Back

So, I'm back in the bosom of family...and boat prep.

Whenever I come back from one of my infrequent work trips, after I've left Alisa looking after the boys solo in some odd corner of the world or another, I'm always relieved to find the same number of crew on board Galactic as when I left.

It's not gaining crew while I'm away that worries me so much as losing some.

So I got to catch up on all the family news - the bread baking and the horses ridden, the recovering oiled gentoo penguin fed fish by hand and the triumphs and tribulations of boat schooling.

Alisa, while she was teaching and cooking and caring and arbitrating and washing and cleaning and mending, all without adult backup, also managed to service all the winches on Galactic while I was gone.  The Norwegian sailor who was next to Galactic in Carl's Marina (room for two visiting boats) saw that and said, "your husband is one lucky fellow!"

Don't I know it.

Having been away from the boat for three weeks, I feel a bit out of the sailing life.  Can you imagine going three whole weeks of sleeping on land every single night?  Kind of beggars the imagination, doesn't it?

Luckily, I've got the (fanfare) passage to South Georgia (!) to get me back in the swing of things.  Immediately upon returning to the boat, I tried very very hard to forget that I had ever earned a PhD and I went back to being Capt. do-it-yourself rigger so that we could be ready to catch the first window.  Before I left for Alaska I changed six shrouds.  After I got back, I tried to change the forestay and only managed to mangle my thumb.

As I say, I was ashore for 21 straight days.  Feel my pain.

But, the initial re-entry is over and we are on weather standby to leave the Falklands.  The work trip that I just finished, though it was very welcome, also took the heart of the Austral summer.  We're feeling the season moving on us, and would very much like to get going already.

But we know what works for us, and the head-out-in-(nearly)-any-weather attitude that works for some of our peers isn't at all for Galactic.  We scheduled with Customs to clear out tonight and depart early tomorrow, but a new low appeared in the forecast this morning and we scrapped that plan.

Our time will come, soon enough. 

Elias Shoots

Elias

King penguins

You'll excuse me if I talk about my oldest kid for a moment.

Elias is nine, and seems to be taking an unreasonable degree of delight from the life that he lucked into by being born the child of two marine biologists who were just about to set out on an open-ended sail on a smallish boat.

He has become our go-to for any questions of field identification when we spot a bird that is new to us.  He leafs through our field guides in his spare time and has a fantastic memory for what he reads.  I have learned not to voice my doubts too strongly when he expresses opinions on questions of range or plumage.  That memory is a counter-weight to his greatest weakness as a junior naturalist, which is an over-enthusiasm for making sightings of the unusual or note-worthy.

He is also finding a passion for wildlife photography and has long expressed the hope that one of his photos might be "good enough" for the blog or (forbid!) Cruising World.

The bird pics in this post are all his.

Rockhopper

Rockhopper and tussac

Albatross chick and rockhopper chick

Many of these rockhopper penguin shots were taken on Westpoint Island in the Falklands, where Elias made a solo visit to the colony.

I woke with a migraine that day, so Galactic wasn't mobile.  Alisa was canning up the mutton that was hanging in the stern arch when we sailed away from Beaver Island.  So Elias set out on his own, hiking from the jetty at the settlement across the island to the combined albatross/rockhopper colony.

I love the image of his nine-year-old self, by himself, creeping slowly around the birds so as not to disturb them and taking pictures of what he saw.  The surf booming on the base of the cliffs, the wind in the tussac grass, the constant hullabaloo of the birds, and Elias, both excited to be taking it all in on his own and also comfortable in the knowledge that this is the sort of adventure that you have when you're nine.

Not to tell stories on him, but as I understand it he stopped to take a leak at one point, forgot to re-buckle his belt when finished, and somehow managed to lose the entire belt before he realized his mistake and went back to find it.  I love the combination that story tells - a kid who is still coming to grips with the basic mechanics of life who is also completely unfussed over the proposition of striding off to a penguin colony by himself.

Gentoo and sheep

Black-browed albatross

Rockhoppers

Black-browed

Elias is also something of a fire-eater when it comes to the selection of destinations for Galactic in the global South ("I've never been seasick in my life!").  He is dead keen on visiting South Georgia.

Stay tuned on that one.

(No) Time For Travel

Gentoo penguins

Rockhopper penguin

Commerson's dolphins

So, we had this magical month in which we did nothing much more than sail around the Falkland Islands.

Before we set out on this endless-seeming trip of ours, when I'd talk to friends who had dipped into the world of long-term travel, this is what sounded so alluring to me: the idea of time to spend in this way.  Big chunks of it, applied to the pursuit of quixotic goals.

Tussac grass is a natural setting for childhood delight

The anchorages are kelpy!

Now that we're back in Stanley, that idyllic month seems very far away indeed.  The carefree month just gone, and the carefree month that we hope is coming up, are broken up by a period of mad boat prep and science work for me.

