Stop and Think

What sailors really think about - the weather. In this case, the weather between Hawai'i and "home".
It doesn't look uncomplicated!

After a visit back to the mainland US to catch up with our families, we are now very happily ensconced once again on the mothership.

One more big ole jump across the blue marble and we expect to be back "home" to Kodiak, that delightfully real commercial fishing town that our boys know not at all and that we know only through ten years of selective memory retention.

(How "delightfully real" is Kodiak as a commercial fishing port? I just looked at the numbers. For 2014, the weight of landings in Kodiak was 35 times the weight of landings for the entire nation of Australia.)

That arrival back at our starting point remains firmly abstract to me. I'll believe it when I see the green hills of Kodiak off our bow.

What's not so abstract is the way that we are engaging with the future that we hope to build for ourselves there.

For me, that means the endless quest for the scientist's Beast Glatisant, or "research funding", and the resulting fascination with the Beast's fewmets, or Requests for Proposals, Proposal Reviews, and Panel Decisions. (Yes, I have recently read The Once and Future King to my boys.)

And for both Alisa and me, that means another attempted act of transference, as we look to work that magic trick of bringing a dream to life. In this case, it is that long-standing dream of ours that goes something like this: "Hey, we're two marine biologists who have a boat of our own. Surely there is a worthwhile research project out there that we are uniquely suited to pursue?"

No mean feat, bringing a dream to life. Especially when that dream requires outside funding. But, given our track record in the living-the-dream department, I wouldn't bet against us. We're focusing the dream idea on the northern Bering and southern Chukchi Seas in the Alaskan Arctic. Stay tuned.

But as our entanglements with land life grow, I can feel the capacity for thought and reflection, one of the treasures of the sailing life, slipping away from us.

Any transition from a ten-year sailing trip back to a more settled existence is bound to entail some pretty big jumps in perspective and moments of cognitive dissonance.

But we have the unique "good fortune" of looking to plug back into our far corner of the US just as that country is going through a time that most politely might be described as "uniquely interesting". On top of the normal personal transition ahead of us, there are larger historical questions at play, some of them existential, that are so difficult to answer in the flash of the moment. (Mad props to you, George Orwell, for so often correctly calling the big historical questions of your time.)

As that transition gets closer, I only hope we keep some of that big-horizon perspective that comes to people who sail the world in their own boats.

School daze - Eric takes a spelling test, Elias yawns.

After 10 years on the Pacific Seafarers' ham net, we finally met longtime net control and former  yachtie Randy, KH6RC. And, incredibly kindly, he gave Elias all of his old pelagic trolling lures and a rod and reel. Very happy kid there.

The latest issue of Cruising World.

The Galactics love national parks! And, like all true westerners, we love public lands in general. It's those people Back East (Wyoming, thinking of you!) who want to lock them up in private ownership.

Kilauea Iki. This was a lake of lava in 1959. We visited on a drizzly cold morning and saw exactly one other party of tourists on the whole four mile walk.

As Fast As the World Possibly Can

The world is giving every indication of not being satisfied with a slow boil.

More and more we worry that a full boil is in the cards.

And we wonder what storm of steam will wait us on land.

Stupidity trumpets its own virtue. Three Orwells would be kept busy overtime.

Bleaching

In my professional life, I have a more than casual acquaintance with the empirical view. I, who stare at data for a living, have been a bit more than at a loss with data describing the Arctic this winter.

The world changes, every bit as fast as the world possibly can.

We have had the great good fortune to fall in with a sailing family from South Africa who are mad keen divers. The dad is a PADI instructor and was just getting their 8-year-old daughter into the introductory class, and getting her a dive partner would be convenient. Which has been in turn terribly convenient for Elias. Thanks so much, guys.

Meanwhile, dangerous children appear to have locked themselves in the conductor's compartment.

