Barky move

Our planned two months afloat are coming fast upon us. In less than a month, we plan to be ready to cast off.

Less seasoned salts might faint at the prospect of having Galactic ready to go, after she spent a listless winter at the dock and we spent a far-from-listless winter, doing everything except boat maintenance.

Well, in some of my less seasoned moments, I have come close to fainting at the idea of having everything ready. But then I reminded Alisa that the dang boat just sailed safely from Hawai'i, for crying out loud, so how could she not be ready for a little jaunt around Alaska?

And then, with the happy excuse in hand of a visit from our good friend Mary Anne from Tasmania and her new-to-us beau Stu, we executed our long-adivsed plan for anyone finding themselves overwhelmed by insurmountable problems of boat maintenance.

We went for a sail.

It was great. We had a cracker of a day, and all us Galactics felt some of the old magic of being under way. Stu, who is a sailmaker and a racer, kindly kept all opinions concerning sail trim to himself unless he was presented with a direct question.

So now, though the job list is just as long, it feels less weighty.

And, point of order - I did sweat to get a new set of injectors into the engine just before we went on this daysail. Worked a treat for the great billowing clouds of smoke that had previously attended any use of the donk.

Summer awaits.

Restrained Pessimism

Today, Saturday the 10th of June, was at one time the target that we set as the very latest day we might depart on the Kona-Kodiak rally.

As it turns out, we're now hoping that we'll actually leave at dawn on Monday the 12th.

There is a wonderful bit of symmetry here.

Summer solstice, June the 21st, 2007, was at one time the target date that we set as the very latest day we might leave Kodiak to begin this trip. We actually limped out of town on June the 23rd.

Leaving port always turns out to be a deal for us. In those early days we pointed to a crew member in diapers as our ready-made excuse. These days we point to my science work load.

Who's the old guy fitting deadlights on Galactic?

I'm approaching this passage with what I call restrained pessimism.

I figure there's an even chance that we'll hit a gale up north. So I'm fitting deadlights, those extra-strong polycarbonate outer window that protect our portlights. We'll leave with the trysail bent to the mast and lashed in place, the naval pipe plugged with plumber's putty, etc., etc. We always figure that the best time to prepare for bad weather is when we're still in port.

But I won't go all out and attach the series drogue to the stern cleats and lash it to the deck in its bag, ready to deploy at any moment. That sort of preparation is fine for New Zealand-Chile or South Georgia-South Africa, but it is summer in this hemisphere after all, and I don't foresee things getting so nautical that we actually have to resort to the drogue.

So, you see: restrained pessimism.

And, more than anything, I'm struck by what a different crew it is that is eyeing this last homeward passage. Early on in our trip, the idea of a gale at sea made my knees weak. Now, we just think in terms of trips that fall along a continuum of easy to less so. We'll set out from Hawai'i and see what we get. I'm reminded of an account I read by a 19th century inhabitant of the northwest Alaskan Arctic, writing about his Inupiat companions' attitude towards the hazards of winter. They understood better than anyone the dangers of winter weather, he wrote, but they evinced no concern over them.

I think that we might have earned just ever so small a modicum of that attitude when it comes to long passages outside of the tradewind belt.

To Poncet

Long-time readers (my favorite people!) will remember the idyllic Christmas that Galactic enjoyed at our friend Leiv Poncet's family island-farm in the Falklands two and a half years ago.

Left to right: Galactic, Leiv's Peregrine, and the family boat, Damien II

Beaver Island is a very beautiful place (above). And it is an even more practical place (below).

Inside the Beaver Island shed

Leiv's family have been keeping Southern Ocean working boats going for decades, and they are the kind of people who can turn their hands to anything. During our visit we gained a tremendous respect for Leiv's practical skills, and it didn't hurt my estimation of him when he expressed his very laissez-faire attitude towards marine engineering ("Regular engine maintenance is a waste of time.").

