Diwali

The past four (or five?) days in Fiji have been occupied by Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

Being the traveling family with a three-year-old, we didn't get adventurous and head into Lautoka at night to immerse ourselves in the festivities.  But upon learning that fireworks were a major part of the holiday, we added "pyrotechnics that might be illegal in either of our home countries" to the shopping list for Alisa's big bout of provisioning a few days ago.

That's me, last night, in the delight-of-anticipation preparatory phase.

And me in the launch phase:

The real pieces of resistance were the two stand-up bomb throwers/rocket sparklers/noise bangers that I lit and set adrift in a plastic tub tied to the stern of Galactic.  Turns out that after you light the fuse it actually takes longer than you expect to get the darn thing set in the tub and pushed away.  My maniacal laughter at the display had a hint of nervous relief at not having the things go up in my face.

Alisa, preoccupied with the boys and the question of whether I was going to set the boat on fire, didn't manage to get a pic.

But she did get Elias' reaction:

Will I Miss This?

I changed the oil on the genset yesterday - a totally routine boat task.  Also routine was the absolute cascade of perspiration that I found myself in during the job.

There's the heat of the tropics, and there's the oven-like heat of a generator compartment or an engine room even hours after the generator/engine has been run.  Put them together, and you get a puddle of sweat on the cabin sole after the job is done (right).

So, I said to Alisa, I wonder if we'll ever end up in a cold enough place that I'll miss being soaked in sweat every time I do a job like this?

Navadra

(Thanks to our buddy Franz for posting these pics of a long-ago cross-country ski trip to the Arctic...)

Check out these two people, completely in love with Alaska.

Do you ever wonder why, six years after they gave up their wonderful lives in the Great Land to head to sea on a boat of their own, they haven't come home already?

I guess one reason we're still at it is places like this:

This is the anchorage we've been in for the last four days, between little Vanua Levu and Navadra islands - that's Galactic, nestled in the center there.  I took this pic when I hiked up to the top of Navadra to get enough internet reception to fire off a few work emails.

It's hard to believe that we've been gone from New Zealand for less than four months.  So much has happened in that time, so many little adventures and new faces and endless little moments of quiet joy with the family on the boat.  Buggering off to go sailing in the heart of your peak earning years might condemn you to an eventual fate of septuagenarian retail employment, but it does have the compensation of stretching time right now, of giving you the illusion of slowing things down right in the sweet center of your lifespan.

Navadra gave us one more spell of tropical bliss for the season.

Man, machete, and coconut

One of the highlights of our stay here was that it coincided with a break in my work.  I've just submitted a paper, and proposal-writing season is not yet in full swing.  So during the four days we were here, I had time to come along on all four of our beach swim-picnic sessions.  Alisa kept commenting on how unusual it was to have me along every day.

We had the place largely to ourselves.  A couple of tour boats came one day and dropped their passengers on the beach for a few hours.  And then two like-minded boats, also carrying young children, dropped by for a couple nights and provided us with convivial company.

And we learned the perils of trusting a seven-year-old to look after his own sunscreen.  Check out poor Elias' face after a session in the waves without a hat.  You can see the big stripes on his cheek where sunscreen was applied, and the burn everywhere where it wasn't.

We take sun protection pretty seriously, and felt pretty bad about this outcome - this is about the worst burn either of the kids have ever had.

~~

And this morning we just up and sailed away, the way we sail away from all these great places...

Now!

Well, I've come full circle in the five days since I've been back on board Galactic.

I arrived jet-lagged and groggy.  And today I find myself groggy after staying up to 0100 last night to get a paper submitted to the journal where it will hopefully find a home.

In between these two sleepy bookends I've had a week of too much work for too little pay.  I've found myself reunited with a partner/first mate/reason for living whose morale was somewhat shaken by eight days of unrelieved kid duty.  And through it all we've been living under the lowering skies and stifling air of the season's slowest low-pressure system.

So now it's time.  The paper is submitted, the visibility for navigating is ok, if not great, and we're going sailing.

Home Again

The view of my homecoming, from my perspective - Elias and Eric closing their eyes and holding out their hands for gifts from Canada.  Eric got three examples of the Dr. Seuss oeuvre, and Elias got The Hobbit and The Sword in the Stone,  both of which we will read to him.  Nanaimo had a great used book store.

So I'm back.  Alisa managed to hold down the fort for the eight days that I was away from the boat with nothing worse than a funny story to share.  (That's at the end of the post.)

I had a good time seeing colleagues at the marine science conference, and am full of ideas for new research.

I was also sick the whole time I was there, and after the 24 hours of travel that it took to get from the hotel in Nanaimo back to Galactic, I am very glad indeed to be home.

The migration of yachts from Fiji down to New Zealand for the upcoming cyclone season has begun, and Galactic will soon be heading that way.  We'll start watching the weather patterns in earnest, and hope to sample just a few more delightful tropical anchorages before we turn south.

