An Appreciation

[Don't tell Alisa about this post.  She still doesn't know that we have a blog.]

Let me tell you, friends…it's not always the easiest thing to be hanging in foreign parts.

Once you get far out of America, you're likely to find that folks start talking funny…eating funny things…and making funny faces when you try to explain the simplest concepts.

It takes moral fortitude to keep putting yourself forward amidst all these strangers who can't even tell you where the bathroom is.

(Which may explain one of the enduring mysteries of the life afloat - what's the allure of "cruising rallies", anyway?  Is it that they let you sail around the world while limiting your interaction with foreigners?)

Lately, I'm in to the whole travel experience, but only when I'm into it, if you get me.  Like, not all the time.  I've got this science career that I'm keeping on simmer and it appears that I'm only going to get book #2 off my mind by writing the darn thing.  All of which can leave me a little short on the energy that is required for extended conversations with people to whom I can only say, "hello", "what is your name?" and "how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?"

Luckily, into the breach strides Alisa.

She has been rampaging into the uncertain territory of Alaskan-Raivavaean communication lately.

That guy who lives in the house with the tiki in the backyard, was playing some boomin' Tahiti-dub when we stopped to commit tourism one afternoon, and sports a 'fro reminiscent of early-days Cypress Hill?  She tracked him down outside the mairie yesterday and, with the help of our French-English dictionary, arranged a Galactic to tiki dude music swap.  He got the Skatalites, The Internet, Burning Spear and Ethiopiques from us.  Lord knows what we'll get from him.

The magasin owner who spent a year in Birmingham, England - the one who gave Elias a ukulele lesson that devolved into a ukulele lesson for me when our boy was too tired?  Alisa arranged all that.

Alisa is the one who has given us the contacts to learn which of the four villages on the island supports the tradition dog-eating, to learn the derivation of "Raivavae", and what maitai means when you're not ordering a drink in Oahu.

Lunettes

Alisa is the one who knows people's parents' names.  She's the one who has met with the mayor two or
three times, learned that he is the one who controls the budget for the school canteen that has been feeding our boys for these two weeks, and got his OK for our boys to continue attending school, and eating there, while we're waiting for the right wind to blow us to Rapa.

I, quite frankly, have been riding her coattails while here.

And I suppose that's how has to work, partnership-wise, when you find yourself sailing circles around the Pacific Ocean for years.

Both of us can't be on the top of our game all the time.  If our enthusiasms can wax and wane out of phase, we can even each other out.  We can take turns showing each other the magic.

When we get to Chile, and I am back to traveling in a language in which I am at least sub-conversational, perhaps it will be my turn.

~~

Oh, and - when we returned to the boat yesterday after the celebration welcoming the new gendarme to
the island (Alisa found out about it for us), we found that the anchorage had gone rolly, so that open doors were snatching back and forth at their latches, and round stuff was liable to roll around on counter.  Alisa says, "I like it better this way.  Reminds you that you're living on a boat."

Sailing dudes of the world, eat your hearts out.

You could sail the world without my wife.
But I wouldn't recommend it.

Lunettes

Every marriage, I imagine, has its own version of the nuclear option - some threat which one spouse or another may resort to in extremis.

In our particular marriage, this nuclear option might be called Playing The Antipodean Card.

Alisa does this now and again to let me know that the double-double demands of playing breadwinning scientist, far-ranging adventurer, loving father and husband and mediocre marine engineer have made me a total pain in the ass to be around.

As in yesterday, when the inanity of trying to make Microsoft Word behave itself while formatting the figures and tables in a five-chapter PhD thesis, coupled with the limits of uploading said thesis (10mb) and pictures for a Cruising World story (25mb) via the donkey-fast internet of Hao, combined with our long stay at the darse de Hao, which would get ever longer until I had everything finished, made me a sullen and grumpy hubby indeed.

So Alisa Played The Card.
"Mebbe we should go back to New Zealand," she said, seeming all innocent and helpful.  "Or Iluka.  Somewhere where it's easy for you to get things done."