What a breath of fresh air from the de rigueur anal-retentiveness about maintenance that American yachties so often take as a given. Leiv has a great let's-get-this-boat-ready-for-the-charter-season attitude that has seen him across a lot of oceans. As is ever the case with a sailor, the proof is in the miles he has sailed.

So recently, Alisa and I hit upon the perfect way to distill our appreciation of that wonderful combination of vast ability and relaxed approach.

To whit, we coined a commemorative, eponymous verb: "to Poncet".

Alisa, in the act of Ponceting the main

To Poncet a job is very akin to the "get 'er done" of the American male vernacular, but, well..."get 'er done" somehow doesn't translate to solo Southern Ocean circumnavigations.

With the inaugural, one-boat version of the Kona to Kodiak rally just about to commence, we've had a few jobs to knock off. And...well...the bloom is well off the frantic pre-passage preparation routine. For once we just want to get the damn barky ready and go to sea without any bashed knuckles and late nights.

So, "Poncet it!" has been our rallying cry.

When we got the main down on the deck to attend to its rotten luff, I was at first dour about our chances. I figured the best we could do would be to patch it, nurse it up to Kodiak, and then ship it off to a sailmaker in Seattle over the winter.

But then we got into the job, and got into the spirit of Ponceting it - get it fixed, don't sweat the details, and move on with life.

And...it's a very liberating attitude. After a couple days of working together on the project, we realized that we were doing a fine job. We don't need no stinkin' sailmaker. Give us a floor large enough to lay out the sail this next winter, instead of our cramped foredeck, and we'll be able to finish the job proper.

So here we are...ten years into the life, and just reaching the point where we're really ready to go off and sail the world in our own boat.

Post-Poncet

It Must Be Good

Great friends of ours recently bought their first cruising boat.

In the nautical world, this is recognized as a dark and lamentable turning point in anyone's life.

Just joking.
Sort of.

We spoke with these friends of ours - really some of the most remarkable, steadfast, and simpatico people we have met in our decade afloat - right in that awful extended moment when the depths of their predicament had become fully clear. (Drop us a line, guys! We want to know how it goes.)

Everything on their new boat boat seemed to broken. They were looking at that insurmountable job list that is a part of most stories of how someone acted on the dream and bought their own traveling boat. And, I think, they were trying to figure out if the lake of expense and angst that had suddenly opened at their feet, demanding to be swum, was really going to be worth it.

We talked with these friends, just when they were re-evaluating their view of the sailing life through the new prism of boat ownership. At one point, one of them asked me if I ever got off the boat.

"Sure," I said somewhat defensively. "I get off the boat."

We have just spent a couple weeks anchored in Las Perlas Islands in Panama, poised on the verge of our big jump to Hawai'i.

Granted, I have been pouring heart and soul and considerable time into the scientific research that keeps us going financially, so my time budget would not be representative for most yachties.

But still, a few days ago I looked at Alisa, wiped the dust from my brow, and said to her, "I had my answer wrong. I should have said, 'Get off the boat? Why would I ever want to get off the boat?'"

Because, when I haven't been trying to understand the ecological implications of sea surface temperature-sea level pressure coupling in the North Pacific, I have been pouring heart and soul and discretionary hours into projects like those illustrated above: fixing the wind generator (partly successful) and renewing the nonskid deck paint in crucial areas (generally regarded as a stunning boat maintenance coup).

Meanwhile, our transmission has developed a leak that seems to have eluded my first attempt at a fix. And our busted telescoping whisker pole seems likely to set out for Hawai'i in a still-busted state. This is a really classic boat problem - it was broken when we reached Cape Town, got fixed there, failed nearly immediately on the trip back across the Atlantic, got fixed again at Ascension Island, and then broke immediately again.

So this is us, a decade into the sailing life, on a well-used boat, which are generally less maintenance than the marina-sitters of the world. We're always fixing something.

And yet, for all that effort, we are all four of us completely enthralled with the sailing life. Consider the days we have just spent at Las Perlas, off a deserted beach, in waters thick with life, at a spot that you could only get to your own boat.

