The Abyss of Time

Tufted puffin - the baddest seabird of the North Pacific

Idyll underway. If the kids are safely tucked away in a book, all is well with our world.

The miraculous Pacific halibut - they're nearly all meat.

The pics above are from our recent biological sampling trip around Kodiak.

It was...great. A detailed report soon, as soon as I get enough free time from science to tell the story.

But for now, I want to consider two other pictures.

The first image is from Long Island - our very first-ever anchorage after we left Kodiak. That's our Pelagic in the background, and of course cabin boy #1 Elias on my back.

And we were just back in Long Island on this last jaunt of ours, ten years and two months after the picture above was taken.

That's Galactic in the background below. Elias has been promoted to AB, but he's still on my back. And cabin boy #2 is very much in the picture, both actually and metaphorically.

As any parent of young children will tell you - the days are endless, and the years go so fast. As I view the progression that is captured by these pics, I am reminded to drink up every minute of time that I have with these two pre-adolescent sons of ours. Nothing could be sweeter than what we have, right now, as a family.

And...it's reassuring to see that Long Island has gotten sunnier over the last 10 years!

Dependable

Me and mom (and Eric).

Well.  I would count us as lucky.  We have had a life over the last ten years that has been far richer than the life awaiting us in that alternate universe where everyone gets just what they deserve.

Our good fortune has been wonderfully multifaceted, and, I hope, not been taken for granted. (In conversation with Alisa I have started using the shorthand "white privilege goes to sea" to refer to a certain sort of American sailor.) But just now I want to focus on the tremendous good fortune that we had in our shoreside ship's agent during our ten years afloat.

That ship's agent to Galactic would be Joan Litzow. Mom to me, "JoJo" to my kids. (Someone felt too young to be called grandma almost 11 years ago when Elias was born.)

Anyone who has been on an open-ended sailing trip will tell you how important it is to have someone back in the home country to look after your affairs. We Galactics cut the ties more than most. No house or business back in the home country to tie us down. And the internet has of course made the mundane details of life infinitely more tractable for travelers.

But, for all that, if you're going on a years-long trip, you really need someone to help out with practicalities. My mom was set up to sign checks for us and authorized to deal with our credit card companies on our behalf. She could deposit the checks that came in from my science work and my writing for Cruising World, she could let us know when the credit card company was calling to OK the sudden splurge of spending in the final 48 hours before we put to sea from some foreign port. She could sign the annual application to renew our vessel documentation and send us the new paperwork wherever we might be. She could open our mail and pay the occasional bill that, for all our efforts to live cheap, still somehow made its way to us.

For all those years that we were gone, robbing her of easy access to half her grandkids, she kept our affairs in order, and was an absolutely dependable backstop against late fees and unmet obligations on our part. That role she played gave us a tremendous peace of mind when we were off in some atoll, blissfully pretending that the real world did not exist.

So. For playing such an important role in making our voyage a success, and for all the thankless tasks that she pursued on our behalf, I wanted to say a very public and heartfelt "thank you" in this space.

And, don't worry, mom. We just got a post office box of our own.

Hiatus

That's us Galactics. We're in the US and on hiatus from the sailing life.

For me, that means a period of immersion in the science life (above).

I've been thinking a lot about the practice of science.

Like the difference between skepticism and conservatism in science - the former is the foundation of our approach, but it can too easily transform into the latter, in which we're skeptical about everything but the status quo paradigm.

I've been thinking about how our current understanding of the problems I work on is fundamentally wrong in some way. That error will be painfully obvious in the future, but it is so hard for us to see the error now.

I've been thinking about the paths that a scientist can take in their career. You can contribute to the incremental progress of the larger community, which is guaranteed to produce results over time - a safer approach. Or you can step back and try to see a path that everyone else has missed, and which might give a shortcut that can bypass a decade of more incremental work - a much riskier approach!

And I've been thinking about how difficult it is to make a really useful contribution in a field where there are a lot of really smart people working really hard on the same questions.

Science, like sailing, rewards the state of being all-in.

In between science meetings and time spent navel-gazing on the questions above, I have a two-week break in which I've joined Alisa and the boys as we catch up with our State-side loved ones.

We've been having a great time.

Siblings!

A dry run for their first Halloween. Tintin and Captain Haddock.

Toughy

Toughy

In the North American sailing-with-kids world there is a strong presence of the "un-schooling" take on education.  Some sailing parents see that as part of the whole package.  Their families are leaving the straight world behind, with all that entails - jobs and mortgage for the adults, and school of any kind for the kids.  Life, rather than any formal instruction, becomes the education.

I am forever cognizant of the fact that I don't have any kind of monopoly on parenting wisdom.  So I'm reluctant to criticize others' choices.

But Alisa and I are at the completely opposite end of the spectrum.  We are fans of education.  We think that education sets a person free, it makes them heir to the entire wealth our culture's wisdom.  We think education makes possible a life of the mind that is part of being a fully actuated person in this world.  I have had opportunity to be struck by the particular kind of frustration and ineffectiveness that seems to be the the lot of some intelligent yet uneducated people I have met in western societies.