Why, given how rapidly we are changing the world out from under our feet, would anyone in any position of power pay attention to science? Of course, given who we are as human beings, you would only expect that someone in a position to act for the greater good would decide that publicly putting his head up his own ass would be the appropriate and cautionary thing to do.

(I thought, briefly, about looking for a less indelicate metaphor there. But if Flaubert couldn't make the stars cry and had to settle for beating out rhythms on a cracked pot, well then. Who am I?)

Thanksgiving on Galactic. Tom there has a lot in common with us. He's retired from the marine biology world. He's also a dual Ameri-Aussie. And he once supervised one of my PhD supervisors! We last saw Tom in Cape Town, and then he rocked up in Bonaire in time for the sailors' classic - a brief but fun hangout.

So, really, I should be reading some Orwell. This is clearly the time for the consolations of literature. But I find myself embarked on a long biography of Thelonious Monk just now, and so have had to make do with some fragments of Auden for any literary perspective.

Auden from the 1930s. Not the thing to lighten your mood.

But Auden does give us Dance, dance, for the figure is easy, / The tune is catching and will not stop. Which is as close to a motivating philosophy as we have come on Galactic.

So lately the idea of some grand gesture has been gaining currency among the Galactics. We consider voyaging distances and timelines of season that are clearly in combination not productive of practicable ideas.

But still. Does this feel like the time for practicality? We do yearn for that grand gesture. We aspire to be Gallic.

Because, really. There are a few true things that I have found to do in my life, and a few true things that Alisa and I have found together and those things happened mostly in Alaska where the scope and beauty of the world can be, for weeks at a time, all that you need to account for. And we've found something like that at sea as well, with our family.

Though finding your way through the mundane weeds of shore can be tiring work for your average carthorse, at sea the verities are all there is. They scream at you with every green flash sunset. They toss you back and forth with every passing wave.

So now, though we're sitting at Bonaire, where I can get my science work done, we are dreaming with our eyes wide open.

And we're dreaming of the sea.

The Way Forward

Well, I'm back to the boat.

And what a visit to the home country that turned out to be!

The only good part of being in the US when the White Power candidate was elected to the highest office of the land was that on election night I happened to be in the company of the best man from my wedding. He and I went out and got drunk, both thoroughly and publicly.

It didn't make me feel any better, really.

So that hopeful feeling about returning to the home country? That has been replaced by something much more wary.

We do all have Australian passports, of course. And a boat that experience tells us is probably adequate to the task of sailing back to Hobart.

I remember going through the "we're outta here" phase on election night. I think it was mostly between drinks number six and nine. I found myself declaiming, to anyone who would listen, "I hope that works out for all y'all!"

But the draw of Alaska is strong.  There is also the thing about not wanting to be driven out of your country, but I find that consideration works on me only when Alaska is part of the equation. Without the Great Land, I think I'd prefer to go and be middle class in Oz, thanks much.

So, when we exit the Panama Canal early next year (everything going to plan), we expect to turn right for Hawai'i, rather than left for Fatu Hiva. Unless the Pussy Grabber In Chief has managed to start a particularly egregious war in the first couple months of his administration.

The year so far, as seen by the Caribbean Safety and Security Net

So. That leaves us in the Caribbean for a couple more months. It seems like a pretty trivial concern at this point, but we have so far completely failed to see the magic of the Caribbean. Our loathing for crowds and very low tolerance for crime risk are a tough combo here. See the map of reported thefts, assaults, and general non-fun sailor moments above.

We had thought about heading up to Cuba, but a chance comment from some Canadian friends about how Cuba wasn't such a fascination for them as it was for American sailors resonated with me. I had a visit to Cuba with that same best man about 19 years ago, and it was great. I don't think I really need to go again.

We thought about Guatemala as well, but very little research told us that it was the kind of place where sailors lock themselves into their boats at night behind stainless steel bars. Not the Galactic way, that.

So for now it looks like we're bound for Colombia.

Stay tuned.

