Good sailing writing should make you do what?

Wet your pants with laughter, that's what.

At least, that was the reaction that both A. and I had when we read this reflection on a dream well lived, written by our good friend Melissa Beit.

Extra credit: explain why these kinds of shenanigans, in the company of children, are a fine idea.

If you can't, you're likely a Dock Queen, or a landlubber, or are simply cursed with more good sense than our favorite sorts of people seem to be.

In the Tradition

Last week the Galactics went beach seining.

Pulling the seine

A beach seine is about the simplest net there is to use. You set it from the dinghy, then pull it in to the beach by hand.

Sorting the catch. Alisa still has her deep knowledge of the juvenile groundfishes of Alaska

Age-0 saffron cod

A little help from the team

The Baxter Guide to the fishes of Alaska

Back in the 90s, Alisa and I did a lot of beach seining as a part of a large study seeking to understand how climate variability limited the ability of seabird populations to recover from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

We have great memories of those summers spent doing field work in coastal Alaska. Being outside all day every day, work that was both physically demanding and intellectually engaging, the camaraderie of fantastic people...who wouldn't remember that fondly?

It was great to be doing that kind of work again. The names of the fishes came back so easily. Kelp clingfish! Penpoint gunnel! We talked about the people we worked with, 20 years ago, and how some of them have found a lifetime's pursuit in the study of Alaskan fishes. And we remembered some of the people from prior generations whom we encountered in one way or another. It's a great tradition to be a part of, the tradition established by those rugged men and women who have pursued knowledge for knowledge's sake in the wilds of Alaska.

Writing it down

There's also a larger tradition that we were invoking - the tradition of understanding the world with repeatable measurement, careful observation, and falsifiable ideas. In this era where the wonderful intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment is held in such low esteem, and the scientific enterprise is under such specific political attacks, it was great to be back in that tradition....doing the simple things of observing the world, and writing down what we saw.

More specifically, we were working to support a study that has been running for more than a decade, using beach seines to measure the abundance of juvenile Pacific cod, and to sample their body condition and energetics, in order to better understand the factors that regulate this population that supports an important fishery around Kodiak.

Mama said there'd be days like this

Tufted puffins

We've always thought that wrapping family life into field work would be a wonderful thing to do. And it was, mostly. Elias in particular is right there with being able to help out. He measured fish, he took notes, he pulled the net.

Eric is still a few years away from being real help, as is his right as a seven year old. Both boys did a great job with some very early mornings to catch the tides we were working, but during these four days of seining Alisa and I were also reminded of the limits of what we can ask the kids to do.

We'll keep those in mind as we cook up plans for more extensive field work in summers to come.

But for this first run, I was very satisfied to see how happy the family ended each day, and how glowing the boys' overall reviews were for the experience.

You Know - Alaska!

Well, you may have noticed that our country is going through Interesting Times. (Open question: will an American president who is proud of the fact that he cannot make the moral distinction between Nazis and anti-Nazis be abandoned by his party? Stay tuned and find out!)

But while this painful transition to whatever comes next is underway, our family has been enjoying a completely idyllic summer in Alaska.

Long-time readers may remember that one of the reasons we decided to forgo the Northwest Passage is that that route would have gotten us to Kodiak in September, after the summer was officially a memory. Following our couple of glorious seasons in the global South, we had reached a point in our sailing lives where, rather than another high-latitude adventure, we would prefer to just spend a summer getting in touch with the island that is our once and future home.

Dreaming the beautiful dream

And that's what we've been doing. We're rediscovering Kodiak through the eyes of our boys, which is so much fun I could literally cry at times.

We're in this great timeless-feeling period between our arrival from Hawai'i and the Start of School, which will mark a big transition to Structured Time for the whole family.

And even though the signs of autumn are beginning to announce themselves, we remain in that timeless state. Day after day, we have...fun.

The Kodiak waterfront

Alpine joy

Fishing. In Alaska, Team Galactic spends a lot of time fishing. This can have consequences...

