Jennifer Barrie - Marooned on Mogmog: A remote island, a shipwrecked Aussie family, a clash of cultures

Our sea voyage of a lifetime: it started with a dream and felt like it ended with the shipwreck. Ten years of planning, dreaming, plotting and scheming, all gone in one night.

Whos even heard of shipwrecks these days? Hello, this is the 21st century not the 1800s! But thats exactly what happened to us, a modern, mostly normal family from Western Australia. Thats how we ended up living on an island in Micronesia that wed never even heard of before and which, according to the Lonely Planet guide, is home to some of the worlds most remote people.

For the previous year my husband, Andrew, and our two daughters Diana, aged 11, and Shannon, aged nine and I had been living our dream, sailing our beloved 42-foot catamaran, Windrider , around the Pacific. We had planned to keep doing that for at least another year. But the morning after that 12-hour battle with the weather gods, Windrider was seated indecorously on the coral beach of this tiny island named Mogmog, with her entire starboard hull ripped out, rudders bent through 90ish degrees, engines out, and communications systems largely rendered useless.

Things looked bad for us; we had chosen not to insure Windie . This was for a few reasons. Our normal insurer wouldnt cover us for overseas. When insuring boats for out of Australian waters, all the companies I spoke to required the boat to be surveyed, and that could only be done in Sydney. As we were in Perth, that really wasnt feasible. Even if we had gone to all that trouble, no insurer would have trekked an assessor to Mogmog to look at the thing. So write-off would have been the only solution, and then we would be left with starting from scratch. Having spent eight years getting Windie s systems exactly as we wanted, the thought of starting again with a new boat didnt appeal. It had been a conscious decision to forego the insurance, and it was a decision we would make again, even with hindsight.

We sat on the beach looking at Windie , expecting tears that didnt come. Was this the end? Could something be salvaged? Were we unrealistic to even have these thoughts? We didnt know it then, but the very fact that these thoughts were running through our minds meant that we had acknowledged a sliver of a possibility or maybe an impossibility.

Andrew has a saying: it is possible to eat an elephant as long as you do it one bite at a time. So we set about devouring our elephant, hoping we werent going to get stomped on.

The seeds of our adventure were sown years ago on an island, in a tent, with eight-month-old Diana in a portacot hugging a coconut. The island was Direction Island, one of the Cocos Keeling Islands, 900 nautical miles off Western Australia. Our great mate Scott had been telling us about Cocos for years, as his sister was a teacher there at the time, and he had visited quite a bit. He suggested camping on DI, as Direction Island is referred to, and we thought it sounded great.

When I rang Dieter, the ranger, and asked if we were able to camp on DI, he came back with, Why do you want to do that ? his voice full of incredulity.

Um, coz it might be fun?

Well, you can camp wherever you bloody-well like, but I think youre nuts!

So with his blessing of sorts, we packed up Diana; Andrews mum, Dawn; and all our camping gear and flew to Cocos.

We spent the first week in a wooden chalet and had an amazing time, meeting the locals, going to the cyclone shelter that doubles as a bar, playing golf. The first four holes go up one side of the airstrip, and then you all stop and watch the plane land then continue down the other side. There are fully stocked Eskies at every hole.

Next we set off for DI. In days gone by, this island was used for the copra trade, so a coconut palm plantation covers the land area. We set up camp under a palm tree with our two tents and a portacot for Diana.

A word about Diana: she had finally come along after six years of trying, two heartbreaking miscarriages and many IVF attempts. She is a miracle. The emotional rollercoaster that is IVF had been really taking its toll we had been at the end of our ropes. Simon, my obstetrician, realised this and sat with us for over an hour, saying that in spite of our failures thus far he truly believed that IVF would work for us. Hes not a bedside manner sort of guy, so we decided on one more try. The result was Diana, who on DI was sitting bald-headed and very blue-eyed, peering out from underneath the brim of a large knitted hat, with a huge knitted rose on the front. Shannon, in contrast, was conceived with little more than a twinkle in her daddys eye, 10 months later.

The beach on DI is pristine white; the ocean is crystal clear; and at one end there is a rip snorkel: a narrow, long channel of water where the current flies through so fast that there is absolutely no chance of swimming against it. You scramble down the rocks with your snorkel gear, throw yourself into the water and swim as hard as you can against the current. That way you get a chance to see the sharks, coral, wrasse and myriad other fish as you fly by. Then it spits you out at the other end and you stagger back up the rocks and do it all again.

On the island, there is an undercover area with tables and chairs. It is filled with years of memorabilia left by international yachties who stay and rest in the anchorage as they make their way across the Indian Ocean to either South Africa or the Mediterranean. There are thousands of flags, wood carvings, bottles with messages and pieces of artwork. It would take a full week to look at everything there.

While on DI we met a bunch of these yachties. There was German South African Joe, who travelled the world fixing unfixable telephones; Ross and Sue from Dampier; Gail and Steve; Paul and Linda; and and and and

Our week was full of hilarious incidents and gave us a peek into a world we had no idea existed, the world of globetrotting yachties. What immediately appealed to us was that all these people of all ages and from all walks of life had decided to largely give up on the rat race. Gone were the deadlines and timeframes. Gone were the day-to-day stresses of normal life. These people would wake up in the morning and talk about where they might like to go next or not. It was completely up to them. The freedom inherent in this lifestyle was something we could not get out of our heads.

One night was Pauls birthday, so there was a surprise party for him in the undercover area. It was a raucous night, with crazy Brazilians leading the way, drinking way too much whatever it was. In the course of the evening, Andrew asked Paul if he had received his real birthday present from Linda yet. No, came the reply, sadly he had not. He said that if he did, he would flash the mastlight. Later on, after the yachties all dribbed and drabbed back to their boats, Pauls mastlight started flashing. Ha! Within 15 minutes, every mastlight in the vicinity was flashing! You could hear the laughter all around the bay.

This was a lifestyle we had to pursue, sooner or later.