Crossings

So, of course we crossed the equator on this recent passage from South Africa to the Caribbean.  It was our third crossing. And the increasing maturity of our crew is marked by the changing way that we celebrate crossing the line.

This was our first crossing, on Pelagic in the Pacific in 2008. None of us have crossed the line under sail before, so we have no shellbacks among us to preside as King Neptune. Elias is standing in, as befits an occasion where the normal maritime hierarchy ought to be reversed.

And this was our second crossing, on Galactic in 2011. That of course is your faithful correspondent as Neptune. This time around, it was only Eric who was initiated into that select fraternity of those who have sailed across the equator.

But! Look what happened when we crossed this time. We had a dance party. Before too long the boys will be joining us in the ceremonial tot of rum.

52 Days/I Know the Size of the Sea

I won't die without knowing how big the sea is.

It is exactly the size of the human heart.

We sailed across the breadth and half the length of the Atlantic. Day after day, week after week, wave after wave, green flash after green flash. As fast as the wind cared to carry us.

You take on a challenge that big with your family for company and only your own skills and wherewhithal to rely on and you'll know - the world is all the stage our ambition needs. Impossibly big, but within the reach of our most serious efforts. Those most serious efforts that carry us into joy.

That life our family made for those weeks, in the odd confines of the boat. Where we lived overarched by the endless sky, while able to walk only twenty steps in one direction.

Look at that life now! It was as big as the world.

We left South Africa on August 3. We arrived in Curaçao on September 24. That makes 52 days on passage, counting the three days each that we spent in St. Helena, Ascension, and Grenada.

As always, land life has caught up with us in port, and the dream that was our life at sea fades into disbelief. We know it happened, and I look back at my journal and marvel at the scratchings there. What thoughts were occupying me, and how do I make sense of them now?

Could it really have been that good? That's the question that always stays with Alisa and me.

It used to be that we would have to put to sea again to find out.

But now we've been doing this for enough years to know.

It was.

Home

Leaving Cape Town before dawn

I have so so so much more to say about our time in South Africa and Namibia. But all that will have to wait for another venue. The course of events has overtaken my desire to consider the past. We are, in that way that is essential for this particular lifestyle of ours, moving on.

We have left behind the gilded palace of the Waterfront Marina in Cape Town and shifted our program northwards, to Saldanha Bay, one of the few protected anchorages in the whole of South Africa. Here I've given some attention to that blessed science work that keeps us going financially. A front is meant to pass through tonight. And then, tomorrow, the gods and the vicissitudes of the sea assenting, we are setting off for St. Helena and points north.

To be more specific, points far north. All the sailing that took us from French Polynesia to South Africa has been taking us farther and farther from Alaska, even as we've been metaphorically looking over our shoulders at the delights of the North, and resolving that we would soon point the bow in their direction.

Soon is a concept that is lived at the ages-old speed of sail on board Galactic, just as it is on any traveling boat. It's been twenty months since we left the Gambier and soon has arrived. Every mile that we will sail on this coming passage, and every mile on the passage after that, and the passage after that, will bring us closer to Kodiak, Alaska, the home that we left nine years ago. All the uncertainties that pertain to any attempt to cross one ocean and a major chunk of another on a family sailboat aside, we hope to arrive in Alaska in a year or so. We are sailing home.

And, we're not at all sure what we'll find in that strange place that we've been mentioning whenever people ask us about our home for the last nine years. Our old life there is as gone as anything. The house that Alisa and I came home to after we were married, and that we brought Elias home to on the day he was born, that's gone. Our old jobs, they're gone too. We still have good friends in Kodiak, though of course the scene there will have changed in the ten years of our absence, though not nearly so much as we have changed over the same time. We don't know what we'll find, and our plans for re-entry into Alaskan life are so shamefully vague as to not deserve the name. And of course just as we've been deciding that it is at long last time for us to sail back to Alaska, we've been watching the home country teetering on the edge of some dark place.