So, yeah, we're into educating our kids in a pretty formal way during these years we're spending on Galactic.

But - easier said than done.  Conflating the parent-child relationship with the teacher-student relationship is liable to be an upsetting experience for both parties involved.

Into this breach strides the Arab Rose, aka My Reason For Living; Alisa.  She's the one who hectors and hounds Elias into getting his school work done.  She's the one who who keeps a strict schedule for the weeks that it takes to finish the work of each term.  She's the one who day after day shows by her example how seriously we take education, and is (hopefully) conveying the discipline to do the hard mental work that is required for any kind of intellectual achievement.

She's tough in a way that I think is paying off.  So I guess this is a shout-out of sorts.

You could sail the world without my wife.

But I wouldn't recommend it.

The Home Country

 I'm writing this as we're about to fly back to Chile.

We started in Puerto Williams...

...then took the flight to Punta Arenas...

...then, magically, landed in summer in the suburbs.  The kids
didn't comment on the transition at all

We've just spent five weeks visiting both of our families in the US.

A need to renew a couple of  passports got Eric and Alisa and
me a day trip Manhattan to visit the Australian consulate 

Our perspective on this country is now firmly expatriate.  We've never lived as a family in the US.  Even though the focus of this trip was entirely on seeing our extended families, our visit also gave us a chance to catch up on how things are going with the 4% of the world population that lives in America.

In other words: visiting the home country is a travel experience for us.

But the US is big enough, and fractured enough by its various tribalisms (red state/blue state, the race hierarchy) that you don't need to be an expat to find terra incognita in the country: there are plenty of good travel experiences available for resident Americans in America.

To whit: one of the things that is impossible to miss is how segregated America continues to be.  My extended family is racially mixed, but when it comes to integrated situations with strangers - in the milieu that we inhabit, those most often occur when black service workers are interacting with white customers.  After a lifetime of being American, I have yet to have a black American friend.  I'm reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just now and she has a great humorous take on that state of affairs.  Don't blame the white American liberal, says a character.  Of course they don't have black friends.  There just aren't enough middle-class blacks in the country to go around.

So one of my ideas for a travel experience on this visit to the US?  To take the boys to Hot Sauce Williams, the barbecue place around the corner from an apartment I rented in the late 1980s.

Without doing something self-conscious like that, my boys wouldn't know what it's like to be in a black neighborhood.

But, as things worked out, we never made it there...

Not that my boys would have necessarily taken much notice of being in a black neighborhood.  I don't spend time thinking about the good and bad things that they have missed by growing up on a boat.  But if I did,  the soul-corroding exposure to racism would be on the list of things they've been lucky to miss so far.  At one point on the visit, I forget where, Eric looked around and said, "There's a lot of dark-skinned people here!"

I think that most white American five year olds have already learned that race is a taboo subject that can't be referred to in a public setting in that way.  They've picked up the strange white American habit of insisting that they don't see race.  (Or am I wrong?  Are land-based five-year-old Americans still innocent of the weight of our cultural preoccupation with race?  If so, let me know.)

In general, spending time in a majority black setting is one of the finest travel experiences going for white Americans.  I got a lot of that in New Orleans, in the early 1990s, when a friend of mine was in the Little Rascals Brass Band and I got to tag along to the second line.  At that point the social aid and pleasure clubs and second lines were getting exactly no notice from outside their native neighborhoods, and my memory is that we sometimes went the whole afternoon, in a crowd of thousands of people, without seeing a white person we hadn't come with.

Which is a very powerful experience for a white American.

Especially if you can imagine an alternate universe in which all those black people are the ones doing the hiring, except that they don't like to hire people with non-traditional names like "Mike".

 After we were done at the consulate we stopped at the Museum of Modern Art to take in the iconic works.  And there we discovered a new trend in cultural consumerism.  People just walk up to the iconic treasures of western culture, snap a picture on their phones, and then walk over to the next iconic treasure to snap another picture.  Surely the point is to take a moment to enjoy the original, rather than making yet another reproduction of these paintings?

Eric and Marc Chagall

But all of this is a very long digression on one small part of our experience of coming back to America.

This is a sailing blog, of course.  But if you sail the world long enough your relationship with the place you left becomes part of the story.

Taking the subway downtown

Can you hear it?  

You must take the A Train

To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem

We also took in Elias' first-ever baseball game

And went walking in mountain meadows in the Rockies.  Lucky us...

We've enjoyed every day of our stay here in the heart of the northern summer.  But now that we're returning, I think we'll also be glad to resume our life aboard Galactic.

The Years

April 29, 2010.  Royal Hobart Hospital. 

April 29, 2011. Half Moon Bay, California.

April 29, 2012.  Hobart, Tasmania.

April 29, 2013.  Hicks Bay, New Zealand.

April 29, 2014. Urquharts Bay, New Zealand.