...both bad (that's Alisa de-hooking Elias)...

...and good (Eric with a dolly varden at Mayflower Beach).

More soon.

The Best Help That Money Can't Buy

Now, I know that plenty of people raise well-adjusted children ashore.

And we only have the two examples of Galactic's own AB and Cabin Boy to go on, so our inference will suffer from some pretty severe sample size problems.

But with those caveats in mind, I have to say that if you want to raise kids who, if nothing else, are generally game to lend a hand when there is work to be done, raising them on a traveling boat is the way to go.

For example, consider these shots from our recent haulout.

We have been through every stage of out of the water maintenance with a young family. In the early days this entailed Alisa looking after the kids while I humped it like a convict in the boatyard.

Occasionally in more recent years it has involved Alisa getting a babysitter to look after the kids while she helped me paint, and then feeling afterwards like it made no sense to pay someone twenty dollars, or whatever, just so she could sprint over to the yard to slap on paint for a couple hours.

But now, our kids are suddenly old enough that not only do they not need constant minding, they are actually clamoring to get in the yard and help, too.

Elias begged insistently enough that we let him suit up and paint a bit on this last haulout. And these pictures show just how proud he was to be lending a hand.

And the wattage of those smiles also reminds me of how much joy kids can make out of tasks that adults see as drudgery, and just how easy it can be to salvage a moment or two of fun when the right kid is around.  

Stainless, or, A Parent's Progress

So this was our sole crew - Elias James Abookire Litzow - exactly three days after we left Kodiak and began this decadal Odyssey of ours.

At that time, Alisa and I were simultaneously learning to be parents and full-time sailors. We were drinking from the fire hose, every day, all day long. We marveled at all the discretionary time that sailors with all-adult crews had to enjoy.

And, when I was feeling expansive, I would ridicule those no-child sailors of our acquaintance.

"All the time in the world," I would say to Alisa. "And what do they do with it? They polish their stainless!" (Pause for horrified look.) "And then they complain about how busy they are!"

Coming from a robust working port like Kodiak (484 million pounds of fish across the dock in 2014), it was easy to pick out the sillier foibles of the yachtie world. And taking the time to polish the stainless steel on a boat that spent its whole life in salt water was very high on my personal list, indeed.

Can you see where this is going?

The picture above is our younger crew, Eric Leo Abookire Litzow, just this Sunday.

School was off. He had the whole day open for himself. Parental opinion was that he was doing a very poor job of filling it.

The kids on yacht Pelagic, who just pulled in from Nuku Hiva, were inconveniently off touring Volcanoes National Park. Eric didn't want to go off the boat and play. He did want to take every chance to pick a fight with his brother and make us all miserable.

It didn't take too long for the light bulb to go on over my head. After Eric pulled one too many outrageous provocations on his older brother, Elias was set loose to go to the beach by himself while Eric was set down in front of our acres of dull stainless with a tube of polish and two rags. (One for applying the polish, the other for buffing it out.)

After all, a boat should look its best, right? And who wouldn't want polished stainless when the labor isn't their own?

Role Models

Consulting with fellow-enthusiast Jorge

I have an ambition when it comes to parenting.

I strive to be an average father. I aspire to a middling outcome.

In our culture, everyone is always talking about how so and so is "such a great dad."

Well, we can't all be so great. I'm doing my best just to do OK.

It might be my unshakeable faith in the not-so-great, not-so-terrible nature of my abilities as a father, but I have long been attracted to the idea that what a growing boy needs at times is a male role model who is not his dad.

I had been thinking that might come in handy when the boys were 13 or so.

But lately Elias' enthusiasm for fishing has been outstripping my ability to fake it and keep up. I may or may not be an average sort of dad, but I am definitely sub-par when it comes to angling.  I can't wait to go gillnetting in Alaska to put in a winter supply of salmon. And I love trolling a lure for tuna on passage. But if you ask me if I'd like to spend a few hours of a perfectly good afternoon drifting around in the dinghy, trying to catch something, I'll probably remember a pressing boat job that I've been meaning to do.