We're buoyed by the memory of how completely Alisa and I loved Alaska before. Alaska, as a place and as a group of people, is something that we haven't seen surpassed anywhere we have gone. We're eager to rediscover the place, and to share it with our sons. We'll sign up for that, for sure.

And, as for a concrete plan for what we'll do once we're there...Well, there's always Galactic, and the siren song of the sea. We have been lucky beyond measure to get these years afloat as a family, and maybe, just maybe, that luck will go on.

And Gone

The season moves ever on, and the winds are forecast to be favorable starting tomorrow.  So, assuming that the good weather-organized boat Venn diagram comes together, we'll make our departure from Ra'ivavae to Rapa.

We've been lucky enough to visit a lot of islands in Polynesia over the last six years.  Ra'ivavae has been our favorite of the lot so far.

Harold Tamaititahio - our great help in Ra'ivavae

A big part of our delight in the island has to be the absence of a yachtie scrum.  Only one other boat stopped in during the month+ that we've been here.

We love meeting fellow sailors, and I love the way that the common experience of people who go to sea in their own boats is a dependable bridge over national differences.

But, when there are lots of boats around, as there are in most of the South Pacific anchorages, sailors tend to assort by nationality, which I find tends to defeat the whole idea of travel.  Worse still, when you share no common language with the locals, and little in the way of common outlook, a fleet of anchored boats gives you a pool of people who are easy to interact with, and that in turn makes it harder to get down with the locals, as it were.

So this mix, of one other boat with whom we could compare notes and trade stories (the delightful crew of the Dutch yacht Hera), was just right.

Marcelle and Eric

But of course, the real joy of Ra'ivavae was the people of this small island, and the warmth with which they welcomed us.  Ra'ivavae is a place where strangers shake your hand, it's a place where (almost) everyone has a wave and a smile at the ready.  Alisa's efforts of distributing lunettes served as our introduction in this place where we don't speak the language, and once we had gotten to know some people, it was the lunettes that we kept coming back to as our consolation when we considered the overwhelming generosity with which we were treated.

"Thank God for the lunettes," we would say to each other as people pressed gifts on us.  When you consider the work that goes into producing food here, and the easy grace with which it is given to strangers, reciprocation with an old t-shirt doesn't feel up to the mark.  So the lunettes have finally given us a way to feel that we're reciprocating adequately to Polynesian gift-giving.

(The many people who do the work to collect the old reading glasses and get them to us, while Alisa and Elias get all the fun of handing them out - that's another story.)

Alisa and an abandoned marae - a pre-contact chief's house/place for religious
devotion/center of local political power.  (I think.)  There are marae ruins
everywhere in Ra'ivavae.  While the language of the island survived, nearly all
knowledge of pre-contact culture is lost.  The island is small (less than 5 nautical
miles long) and the apocalypse of post-contact epidemics was total. 

So, Ra'ivavae gave us all that we ever hope to find in the sailing life.

But, then, someone from Moorea whom we met here smiled when we said we were going to Rapa and replied, "Rapa?  You'll cry when you leave Rapa."

New places ever await.

Content

Ever since we left New Zealand, we've been keeping the water tanks full with rain that we catch on board, supplemented by the occasional hauling session with jerry cans.

We last bought diesel fuel in New Zealand, but we carry a lot - 900 or 1000 liters - and I'm hoping that we won't have to buy more until we reach Chile.

Butane for cooking we can get at any village in French Polynesia, though is is a bit of an event to get the 13 kg tank out to Galactic and then back to the magasin empty after I've hung it on the stern arch and decanted the fuel into our own tanks.

All of which sets me up to mention an email I sent to a friend from the Tuamotus a while back.  I mentioned that our water, diesel and butane tanks were all full, and we were feeling pretty flush as a result.

I didn't think much about it, but the recipient grabbed on it as evidence that we were living the Good and Simple Life.  A, "mate, if that's what your'e worried about, I reckon you're doing alright" sort of sentiment.