Alisa and I finished replacing a particularly difficult window at midnight last night, and then fell asleep at the saloon table, leaning on each other's shoulders.  We've replaced six shrouds on the boat, and gone out to tune the new rigging Falklands-style - beating up Stanley harbor with two reefs in the main and a scrap of jib.  I'm making new deadlights for windows that we aren't going to replace, and there's still the staysail forestay to replace if we get to it.  And the wind vane needs some attention.   And, no matter how much of these jobs I've gotten finished by the end of this week, I'm getting on a plane on Saturday to fly up to Alaska for a stint of in-person science work.

In the midst of all this, there is little time for travel.  We're tending our own various gardens for now, and not putting ourselves forward so much in Stanley.

Westpoint Island

Rockhopper penguin

Black-browed albatross

Preening rockhoppers

Like a turkey through the corn

Meanwhile, as you can see from these images, one of the delights of our time here has been the wildlife.  The albatross and various penguins are about as unconcerned with people as you could wish.  It's easy to find settings where it's just our family sitting next to a seabird colony, watching the show.  The boys have been in heaven.

Rockhoppers

Gentoos 

And a magellanic penguin for variety.  They're burrow nesters. 

All of the land-based shots here were taken at Westpoint and Carcass Islands, where we were very warmly received by either the caretakers or owner.  We were free to just wander around and entertain ourselves on both islands - very much a travel experience, as opposed to the regimented experiences of tourism.

And Carcass offered us another chance to get up close with some elephant seals.  Wonderfully argumentative creatures, those.

OK.  I gotta go cut some more deadlights.

Your Bloodthirsty Children

As I write this we're on our final countdown to leave Beaver Island, in the very westernmost Falklands.  I don't have our log just by me so I'm not quite sure exactly how long we've been here - at least a week, anyway.  This place has had that special magic of being timeless for us.

Riding in the back of the Land Rover - only the beginning. 

For the boys in particular Beaver Island has been a complete joy.  A highlight for them has been how hands-on the place has been.  We've been to any number of places where you can't touch this or disturb that.  But Beaver is part of that world where it is ok to kill what you eat, rather than paying someone else to pay someone else to do it for you.  The boys, who have long lived on fantasies of farming and hunting, found the reality quite to their liking.

Running alongside the Land Rover - even better if there is a...

The tone for our visit was set when we arrived, and our host Leiv offered to go out and shoot a reindeer on our first full day on the island.  No mucking around and waiting for the "perfect" time on Beaver.

...dead reindeer ahead.

Beaver is home to a herd of reindeer that Leiv's dad and brother plucked off South Georgia in Leiv's Dad's boat, the Golden Fleece.

(Jérȏme Poncet is known as "Leiv's Dad" on board Galactic, but he is something of a deal in the small world of adventurous sailors.  The brother even has a Wikipedia page - I checked.  He and "Leiv's Mom", Sally, got up to a lot of very impressive adventures in the Southern Ocean, long before  these contemporary days when everyone and their cousin is sailing around down south.  Genuine Bill Tilman-type adventuring.)

The tone for the whole visit was set on that reindeer hunt.  Leiv tried to get close to a herd of reindeer but they ran off.  He then tried to salvage the day by interesting our boys in a visit to the nearby gentoo penguin colonies.  You've never seen an offer of professed "fun" fall so flat with a pre-adolescent audience.

I could just see the thought balloons over Elias' and Eric's heads as they looked down at their toes, too polite to tell Leiv what they thought of his offer to go eco-touring.  "Effing penguins?", they were thinking.  "Whatever, farm boy.  I thought you were gonna whack us a caribou."

Leiv referred to them later as "your bloodthirsty children".  Shamed into doing the right thing, he snuck up on the reindeer again and shot one this time.

Mutton chops on the grill.

The boys, bless them, have been game for whatever harvesting opportunity has been on offer at Beaver, from reindeer liver to hearts of tussac grass to mushrooms to minnows trapped in the creek to upland geese for Christmas dinner.

Alisa, not to be left out, has been keeping the pressure cooker humming, filling our empty mason jars with mutton and reindeer for the long miles ahead.

And minnows to grill and eat whole while we're waiting.

Elias watching Leiv butcher a sheep

Elias, following Leiv.  Leiv has been the perfect host for our boys (and for us).
Don't you love the way their two postures tell the tale of the journey from boy to man?

Elias hunting (unsuccessfully) for our Christmas goose - they're on the hill in the background.

Bloodthirsty - boy and sea lion.

Alisa and Leiv cutting meat.  The Falklands are quite the place for Alaskans who have been away from home too long. 

Elias plucking one of the Christmas geese that Leiv shot.

Christmas geese. 

Our reindeer antler Christmas tree.

I'll write more about Beaver Island later, I'm sure.  But now, in the moment before we leave and begin the journey back to Stanley, I wanted to just share these pictures and this brief account of how much fun the boys have had here.

We've been to a lot of places in the last eight and a half years.  But I suspect that Beaver is going to be on the short list of those places that we can invoke with just a name.

Five years from now one of us will be able to say "Beaver Island", and the other three will light up at the memory.

The end.