Alisa and I haven't yet had the chance to catch up without the boys around, but it seems we've both been thinking about the long-range plan, and independently coming to the same opinion about where Galactic should be heading after New Zealand.

More about that some other time.

OK, so here's the story.

Alisa had a good routine going with the boys while I was gone.  Three hours of school in the morning for Elias while Eric played in the saloon.  Then into the resort for a swim in the pool, picnic lunch on the beach and back to the boat for Eric to nap, then an early dinner at the bring-your-own-food barbecue that the resort hosts for yachties every night.

So, coming back from the pool one day, the outboard quit - Alisa had neglected to fill the tank that morning.

Undaunted, she started rowing back to Galactic.  And then one of our aluminum oars, which had been secretly corroding from the inside, snapped in half.

So now she was without means of propulsion, and being blown down on the reef behind the mooring field.  Yells and waves at neighboring yachts brought no response.  So she stripped down to her skivvies, jumped into the water, and began swimming for the mothership, dinghy and children following along at the end of the painter.

It was only after they made it back to Galactic, and Alisa was standing on the jupe, that someone showed up to see if she needed any help.

The funny part comes when Alisa is telling the story, and she's trying to thank this yachtie bloke she's never met before for coming by to offer help, while simultaneously trying to ask him to just leave right away so she doesn't have to stand there and talk to him in her not-ready-for-company outfit of soaked sports bra and underpants.

Mango smoothies in the pool.  Alisa admits to the regular employment of bribery to get her way with the crew while I was gone.

Leaving Home

This was the view from our lower spreaders yesterday afternoon.  Galactic is in the mooring field at the Musket Cove Resort, along with about 40 other boats.

This isn't the sort of place that we would normally bother with.  But it gives us everything we need during my upcoming trip to Canada for a marine biology conference - a secure place for the boat, and, importantly, the resort pool, which our boys will surely not tire of during the week I'm away.  It also turns out that the boat needed to be at a marina (or on a marina's mooring, in this case) in order to secure a letter from Immigration that will allow me to re-enter Fiji without an onward ticket.  

Anchoring off resorts is a very popular thing for yachts to do in Fiji.  I think that part of the reason is that people are scared off of the idea of presenting sevusevu and interacting with a village at every new anchorage they visit, and the resorts, which are outside the sphere of traditional protocol, give them a way to skip that experience.

I'm sitting in the departure lounge of the Nadi airport as I write this.

Alisa and I have been getting ready for this period of separation for a week or so - mostly just me bringing her up to speed on various engineering details.  I'm sure that everything that will be fine while I'm gone, though it will be full duty for her to be the only adult on board all week.

But while I'm sure everything will be fine, it was a jarring experience to wave goodbye to my wife and two little boys - them on the decks of Galactic, me on the ferry that would take me to the main island of Viti Levu.

We live a physically very close existence, of course, and share nearly every experience on board as a family, which made it a bit surreal to be leaving them on the boat without me...

Funny Weather

The east side of Viti Levu.

We've been making tracks to get the boat in place for my upcoming trip to Canada for a marine biology conference.

With a rare deadline in hand and not wanting to get caught short, we watched a forecast low approaching for days.  It was meant to bring heavy rain - not the sort of weather for navigating by eyeball among the uncharted reefs that appear here and there in Fiji.  So we've kept the pace up, putting in longish days and denying the boys the pleasures of shore.

Finally we arrived in Vitongo Bay just before the three days of rain were meant to start.  It wasn't the most exciting anchorage (read: no beach for the kids), but it was secure.

Soon after we had the anchor down the clouds to the west of us became properly threatening.

And then...nothing happened.

The rain didn't appear the next day.  Or the next.

I worked on some science.  The boys bounced around the boat.

Finally, at lunch on the second day, Elias asked if we couldn't just get a move on.  Which we promptly did.

We made it about ten miles down the track that day, and the action and movement raised everyone's spirits.

And the next day, as the forecasts were still calling for heavy rain and thunderstorms, and the low was stubbornly remaining to the north of us, we had a sail that looked this good:

The end.

Amongst It

Fiji has given us our first family snorkel outings since Tonga, which seems so long ago.  The pics below were taken at the Namena Reef reserve, our first stop out of Savusavu.  Divers and boat owners visiting the reef pay a small fee that goes to the village with traditional ownership of the area, and compensates the villagers for not fishing on the reef.  After all of the over-fished reef ecosystems that we've seen, this seems like a promising approach for conservation, though I can imagine a social downside through the loss of traditional fishing activities. 

Two-marine-biologist crew that we are, we went out of our way to find someone who could take our fee.

These are damselfish - blue-green damsels / Chromis viridis, if I'm not mistaken.  The damsels are the Pomacentridae - a ubiquitous, often beautiful, and diverse family of reef fish - our ID book lists 199 species.  I've been paying more and more attention to damsels lately.  They're always there, so that you tend to take them for granted, but when you start paying attention you see how hard they can be to ID, and how many different types are about.