Ha!  As if!  Living on a boat that's going nowhere seems much much worse to me than living on no boat at all.  So I'll redouble my efforts to keep all the balls in the air with my normal smile in its normal position, plastered on my face.

It's the old conundrum - it's a challenge at times to work on the boat, and working keeps me from immersing myself in travel.  But it's also the compromise that has kept us going for all these years.  And hey - it won't last forever.

In the meantime, I'm able to produce some reasonable contributions to science, even if they do take longer than they would in an office.  And the travel has its compensations, like the view of the endless horizon beyond the quai here in Hao, where I am sitting to do my internet.

But enough of all that.  This is a post about lunettes.

Lunettes, of course, are eyeglasses in the French-speaking world.  In this case, used reading glasses that are collected by the Lion's Club in New Zealand, cleaned, graded, and given to yachties to distribute in out-of-the-way corners of the South Pacific.

Alisa knew a good thing when she heard about it, and we shipped four hundred pairs of reading glasses when we left Whangarei.

She's given "clinics" in Fakarava and here in Hao.  The response has been big, as you can see from these pictures (inside the mairie, or town hall in Hao).  Eye doctors visit the villages once a year, not everyone can get an appointment, and glasses are super-expensive.  She gave away 100 pairs here in Hao - in a village of 1,200 people.

Polynesian culture very readily accepts the idea of gift giving, so it has been (more or less) easy for her to explain what she's about in spite of the language barrier.  And reciprocation is a big part of the culture.  Flowers enough for leis don't grow in the poor soil of the Tuamotus, so she and her helper, Elias, have returned from these session bedraped in shell necklaces.  And people have stopped by the boat later with gifts of coconuts or fish.

As you might expect, these sessions have given us instant entree into the village scene.  Alisa meets the mayor, and a bunch of less notable locals, and we have a bit of context for understanding the village during the rest of our stay.

And these lunette sessions super-charge the travel experience.  People stop by the boat at odd hours for glasses, and stay for a long visit afterwards, even if we had had other thoughts for the day.  It can be annoying - people ask Alisa to come by their homes when she's trying to care for the kids and it seems they could just come to the boat, or they ask her to replace scratched glasses, or she isn't sure that they really need them at all, and it seems that people are being acquisitive at her expense.

But then she sees someone's face light up when the smudges on a book are suddenly revealed as words, and none of the little annoyances matter a bit.

Or we meet a particularly sympathetic old fella who comes by the boat for a pair, and he miraculously brings forth the most beautiful Polynesian music from our boys' ukulele, which had remained mute whenever one of us had picked it up.

Denied (by my Wife!)

I was in yachtie heaven.

This was the week that "replace batteries" made it to the top of the job list.

(I know, that doesn't sound like "yachtie heaven".  We'll get there.)

A little bit of reading online revealed that the selection of batteries, and figuring out the proper setup for charging them, is a topic that sits right in the double-negative zone for my personal Venn diagram of Unpalatable Boat Stuff.  Buying batteries is both expensive and complicated - two qualities I deal with poorly, especially in combination. 

There's a huge range of battery and charging technologies available for sailboats - so much so that this is one of the favorite realms for that (large) part of the Anglophone sailing world that mostly sees the life afloat as engineering school for rich people.

I'm not trying to pick on the wonderful people on Morgan's Cloud, and I readily admit to drawing on their excellent site now and again for some engineering help.  But really, if you hang around a certain type of full-time sailor long enough, you quickly find yourself wondering if all the technology on their boats serves them, or if they serve it.

I suspect the latter.

So, imagine my joy when I found the online price in the photo above.  (This is the "yachtie heaven" part.)

Those are golf cart batteries, in case you're wondering.  And golf cart batteries are my kind of boat gear.  Let other people clog up sailing chat forums with stories of how their fancy-pants AGM batteries did or did not charge properly, did or did not keep their watermakers/toasters/microwaves/water heaters/cocktail blenders going.  I was just going to buy some old-fashioned flooded lead-acid golf cart batteries, series them together to get 12 volts, save myself eight hundred bucks or so, and move onto the rest of my life.

