Status Check

Bring it.

The rig - it checks out

The times come when I'm swept away by the excitement of what we're up to.

All the mundane concerns of boat and life drop away and I think of the names.  Rapa Iti!  Rapa Nui!  Pitcairn!  Puerto Natales!

All of it is legendary to me.  All of it.  Places I never thought I'd see, as much as I might dream.

I consider what we're about and I upgrade the Galactic status meter -  from "Viva!" to "F*ck Aye!"

The only higher level on the meter is "Getting Jiggy With It".

We've been there before. And it's a wonderful place to be.

Stars in my eyes…And the family home at anchor

Alisa is back to nearly 100% of her considerable pre-shingles strength.

No matter how many little jobs I find to worry away at, the boat is about as ready for sea as we could want.

We are thoroughly provisioned.  One vast locker has been reserved for six months' worth of duty-free beer.  And the weather forecast promises a spell of settled westerlies.  Our departure cannot be far away.

We cannot prepare to sail without going sailing.  A two-reef day in the Bay of Islands served nicely

There are a lot of other things that I think about when I'm not feeling expansive and making jokes to Alisa about the Galactic status meter.

But the internet is not the place for too much honesty.  The Rebel Heart blog taught us that, if we didn't already know.

A seven-year-old can fit in my beer locker

The real stuff, the deep stuff, the stuff that can't be splashed on a Facebook "status update" with a trio of exclamation points - that stuff needs to be digested, to be worked through for a time, and then written in a book, meticulous draft after meticulous draft, until you're sure that you've got it as near to right…as you can.

Enough to say that I have the concerns of a father, and when I get tired of thinking of those I can always contemplate the divine mystery of how in the hell we might some day end this long long long sailing vacation and come to rest somewhere ashore, in some semblance of a stable life for the second half of the boys' childhood.

There have been sleepless nights.

My consolation, aside from the endless hours that I get to spend with my boys, and my wife, day after day, is that my motives are the purest imaginable  - I operate out of an enduring, and unshakeable, confusion about what life is, and what we're meant to do with it.  So I just operate on instinct, and Alisa and I decide that being sedentary is not what we want to do with this gift of being human...

The cognoscenti will recognize this as a starter motor.  The truly "switched on" will see that two of the three bolts holding it in place have given up their posts and gone home to the oily pan beneath the engine, where they seem to believe that they belong, and left their old friend the starter motor hanging by a few threads of the third, and last, bolt.  This is demonstably not a blog about boat maintenance, but really, you have to wonder.  Why do gremlins like this make their appearance just prior to a big passage?  And what does it mean?

Boat Life, Just Life

Science experiment

Elias is seven.  From this sample of one, I have deduced that seven year old boys are old enough not to want to cry when they're upset, but young enough that they can't always help it.

For the last week we've been in a forgotten little estuary next to the first capitol of New Zealand where visiting sailboats congregate to make their final preparations before leaving for the tropics.

The kids whom Elias and Eric played with in Whangarei are of course not here, and the boys are keen to interact with some peers.  Knowing that we also need to recycle some books and toys, Alisa took matters in hand and announced over the daily radio get-together that she was organizing a kids' book and toy swap on shore.

Our boys arrived at the appointed time brimming with excitement at the prospect of new possessions, and with two bigs sacks of their own stuff to trade away.

A few other sailing kids showed up.  But none brought anything to trade.  Eric, who we have realized really should have been in preschool during our three months in Whangarei, screamed and hit.  Alisa, who was recovering from shingles and doing laundry, had to call me on the radio for child-minding backup.

That's never happened before.

Undaunted, Alisa drove the boys around the anchorage in the dinghy the next day, asking boats if they had children aboard.  They need some mates, she said to me.  They look at other kids with longing.

And - success!  A Swedish boat, in the throes of their last 48 hours of preparation for going on passage, did have kids on board.  And yes, they would like to trade some books.

Elias ended up staying on board their boat for a play while Alisa went to do some chores ashore.

When she came back she could tell that something was wrong.  And when Elias got back on board Galactic he sprinted for his cabin, trying to stifle his sobs.

It turns out that he gave away some of his very best books, and somehow got nothing in return.  And he didn't know how to speak up and explain that he wanted to trade, and not just give the books away.

Kids' books on Galactic get used.  We read them so many times that the boys learn entire books by heart, word for word, before they can read themselves.  Individual books become associated with a hundred different bedtimes, and rainy days at anchor, and long afternoons on passage when the boys curl up with Alisa in the cockpit to read book after book after book.