Papaya and pamplemousse for breakfast, every day

His comment made me think about it more.  And I kind of agree.  We have our larger ambitions and our thoughts for the future.  But while we're traveling on the boat, most of our concerns are concrete and in the present.  That's a luxury, I suppose, in this day and age.

And it's a luxury we're not taking for granted - we are very satisfied at how easy it is to satisfy us right now, if you follow me.

Here in Raivavae, meanwhile, our satisfied-with-the-simple-things phase is taking on a new dimension - the dimension of fruit.

People grow a lot of fruit in Raivavae, just as they do on every volcanic island in Polynesia.  You can't buy any of it in the store.  But people here are phenomenally generous, and have given us so much that we have been replete with fruit throughout our stay.

Alisa has kept count - we've got our 8th stalk of bananas hanging from the stern arch right now.

After the fruit desert of the Tuamotus, all these tropical delights - the bananas and pamplemousse and korosole and vi and papayas and oranges and pomegranates and that weird purple sphere that we didn't get the name of - they are all a delight.  And, thanks to the kindness of people here, we have all that we could possibly want, and more.

What could be better than that?

Meanwhile, here, and below - there are so many more stories than I could ever get down!

Transition

What we left behind

One of the things that life on a traveling boat does very well is transitions.

You get used to atolls, say, but then the season is turning and it's time to light out for the mountainous islands to the south.  And the four days that it takes to sail to the next place give you all the time that you need to reflect on what you've seen, and to let the anticipation for the next place build.

The pass, and the village, astern

The passage to Raivavae was a mixed bag.  A booming run with the jib poled out for the first time in months.  Headwinds.  Calms.  Squalls and blue skies.

Passagemaking.  The ineffable peace of the sea.  Really, it's always just like this

Landfall at Raivavae

And then, this place, so different from anywhere we've ever been.

Raivavae is in the Australs, the southernmost archipelago in French Polynesia.  They are well off the beaten path for yachts, and thus offer the promise of a certain degree of time travel - the chance to go back to a time before locals' expectations had been colored by  hundreds and hundreds of boat visits each year.

The physical contrasts with the Tuamotus are everywhere.

First look

The wind sets up a profound silence here that you don't get in the Tuamotus, where the boom of surf on the reef colors every moment, day and night.  Here the wind whispers and sighs in the trees, familiar sounds that are the backdrop for a profound silence.  So different from the endless slatting of atoll coconut fronds in the tradewinds.

Mountain and mist

Here the rain just drops from the sky, miraculous gentle rain released from the mountain slopes without all the sturm-und-drang of squalls in the Tuamotus.

And, here there are mountains.

The boys, sighting a pig.   Poor fellows, we put them
into a lot of unfamiliar situations

A mountain gives the landscape some mystery, a suggestion of some place that can't be immediately known.

And mountains give people a place to run to, in times of need.  The Tuamotus, by contrast, are so exposed, such naked and vulnerable little bits of land.  Very foreign terrain for those of us who come from landmasses that cannot be seen across.

Revitalized, we find ourselves re-engaging with the travel life.  We are consciously putting ourselves forward.  The whole family sets out to hitch-hike to a village where dance might or might not be going on.  We ask permission to view the tiki in a stranger's backyard.  Alisa has met with the mayor, just as she meets with the mayor in every village where she will distribute lunettes.

There have been moments when finally arriving at this place that I have dreamed of for so many years has me thinking of the big picture.

Is there something important going on, something obvious that we are missing because our days are so full of the mundane details of keeping everything going?

Is there some song that all these people and all these places are singing, a song we could start to hear if we just stood still to listen?

It's always a dangerous moment when travelers start to seek something larger from their travels, when they start to look for the information that only wandering could reveal, the lesson that their stay-at-home friends will find invaluable upon their return.

It's not a mistake that one of the finest travel books of all time, The Songlines, was a novel.