But this is where the denied by my wife part comes in.

I explained my find to Alisa, and told her how we'd just have to get a couple of new battery boxes fabricated, and build a shelf in the locker right behind the nav station to take the two batteries that wouldn't fit into our current battery locker.

Alisa says "no" to me so rarely.  Which is why, I suppose, we've been living on a boat for five and a half years.  

But this time she did say "no".  Said it gently, but said it.  Firmly.

She reminded me of the times she's had to keep the kids out of the cabin because I've been blowing off sulfuric acid fumes while equalizing our flooded batteries.  She reminded me of how long it took me to build a new battery box when we bought flooded batteries for Pelagic.  She let me know that super expensive, fancy-pants AGM batteries sounded just fine to her.

So that's what we're getting - four 6v AGMs, at a hundred and five pounds each.  And I must admit that the simplicity of installing them - no battery boxes, no shelves - is pretty attractive.  And I promise not to write anything on the blog about charging them, etc.

Unless, of course, "charging them, etc." ends up providing an insight into the endlessly fascinating topic of Marriage Afloat...

Sunday Mornings (And Friday Nights)

So this picture sums up Alisa's life, well, ever since we started sailing full-time in 2007.  She's the one who's got the kids.

That's not all she does, of course.  She stands watch and navigates and tells me when it's the right moment to drop the pick in a crowded anchorage.  She made our bimini and drilled holes in our toe rail when we needed a place to tie in the netting on the life lines.  She reefs the main and cooks both at sea and in port and she's the one who figured out how to tune our radar and she does all the provisioning for the boat.

But she does all that in breaks from childcare.

I watch the kids and brush their teeth and change their diapers/nappies, too.  Of course.  But the way that we've divided up the work of everyday life has me doing more of the non-kid things and her doing more of the kid things.  (Surprise!)

And on this last crossing of the Pacific Alisa was really watching the kids a lot.  I was doing the final re-write on the book and working on two marine biology research projects and playing engineer for Galactic.  So Alisa had the kids so much that friends even commented on the blog to ask if they could please see just one photo of Alisa without the kids.

I checked.  We didn't have any.

So when we settled into Hobart to take a break after that crazy period of simultaneously working and sailing across the Pacific, I had an idea:

I would take the kids every Sunday and give Alisa the day off.  That's me above, making pancakes for breakfast on the first of those Sundays.

But... it didn't quite take.  We were in the yard for two weeks so I didn't have the kids for those Sundays, and then even after we were back in the water other stuff kept coming up, and Alisa ended up not getting the weekly break from child-rearing that I had nobly promised her.

Luckily - there's another sort of break that's available to her: the girls' night out.

Our good friend M-A took Alisa out dancing last week.  This is a picture that surfaced from that night out on the town.

I think that the occasional Friday night out might make up for a whole bunch of Sundays spent with the kids.

Notes on Living Together in a Small Space

Putting my dinner dish in the sink tonight, I noticed the grime at the base of the splash board.  It's the kind of dirt that you don't notice - it just gradually accumulates - until suddenly you do notice it, and wonder when you started living in squalor.

"God, this galley is a mess", I muttered to myself after dinner.

I swear that I was just thinking about how I had great intentions of pulling out the stove and cleaning underneath it and generally giving the galley an annual inside-the-corners scrub once we reached Hobart, but had never gotten around to it.

But, what actually happened is that Alisa overheard me and has spent the hour and a half since the boys went to sleep scrubbing at the galley, a frown of concentration on her face.

I'm pretty sure that's not the outcome that I intended.

But then again, our own motives are often mysterious to us!  And nothing happens in a social vacuum on a family sailboat.  Every muttered comment and facial tick contributes to the tapestry of on-board communication.

Next time I'll keep my muttered comments to myself and just pick up a scrub brush.

Partners

"It's not the ship, it's the crew."


