This Peripatetic Life

We were at a party last night in Kodiak, and someone asked me about the friends we'd made during our grand tour.

"Yep," I answered. "The way we look at it is, we got to know some of the most fantastic people that you could ever imagine. And most of them we'll likely never see again."

Elias and Eric had certainly picked up on the transitory nature of sailing friendships. As we were counting down our last year before returning to our home port, I once asked them what they were looking forward to about being ashore. "We can have friends!" was their immediate, and enthusiastic, answer.

Most of the time in the life afloat, you meet people, hit it off, and then sail away from each other, never again to cross paths. If you're on the same route, say sailing across the Pacific, you're likely to run into people over and over during the season. But then the season ends, and you inevitably go your separate ways. 

A very few times, though, we've been lucky enough to run into simpatico yachties during more than one season.

A couple memorable examples are illustrated below. There was Six Pack, with Rex and Louise aboard, whom we met in Tonga, saw again a year later in Queensland, and then saw again a couple years after that in Tasmania.

And there was Thélème, the long-term floating home of wonder couple Richard and Michele, delightful holdovers from the good old days when sailing wasn't so darn serious, and sailors were a lot more fun. That's Thélème tied next to Galactic in Whangarei, New Zealand.

The very champion example of ships we meet more than once, though, is our friend Leiv on Peregrine. We met in Tasmania, saw him again in the Falklands, and just now had a great summer with him in Kodiak.

Leiv and Elias, high above Kodiak

But these things of course come to an end. Leiv buggered off a few weeks ago, chasing rumors of cheap sandblasting in Mexico, and ultimately headed back home to the Falklands.

I've gotten very used to quick goodbyes. In fact, the practiced way that sailors make quick work of goodbyes is one of the many things find attractive about that wonderful tribe of hybrid dreamer-doers.

So it was Alisa who really marked the moment for us when Leiv dropped by Galactic to say farewell. When the hell would we ever see each other again, she wondered aloud.

When indeed.

Farewell, mate.

You're Not A High Latitude Sailor Until...

You know the saying from the old days - "you're not a cruiser until you've towed the Pardeys into port!"

(That's just a delightful bon mot from an earlier and much more innocent era in the sailing game, and not at all a dig at the Pardeys, who, when we met them in New Zealand, were more than kind and hospitable.)

But, having heard that joke from the past recently, I was inspired to coin my own variation: "You're not a real high latitude sailor until you've had Jérôme Poncet on board for dinner!"

We Galactics were recently privileged enough to do just that.

Our mate Leiv Poncet has been operating his sailboat Peregrine out of the Kodiak this summer, and his dad, Jérôme, came to Kodiak from the Falklands for a bit of a sailing holiday with his son. Having been hanging out with Leiv every chance we got this summer, we naturally also got to hang out with his dad while he was here.

In the world of high-latitude sailing, Jérôme is just about as big a deal as there is.

Consider this: his first boat Damien, which he co-owned with Gérard Janichon, sits right next to Bernard Moitessier's Joshua in the Musée Maritime de la Rochelle. Damien was a 10-meter, cold-molded sailboat that more than once went as far or farther than any small sailboat had before. After the Damien days there were the even more groundbreaking days in Damien II with Sally and their kids, and after that the professional years in the Golden Fleece.

It's all quite a record of achievement and derring-do, more wonderful and detailed than what I can do justice to here.

The great part, though, is that all of that means nothing when you're talking with him. Jérôme comes across as a normal guy who happens to be extremely authoritative about high-latitude sailing. He was tremendously kind and interested about our boat and our infinitely more modest sailing ventures. He reminded me of a truism that we first recognized from observing commercial fishing boat captains in Alaska: the very best and most skilled mariners have no need to show off or brag about what they have done.

There was this one difference between Jérôme and commercial fishermen of our acquaintance, though - the commercial fishermen don't have anything like the irrepressible gleam that Jérôme carries around in his eye.

Speck 'dat

Did you read Barbarian Days? You really should. "Speck 'dat" is my memory of William Finnegan's rendering of Hawai'i slang of the sixties for "check that out!"

Admission: I read very very few sailing blogs. I suppose that if I'm doing it myself full time, I don't feel the need to go online to read about someone else's experience afloat.