See the beach fire pic above from Las Perlas - I expect that our next beach fire will be in Alaska.  See the photos of Eric below, swinging from a halyard.

And see the happy family, very much together, very much in the same boat, below.

Buying your way into that kind of living with some boat maintenance...who wouldn't make that trade?

Brown pelican, catching dinner

Freak of the Week

This one is for all the boat maintenance aficionados in the audience.

The shot above is the back of our engine instrument panel in the steering pedestal.

As with nearly all the wiring on Galactic, it's a neat, professional looking job.

But I was motivated to dig in there because our tachometer has stopped working, and I wanted it operational for the Canal.

A quick fix got us through the Canal experience with some evidence beyond that of my ears for judging how fast the engine was turning.

A more thorough investigation on the Pacific side showed this:

We've always known there was a bad cockpit fire on Galactic two owners before us. And this appears to be the last damage from that fire to be found and remedied.

These cables run from the engine room, through the stainless steel tubing of the pedestal, to the instrument panel.

The heat of the fire was apparently enough to melt the insulation off the wires. So for years - and for us, for two crossings of the Pacific, and two crossings of the Atlantic - the ignition switch and engine instruments were served by nothing more than bare corroding wires, surrounded by ash and melted insulation.

How they ever worked in that state is beyond me...

So. The fact that I've been getting through jobs like this speaks to the fact that we are getting closer to setting out for Hawai'i.

And in addition to these boat jobs, I've gotten through a pile of science work and we've finally been able to leave Panama City.

We're all happy about getting away from the Big Smoke, none more so than Elias:

Big Big Big

This is my favorite picture from the passage between South Georgia and Cape Town.

I'm doing my best impression of the guy who was up for most of the night, keeping sleepless radar watch for lurking icebergs, and the guy who was also doing most of the sailhandling on the passage.

Oh, wait.  I was that guy.  I guess that's why I look like a cross between Joshua Slocum and a pile of sh*t.  It was a long passage, and it took a certain toll.

The boys, meanwhile, have this semi-quizzical look of kids who have been raised to know no other life, but are starting to suspect that there might be some other alternatives out there, somewhere.

For reference, our path is roughly indicated on the map below.  I think I screwed up the location of Cape Town, but you get the general idea.

Getting to South Georgia is much easier than getting away.  We weren't keen to head back upwind to the Falklands once our time in South Georgia was done.  So that left us looking at the passage to South Africa.

This was so so much bigger than any crossing we've done before.  We're quite used to the company of genuinely salty people who take this kind of passage as a matter of course, so I'm reluctant to make too big a deal of it.  But for us...it was a very big deal.  Water temperatures below 2°C/35°F, icebergs, the possibility of really violent weather, and the guarantee of gales at least.  And, as with any ocean passage, it's an arena where you are utterly on your own.  So, again, a big deal to us.

Given all that potential downside, you might ask yourself if this was really a passage for children, five and nine.  Well, believe me, we asked ourselves that many many times before we set off from the Falklands.

We've known a lot of people who have sailed with their children, and I can think of only one set of parents who we thought were being irresponsible.

Taking young kids to sea means that you need to be as sure as you can be sure of anything that you are up to the challenges of your chosen passage.  Almost every parent who we know who sails with their kids understands that standard, and meets it.

But consider our situation.  We've been sailing with young kids for nine years come next month.  We've gradually been branching out from the delights of downwind sailing in the tropics and exploring more challenging areas.  How do we know when enough is enough?  Where do we draw our own line in the sea, beyond which we think it imprudent to venture?

We can't ever let ourselves go too far, and find ourselves committed to a passage that is so difficult that we aren't able to properly care for the kids.  If we got caught out on a trip like the one from South Georgia to South Africa and got into real difficulties, there would be a chorus of people jumping on the chance to condemn us as selfish idiots.  And well.  If we really did get caught out on a trip that was too much for us, we would agree with that assessment.

