The Black Watch

Fred Olsen liner, The Black Watch glides along the Trinity Inlet, Cairns on its way to cross the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea to the Komodo Islands in the Timor Sea.

Komodo island, part of the Lesser Sunda chain of Indonesian islands, is the rugged habitat of the 3m-long Komodo dragon monitor lizard. Komodo National Park covers the entire region and contains more than 4,000 dragons, as well as rusty-red volcanic hills, savannah and forests. Its surrounding waters of seagrass beds, mangrove shrublands and coral reefs are famous for diving.

In a previous life I sailed a couple of times from the Tyne Commission Quay in North Shields to Bergen and Stavanger on this ship.