But though I don't read them in quantity, I have tremendously enjoyed a few blogs over the years, mostly written by erudite friends of ours. (Shout-out to you, Enki!)

So check this out: the sailing blog of Pandion. This is the real-time memoir of some great friends of ours, from our own barbarian days in Iluka. These people are switched on, in the Australian parlance, and though they are only just getting going, I reckon they'll be well worth following over time. So get in on the ground floor!

Alisa and part of team Pandion on board Galactic, back in the day.

What I Like

That's what I like. Galactic is just to the right of the guard tower

Panama, rather than being the between-the-oceans transit lounge that I was expecting, has turned out to be a fantastic destination on its own terms, regardless of our business with the Canal.

A highlight for our crew of wandering biologists has been the biodiversity. More bird species have been recorded in this little country than have been recorded in all of the US and Canada combined.

As for the people part of travel...I find that I am getting to be more and more like our friend Richard, on the indefatigable yacht Thélème, whom we met all these years ago. Richard, who has been sailing much longer than we have, once explained to me that he has reached the point where, if given the choice between two anchorages, one in front of a village and another off by itself, he inevitably finds himself gravitating towards the lonely anchorage.

Portobelo and the lay of the land

And so it has become with me. As a case in point, I offer up the delightful Caribbean port of Portobelo.

The place is filthy with history. Sir Francis Drake was reportedly buried at sea just off the harbor, and the history only ramps up from there.

Portobelo today is a fairly quiet roadside town, come down quite a long ways from the years, centuries ago, when it was a terminus for the transshipment of the fruits of genocide.

The town is something of a backpacker destination, and has a very lively Carnival scene infused by the local Afro-Caribbean culture. There are two Spanish forts, long since abandoned, right in the town, and all sorts of little eateries for bored looking tourists.

And, from day one when we made our immigration formalities there, I would have happily not set foot in Portobelo the town ever again.

The other side

But the other side of the harbor, away from the town, was my very image of travel idyll.

Here it was possible to anchor just off of another derelict fort, this one a three-level affair with a large waterfront fort, a smaller one a hundred meters or so up the hill, and a third at the top of a short track through the jungle.

Ba-boom

 The area around the two lower forts has been cleared of trees, producing a wonderful forest-grassland ecotone that was a birder's dream. It was always possible at the end of a day of science work to nip over with a boy or two and spot a handful of new species.

And when there were other kids about for the junior Galactics to play with we would send the whole mob ashore to go nuts in the forts without the inconvenience of adults sticking up the works.

Just look at the top picture in this post - can you imagine a better setting for the 6 to 10 set to be left to their own devices?

Our great friend Diana gently, and rightly, pointed out to me that my recent anti-rally screed sounded suspiciously like the ravings of a grumpy old fart.

(But, Diana, they're doing it right now! The "Puddle Jump" rally is having a meeting today in Panama City. When did anyone ever dream of going to sea so that they could attend meetings? And now they'll go to this meeting, and then they'll hurry through the Tuamotus so they can make it to the staged cultural event in Moorea, all the while ensuring that they travel half the world round without leaving the bubble of people very much like themselves.)

So yes, you're right, Diana. Grumpy old fart status attained.

And so it is, perhaps, with the people side of travel.

I still love meeting people, and various yachties remain some of the most remarkable people I have ever met. And at times in the past we have gone to great lengths to achieve friendship across cultural and linguistic barriers, with extraordinarily wonderful results.

But our affairs with town life in a place like Panama can be fairly transactional, and the trouble of getting past my awful Spanish to make a meaningful connection with a local can seem like more trouble than it is worth.

In contrast, a place like that abandoned fort on the other side of the harbor from Portobelo, redolent with history, offering reasonable solitude, and the delight of learning a new place through its avifauna...put me in a place like for a couple of hours with my family, and I am completely content with life.

Rich Man's Jail

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about. -Sterling Hayden

Reader "horizonstar" left that quote as a comment to my post about opportunity costs.

While I admire the notion that's expressed there, I admit to some reservations. I'm not one to romanticize hardship. There have been many times when I've been happy to be working enough that we have relatively deep pockets for maintaining Galactic.

But then we put the barky into a marina in Curaçao, and the sentiment expressed in that quote made a whole lot more sense.