You don't give up looking, of course.  Or at least being curious.  But the lessons are contingent.  They are personal.  We are who we are.  The world is what it is.  We go to sleep without the big questions being answered.

Meanwhile, we have this place to explore.

Contingent and Bohemian

If you're paying any attention you'll know that one of my very favorite things about French Polynesia is how the internet access completely sucks.

Here in the village of Pouheva, on Makemo Atoll, the internet surpassed all our expectations for glacial service at a caviar price.  Here it just didn't work, period.

Which, since I didn't have any pressing work commitments that I was trying to meet, was completely fine with me.  I could live my life instead of staring at a screen.

Now, after a couple days, the internet is inexplicably working.  I met a couple of non-pressing work deadlines.  And then, as is my wont, I took a look at the Times online.

And, oh vey, is the world doing an awful job of looking after itself while we're on this endless voyage of ours.

At the risk of being facile, I cannot help but ask why we, and our boys, are living such a charmed life.  Why are we so endlessly fortunate?  Those four (?) young boys who were killed while playing on the beach in Gaza a few weeks ago serve as a counter-example to our experience that will stay with me for a very long time.

One of the natural history marvels of the South Pacific are nesting fairy terns.  They famously don't actually build a nest, but just lay an egg on a bare tree branch and let the newly-hatched chick balance as best it can.  We've seen lots of fairy terns, but never a nest - until we spied this one in front of the Rotoava Mairie - the town hall.  Chick and adult were active when we spied them at dusk, but when we came back for pictures the next day it was siesta time.  That fluffball on the right is the snoozing chick

Tuhoe, the mayor of the commune that includes Fakarava.  As an orphaned teenager, he was adopted by an Alaskan couple visiting on their yacht, and spent the next five years living in Anchorage.  I asked him to pose with the fish he was giving us from his freezer

So, there is no way to segue out of that sort of intro, except to say that we are (touch wood yet again) on the most amazing roll.  It feels like the first seven years of all this nautical carrying-on were just the warm up.  We are now securely living an existence more contingent and bohemian than that led by anyone else we know - with the exception of a dozen or so of our sailing friends.  Well aware of how swiftly the unyielding twists of lifetime narrative can put an end to this sort of idyll, I am treasuring every day.

Like…the day that saw us done with our various business at the big smoke of Rotoava, and sailing off to the south pass of Fakarava:

Here and below - the blokes, more or less keeping watch for coral bommies.

God, do I love sailing in an atoll lagoon.  As long as the light is good.

And me, at the end of our second three-hour day of sailing inside the lagoon.  Moving the boat takes it out of you.

 And this one, for our friends on Enki, who are sailing the populous waters of the Med.  Check out the egregious overcrowding in the south Fakarava anchorage - ten boats in one frame!

The good old days, they're all gone.

The main attraction that brings all these boats is the famous south pass, with its various fauna Chondricthian.  We of course wanted to see for ourselves.  This, and below, is what happens when Alisa tells four-year-old Eric to hold on in the dinghy on the way to the pass.

He flies instead.

And some of the goods: a Napolean wrasse, of which there were several to be seen every time we visited the pass.  Something this big has to be poisonous (ciguatera) to be common.

 Boy and goatfish.

Gray reef shark.


















"They're potentially agressive!" Elias loves to point out.

Not that you'd know it from watching him swim around them.  The kid is very very relaxed in the water.

 How Eric "snorkels".  We're holding onto the painter of the dinghy and letting it float in the pass on the ebb tide along with us.  You get a great ride that way.

Toes and sharks - every parent's dream.

I've done all that one kid can do in one day.

Alisa taking a break from the water for a French lesson.  What else do you do if there's a retired French teacher in the anchorage?














Since these pictures were taken, we used the most perfect hiatus in the tradewinds to make tracks 75 miles upwind, to Makemo and its satisfyingly awful internet (and delightful new wharf).  More on all that soon.

Watching the green flash