"Thank you for driving carefully through our ocean"

When I left the Panama Canal I carefully wrote "The Pacific Ocean Welcomes careful drivers" shamelessly half inched off the Red Dwarf front cover, which depicts a sign with the corner shattered by a star trek style blue streak across the stars. The sign reads "infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers", presumably in the motorway font.

We are anchored off Adolphus Island and can see Cape York, named by Captain Cook after his favourite chocolate bar. This is my last stop in the Pacific. Probably, the exact definition of where it ends I neither know nor care.

Seriously though, poor old Cook who'd seen more of the world than any man before him, and probably precious few afterwards was getting right short of names by this point. Off the tip of the Cape York peninsula is the centre of the Torres Islands. Thursday Island. Its neighbouring islands are Wednesday Island and Friday island between us and them are the Tuesday Islets.

We're not going ashore here, not because we're afraid of aboriginal spears, but because we're not allowed. There are no aborigines here, the native inhabitance of this area are known as Torres islanders, they're Melanesian like the Solomon Islanders the Vanuatuans and the Papua New Guineans. Melanesian's are pacific islanders, boat people seafarers and have far more in common with their neighbours than either the aborigines or the white Ausie's who like the pacific islands and the Aborigines  they treated incredibly badly in the past.

Cape Yorkie Bar

They think, quite rightly that the Torres strait is they're playground and think nothing of tooing and froing with the relations and friends in PNG just across the straits. This is Australia home of the tightest most annaly retentive and zealous customs and quarantine in the world. Does this bother the Torres Islanders? No is doesn't. The net result is if we go ashore here or even at the port of enrty in Thursday Island, we will have our food confiscated and have to clear quarantine again in Darwin.

Custom's have given up trying to make the Torres Islanders go to the mountain, and have instead moved the mountain onto perfectly innocent yachtists.