On a couple occasions lately, Elias has found a work-around. He's met adult yacthies who are as mad for the piscine hunt as he is. And, one way or another, he has organized fishing expeditions with them, in their dinghies

I *think* that these fishing buddies of his are enjoying the outings as well. He always seems to come back with happy stories about all the interesting conversation that they had (read: he talked their ears off?). And, more to the point, they also come back with fish.

Anyway, whatever these friends to Galactic might think, I think these outings are a great way for Elias to go about the business of finding his way in the world, and finding his feet outside of the family domain.

Again

You might remember that nearly two years ago our family fun boat, the Little Dipper, was stolen from us at Chiloé Island, in Chile.

The Little Dipper was an 8' Walker Bay sailing dinghy. And ever since she was whisked away in the dark of the night, Alisa has been set on finding us a replacement.

Well, you can see where this is going. Someone told Alisa about a Walker Bay for sale here in Bonaire...she tracked down the seller...and a day later we had a replacement Walker Bay.

And, even better, the seller took Fernando from us, the wonderful gift of a hard dinghy that replaced the Little Dipper and saw us all through the canales of Patagonia, securing the safety of the mothership with many a line ferried ashore to a stout tree. The seller (a lovely guy, Alisa reports) took Fernando away in his pickup, and came back the next day with the $200 USD he'd sold her for...which went a ways towards defraying the purchase price of the Walker Bay.

It was all still a bit on the expensive side to get this replacement boat when we had a perfectly good hard dinghy. But the boys are over the moon. And it was a joy for me to watch Elias immediately jump into the boat to sail around the anchorage for an hour or two.

I really didn't know he could sail that well!

Out Of Touch

Yachts to the left of us... 

...and yachts to the right of us.

So, we're here in Bonaire, one of a long line of yachts moored off the main (only?) town.

The land is - just there - right over our bow. Close enough that I can easily hear the excellent live music being played on the weekends.

Elias and mate, off for a snorkel

But even though we are only 150 meters or so from land, it's now more than a week since I set foot in the dirt. And that last foray was just a quick dash to illicitly stuff a bag of our trash into a dumpster.

My last real land experience, a classic sailor's afternoon of cruising various shops for things that might be persuaded to work as boat parts, was ten days or so ago.

I find that I'm liking this all-aquatic existence.

Bonaire is a perfect place to get your exercise in the water. Every day I swim, usually for an hour or so, down the row of yachts and back.

The boys take recess from school every morning by jumping off the boat into the water about a hundred times in a row. I take a break from my research grant proposal writing and join them.

We pretty regularly take Galactic to one of the dive moorings around the island for a session of family snorkeling.

Elias is learning to scuba dive. Eric has suddenly gone from being a very poor, very reluctant swimmer to being one of those half-fish/half-boy creatures that you see growing up on traveling sailboats. And today Elias and his 8-year-old mate from Jadean took our inflatable, Smooches, and went off on an adult-free snorkeling safari.

True, it came to a premature end because Elias cannot always get the outboard started. But I love to see him and other kids off doing stuff on their own.

So for now, as I toil away at the science salt mines, and we occasionally grumble about the Caribbean, and how it's nothing like our beloved Pacific, we look up and realize that we've got about the best thing going that we could wish for.

An evening swim. Eric is still light enough to bodily throw off the boat. 

Why do they make kids' drawstrings so long, anyway?

Thinking Up a Hurricane

Good book alert.

We picked this one up in South Africa - a memoir of family sea-going life with a not-so-good father.

The author, Martinique Stilwell, is very good on the child's perspective of how life turns out when parents are derelict in their duties, and how parents make a long series of choices for their children when they decide that it's too much bother to educate them.

The story is from the tail end of the 1970s, when there were a lot more parents out there happy to let their children grow up (euphemistically) free and (actually) ignorant. But the book does offer an interesting perspective for contemporary parents disinclined to put  effort into their kids' education.

