If you're headed by boat to formidable Christmas Island, you need to know where to go.

Flying Fish Cove – the only safe anchorage at Christmas Island and even then conditions can change in a moment, as a huge swell rolls into the usually calm cove.

Hardly a true cove, it's one of the few places where there's a beach on Christmas Island and the curved bay faces north west, making it sheltered for most of the time, except when a cyclone's coming in.

There are a number of shipwrecks associated with Christmas Island, with the majority of these either during the conflict in World War II or as a result of asylum seeker vessels arriving from Indonesia. Those that didn't sink in Flying Fish Cove would have been headed there.

Yet it's also where Settlement is – the town named by the very original, practical miners, managers and engineers who built it from 1888. Stretching from the edges of the cove itself right up to Rocky Point, the oldest houses on the island are there.

And why are Christmas Island and Flying Fish Cove so important? It's the setting for the third book in my Turbulence and Triumph series, Ocean's Triumph.