These aren't damsels - they're anthias, and members of a completely different family (though I can see three damsels in the photo as well).   We've seen almost no anthias, so I was very excited to see this group, though I wasn't able to identify them.

Eric is a champ on our family snorkel outings, paddling along in goggles and life jacket, breathing through a snorkel even though he never puts his head in the water.  

The trouble comes afterwards, when we're showering off back on the mothership.  Eric hates having his face or hair washed - to the point where doing either involves a complete full-volume screaming/crying tantrum.  Who brought a three-year-old on this trip? I say every time.

The solution, we've found, is to shower him while he's wearing his goggles and has his snorkel in his mouth.  Alisa thinks he's still crying a bit, but that the snorkel mutes it...

Namena Island was a fun stop, but there is no village on the island, so we weren't really engaging with Fiji while we were there.  All that began at our next stop, Makongai Island.

These village kids are fast, Elias says. 

That's me above in my village-formal kit - a sulu to be exact - on the day we made sevusevu at Makongai.  As I noted in an earlier post, this spot isn't a village - it's a fisheries station dedicated to the rearing of giant clams and green sea turtles that occupies the site of an old leper colony.  But visiting yachts still do the proper thing with sevusevu - the traditional request for permission to be in the precincts of a village, with a ritual gift of yaqona.

Dressed up for a visit to shore.

Makongai gets heaps of yachts passing through, but the people living there give very little indication of being burned out with the endless visitors.

On our second night there was an "entertainment" for the yachties in the anchorage.  Normally we stay away from canned demonstrations of traditional culture.  But this was a fundraiser, with contributions requested to help pay for a trip to the main island of Viti Levu by the island schoolchildren, which is an obviously good cause.  And the locals were so gracious about the whole thing - the invitation so sincerely made, the entertainment attended by everyone living at the site and presented with such obvious good will, that we were very pleased to attend.

Eric isn't sucking his thumb - he's imitating Lisa's performance of a whale call.

The yaqona bowl.  Yaqona is more familiarly known to us by the Polynesian name of kava.  It's the traditional grog of Melanesia.  The triangular emblem on the front of the bowl traditionally points at the chief, and the guys doling out the yaqona made a big joke of making sure it was pointing at one of the yachties - who happened to be me.

A couple of Hungarian sailors who have spent the entire season in Fiji taught me to say "high tide!" to request a full ration when my yaqona cup was being filled.  They also egged me on to say "taki".  It's how the chief calls for another round to be served out, they explained.  Say it, say it, they told me.  Everyone will love it.

So I called out taki, twice.  There was a muttering of taki in the crowd on the pandanus mats, but no further round of yaqona was produced.  Then two men excused themselves and the sound of pounding started up nearby.  Instead of explaining that the yaqona bowl was empty, our hosts were graciously pounding the root to prepare more.

We knew that the entertainment had nearly finished off the local supply of yaqona, and I felt crestfallen at having been unwittingly rude enough to demand more.  My only consolation was that I had brought in a second bundle beyond my sevusevu contribution when the word went out that the local yaqona supply was low. 

The local kids have been practicing for an upcoming dance competition, and provided the entertainment.

After the dancing and singing was through, the second bowl of yaqona saw the yachtie-local fraternization deep into the night.  The Galactics, though, excused themselves early and got the younger crew to bed...

The end.

On It

On the wind, that is.

Though pictures forever fail to capture the experience of being at sea, here is a brief photo album of our day spent sailing into the wind to get to the reef-encircled island of Makongai.

Queasy three-year-old tries, and presumably fails, to get comfortable on the high side.  

Mom smiles at it all.  

Soaked after a stint on the bow, conning us through the pass under sail.

Mom and son vs. tuna. 

It was a dinner to remember.

~~

Those pictures were taken a few days ago.  Today, we've had a surprisingly tiring time navigating through the reefs to get up to the north side of Viti Levu.  

The most remarkable event of the day was the pig we came across about two miles offshore, swimming along bravely, but not towards land.  I was at the mast, looking out for uncharted reefs, and so saw the pig first.  Funny how quickly you do the parental calculus that adds up to "don't say anything".

But Elias spotted the pig as well, snorting and blowing bubbles with his snout as he paddled along with his trotters.

Eric instantly displayed the expected reaction.  "Can we save him?" he asked.  

Alisa and I looked at each other.  

This pig wasn't anything out of E.B. White.  It was a big, feral-looking pig out of the Melanesian bush.  Every scenario that we might imagine for a rescue had a variety of poor endings.

I didn't think of it at the time, but this might have been the only time in our six years on board that a gun would have been useful, as one reasonable thing to do would have been to drive right up to the pig, shoot it, haul the carcass on board with a halyard, proceed to a village, and make lots of new friends.

As it was, we left the pig to his fate.

Lord knows how he got there.