The Romance Of the Sea When You're Ten, Or Six

Ok, you know what makes me tick on long passages.

What about the kids?

Well. Our little Alaskans-in-training on Galactic are very much into killing what they eat. Or at least eating what I kill for them. Check out Eric's smile in the pic above. He's about to levitate with joy.

So, while there's a lot of things that the boys seem to like, or at least accept, about being at sea, nothing fires their enthusiasm like catching a fish.

And this passage from South Africa was very good for the fishing. If nothing else, we put in enough hours of trolling to expect a few seafood feeds out of the deal.

So here are the boyish smiles that did not get away.

Elias' first mahi mahi

Elias' first marlin. (We let it go.)

Ascension Island. The best-fishing anchorage in our 9 years of sailing.
Not humanly possible to be any happier than these two boys.

Eric's first-ever pelagic fish. Check out the fighting belt!

Wahoo for dinner! And breakfast and lunch and dinner
and breakfast and lunch and dinner

The mahi mahi that Elias caught for our 15th anniversary dinner

I keep telling the boys that Alisa can fillet a salmon much better than I can.

Queasy Kids

Eric (1) and Elias (4), leaving California.

Go back in time with me for a few paragraphs.  The year is 2006.  I am pregnant with Elias and reading every speck of information I can find about sailing with infants.  Unfortunately there is hardly anything written on the subject, and yet I am certain others have gone before us because I have read articles by the Martins and the Poncets.  But their stories are about travel and adventure and they don't address the daily grind of sailing with babies.  But this was exactly what I was looking for:  I wanted to know how to wash cloth diapers at sea and I needed an answer to the question that everyone seemed to be asking us, "But what if your baby gets sea sick?".

And then I found a small paragraph in the sidelines of an old sailing magazine in which a very salty mother said that children younger than age 2 don't get seasick.  At least that is my memory - very possible that I am a bit fuzzy on it, as I was in my third trimester.  So, right or not, I held on to that 'fact' during the nights that worry kept me awake.  Again and again, I returned to the idea that babies under age 2 cannot and do not get seasick.  I loved that idea - it fit with our life plan to sell the house, quit the jobs, and start sailing.  And Elias, bless him, lived up to that ideal in every storm and rough weather passage all the way from Alaska to Australia - turning two in Tonga and still not being sea sick.  He earned the name, 'Little Salty', and to this day he has stronger sea legs than any of the Galactic crew. Lucky boy.

Eric. Well, Eric kind of broke the mold. If Elias had reacted to sailing the way Eric did, then I am fairly certain we'd have stopped sailing.  Eric vomited every time the wind was forward of the beam, regardless of wind strength. It was a huge worry when we were sailing along the CA coast south to San Diego with our newly acquired Galactic.  What would happen when we sailed to the Marqueses and Eric was too young to medicate?  That passage was stressful because poor Eric vomited profusely for the first 3 days. Thankfully on day 4 he found his sea legs.  But on almost every passage since then, Eric has vomited multiple times.  It is common for him to say things like, "Mommy do I get to eat dinner tonight since I didn't throw up once today?" to which I reply, "Yes, but only if you eat it in the cockpit".

So what to feed queasy kids?  How to keep them hydrated?
1) Juice becomes part of our daily routine.  Normally our kids just drink water or milk, but on passages they get lots of juice, homemade lemon/limeade or Milo.
2) Applesauce
3) Fruit: fresh or tinned
4) Plain pasta with oil and salt (Eric's fav...see photo below)
5) Warmed tortillas, hold the cheese.
6) Crackers: saltines / pilot bread/ plain crackers
7) Ginger: candied ginger or gingersnap cookies
8) Jello - the kind that wiggles and jiggles (not the Australian jello, which is jam or jelly)

Eric with his favorite sea meal: plain noodles!

Other families have told me they like to have rice cakes around, but ours always end up going stale before we open them.   So when the French sailor who was about to begin ocean passages with his little girls asked me for advice on what food to buy, I gave him the above list.  It is sadly bland and void of olives and brie cheese, but really the idea is for them to drink a lot of fluids and then eat foods that will let them keep the fluids down.  If/when Eric starts to throw up, it's a big routine to rehydrate him for the next few hours. Best avoided.

