger, adjoining Horn Island, home to the converted WWII air strip that welcomes a few flights daily to and from the mainland.

Around here, most of the locals live on one of the surrounding islands, and travel to and from here in their “tinnies,” the Aussie name for the ubiquitous open-topped aluminum boats with outboard engines that ply the coral-crusted waters of the eastern shore of this island continent.   Distances are measured in cans of gas, with each can holding about 20 liters.  Yesterday, we met Norman, an old but physically imposing Torres Strait islander here for medical attention.  He cut his foot badly climbing the ladder into his tinnie after a morning of diving for lobster.  With an alarming Don King-like shock of frizzy bone-white hair, a mouth that seemed to have lost all its teeth, and accompanied by a small, scruffy mutt, he told us he came from Moa, about 2 cans away. 

Norman sat under a corrugated roof, flanked by two long-dormant rest rooms at the small beach overlooking the Horn Island ferry dock.  Earlier, waiting for Jen to return from TI on the ferry, I watched a battered yellow ferry make three trips across the channel, bumping the dock each time to discharge dozens of uniformed kids, happy to be home after their day at TI's primary school.  A few jumped on bikes that leaned, unlocked, against the crude fence that kept people on the dock, while others were picked up by parents in cars.  Most walked or skipped in pairs down the gravel-paved roads, just like kids everywhere.  One or two hung back to watch the 3 foot baby crocodile that skittered along the mud banks, snapping up small fish here and there. 

The Australian Jabiru stands over a meter tall

The tides rise and fall twice daily, revealing and then concealing vast mud banks that become the feeding grounds for birds and amphibians alike at low tide, when the water level drops about 6 feet.  We watch cranes lift their spindly legs slowly as their long bills glide mudward to snatch food from the glistening mud, as the tidal current races by just a few meters away, tugging our boat at its anchor.

We asked Norman about crocodiles; he introduced himself as the last living skipper of the traditional pearl luggers that sailed these waters for decades, a claim we could not dispute since to every appearance, he belonged at the helm of a traditional sailing boat.  He assured us that the only thing he’d ever been bitten by was the prop on his tinnie, and that, in fact, “the crocs around here are afraid of me!”  He leaned forward, held out his arm, and related how one time, he stood face-to-face with a croc just “this far away” and said “scat!”

We spent some time with Norman; he was waiting on the tide to lift his tinnie off the mud flats; having spent a few weeks in the hospital, he was discharged (one imagines against medical advice) to find a small leak in his tinnie.  Unfazed, he related how he planned to get back to diving as soon as the bandage came off, and that he needed to get back to Moa for the ‘tombstone opening’ of his father’s grave.  Traditionally in these parts, the tombstone of a deceased person is kept covered for a year after death, and then unveiled in a formal ceremony.  This morning, his boat was gone, and we wish him a safe voyage back to Moa.

Sailboats come and go in our little anchorage; the other night, we hosted four boats worth of crew for a dinner party in ile de Grace.  Freshly-caught tuna on kabobs, rice, and lots of wine and beer and the sharing of stories about passages and anchorages near and far – lovely evening, and a reminder of why we love to cruise.  Most boats are headed to Darwin, about 750 miles west of here, and the launching point for a popular sailing rally to Indonesia.  It leaves Darwin too late for us; we need to be out of Indonesia by late August in order to get to South Africa before the southern Indian Ocean cyclone season.  In one way, we’re in a hurry, compared to these sailors.  But then again, we’re happy sitting lazily at anchor here, at Thursday Island, living on TI time.