Fast

I'm not really into big boats - one of my favorite rules of thumb is that happy sailors have small boats.  When we were boat shopping three years ago we were looking for a boat no more than 42' long.  But of course you don't get everything you want, and Galactic was the right boat for us in a whole lot of ways, even at 45' (that's 13.7 m for everyone else in the world).

So I'm not one to sing the praises of a bigger boat.  But I gotta say that I LOVED having a boat this size for crossing the Tasman and going down to the Aucklands.  Partly this was because Galactic, at more than twice the displacement of our last boat, Pelagic, is plenty comfortable at sea.  But the real advantage of a bigger boat in those waters is the speed.  We have good sails and a fast underbody and when we got a reasonable weather window we could poke our noses out of whatever snug anchorage we were in and make eight or nine or even (with a bit of help from the tide) ten knots (below) so that we were in the next snug anchorage before the window closed.

The other thing that made me happy about our setup while we were down south was our anchor - our really really big anchor.

We've got a 40 kg / 88 lb. Rocna, which we got at a steep discount in California when we were fitting out the boat.  And when the wind started williwawing in Erebus Cove in the middle of the night, with Galactic heeling over and spinning around on the chain, I didn't worry for a minute that we might drag.  (Touch wood!)

 
And, well, I don't like to go on about practicalities too much on the blog.  More than anything else, I was aware of how much we relied on our various routines to do everything - our routines for finding an anchorage at night, and pulling the hook in the morning, for cooking dinner at sea and gybing the boat when sailing wing and wing in a big swell and for standing watches through the night.  All those things are completely second nature to us now - it's almost like we can just put ourselves on autopilot to get these tasks completed while, hopefully, we're mentally scanning the scene for the possibility of something that isn't routine.

Anyway, it seemed to work...

A Glimpse of Home, So Far Away

Galactic and her crew found themselves at the Aucklands just as a series of gales swept in from the west.  We spent the next few days snugged down in the best anchorages in Port Ross - Erebus Cove (below) and Terror Cove.

Terror and Erebus are names that resonate in the history of polar exploration.  The anchorages were named when the ships were in the Aucklands during voyages of Antarctic discovery, under the command of James Ross.  Later, of course, they disappeared under the command of John Franklin during the search for the Northwest Passage.  Very cool to anchor Galactic in this place.

There was also a settlement here, briefly, about 160 years ago.  Three hundred people lived along the shoreline in this picture, but now the rata trees look like they've been undisturbed since the dawn of time.

A cemetery is one of the few remnants of the settlement.

Many of the graves are from shipwrecks that occurred after the settlement was abandoned.

The weather limited us to a quick trip ashore and some exploring in the dinghy.  But meanwhile, of course, we were at home on board Galactic, and family life went on as per normal.  This is the only way that we could imagine extended travel with little kids.

Home school (boat school?) has become a major focus of Alisa's efforts.

Bundling the kids up takes time!

We scrubbed footwear before and after each trip ashore to prevent the accidental introduction of exotic plants.

When the weather cheered itself up we took Galactic around to Ranui Cove and went ashore to the World War II coast watch station.

The old lookout building.

The pinups are still on the wall, seventy years later.

And the magazines are still stacked in a corner.  This one was a find - Brad Washburn is a hero of Alaskan mountaineering - the central figure of mountain exploration in the Great Land.  Corresponding with him about his first ascent of Mt. Deception, and a route that a friend and I put up on the same mountain fifty years later, was a highlight of my climbing days.  It was great fun to imagine some bored, lonely Kiwi down here all those years ago, reading about Washburn's exploits.

The view from the lookout.  The tip of our mast is just visible as a dot on the shoreline in the center of the photo.

We sailed around to Dea's Head to anchor for the night.  Penguins porpoised in the sunlight on either side of us.  The anchorage was still - and yes, that is a gin and tonic in Alisa's hand.

We had a celebratory pizza dinner in the cockpit.

A period of settled weather had arrived, and we were expecting moderate SW winds on the leading edge of an approaching high.  It was the third week of March, and although we had only scratched the surface of the Aucklands, we were determined not to be caught out by the changing season, either in the subantarctic or at Stewart Island.  It was time to go.

As I took the shot above we were listening to pigs screaming in the bush and New Zealand sea lions howling from the water.  A few hours later the southern lights came out - the aurora australis.  Alisa and I met each other in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the aurora borealis is a part of everyday life, especially if you are a student living in a cabin without plumbing and find yourself making visits to the outhouse in the dead of night.  So it was a particular treat for us to see the aurora australis at least once in our lives. After all these years of traveling, and the effort of getting ourselves to somewhere as far from our previous experience of the world as the Aucklands, we were presented with this sight that was both wonderfully familiar, and something we had never seen before.

All the world is our home, and anywhere where we can manage to get our boat, safely, is a place where we're meant to be.

The display that we saw at Dea's Head was a good one - not one of those times when you wonder if that smudge of light on the horizon is the aurora, but one of those times when the lights dance high overhead.  We woke Elias to see them.

He was a little impressed, but mostly sleepy.

The next day we put to sea.

It was a good trip back.

In the next post - a few highlights of what we learned while operating the boat down south...

Southern Ocean Mojo

Hmmm...was it really only a month ago?

Our trip to the Auckland Islands wasn't at all Southern Ocean sailing in the classic Bernard Moitessier, Beryl and Miles Smeeton way, all graybeards and lonely expanses and coming to the end of one's self.