The marina in Curaçao

We had a pretty good excuse for being there. In order to leave Galactic in Curaçao so that I could get some work done in the States and we could all visit family, we had to put her in customs bond. And that required putting the boat in a marina.

The place is a sterile nothing that was created as a part of a tourism mega-development. It's quite expensive. But at least we had the excuse of leaving the boat to explain our presence.

But there were quite a few other crews living aboard in the marina, with no apparent excuse on offer.  And the scene was dull. 

To paraphrase a good friend's comments on visiting his in-laws: never have so few, with so much, done so little.  The marina is full of super high-end "cruising" boats that are busy doing nothing. The people living aboard them seem to have very carefully recreated their home culture in this new place, and the dockside scene has all the verve and authenticity of any beach condo community anywhere.

By contrast, the anchorage in Spanish Waters that we had just left felt like a thrilling, anarchic place. And believe me, as anchorages go, Spanish Waters is pretty low on the thrilling/anarchic scale.

But there is a fundamental upside to being anchored as opposed to being tied to the dock. You have a wonderful moat around you, keeping the rest of the world at a respectful distance. And at anchor you're keeping alive the feeling of contingency and impermanence that is the essence of living on a sailboat. The outcome of your voyage is still in doubt. You could pull the hook at any time, and suddenly avail yourself of the great sailor's freedom of being on the way from here to there. 

When your boat is tied to the dock, on the other hand, it is literally and metaphorically tied to land. Your voyage is over for now. And nothing very worthwhile will happen with your boat until you untie it again.

Our neighbor boats in that marina are variously weighted down with watermakers and gensets, those two great tools for maintaining the life of land on a boat. But still their owners pay perfectly good money to forsake any feeling of freedom, just for the comfort of those two leashes to land, the power cord and the water hose. 

I wonder if it isn't the terrible handicap of wealth that keeps them there. Once your boat and its accouterments are astronomically expensive, it might be so much more comforting to live behind a locked gate.  And to pay a subset of the dark-skinned locals to protect you against the imagined depredations of their kin.

Ah, but! Into this sad scene come the crews of Itacaré, Gentileza, and El Caracol - two Brazilian families living in the marina, and their friends, a Portuguese family, anchored just outside, whom our family had the good fortune to fall in with.

This mob instantly swept Alisa and our kids into their orbit of fun. Elias and some of the dads involved discovered a shared deep appreciation for fishing. And after I was away in Oregon on my work trip, Elias even got to go out on a blokes-only fishing mission with the fathers. I think this kind of exposure to role models who aren't me is a very good experience for a boy Elias' age.

And thus, one of my great motivating beliefs as a traveler: there are good people everywhere.

In Praise of the Off Season

Elias, steering a local boat on a daysail

Another traveling crew, who had left their boat at the False Bay Yacht Club while they were out of the country, returned last week. They're Australian, with kids, and inevitably in this small world of traveling boats we share mutual friends with them. Together we had a braai at the club and fell into the easy chatting of strangers who have a lot in common.

Alisa and I have been missing the company of other traveling boats - since we returned from our safari we've been the only traveling crew here. At this point in our sailing lives, we start to miss the company of the also-saltstained if we're away from it too long.

But! It has also struck us that there has been a tremendous upside to being in South Africa during the off season. If we were here during the peak season, when as many as 16 foreign boats might pull into Simon's Town on the same day, it would be very hard to break out of the yachtie bubble. All those fellow-travelers on the other foreign yachts would have so much in common with us, and if experience is any guide would be a generally excellent sample of humanity, that it would be tremendously easy to just hang out with them. And it would have been correspondingly difficult to break out of the bubble and get to know some locals.

And so, it has been our great good luck to be starved of the company of fellow travelers this season, and thereby to get the chance to find friendship among the locals.

It's true - there really are good people everywhere. And meeting some of them in a place where we've never been before, and getting a bit of the unique perspective on the human experiment that they each provide, is one of the things that keeps us traveling after all these years...

So now we'll leave South Africa (soon!) having added to my thumbnail description of what we've earned for ourselves over these nine years of travel. 

We know fantastic people around the world, I sometimes say to Alisa. And almost all of them we'll never see again.

