Killer tides, feisty crocs, giant clams await the traveler in one of Australia’s great untamed regions, the Kimberley coast. Would you dare to visit?

Three days through our trip in one of the most remote parts of Australia, our catamaran drops anchor. I look around for Montgomery Reef, but it's not there. I check the marine chart. I check my GPS. This is definitely the right spot. So what gives?

“Where is it?” I ask aloud.

"Patience", advises Glen Burns, onboard guest lecturer and on of the few people who has been here before. "It'll come, mate. Just you wait."

And sure enough, it does. Before our eyes, a reef appears from the water, slowly at first, then in massive chunks. Sparkling in the sun and with water gushing off its back, Montgomery Reef - which measures 96km across - eventually rises four meters above sea level.

"Told you," says Glen. "It's the tides!"

We transfer to a Zodiac, an inflatable rubber boat with an outboard engine, run a gap in the coral and cruise the inner side of the reef until we find a safe place to land. Once on the reef, we jump over tide pools containing brain coral in striking hues of blue, green and purple, while deftly avoid yawning giant clams with undulating blue lips. A 25cm-wide crab attacks the end of my walking stick. In one of the larger pools, we see a spotted dorsal fin moving back and forth. Glen reaches down and yanks up a 50cm-long epaulette shark trapped in the coral by the rapidly falling tide. "Check this out," he says, fingering a bite-shaped indentation on the shark's fin. "Something has attacked this little critter, taken a chunk out of him."

Suddenly, there is a shout from our catamaran: the tide is turning and the ocean is rising rapidly. We motor back to the ship and watch Montgomery Reef vanish. We then spot a sleek white private yacht approach from the south. This is not an unusual sight in other waters, but along the kimberley coast encountering another craft is as surprising as now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Montgomery Reef. We were not to know at the time, but this sleek yacht, called the Seal, woud be yet another victim of the wild, untamed Kimberley coast.

More than three thousand islands linger off the mainland and there are countless bays, coves and creeks along its convoluted coastline, many of which have never been named

An Aussie friend was the first to tell me about the 1,600km largely uninhabited and unexplored shoreline in northwestern Australia. He regaled me with tales of the abundant wildlife, astonishing natural phenomena, rich aboriginal legacy and eccentric European history. More than 3,000 islands linger off the mainland and there are countless bays, coves and creeks along its convoluted coastline - many of which have never been named. It is one of the largest stretches of coastline in the world that has been barely touched by man. There are several good reasons for this: it's difficult to get to the Kimberley;it has an insufferable climate, either too hot or too wet for all but a few months each year; and there's a whold ecosystem of creatures that can - and will - kill or cripple you. These include tiger sharks, box jellyfish, a plethora of poisonous snakes and toxic spiders, and more man-eating saltwater crocodiles than you care to imagine. While we are at it, toss in furious whirlpools, flash floods and unrelenting heat.

I had almost given up on the idea of travelling to the Kimberley until I heard about the Coral Princess, a 35m catamaran that plies the coast from Broome, the region's largest town, and on to Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory. Because of the limited season (April to September) and the boat's capacity of (50 passengers), it was more than a year before I could secure a berth.

Prior to World War II, Broome was homeport for hundreds of pearl luggersm which supplied 80 percent of the world's mother-of-pearl. Today, the town - with a population of about 12,000- is the unofficial capital of the Kimberley coast and the only place resembling an urban area along its entire length. Much of the old Chinatown district remains intact, wooden buildings arrayed along two dusty streets. The bar at the Roebuck Bay Hotel is rough and rowdy and includes a drive-up window for those who like their booze to go.

The Coral Princess pulls out of Broome around sunset, heading due north along a route navigated by Dutch mariner Abel Tasman in 1644 and British buccaneer William Dampier in 1688, the first Europeans to explore the coast. Much of my first evening is spent getting to know the other passengers and crew, a mix that includes a motivated speaker from southern California, a retired bus driver from Melbourne, a Swidd corporate trainer, a young Aussie ornithologist and the aforementioned Glen, a marine biologist based in Queensland.

Around midnight we thread a channel between the mainland and the Lacepede Islands, a remote bird and sea turtle sanctuary. In 1876, American guano collectors raised the Stars and Stripes over the Lacepedes, claiming the islands for the United Sates. When Aussie miners tried re-sizing the guano fields, the US ambassador to Australia demanded that Washington dispatch gunboats. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and the islands passed back into obscurity. The Lacepedes are sometimes a port-of-call for the Coral Princess. But not on this voyage:the waters aren't right. And if there's one thing you learn quickly about the Kimberley, it's that you don't mess with Mother Nature.