But... it was enough - enough of a chance for us to dip our toes into higher latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, where the game seems to be so different from the northern environments where we're at home.

To begin with, there was Bluff - gateway to the New Zealand subantarctic.  We checked into the country there, and then returned after our fortnight at Stewart Island so that we could be checked by the Department of Conservation before heading south.

Kiwis (and visiting sailors) love to bag on Bluff.  And it's true that there's not much there.  This is the view of the CBD from the century-old wharf where we tied up Galactic.

Said century-old wharf is a big part of why sailors love to watch Bluff disappearing over the stern.  There are all the rusty bolts and old tractor tires to tie up to that you could want.  When the wind blows southwest it pins you to the dock, and the tide runs like a river.

Here we're using five fenders and two fender boards to make peace with a stack of tires.

There's also a two-meter tide at that dock, so you leave the boat squeezing the air out of the fenders in the morning, then come back to find her out of reach in the afternoon.

Carrying rubbish to town.

The outfitting choices aren't so great in town, either.  We realized that Elias had grown to the point where there was a gap of bare skin between his boots and warm pants...all we could find to solve the problem was a pair of rugby socks at the op-shop.

Luckily, he thought they were just the thing.

So the amenities of Bluff were a bit short of the mark.  But - oh, man.  The people there are friendly friendly friendly.  They set a standard that the rest of (very friendly) New Zealand would struggle to meet.

We finished our business in Bluff...and then there was nothing to it but to head out for the Aucklands.

You'll remember that I was feeling pretty indecisive about the trip.  That hesitation is all about the kids - if it were just Alisa and me on board, I think we'd get up to all sorts of highjinks afloat.  But with the kids in the mix, I'm pretty happy to keep our ambitions in check.

But as it turned out, the passage south was everything that we could have hoped for.  Sun hats in the roaring forties!

Royal albatross.

Black-bellied storm petrel.

After a day and two nights at sea, we pulled into Port Ross at dawn.  Gale- and storm-force northwesterlies were on the way.  Our weather window had closed.

I had, of course, been up much of the night, and was dying for sleep.  But we were here!  The dinghy clearly had to be launched, and a tour of the bay taken, whatever the weather.

Whatever the weather!

More soon.

Port Sickness, And the Antidote

This happy fellow is just finishing the sail from the Auckland Islands to Akaroa - that's the coast of the Banks Peninsula in the background, with the sun setting just as we're about to enter the harbor.  We're just completing a mostly gentle 500 mile sail, a great finish to our adventure of visiting the subantarctic.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, our first day in Akaroa was a huge letdown.  It might have been something about trying to get a few practicalities accomplished in the very impractical environment of a tourist town that we were suddenly sharing with a cruise ship's worth of fellow-travelers.  It might have had something to do with the constant provocations of sharing life in a small space with a two-year-old.  It might have been tangentially connected to the fact that we're suddenly in a state where neither head on board is functioning.  And it very likely had something to do with the strain of keeping boat and family safe during our month in southernmost New Zealand, and the sudden switch to another set of concerns once we reached port, the concerns of my parallel life as family provider and biologist with a research career to nurture.  But for whatever reason, my mood yesterday was beyond (below?) toxic.

Readers of South From Alaska will know that I am a long-term sufferer of port sickness.  And the best antidote, I think, is to remember all the good stuff that we're earning via the endless trouble of boat life.

Things like, f'r instance, this school assignment that Elias wrote last week:

Alisa had just left Elias to work independently on this bit of school work while she was looking after Eric.  And Elias, on his own, came up with this idea for things he would not like to live without:

"Water and food and love from my family.  And I would not like to live without fishing hooks to catch fish."

That's a pretty good antidote for any lingering questions of whether all the trouble of running family life on a traveling boat is worth it.  And Enderby Island was a pretty good antidote as well...

Enderby is the northernmost island in the Aucklands Archipelago.  There's a clean-bottomed anchorage, which Galactic is anchored in above, and a beach that the strange and rare New Zealand sea lion breeds on, and a few huts (at the end of the beach in the photo above), now vacant, that are inhabited by sea lion biologists at the height of summer.

And there is a boardwalk taking you across the island that provides both perfect footing for two-year-olds and interesting things to pick up like albatross beaks.

The boardwalk goes right past royal albatross nests.

 Getting this close to a nesting albatross made for a very remarkable moment, for us and for the boys.

And this shrub habitat is shared by yellow-eyed penguins.

And then there's the beach - a perfect little hotspot for marine wildlife needing to come ashore to breed.

Pictures don't convey how much was going on at the beach.  Sea lions occasionally came charging down from the hills above, giant petrels and Antarctic skuas and penguins and pipits and white-fronted terns were constantly doing their thing.

Giant petrels are wary, and tough to photograph.

Elias' portrait of his mom.

And sailing back to a more protected anchorage at the end of the day.

Enderby is very different from the place it was before sealers and farmers and long-liners showed up in this part of the world, and our visit was after the peak season for seeing wildlife.  Nonetheless, we found it to be pretty jaw-dropping.  So different from anything we're used to, and, in spite of those changes, so vital, it did a very good job of standing in as the archetype of a Southern Ocean island, an oasis of terrestrial life in the vastness of this cold grey sea that stretches around the pole and meets itself again.

Not a bad thing to remember when you're having an off day in port.