ACROSS THE TOP

“That sea sure is mean,” our kind driver observes as my salty trio climbs into his truck, fresh off a roughand-tumble crossing of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

After 48 hours of swift sailing – double-reefed and surfing at 14 knots ahead of a 25-30 knot breeze – we wholeheartedly agree. The downwind surfs might have had us smiling, but the gulf ’s walloping, sideswiping, tidal swell comes at you from another angle entirely, giving rise to its reputation as the so-called ‘washing machine’.

Having arrived in Australia’s Northern Territory we hitch into Nhulunbuy from Gove Harbour for fresh supplies, staring out the window at the parched Arnhem Land scrub. Our new mate – an indigenous Yolngu elder – yarns about sailing and one gnarly trip when his Indonesian wife threw up all the way to Sulawesi.

“But that was nothing compared to the Gulf of Carpentaria,” he says, and we all laugh and nod.

The Gulf of Carpentaria occupies a tremendous expanse (some 120,000 square miles) between Australia’s most northern tip, and what’s locally called the ‘Top End’. Cyclones brew up in the gulf at the start of every year, then spiral outwards in all directions. When they abate and the south-easterly trade winds begin to blow, crossing the gulf is all part of the journey for westbound sailors making passage from the Pacific via Australia’s East Coast to Indonesia and beyond.

Setting out from Cairns in the protection of the 2,300km-long Great Barrier Reef, cruisers can dally on a remote coastline, blissfully castaway on tropical isles and barely-there sand cays.

Once at the tip of Cape York, a transit lane squeezes boats through the Torres Strait islands that pepper the gap between Papua New Guinea and Cape York. To the west lies the Gulf of Carpentaria and one wildly pitching passage to reach Arnhem Land and cross the Arafura Sea to Darwin.