 Yes, that is a sword cake above, and below.  Alisa solicits requests for birthday cake themes.  And swords are very much on the collective boyhood mind of Galactic.

Help From Afar

When my family told us they'd like to visit in February, we were torn.  Our first reaction - "GREAT" - bumped right into our considered reaction - "but we'll be right in the middle of the haul out then."

"No problem," came the reply.  "We know you're busy.  So we'll watch the kids while you and Alisa both work in the boat yard.  That still leaves coffee time in the morning and beer time at night for us to visit."

So they all came, all the way from Boston to New Zealand - my parents, my sister and her two kids.  And it worked out exactly as planned.  Alisa and I teamed up in the boat yard every day that it wasn't raining, and as a result we got way more done than we would have had I been soldiering on alone.  Our kids had a great time with the family, who stayed at the beach cottage just down the hill from our house-sit.  The whole mob made a few sightseeing trips out into the country, cause, hey, this was looking pretty certain to be their once-only family trip to New Zealand.  And we got that coffee-time and beer-time to visit.  (I notice that nearly every picture of adults taken during the visit features wine glasses or beer bottles.)

I'm very glad that they were willing to make such an expensive visit under less-than-perfect conditions.

Alisa and I made great progress on replacing portlights on Galactic while they were here.

The new event for the Yachtie Decathlon - painting with exam mirror in hand 

Busted knees and fierce concentration

Only the advent of a rainy spell kept us from finishing all five windows while we had the gift of unlimited kid-minding.  Yesterday the family left and the rain cleared in the afternoon.  Alisa and I got two more windows sealed up, even with the kids aboard the boat.  It was a pretty good performance by team Galactic - we got them sealed up just before the rain resumed, I only yelled at Elias twice (or three times?) and we were back at the house-sit in time for dinner.

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...

Uncle Mike

Though I occasionally stray far off topic, this blog is about sailing and traveling.  In the past few weeks we've been traveling, of course, but traveling back to see our families in Boston and Cleveland, and I haven't felt the need to post to the world about the wonderful, and wonderfully mundane, visits that we've been having.

Soon enough we'll be back in the nautical life.  On Sunday we'll depart Ohio, bound for New Zealand, with an extra piece of luggage crammed full of cheaper-in-America boat parts.  And once we're back, we'll be in the thick of it - a few days of work on the boat, a blast of the science work that I haven't finished up while visiting family, and we'll be looking to catch the first thing smoking, as someone in a different time and different place might have said.  But instead of a train to Chicago, we'll be looking for fair winds to Tonga.

Meanwhile, these pics.  When we were in Boston my Dad and I built a treehouse for my sis and brother-in-law, who have four daughters, and a son soon to arrive.  When my sis asked us to do the job, it seemed like a great way to play the role of visiting Uncle - what better thing to do than leave something semi-permanent and fun behind?  And I was reminded of my Granddad, who always had some big job ready for my Dad and uncles during family visits - he was forever dragging the men out to plant trees around the place.  And there's a certain wisdom to that - banging nails, or planting trees, is a much better way to spend time together, and visit, than just sitting around on the couch, staring at each other.

Galactic At Rest

We're in Opua now, one of the global centers of yachty-ness.  Opua is the northernmost port of entry for En Zed, and I think of it as a funnel at the end of the tradewind route across the South Pacific, catching all the yachts that come down from the tropics.  We're out of synch with the boats that crossed last year, so don't know many people here...but we did run into Momo, a family of four whom we last saw in Suwarrow, Cook Islands, in 2008.  It's funny how some people stick out in your memory, even if you never spent much time with them.

The energy in Opua is all about sailing away, as the migration to the tropics for the cyclone-free season has begun.

We're leaving too, but not on the boat.  We've parked Galactic on a mooring ball, and have a date with an Auckland - San Francisco flight tomorrow.

The boys have been vibrating with excitement for the last week.  I only hope they calm down once we're on the plane...

End of April, Start of May

On board Galactic, birthdays come two at a time - first Eric's and Alisa's, then a few months later Elias' and mine.

This particular end of April saw Eric turn three.  He awoke on the day saying, "I'm not two any more!"

His transition to three-ness has been presaged by all sorts of milestones in recent months.  Alisa threw the very well-used stroller away in Napier.  Eric's out of nappies, and our upcoming sail from New Zealand to the tropics will be our first-ever passage without diaper buckets lashed on deck.

Eric's premier gift this year was a stuffed royal albatross.  The fact that it's a royal is important, as Eric can tell a royal from a shy albatross, and the royals are the ones that he calls "my friends."  That's not a smile above, by the way.  That's his royal albatross imitation.

Alisa did a penguin cake.  That's a smile, by the way, not a penguin imitation.

Then, the beginning of May saw Alisa turning 39.  (Again.)

I managed to struggle through the process of making a cake (from a box!) and dinner (mjeddrah, with real-time instructions from Alisa).  The boys rose to the occasion, and I think Alisa got what she asked for - a happy day.

After dinner we had a dance party.

That part was Elias' idea.