A haircut in Grytviken before setting out.

So we thought about it for years, the idea of going to South Georgia, and committing to the passage that would get us away.  For most of that time, we thought that we wouldn't go.  It seemed too ambitious a trip for our family crew of amateurs.

But in that time when we weren't thinking we would go, we were laying the groundwork for a successful trip without really meaning to.

We sailed across the Tasman Sea, from Hobart to Bluff.  We made the very moderate crossing to the Aukland Islands, in the New Zealand subantarctic.  We made the much bigger crossing from New Zealand to the Tuamotus, and came to grips with what a less-than-ideal passage might look like.  We got ourselves to Chile without drama, and then spent the winter season on the move in farthest south Patagonia.

In other words, we served an apprenticeship.  We gradually bit off more and more.  Over time we brought the boat into good nick for harder trips.  And more importantly, we turned ourselves into crew who were competent at these sorts of trips.  And we started to meet more and more like-minded people with much more experience than we'll ever have.  We learned to ask these people the right questions, and we listened very hard to their answers.



For reasons of tactics, we left Grytviken in somewhat unreasonable conditions.  Williwaws were pouring off the mountains as we made our way to sea, and once we were out of the lee of the island we found ourselves holding on while Galactic, well reefed down, sailed her wandering path over the steep seas that came charging up behind us.  We all felt rotten (except Elias).  But we figured we'd have conditions much rougher than that soon enough on the trip, and leaving while things were still rough after the passage of a low allowed us to get one more day to the north before the next gale caught us.

I love these pictures of the four of us early on in the trip, hanging out in the cockpit and wondering when the hell our sea legs will catch up with us.

All that I think was so much time spent making our own luck.  We had plenty of the real kind of luck, of course, the luck that was not of our own making.

But we also had some fairly representative lousy conditions on the trip.  We had three gales, all blowing from the north, and thus halting our progress northwards towards ice-free waters.

Once we made it to Cape Town, we heard the reports from four other boats that had sailed from South Georgia or the Antarctic Peninsula, and we heard the stories from locals about other boats arriving in seasons past.

The damage list for those boats was long, and severe.  Broken rudders, exploded sails, rigging failure and boats rolled over.

(Our favorite post-passage quote was from Olivier.  Me:  "Wow, 17 days, that's a really fast passage." Him: "Yes, I had to be fast.  I wanted to get here before I sank.")

Alisa and I are careful not to ascribe merit to a lucky outcome.  But our biggest gear failures on the passage were a chafed-through leech cord on the main and an telescoping whisker pole that wouldn't extend.  We wonder if part of the reason for that happy outcome wasn't that we heave to very quickly.  Once the wind is much over thirty knots we just park the boat and wait for things to get better.  This is a much lower threshold than that exercised by most boats in the Southern Ocean.  And I suspect that there is some real merit to that conservative approach, that it keeps us out of all sorts of difficulties that might arise from the combination of big seas and high boat speed.

Eric tucked his stuffed animal in to keep me company.

Eric and Alisa bunked on the sole for the duration.

The biggest surprise of the passage was how far north we saw icebergs - we encountered them almost daily all the way up to 46° South.  They were mostly huge tabular bergs from Antarctica.  And they made me nervous as hell.

We relied heavily on the advice of our friend Leiv, who counseled that we would find smaller bergy bits only near, and downwind of, their large parent bergs.  The bergy bits are particularly dangerous, since they are like floating rocks, just at the surface where radar can't pick them up.  We trusted in the idea that the parent bergs, easily seen on radar, signaled the presence of any danger.  It worked out.

On our second or third day out we came across a berg with a long fogbank behind it.  When we realized that the fogbank was actually another berg, 10s of kilometers long, our worldview took a bit of a shaking up.  It was one of those bergs that gets tracked from space.

Hard to photograph, but this iceberg fills the horizon.  The scale was a little horrifying.