"Tides govern everything along this coast," Captain Greg Bennett tells me on the bridge that first night. "We're approaching spring tides right about now ... they can get up to nine meters. They can change like that!" He snaps his fingers."And when they ebb, the water runs quicker than a river."

Having never seen the ocean move that fast, I assume Bennett is having me on Aussie-style. Outside the wheelhouse, the moon and Venus are poised above a perfectly flat sea. Not a hint of movement other than our own forward thrust. "Yeah sure," I think to myself. "Bring on those monster tides!"

Bennett seems to read my mind. He ducks into his cabin and returns with a history of Phillp Parker King's 1920 voyages along the Kimberley coast and reads a passage aloud:"King now braced himself for another fearful night, for he had no means of resisting the relentless tides ... In growing darkness they were rushed along, occasionally being caught in whirlpools, which spun the ship so furiously that he thought she might throw her masts ... they continued for several hours in this state of helpless terror."

Fair enough. But it is still hard to believe that in this age of sonar and satellite surveillance, powerful diesel engines and hourly tidal updates, a vessel as large and sophisticated as the Coral Princess can still be at the mercy of tides. I accept, however, that they affect where we go and that our itinerary over the next week and a half will vary from day to day, perhaps even hour to hour. "No two trips are ever the same," Bennett tells me.

At daybreak, we cruise past the stark white lighthouse at Cape Leveque and the secluded Aboriginal settlement of Kooljaman. As Tasman, Dampier and other explorers observed, indigenous people once lived along this entire coast, collecting food and fishing from wooden rafts. Today, more than half of the coast is given over to Aboriginal reserves. But they are largely empty, their inhabitants opting for an easier existence in Broome or the lush eucalyptus graslands that lie inland from the coast. Kooljaman was the last settlement of any sort we would see for more than a week.

We cut across the top of King Sound into the myriad islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago, named after Dampier's pirating ways. The following morning we anchor in Talbot Bay, where I get my first lesson in tidal dynamics. After piling into a Zodiac, we ply a maze of channels until we find our path blocked by a 100m-high rock wall - a giant slab of Pentecost sandstone pushed up from the sea 100 million years ago. Expedition leader Mark Christensen points to a gap just wide enough to sneak through. On the other side of the gap is a bay with water the color of jade, and beyond that another sandstone wall, with another gap leading to another bay.

We wait for the tide to turn, and when it does, we are left slack-jawed. Within minutes, the calm water has vanished, replaced by a raging torrent trying to escape from the inner bays. Water races through the gaps at more than 15 knots, creating what the Aussies call the Horizontal Falls.

With Mark at the tiller, we run through the white water in our Zodiac, bucking up and down. A wave crashes over the bow and we almost flip. but Mark regains control and we shoot through the current into the still water of the innermost bay. in that split second i become a true believer – the ocean can move as fast as a river; there are such things as monster tides. And what i just witnessed is hardly nature at her most extreme - at least not in this part of the world.

Back at the beach, first mate scott simmons announces he has found some freshwater pools high enough above the high-tide mark to be crocodile-free. it’s time to do some swimming

That afternnon, we witness the tidal extravaganza at Montgomery Reef and have our brief encounter with the Seal - one of only six vessels we see during the voyage. At nightfall we anchor in Doubtful Bay, where we linger for two days, probing the shoreline in our Zodiacs, searching for wildlife and Aboriginal sites. We hike inland through thick bush to an ancient rock-art gallery tucked beneath a cliff. As we enter a cave, Glen whispers an incantation.

“It’s always wise to give them a little greeting as you enter the gallery,” he says.

“Them who?” i ask.

“The ancient spirits,” glen replies. “They can cause you all sorts of grief – floods, cyclones, droughts. you don’t want to upset ‘em.”

staring down at us from the cave ceiling is the Moon spirit, his face rendered in ocher and white, with two piercing black eyes. All around him are ancient maritime scenes – portly dugongs, giant fish and tiny human figures hurling fishing spears. The design is typical of the Wandjina style that developed after the 13th century, although many of the figures have been touched up by later generations of native artists.

Further up the canyon is another gallery, this one filled with older so-called bradshaw Aboriginal art: small, dancing figures with sinewy bodies, braided hair and tasseled clothing. even though they predate Wandjina, the bradshaw igures are clearly more sophisticated. “We don’t know a lot about them,” Adrian boyle, the Aussie ornithologist and onboard specialist, tell me. “Modern Aboriginals won’t have anything to do with them, say they weren’t done by their own people. Then who painted them? some group that lived here before the Aboriginals? We may never know.”