So poor Elias, who is learning his way with possession and acquisition (central actions in our culture, after all), was heartbroken to see these old friends going away without anything to take their place.

It was one of those moments of paternal empathy, when you watch your kid learning his way in the world and getting bruised in the process.

And, Elias was running into the exact kind of situation that bothers adults all the time.  Buying and selling, trying to carry yourself in a way that keeps you from being taken advantage of, trying to be savvy without hurting others - this is so much of the business of life.

I guess that's why I don't think of what we're doing as "cruising" - that solipsistic concern with amp-hours and crevice corrosion and osmotic blisters and so on.  All that stuff is really very secondary.  Living on a boat is, at this point, just living to us - living with a constant family togetherness, so that there are few moments in each other's lives that go unobserved.

Housekeeping is...

…a funny thing to do for someone who lives on a boat.  But there are three housekeeping issues that I wanted to address:

First, the recent layout change was in part motivated by the desire to fix the problem of the blog crashing on iPads.  It seems to have done the trick on Alisa's device, but if anyone continues to have trouble, please let me know in a comment.

Second, the radio show This American Life has an upcoming story on the Rebel Heart rescue.  If you live in America you can listen on public radio this weekend, and they'll also post the show on the web soon after it's been broadcast for anyone to hear.  This American Life can do very good long-form journalism, and it looks like the Kaufmans found a great platform for telling their story.