Eventually we left the ice behind.  The temperatures moderated and we settled down to simply sailing the miles required of us, and wondering how many gales we would meet along the way.  The family spent each day in the cockpit, reading aloud and drawing for hours on end.

Even when the conditions had eased, I found myself under the chronic tension of taking responsibility for a good outcome on such a big jump.

The seas are famously difficult to photograph.  I have some great video, but with my time commitments to science, I draw the line at posting video online.  To quote a Scottish friend, I can't be arsed with it.

Elias is always keen that there be a prize for the person spotting land at the end of a passage.  He very much likes the story of Columbus nailing a gold coin to the mast for the man who first spotted land.

Unfortunately for him, it's always been me who spots land first, even if I'm not really trying to.  I just know where it should be, and am paying more attention to the problems of navigation.  But this time it was Elias who was the first - he spotted the Cape of Good Hope before anyone else.  What a classic landfall.

Landfall

We dealt with a tremendous amount of shipping coming around the Cape.

Elias was overjoyed to receive permission to strip the insulation from our portlights and hatches as we approached Cape Town.  Our year in the South was over, and this was a fitting act of transition for our arrival in Africa.

Lion's Head, with Table Mountain in the background.

Cape Town!

I shaved for landfall.

She's laughing because she's wearing a jacket but no bibs, and just got soaked while working on the bow.

Cape Town is one of the great ports of the world.  The Royal Cape Yacht Club is the mandatory destination for inbound yachts.  It is tucked right in the heart of the working port, which gave a great feel to our arrival.

So now, after all our years in the Pacific, we've crossed the Atlantic, too.  

We made Cape Town 21 days out of Grytviken, and put a bit more than three thousand nautical miles on the log in the process (though this wasn't our noon-to-noon distances).  Considering that we were hove to four times on the passage, once for two days, we were very happy with the speed of the trip.

The next morning we cleared customs, and had a cook's night out at the yacht club restaurant to celebrate our achievement.

Cape Town marked a tremendous transition in our sailing lives.  More of that, and what we found waiting for us in South Africa, in our next post...

Back

So, I'm back in the bosom of family...and boat prep.

Whenever I come back from one of my infrequent work trips, after I've left Alisa looking after the boys solo in some odd corner of the world or another, I'm always relieved to find the same number of crew on board Galactic as when I left.

It's not gaining crew while I'm away that worries me so much as losing some.

So I got to catch up on all the family news - the bread baking and the horses ridden, the recovering oiled gentoo penguin fed fish by hand and the triumphs and tribulations of boat schooling.

Alisa, while she was teaching and cooking and caring and arbitrating and washing and cleaning and mending, all without adult backup, also managed to service all the winches on Galactic while I was gone.  The Norwegian sailor who was next to Galactic in Carl's Marina (room for two visiting boats) saw that and said, "your husband is one lucky fellow!"

Don't I know it.

Having been away from the boat for three weeks, I feel a bit out of the sailing life.  Can you imagine going three whole weeks of sleeping on land every single night?  Kind of beggars the imagination, doesn't it?

Luckily, I've got the (fanfare) passage to South Georgia (!) to get me back in the swing of things.  Immediately upon returning to the boat, I tried very very hard to forget that I had ever earned a PhD and I went back to being Capt. do-it-yourself rigger so that we could be ready to catch the first window.  Before I left for Alaska I changed six shrouds.  After I got back, I tried to change the forestay and only managed to mangle my thumb.

As I say, I was ashore for 21 straight days.  Feel my pain.

But, the initial re-entry is over and we are on weather standby to leave the Falklands.  The work trip that I just finished, though it was very welcome, also took the heart of the Austral summer.  We're feeling the season moving on us, and would very much like to get going already.

But we know what works for us, and the head-out-in-(nearly)-any-weather attitude that works for some of our peers isn't at all for Galactic.  We scheduled with Customs to clear out tonight and depart early tomorrow, but a new low appeared in the forecast this morning and we scrapped that plan.

Our time will come, soon enough.