Don Cleavin – Navigating the Great Barrier Reef

We had a three-month deployment to Australia, to Darwin, but we’d been at sea for quite a long time around the South Atlantic and you’ve got to bear in mind that I was in the Engine Room and the Captain never used to come along to me every day and say, “We’re in that area now, and this is what we’re going to do here.” He didn’t know about that.

In the Engine Room you’re isolated. You don’t know what the hell’s going on, or where you are, but we was in the Pacific on our way to Australia.

We’d been doing a lot of running around and for an ‘A’ Class boat like the Anchorite, it has enough fuel to go anywhere but we was getting low on fuel you see being that many miles.

We were very short of fuel, so we had to get to the nearest Port to get some diesel, which was Townsville. Townsville was on the north coast of Australia, and we was on the other side of the Great Barrier Reef.

To get in there, we had to go through this channel, through the Great Barrier Reef that no ship has been through there since Wartime.

We were a small ship in desperation to get some juice and to get there, we had to get everybody up from down below apart from the Watchkeepers, and we was on the surface edging through the coral heads through the Barrier Reef. We was all stood there.

You could look down and see the coral heads just a matter of feet from the side of your ballast tanks. You get into one of those it could cut your ballast tanks open like a razor blade.

It took us about three quarters of an hour to get through the reef.