And I want to end this post in the Here and Now.  Eric has become a good sailor, despite his battle with mal de mar. He's tried everything under the moon medication-wise, and he's always so resilient when he does get sick. After throwing up, he says "That's all right, I don't care, Mommy" but I know that everyone hates that feeling and I know he is just being super tough. During our most recent passage from South Georgia to Cape Town we had the kind of conditions you'd expect: we hove-to for 3 gales and there was a steady 4 m swell running all the time as background music to the wind waves and chop. And on this particular passage Eric did not get sick once! Of course, he was taking medication, but often the medicine does not work.  He felt nauseous at times and so our routine was for him to sleep alongside me on the cabin sole each night, and to spend ALL day in the cockpit drawing pictures.  We went through a lot of paper on that passage!

A happy Eric, sailing somewhere between South Georgia and Cape Town.

Eric gives South Georgia a thumbs up!

Eric recently turned 6 and his ability to think problems out is improving all the time. He has not quite reached the 'age of reason' but he is already talking to me about the upcoming passage. He quietly mentions that he doesn't like passages because he doesn't like to be sick.  I can't blame him one bit.  But as morale officer, I don't miss a chance to remind Eric that he's doing better and better each time. I tell him that he's already sailed our hardest passage  - that steady gales and ice bergs are behind us.   When I talk to Eric about the upcoming wind and swell conditions that await us, he gets excited for the tradewind sailing that is on our horizon.

We all are.

If I have missed any foods that work for another queasy kid, please let me know and I'll make sure I buy it before we sail for St. Helena later this month!

Just Fun

The Galactics, watching wildlife

Well, courtesy of the patchy cell coverage that we have enjoyed in the out of the way places that we've been visiting, we're now nearly three weeks into our car camping trip through South Africa and Namibia and the chronicle of our doings in this space is hopelessly out of date.

I want to post this brief note to say that in spite of the inevitable hassles of putting in long days in the car with a six year old, and the occasional moments of travel uncertainty, we have been having almost nothing but fun, day after blessed day.

Now, having fun is about the only goal that some yachties need in their approach to sailing and life. (Thinking of you, Fatty Goodlander.)  But fun, to be perfectly honest, usually bores me to tears.  I outgrew fun, as a pursuit, right around the time that I flunked out of college for having too much of it. The idea of traveling the world in a small boat just to have fun seems completely ridiculous to me.  Why not stay home and watch You Tube? That would be more "fun".

I am not at all fit to keep their company, but the travelers who I look up to are the Ryszard Kapuścińskis of the world, the Bruce Chatwins and the Bill Tilmans.  I admire people who travel far  afield out of an overabundance of human spirit, who travel out of an incurable romance with the idea that whatever there is to figure out about life, it won't be figured out sitting at home.

What did any of those three men know about "fun"?

The land yacht

The braai

Nonetheless, that's what we've been doing on this trip - having fun. We've been hitting the national parks in a supremely comfortable camper and seeing the iconic wildlife of southern Africa. Every night we braai (barbecue) under the stars. The beer is cheap, the wine is cheap and good, and we can afford t-bone steaks. Both boys are mad for birding, and nothing makes them happier than spotting a species that is new to the family - in our lexicon, a "lifer". I have a good book to read, and just before this trip I finished up a huge push of science work.

So who wouldn't be having fun?

And, well. There might be something to be said for this fun stuff, after all. It's not like the gloomy and serious among us have all of the answers. So, for this month at least, I'll be satisfied with the company of my dear wife, and the hundred smiles that my boys grace each day with, and the supreme good fortune that sees us able to undertake this trip together.

But we take our fun seriously! Up at 0500, making sandwiches to see us through the day...

Eric and lion

All funned out

So, cross us off your things to worry about in the world.  We're having fun.

I'll post some specifics soon...