And last: our first-ever business plug on Twice In A Lifetime!  (Totally unsolicited, I assure you!)  If you find yourself in need of sailboat blocks in New Zealand (if it hasn't happened to you yet, it will, believe me), get in touch with the New Zealand Garhauer shop.  Well, not a shop - it's run out of a very nice couple's garage in Paihia. Their prices are the only good deal in New Zealand.  They'll pick you up from your boat if you don't have a car, will drop parts off, and will let you exchange if you lose your mind around all the shiny yacht jewelry and choose the wrong block.  Five-star Galactic rating.

~~~

Shower time for a four-year-old
who can't bear to get water on his face

Meanwhile, back in our daily narrative…  Well, what to say - parenting in our ultra-nuclear family mode (nearest grandparents/aunts/uncles - five thousand miles away!) can be tough.  Motivated by the desire to fit in a "science experiment" from the curriculum that required internet access, Alisa did a big school day for Elias yesterday.  Education ran into the afternoon, which it rarely does on Galactic.  All this time she was watching Eric, too, as I had gotten up at 0530 to fit in some writing, then made breakfast and launched into my boat day (buy a shiny Garhauer block!  set up the new boom vang!  free up the corroded petcock on the muffler!, etc., etc.).

In her still-fragile state, it was too much of an effort for Alisa.  The pain of the shingles on her face came back in a big-and-bold, enough-to-make-the-toughest-woman-I-know-cry kind of way.

We assume that she'll be well enough to go on passage next week, and so have been keeping the pressure on to get the remaining boat tasks and life-before-we-lose-internet-for-a-month tasks completed.

But pushing to get everything done is obviously not what Alisa needs right now, and we'll have to counsel ourselves with patience, even as the month of May, precious for Southern Hemisphere voyaging, passes away, day by day.

Very Big Passages and Very Little Kids

They're f---ing heros.  They were trying to give their kids the very best life possible.

--A writer acquaintance,

 in conversation about

Eric and Charlotte Kaufman

Elias crossing the equator en route to the Marquesas, age 1.

This photo and below - Eric en route to the Marquesas, age 1.

The Rebel Heart story is very close to home for us, since we have twice sailed the passage that they were on - once on Pelagic and once on Galactic.  Both times we had one-year-olds aboard.

Our hearts go out to the Kaufmans - we don't know them at all, but we have every reason to expect that they prepared very hard for the trip, and take their responsibility as parents very seriously.

As for all those people who have queued up to criticize them, either by being interviewed in the media or as online trolls - well, you would think that self-respect would stop people from flapping their gums when they don't know what they're talking about.  A tradewind passage like the one that Rebel Heart was making is an eminently safe affair for a well-found boat.  Anyone who describes such a trip as too "extreme" for little kids is likely ignorant - and also more than likely jealous that someone else had the courage to try something they'll never do.

The risks that come from the remoteness of the route, and the resulting distance from medical care, are faced by families in other situations.  As a friend of mine pointed out, no one would criticize an Alaskan family that lived in the Bush if their one-year-old required a medevac.

(As an aside, I found the only humor in the whole saga in the fact that Eric's brother-in-law decided to get up on his hind legs and give an interview saying he thought the whole trip was a bad idea.  Chuck, Dave, Chris - if I ever do anything that you think is really stupid, please have the courtesy not to tell me through the local CBS affiliate!)

[But note this addendum - after seeing this post from Charlotte, I guess that the family comments aren't so funny.  Mike]

Sailing big passages with very little kids can be very difficult on the parents - see this example and this one, too.  But we haven't regretted either of our Pacific crossings with toddlers, or the bigger-picture decision to raise the kids on a boat.  The upsides of this life, for us and for them, are enormous.

And, six years in, we continue to very actively assess the line of what we think is reasonable to take on with the kids.  That's perhaps the heart of going long-distance sailing with kids - it's entirely up to the parents to decide what's reasonable, and to decide what level of preparation is sufficient.  No one licenses us, no one inspects our boat or examines our competence.  We internalize all of the safety decisions that parents back on land are able to offload to the larger society.

For us, the line of reasonability precludes Antarctica or South Georgia - though other families have safely sailed to those places with young children.  And for anything that we'd like to do on the boat, we try to prepare with incremental steps.  Thus 3-day and 7-day passages with Elias before we set off across the Marquesas, and trips across the Tasman, and down to the New Zealand sub-Antarctic, and between New Zealand and the tropics and back, before we set off for Patagonia.

No one can take the question of safety for the boys more seriously than we do, and the responsibility of taking them to sea is a weight that we live with, day to day.

But, conversely, the joy of this life, all together and together all the time, seeing the world as we will, is a pleasure that we live with, day to day.  It is, I trust, a pleasure that will turn over time into memories to inform all four of our lives for decades to come.

Making a Sensation

Doubtless you've heard about the couple with young kids who got into trouble on their sailboat.

No, not Rebel Heart - Anasazi Girl.

The particulars are so similar.  Anasazi Girl is also American-flagged, they also had very young kids aboard (ages 1, 3 and 5, according to a story online), and they also had to be rescued from their disabled boat - they were dismasted west of Cape Horn last month.

But where Rebel Heart went viral, Anasazi Girl has received not a speck of attention.  I only heard about them through the sailing grapevine here in Whangarei (turns out we know a couple of their friends) and the link above has received two comments since it was posted nearly a month ago.

So, what's the diff - why does one event get no notice, and the other become the latest distraction for millions of people?

  

Enrollment Grows

At this point...

…the schooling is pretty basic.