Finally, after nine years of sailing, we were invited to tour a candy factory. 
Now we can safely retire from travel, knowing that the crew's fondest wish has been granted.

Here, and below - getting down with the locals

More soon...

A Different Dirt

Our friend Fatty Goodlander has a wonderful us-and-them riff about "dirt dwellers". That would be his shorthand for the part of the human race that lives on land.

He maintains that the customs of that particular tribe of humanity are particularly hard to fathom. It's a tremendously entertaining spiel. And really, if you're going to stoop to that lowest and most common human failing of deciding who is and isn't in your tribe, and who is, and is not, therefore worthy of being considered fully human, you might as well go big. It's us sea gypsies vs the other 99.9999999%!

But, dear Fatty, I might ask you to consider the view that there is dirt, and then there is dirt. As in, not all of the solid bits of the earth are equally bad.

Take, for instance, the farm at Omandumba, Namibia, where these pictures were taken. The campground there was...  Well, scroll down to the picture of our rental truck between the boulders, and you'll see how good it was. No other campers, the stars screaming-bright at night. We were just absolutely in heaven.

And although there were no other campers around, there was a San (aka Bushmen) "living museum" about 300 meters away. The living museum concept seems like a cool way for semi-traditional peoples in Namibia to benefit directly from tourism. You pay for a tour, and they demonstrate traditional bush skills to you. The people at this museum rotate between the living museum and their village on the border with Botswana, two or three months a time in each place.

I was over the moon hearing a click language being spoken. I haven't read up on it, but San culture, and language, are impressively old. The language is famous for having a number of sounds that are made by clicking the tongue or throat. Trying to repeat the San names for trees or animals was as fun as it was unsuccessful.

There is also something a little seedy in the living museum scene. Get a picture of the naked Africans! Big-time out-there travel moment! But we managed to look past that.

The really interesting interaction was off-hours. The campground had the only water source, so the San would come over to our camp in the mornings and evenings to fill their bottles. It was always a pretty large group that came over - usually ten or so, including kids. Everyone would be wearing western clothes, and their demeanor was quite shy. That was the picture to get - something about the western clothes spoke of a culture in transition. But it just seemed too too intrusive to grab a camera at those moments. Better to just interact as equals as best we could instead of devolving into the photographer-subject relationship.

The site was also crawling with ancient San rock art. Ancient as in millenia old. That was pretty cool. And seeing it while listening to San speaking about it in that click language...that was worth the trip, for sure.

More soon...

But Is It Safe?

We've just spent six days in Kruger National Park, in the province of Mpumalanga in northeastern
South Africa.

Our experience in the park was completely over the top (above).  More about that in another post.

What I'm thinking about today is the people side of South Africa.

First, there was the pleasant surprise that the crowds at the campgrounds we stayed at in Kruger were almost entirely South African. I had expected an international crowd, but we only saw two or three other groups of obviously foreign campers during our stay.  The language spoken in the campgrounds was overwhelmingly Afrikaans, which made a nice contrast with the English dominance that we are used to from the Western Cape.

But it was also hard not to notice that the Kruger scene was very much a "white Africa", as Alisa put it.  The visitors were overwhelmingly white, and the workers overwhelmingly black.  I'm not keen to see our visit to South Africa in nothing but terms of race, but it's very hard to avoid.  Kruger was another one of the gated, all-white scenes through which we are experiencing the country.

As we've tried to figure out what is safe for our family here and what is over-reacting, we have carefully assessed the advice that we've gotten from South Africans, either solicited or unsolicited.  And we've noticed an interesting divide in that advice.

On one hand, people have been tremendously cautionary.  The mother of one of Elias and Eric's friends at the yacht club in Simon's Town warned Alisa about the risk of child abduction.  And adult abduction, for that matter. A number of South Africans warned Alisa, when she said that we would be driving across the country between Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, that we should be very very careful on the trip.  A woman whom we met in Kruger commented on how wonderful an experience our visit must have been for the boys.  And then she said it was good we were doing the trip now, "while you still can".  She summed it up by saying "South Africa" and shaking her head.

Driving the highways around Jo'berg, you see road signs warning  of "hijacking hotspots".

At times, this advice, and some of the horror stories we've heard, have really scared us.  Is this the kind of place we should be traveling with our boys?