That nautical cliche holds so true for traveling sailboats.  People (well, men, mostly) turn their interest in the sea into a fetish for boat design and gear specs.  And it turns out that stuff is tangential to having a happy, or even safe, traveling boat.  What you really need to make the life afloat a success is an above-reproach partnership with the person who you sail with.


I've been aware of all that ever since the first six months that Alisa and I spent as full time-sailors.  We went through a lifetime of tough moments together in those six months of learning the ropes, and the fortunes of Pelagic very much rose and fell based on how well Alisa and I were working together on any given day.


But now, with a couple Pacific crossings under our belts, I'm also starting to see the corollary.  Sailing doesn't just require strong partnership - it also fosters it.  If a couple are embarked on the enterprise of crossing big pieces of water on small boats, they have something external that they are always leaning against.  The challenges of the lifestyle keep you looking outward, they remind you that you aren't the center of the universe, and they keep you from navel-gazing at either yourself or the "relationship".  Having a challenge of that magnitude saves you from the ennui of a sedentary life.


(Or maybe romance just lasts longer when you're both living in your bathing suits.)


~~


Below - transiting between Tasman Island and Cape Pillar, yesterday.

The alchemy of bread and secret ingredients of Marriage

My standard loaf, sliced to accompany the brie cheese we consumed throughout French Polynesia

There is something about making bread, by hand, without a bread maker but using my own hands to work the dough – something that is satisfying and basic and wholesome. Sure it smells amazing while baking and tastes wonderful, but it is more the enjoyment of this age-old routine that is woven into my week. I like that my lifestyle values the time it takes to bake bread from mixing flour, yeast, salt and water. I love that my family encourages the routine by eating it so fast that I have to bake 2 loaves of bread 3 times a week.  [That's 2 kilos of flour a week for those of you provisioning your galley].

Logically, I am always striving to make better bread, with more texture and better crust.  But I was a bit chapped today when a huge improvement on the bread came from….from MIKE!  This is the man who condensed our first 1.5 years sailing into a 286 page book and never once mentioned the smell of fresh bread or the pleasure of having fresh bread when there wasn't any other fresh thing in the galley aside from an onion and shriveled clove of garlic. On both passages across the Pacific, regardless of the weather or how I felt, I spent every other morning either baking fresh bread or hand washing cloth nappies.  And I am not complaining about this, just stating that these are routines that I breathe everyday and they are so outside of Mike's awareness that he neglected to put them in the book. To be fair, I almost never think of the transmission fluid level or the water filters on the galley sink. But to continue my point, I was just a bit unnerved that someone so cavalier about the whole bread making process would deliver such a grand gesture of improvement.

This morning I took both boys ashore at 0830 with both bread loaves shaped and only one hour left for their second rising.  I asked Mike to set his timer for an hour and then remove the towel that was resting over the dough and turn the oven on for 22-25 minutes, until the tops were just brown.  Simple enough.  But then Mike forgot about the bread – how do you forget about bread that is smelling up the galley with the delicious aroma that is singing for butter – and he baked it for 30 minutes.  That five extra minutes was the trick! La de da…the bread was crisp and brown and inviting - such an improvement that I've quickly swallowed my pride – along with too many pieces of fresh bread. It was so good that we nearly ate both loaves today and tomorrow morning I will be again adding yeast to flour; and so long as Mike doesn't offer to show me how to turn on the galley oven, I think our marriage will continue its rise to splendor, just like a tasty loaf of bread. 

The much-improved bread. Oh, how good it tastes!

Ten

September 22nd was our tenth anniversary.

We celebrated at anchor in the atoll of Penrhyn, on the calm windward side, by the little village of Tetautua.

Elias had ended the day horribly. After coming back to the boat he discovered that he had lost a necklace that local eminence Seitu had given him. This sent him into a two-hour tantrum. First there were real tears at the loss, then forced tears, and then an escalation into screaming and moaning worthy of a mortally-wounded animal in the bush. Adult tempers were severely tested by it all, and we didn't necessarily pass the test with perfect marks...