Living on a traveling boat full-time makes you come up with your own approach to a hundred different important aspects of life.  How-to references can get you started (I quite liked Hal Roth's How to Sail Around the World), but they can only get you so far, simply because everyone does this thing in their own way.

Educating the kids on board illustrates the range of ways that people answer important questions about life afloat.  A number of American sailors lean towards the "no-school" approach, stressing the real-world learning opportunities of a life afloat, and de-emphasizing formal education.  At the other end of the spectrum, some families spend hours each day on home-schooling the kids.

(The variety of approaches exists among nations, too.  As I understand it, school-age German citizens are legally expected to be in school, in Germany.  So we've met a few German boats with pre-school kids aboard who were looking to get back home in time to start school.  France, on the other hand, supports traveling families by providing an intensive home-school curriculum.  Alisa just met a mom who is teaching her under-tens in the morning and afternoon each weekday, and some weekend hours besides, with completed schoolwork sent back to France monthly.)

On Galactic we fall pretty far on the formal education end of the spectrum.  Alisa has been homeschooling Elias since we left Tasmania, and it's an hours-a-day affair (I'm off the hook as a teacher due to the time I spend doing science work.)  Because he's an Australian citizen and did a year in Tassie schools, Elias remains in the Tasmanian system - for the same (nominal to us) school fee that we would pay back in Tas, we're supplied with a curriculum, all the materials, and access to a teacher in Hobart when Alisa needs help.

We decided early on that we would emphasize the importance of school to Elias - other things fit in around the daily schoolwork, not vice versa.

And over the past few weeks Eric has been lobbying to be allowed to do schoolwork too.  He's not meant to begin his preschool until he's four, but that birthday is only a month away, so Alisa has given in and let him start in a small way.

The day is coming, soon, when the work involved in Alisa's biggest job is going to double.

Makes Me Feel Better

Going to sea is a balm.  I fear the day when going to sea doesn't make me feel better.

Going to sea and catching a fish - while sailing under spinnaker.  That makes me feel better.

Catching a kingfish - that really makes me feel better.

Oh, and time, too, and being in a new place - those things help.

I think I feel better.

(But another coda.

Today in the Whangarei playground three-year-old Eric chased after a sparrow - and called it a "f***ing bird", three times, very loud.

I guess he was listening during those two failed marina exits.  Which didn't make me feel great.

Boat stuff can be hard - but fatherhood might be harder...)

Who Brought a Three Year Old On this Trip?

The question may occur to you: are they really having as much fun as it seems on the blog?

The answer is: yes, absolutely.  We're having all that fun and more.

But we're having some other moments, too.

Our youngest, Eric, has lately been as unreasonable as only a three-year-old can be.

Sometimes he's just cute enough to get away with it.  He often gets livid when we address him by what used to be called his Christian name.  "I'm not ERIC!" he tells us.  "I'm Scuppers!"  (Or Tashban Knight, or Stuart Little.)

Twenty minutes later when he has to use the head and we get him undressed and in position and say, "ok, Scuppers, call us when you're done", he gets equally livid.  "I'm not Scuppers when my pants are off!" He yells at us.  "I'm Eric!"

It's ridiculous enough to make me laugh, in spite of the getting yelled at part.

Other times, it's not so cute.  There's been lots of potty talk lately, lots of hitting his brother and throwing tantrums and snatching at toys and screaming any time he wants something from us.

Living in a confined space with that behavior, day after day, is not a soothing experience.  Even even-keeled Alisa has been blowing her top lately.  And so my mantra has become, "who brought a three-year-old?"

I comfort myself with the knowledge that the age of reason is only four years away.

Of course, by then we'll probably be living in a house.

Nitty Gritty

It's all about the nitty gritty on Galactic lately.

First, Alisa has been finishing up her annual round of winch maintenance.  And, since we've owned the boat a little less than two years, and are perennially behind schedule, it's the first annual round of winch maintenance for us on this boat.

This is the winch that she opened up yesterday, one of our big 'ole primaries, for the genoa sheets.  It probably hasn't been greased in ten years.  Very bad operating conditions, very bad nitty gritty.

Then for something pretty different, this is the space over Eric's bunk.  We've been giving him an animal sticker every time that he successfully takes a dump in the head.

As you can see, he's had a lot of success lately.

That's also pretty nitty gritty, but in a good way - sooner or later, the fecal-intensive period of child rearing will end for us.  Alisa has her heart set on a passage to New Zealand that doesn't involve diaper buckets.

I can't shake the idea that these two things are connected for us somehow, the ying and yang of our detail-rich lives...

An Accent

Yesterday our friend M.-A. confirmed what I've been noticing for a while now: Elias is developing a very noticeable Australian accent.  His year in an Australian school seems to have done the trick.

It's not at all the Paul Hogan caricature of an Aussie accent that we think of back in North America.  It's much more organic than that - he's lost his terminal "r"s completely, and "r"s in the middle of words are just hinted at.  Meanwhile his vowels have stretched into weird Antipodean dipthongs.

I imagine it will all fade when we leave Oz.  But meanwhile I've noticed how this little accent makes Elias seem like a slightly different person.  And I've also gotten an insight into how odd it must be to have a child with a completely different accent from your own...

Take the Tour

Our friend Heather - long-time blog reader / indefatigable blog commenter / first reader of unpublished sailing narratives - recently had a good idea for the blog.  I see a bit of art on the bulkheads, she said.  How about a tour?

So here it is, the Galactic visual arts tour.

First, the best - our two tapas from Futuna:

 Tapa is one of the core traditions of Polynesian and Melanesian culture.  As far as we can tell, Futuna is known for the standard of its tapa making.  We found a great collective of women making and selling the stuff there:

(Note to the yachties coming after us - tapa might seem like a much better souvenir a few years after the fact than will that Polynesian tattoo on your ankle.)

OK, next on the tour - this shell and grass fan, a gift to Alisa from Matasa, on Penrhyn, in the Cook Islands.

Our great mates on Pacific Bliss wrote about Penrhyn so well - check out all three of their posts about the place.  Reading them, just now, I'm seized by the desire to go back...

And finally, in the traditional Pacific arts department, there's this tiki from Fatu Hiva:

Hey, if you're reading this with the idea of sailing to the Marquesas next year, do yourself a favor - ignore the rules and go to Fatu Hiva first, even though it's not a port of entry.  A finer landfall in all the world cannot be imagined.

(And, as a perfect metaphor for cultural disassociation, I can't do better than the image of Jacques, the carver of this tiki, who I believe took the pattern from a volume on the ethnography of the Marquesas.)

And well, there's more, of course, but brevity is the saving grace of any tour.

But before I close, I'll note that we make room in our collection for the odd Impressionist:

 And of course lots and lots of prelapsarian works that seem to speak of a happy childhood:

~~

Along those lines (sort of), I'll mention that Elias' reading ability has recently hit the stage of exponential increase.  Not to be too precious about it, but I think that if you're one of those people for whom books have been at the very center of things at some point or another, watching your child step into the world of the written word is a wholly uncomplicated joy.

Take a look at this scene from yesterday - doesn't this look like a happy fatherhood?

In The Water

It's 11 PM as I write this (or 2300 hours for anyone out there who is standing night watch).

Alisa, at this very moment, is out in the cockpit, greasing and assembling a winch after its annual strip and clean: 

Sailing dudes of the world, continue to eat your hearts out.

Now, if only she could stop breaking the $70 plastic winch parts that just arrived in the mail (that jagged section in the back was smooth until a little too much torque was applied):

On another domestic front, we just got rid of all the carpet in the saloon.  The ultimate cause was spring, of course, but the proximate cause in this case was the pizza that Eric threw all over the saloon while Alisa and I were occupied with the four-handed job of replacing the windlass switch all the way forward.

I'm going to miss this phase where we greet every big kid mess by just chucking another section of carpet into the dumpster.

So, a lotta little domestic moments like this for us lately.  But, fear not, much bigger things are on the horizon for team Galactic.  The Royal Hobart Show is tomorrow, and Elias has a four-day weekend as a result.

(Before I continue, let me take a moment to wonder why oh why Australians use the adjective "royal" when they want to make the point that something is particularly wonderful.  All the monarchial carryings-on here really get tiring.  The only upside to this nation's anachronistic fetish for all things Queen is that it allows me to simultaneously be a liberal in America and a republican in Australia.)

But, anyway, back to the sailing blog.

We've got a four-day break from school.  Both kids have diarrhea.  The forecast is for bucketing rain and 20-30 knot southwesterlies as a couple of lows pass over the state.

Given that set of conditions, what else could you possibly want to do besides go sailing?  That's very much our plan, assuming that it isn't too breezy to get out of the marina.

But, alas, deus ex machina: the engine isn't doing its thing.  We've had the injection pump rebuilt and, after it was replaced, first off the engine wouldn't fire at all.  That one took the mechanic two hours to figure out.  Now we start, but get no revs.  No bets how long that one will take to set right.  No complaints at all about the mechanic in this case, just a note about how weird things happen when even a professional dabbles in the black art of boat repair.

So, we're here at least until someone figures out the donk, and until Alisa can get new winch parts to replace the other new parts that she just broke.  And that means we'll have plenty of time here at the dock to observe Eric's latest not-so-cute behavior.

The little guy has been saying the oddest things during the night-time lately.

Things like: mommy, don't throw me in the water!

He gets going on that theme and won't be talked out of it.  Over and over he insists either that we're throwing him in the water, or that we're letting him fall in.

Yes you are, he says.  You are throwing me water.

We think/hope it just has something to do with the sickness that he's been fighting.  But for someone like me, who has always been very open in my view that superstition is a profoundly important part of going to sea, hearing the little fellow say such perfectly unlucky things, again and again, is just a bit unsettling...

Spring

Only one thing to notice about this picture, really.  The hatch is open, letting in some wholesome fresh air.

Five months ago I put plastic insulation over all the hatches to keep winter condensation at bay.

Now it's warm enough that we've taken the insulation off the hatch in the saloon.  All the others are soon to follow, I'm sure.

In May we also laid pieces of carpet over the sole.  It kept the boat nice and warm when the water temperature dropped.

It takes the water longer to warm up in the spring time than it does the air, of course.  So we'll keep the carpet for another week or two.

So far we've only gotten rid of one piece from our cabin.  But that had to do with Elias coming back in the middle of the night to use our head.  He was still asleep enough that he just stood in the head and emptied his bladder into his pajamas, then walked out without realizing that anything was wrong.

The carpet wasn't worth saving after that.

The really welcome sign that spring has arrived is that the never-ending chest colds that kept Elias and Eric barking through the nights of winter have finally left us.

The not-so-welcome bit is that the chest colds have been replaced by fevers and diarrhea.  Childhood is not for wimps!

It's all just the normal run of things, of course.  But Eric, who has been particularly hard-hit by the fever, has responded by waking up screaming bloody murder three or six or eight times a night.  Which has been a little tough on the parents involved.

Remember when you were so young that the most comfortable position for sleeping was on your knees with your bum in the air?

~~~

Peace, Out - Galactic.