So we ask more questions of the locals.  And there is a second line of response, beyond the more obvious cautionary advice.  A lot of the country really is safe, especially for a local who knows what's what.  When questioned, some South Africans tell us that we're at no more risk than we would be in Paris or New York. This sort of reassuring talk often seems to spill over into downplaying any sort of racial animus in South Africa, and I wonder how much of it is wishful thinking, or a desire on our interlocutors' part to be positive about their country.

The great shame about all of this from our perspective is that we have decided that our only reasonable course of action is to continue acting like the very wealthy people that we are by the standards of most South Africans, and to use our money to insulate ourselves from the problems of the country.  Outside of Kruger, we have been paying $15 or $20 US a night to camp in private lodges or game reserves.  There is an ocean of largely-black humanity between these little gated refugia that we come to rest in, and that ocean of humanity remains completely mysterious to us.

Running With the Big Dogs

Pierre (left) and Olivier (right) just before setting out to sail non-stop from South Africa to New Caledonia

We've left Cape Town behind and have shifted around to Simon's Town on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope.  This little town is a much better setting for the city-challenged Galactics, and we expect it to be our base for much of our time in South Africa.

Cape Town is of course one of the great ports of the world, and very much on the regular route for high-latitude sailors in the Southern Hemisphere.  Now that we've left Cape Town, we've left behind our last contacts with the Southern Ocean sailing community.

As we're unplugging from that world, I wanted to take a moment to note how much we've enjoyed rubbing elbows with that group of sailors who aim their boats at the far South.

The standards of seamanship in that world are just incredibly high.  For the last year or so we've been hanging out with people who routinely demonstrate just how much you can pull off in relatively small boats in the biggest waters in the world.  And we've found the sailors that we meet in Puerto Natales or Puerto Williams or Stanley or Grytviken to also be impressively warm and open and free of artifice.  It's just like the the Alaskan commercial fishing world, where Alisa and I found that the most capable people tended to be the most humble and low-key.

Nearly without exception, we've found that even people who have been sailing down South for decades assume that we are from the same tribe as them once we show up somewhere.  If you sail your own boat into one of those ports, especially in the winter, you are immediately in the club.

And of course there is the intense connection between people relying on their own devices in a setting where you have to accept whatever the sea deals you.  We met Pierre and Olivier in the photo above briefly in Grytviken.  But when we saw them again in Cape Town we were much more than casual acquaintances.  There is a commonality of outlook and shared experience that cuts through so much social deadwood, and makes for a real feeling of warmth, a real brotherhood, among people who know each other hardly at all.

Finally, I want to note that sailing the Southern Ocean might be the last great adventure that is left to our age.  The mountains of the world are desperately crowded, with the great problems solved generations ago, and contemporary climbers are reduced to paltry achievements like setting speed records on classic routes.

But the oceans are what they always were.  True, communications and weather forecasting have made setting out on a big passage much less daunting than it used to be, and places like South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula have lost the solitude that is the essential ingredient of adventure.  But the long passages in the far South - I'm thinking here of Pierre and Olivier heading off non-stop for New Caledonia, or the Canadian yacht that left a day later, bound for New Zealand - these undertakings in mere boats are still the grand adventures they always were.