We sail up the prince regent river gorge to a spectacular multi-level waterfall. king’s cascade is one of the most awesome sights along the coast, and one of the most dangerous

Back at the beach, first mate Scott Simmons announces he has found some freshwater pools high enough above the high-tide mark to be crocodile-free. it’s time to do some swimming. The pools are swarming with life. Freshwater turtles, blue-and-red harlequin beetles, little black fish nipping at our toes, bats hanging upside in half-submerged caves. A six-meter waterfall tumbles down a cliff face. “This is what i love about the Kimberley,” says Scott as we sit beneath the falls. “Most of the coast is charted, but not all of it is explored. You don’t necessarily know what’s up every creek and bay. You’re always finding new things.”

That night, we hear a frantic mayday call on the radio. A yacht is in trouble. it is the Seal, the yacht we encountered at Montgomery reef the previous afternoon. She ran aground somewhere in the buccaneer Archipelago and is taking on water fast. passengers and crew are about to abandon ship. captain bennett is ready to turn the Coral Princess around and head for the stricken vessel, but we get word another craft is closer.

Details trickle in the following morning: everyone on the Seal is safe, but they got away with the clothes on their backs. Everything else is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The vessel was lost, serving now as a potent reminder of the dangers lurking along the Kimberley coast.

Over the next few days, we see evidence of other Kimberley calamities. On Sheep Island, I brush away sand to read gravestones of woebegone colonists who settled here to raise sheep in the 1860s. One is Mary JanePascoe, who died three weeks after giving birth to the first European child born along the coast. Constable Walter Gee: "Speared by natives while on duty." After two years, those left on the island called it quits, released their sheep and fled back to Melbourne.

At Careening Bay in 1820, Phillip Parker King was forced to beach his flagship, Mermaid, when it lost a battle with the Kimberley tides. It took King and his crew three weeks to repair and relaunch the vessel. Ordered by the British Crown to “leave some evidence which annot be mistaken of your having landed,” the mariners scribbled inscriptions into a boab tree overlooking the beach, carvings that have become higher and wider as the tree has grown over the past 188 years.

We sail up the prince regent river gorge to a spectacular multi-level waterfall and hanging gardens that Captain King named after himself. King’s Cascade is one of the most awesome sights along the coast, and also one of the most dangerous. On a sweltering hot day – which is nearly every day in the Kimberley – the water at the bottom of the falls looks inviting and you think to yourself, “It’s got to be safe. We’re 25 kilometers inland for god’s sake!”

That was the mistake made in 1987 by 24-year-old American model ginger Meadows, who arrived on a private yacht, the Lady g. “ginger and another crew member scrambled up a rock ledge and dove into the water,” Mark elates as we float safely in our boat beneath the falls. “The skipper saw a crocodile and yelled, but they couldn’t hear him over the sound of the water. When she saw the skipper, ginger panicked and tried to swim back to the ledge. she suddenly went underwater for 30 seconds. she came back up, was dragged back underwater and that’s thelast they saw of her.”

Throughout our journey we encounter crocodiles sunning themselves on muddy riverbanks, or peering out of the water at night with pink eyes, but always from the safety of our boat . That was about to change.

On Naturalist island on the eastern flank of Prince Frederick Harbor, we head ashore to watch the sunset and barbecue seafood for dinner, including a huge barramundi landed by a fellow passenger. I sit with Bob and Del Flemming, founders and owners of the Billabong Wildlife Park in Queensland.

“The only thing true about [the movie] Crocodile Dundee is the fact that crocs live in the water,” bob explains. “Here in Australia we like to make everything into something dangerous, all of these ‘terrible’ animals. But crocs are reptiles and they don’t like to use a lot of energy; they’ll take easy kills like wallabies and dingoes instead of humans. Look at the numbers – only 35 people have been killed by crocs in the last 150 years.”

When i point out that the frequency of crocodile attacks has increased dramatically over the last 20 years, bob strikes back. “Most of those people had two things in common: grog and the fact that they went swimming where they were told not to.”

By the time dinner was finished, the ebbing tide has pulled the sea out a couple of hundred meters. The Zodiacs couldn’t reach the beach. We started to wade toward the Zodiacs. Glen was smart enough to sweep a flashlight across the water, discovering a pair of pink eyes less than 30m offshore.

Short of the normandy landings, I’ve never seen a group of people thunder out

of the surf so quickly. All of us were a bit scared and a bit intoxicated; not so much by the beer and wine consumed that evening, but by the adrenalin rush that you get from an encounter with raw nature essentially inimical to man – even when man comes a very long way to admire it.