When he had finally fallen asleep Alisa and I regained our equanimity in the cockpit over a dinner of chicken and fish that had also been given to us by Seitu. Our fridge has been down since Tahaa, so this gift of animal protein made our celebratory meal into a real routine-breaking treat. Alisa rounded out the meal with a bottle of Côtes du Rhône that she had bought in Tahiti. The surf boomed on the outside of the reef and the village generator clattered away in a nattering, conversational tone. A fringe of stars hung low around the cockpit awning.

So Alisa, I said.

Yes?

You know that hypothetical dog musher who would have married you if I hadn't come along?

I think I remember you saying something about that.

You know how I also say that I saved you from a lifetime of shovelling dog sh*t from a dog yard in some village in Alaska?

I think I remember you mentioning that too.

Well. What do you think - would you rather be shovelling dog sh*t or doing this?

I could see her smiling in the half-light.

Does it matter that my answer would have been different a couple hours ago?

She Sails

Well, it happened - we finally got out for a sail on Galactic.

And we liked what we saw.

The boat is a lot bigger than what we are used to, but she doesn't feel too big to handle.  Much of the core sailing gear - sails, mast and boom, rigging - is brand-new and higher-quality than what we would have bought if we were fitting out the boat ourselves.  One of the benefits of all this good sailing gear is that she sails quite well in light airs for a boat displacing 20-odd tons.  Alisa and I agreed that she promises to be a good sea boat, and we are looking forward to some heroic sailing when we get to the trades.
 
There were some other things that we liked about the new boat a lot.  All the control lines for jib and main are in easy reach of the wheel, making it easy for one person to sail.  And it turns out that there is plenty of room under the dodger for both boys - Eric in his car seat and Elias on a cushion.

And, just to make it a real-shake down sail, we got some unplanned action out of the day: the wind blew, the boat heeled, two drawers emptied onto the sole and a coffee pot ejected its contents all over the galley.  Meanwhile, that part of the crew who was down below changing a stinky diaper began to harbor dark thoughts about that part of the crew who was on deck and apparently making the boat heel for the sheer dirty pleasure of it.

We had both stayed up late the night before, and in our tired and grumpy state we found ourselves enjoying a spirited discussion about who had the tougher job - the person changing the 10-month old's diaper down below, or the person watching the antsy four year old in the cockpit while sailing the boat between the pylons of the Bay Bridge under conditions of shifting wind and adverse tide.

This is the sort of moment that I suppose might lead some people to reconsider the whole notion of sailing with small children.

Alisa and I, though, having been through it all before, kept in mind that most of the program of sailing with the family is wonderful.

We finished the day with a lovely sail down the narrow ditch separating Oakland and Alameda.  Our spirits revived, I risked a look back by saying to Alisa, "You called me an ------- back there."

"Don't be silly," she said.  "I would never call you an -------.  Or at least not in front of the boys."

Peripatetic

Well, our dreamy four-and-a-half month housesit is over.  Here's Alisa over the weekend, in the midst of the final clean-up.

We're now in our third Tasmanian housesit, a two-bedroom flat in West Hobart that a friend of a friend very kindly made available to us while she was away.

We continue to believe that we'll be living on our next boat before we know it.  But meanwhile, this bouncing around between housesits is what we're doing.  I don't particularly love the feeling of being a 42 year old serial housesitter,  dragging the kids and our stuff from place to place like this.  But then we're also not prepared to sign a lease on a place and settle into Hobart for six months.

Luckily Elias seems completely unfazed by all this moving around.  And Eric of course has no idea what's going on.  And Alisa, let me say, is a complete champ about it all.  Few moms with a three month old and a four year old could handle moving around like this so gracefully.

I think it's a sign of how strongly she's committed to continuing the sailing dream, and the inconvenience that she's willing to put up with to make it happen.

Either that...or maybe I'm such a wonderful husband that she's willing to put up with the occasional bout of homelessness just to be with me?