There is an irreducible challenge to sailing these waters.

~~~

And now we've been meeting some very nice folks who have come to South Africa via the low-latitude route through the Indian Ocean, and who are on the tail end of the migration of yachts from South Africa up through the Atlantic.  We Galactics have had our year of adventure down south, and we are very glad to be relaxing back into tropical passagemaking, where we properly belong.

The Gift of Kodiak

South-central Alaska from space - Kodiak is in the foreground

So, for nearly two weeks now I've been in Alaska.

I have two active research projects in Alaskan marine biology, and although almost all of the work is analysis and writing that I can do from Galactic, I occasionally need face time with my Alaskan colleagues.  That's what brought me up here.  I've been catching up with old friends and colleagues and colleagues who are also friends while Alisa gets to stay back in the tiny private marina in Stanley, boatschooling both boys and generally keeping ahead of them without any adult backup.

Sorry, babe.

The gift of Kodiak

The groups that fund my research are keen for the work they support to be presented to the general public.  "Science outreach" they call it, and I'm generally a fan of the process.  Most of my work is funded by public money, and I'm happy to report directly back to the public on what comes out of that work.

On this trip I made some public presentations in Kodiak, the commercial fishing town in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska that we sailed away from eight and a half years ago.  I stayed with old friends, I revisited old haunts, I caught up on the news.  I took a banya, which is a requirement for any bona fide visit to Kodiak.

Kodiak, the island, is a completely remarkable place.  Kodiak, the town (it sometimes puts on airs and calls itself a City), is physically unimpressive.  To be charitable.  More often than not, it comes across as a grimy working town, a supremely utilitarian settlement that hasn't been prettified for visitors in the few hundred years it has existed.  It can be especially ugly during a winter like the one we're having, with a strong Niño creating a grey, oppressive, rainy winter completely devoid of the white magic of a snowy Alaskan landscape.

Even though Kodiak is a working town, it can also be a hard place to make a living in.  There are plenty of people who are just getting by in Kodiak.  People warn me that methamphetamine and heroin use are strongly on the upsurge.  Acquaintances mutter uncomplementary things about the schools.  My male friends in the town have generally aged quite hard in the years that we've been gone.

For all that, Alisa and I are very excited at the idea of eventually sailing back to Kodiak and settling down.  It remains home.  It's the only place in Alaska where we still have a strong community.  And that community is made up of some very remarkable people.  Kodiak, like the rest of Alaska, attracts fantastic people.

All that, I suppose, gets at what I was thinking about when I titled this post.

Kodiak is a magical place that has the extra magic of never making you think that magic will play a role in your life.

Kodiak is a unique place with a supremely everyday reality that tempers my expectations even as I'm excited at the idea of sailing back there some day.  Kodiak is the place where Alisa and I have been lucky enough to run up against a handful of very remarkable people with whom we share the place.  (Check out the work of my favorite living Alaskan artist in the pic above.)

Kodiak, in the end, remains our secret place in Alaska, and the world, the place where Alisa and I still think we will go ashore some day and look to make a less peripatetic life with our boys.

Kodiak is a gift...

Alaska is a gift, too...we still have great friends sprinkled around non-Kodiak parts of the Great Land.  This pic is from the day DRR took me up to Hatcher Pass to find some snow.

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.

Unstuck

Speedwell Settlement

At the Speedwell/George/Barren group we applied that favorite tactic for sailing vessels harbor-bound by bad weather: patience.

Eventually we waited long enough.  The west winds died to a whisper, and we carried on our way, unstuck.

We were bound across Falkland Sound, the body of water that separates East Falkland from West Falkland.  Our destination was Albermarle, a property run by the same extended family that owns Speedwell.

We were happy to be able to carry some empty fuel barrels from one settlement to the other.  The first practical thing we've ever done with the boat, I joked with the farmers.  The boys found the drums to be useful for making music.

With Tanya and Shaun and family at Albermarle

We had another good visit at Albermarle.  Tanya and Shaun, the young couple who farm the place, made us very welcome.

From Albermarle we took two leisurely days to get right around the bottom of West Falkland to our local friend's island.  We had good sailing winds both days, and it was a joy to not be motoring into the weather.  But I was still a bit on edge about the state of our rig, with the three stranded lower shrouds.  It will be a relief to finally replace that wire when we get back to Stanley.

Gentoo penguin

Peale's dolphin

On the second day out of Arbelmarle we came upon our local friend, completing a charter for a group of biologists on his yacht Peregrine.  We had last seen Peregrine in Tasmania - a lot of sailing miles ago, let me assure you. 

Peregrine

It was a treat to sail in company with a friendly boat.  That doesn't happen too often.

Our friend, Leiv, got this picture of Galactic as we were coming in towards Beaver Island, with a fresh breeze behind us and the tide full in our face.

The jetty at Beaver Island

Beaver Island

It was at Beaver Island that the adventure really began for us.  Particularly for the boys, who are now utterly and completely in the Boys' Own Heaven that is a Falkland Islands outer island settlement with a very generous, patient, and forbearing host.  Both Elias and Eric have told us in no uncertain terms that Beaver Island is their 100% favorite place on earth.

I'll show you why in the next post.

Local sight

Boy with reindeer antler.  It became our Christmas tree on Galactic.