Pelagic Attacked by Shark

Here we are, in Australia. Our arrival was quite a momentous event. It took lots of dreaming, planning and doing to get us here on Pelagic. A full report will follow, and there’s still New Caledonia to catch up on. All that is coming soon, and in the meanwhile I’ll leave you with this tidbit from our equal-parts-trying-and-magical passage from New Caledonia.

***

On the fifth day out of New Caledonia, Alisa and I were talking about the upcoming Litzow family reunion in Australia. “You know,” I was saying, “we’re going to have to come up with some good stories from this trip. My Australian relatives are natural story tellers, the kind of people who come up with hilarious adventures to relate whenever they do so much as go grocery shopping. When they really branch out and come to the States to see us, they end up with all kinds of great stories about the funny things that happen to them. Stories that they tell each other for years. I’ll feel so lame if we sail all the way from Alaska to Australia and all I can come up with is, ‘The sunsets were really beautiful.’”

Ask, and be careful what you ask for.

That same night the three of us were relaxing down below after dinner while the windvane steered Pelagic. I was wearing headphones in an attempt to ignore my son (spend a week at sea with a two year old and then you can judge me), so the first time I heard the sound it didn’t make much of an impression. It was a loud “wham!” that, with the headphones on, sounded a lot like the jib backwinding and then filling. A lot like, but not exactly like. The second “wham!” was unmistakably the sound of something going suddenly very wrong, and Alisa and I both dashed into the cockpit to investigate.

When you’re in the middle of the ocean on a small boat, sudden noises like this get your attention in an absolute way.

As soon as we reached the cockpit there was a third “wham!” and we saw the windvane jumping on its mounts. I moved aft and saw something big splashing in the water just behind the boat. My first thought was that we’d hooked a fish that was way too big and that it had somehow gotten wrapped around the windvane.

But both fishing lines were slack. My sleepy brain tried to figure out what the big thrashing presence in the water might be, and how we might get it away from the delicate and oh-so-important windvane. But then whatever it was left.

The windvane hung limp in the water, no longer steering us. With no one at the helm Pelagic gybed and the preventer held the main backwinded, slowly pushing us back to New Caledonia. Alisa took the wheel and got us back on course. After a little struggle against the force of our wake I pulled up the windvane rudder. And then things started to make sense.

We were about 170 miles from the nearest point on the Queensland coast, which means we had just entered Australian territorial waters. We were moving through the water at six and a half or seven knots. The moon wasn’t up yet, so the night was dark. There was a little bioluminescence in our wake.

The rudder was criss-crossed with bite marks. Something, we figure a shark for lack of any better candidate, came across Pelagic out on the dark ocean and took a fancy to the shiny stainless rudder that was swinging provocatively back and forth behind the stern. Enough of a fancy not to give up until it had hit it three times.

A central linkage on the wind vane had blown out under the load. This was a pretty serious deal, since our electronic autopilot has been out since Mexico. No windvane meant we’d have to hand steer the last 220 miles of the trip. Handsteering around the clock is no joke for a two-adult crew with a two year old, especially with the conditions we had – a broad reach in about twenty knots of wind. It was work and concentration to handsteer a course with the rig we were traveling under (full main, full jib), and it renewed our respect for the windvane to remember how well it had been steering us in those conditions, hour after hour.

We took a reef to make the steering easier and after Alisa put Elias to sleep I managed to fix the windvane with a few spare parts we had on board. And that’s the real joy of the windvane compared to the more modern electronic gear that infests yachts these days – if something goes wrong with the windvane, you can actually fix it at sea.

So that was our welcome to Oz. Hopefully things will look up from there.

***


Elias pointing out shark damage to the bottom of the windvane rudder.

The teeth left deep grooves in the stainless steel of the rudder. There are three sets of teeth marks at different angles, corresponding to the three hits.

Elias demonstrating how the shark bit the rudder. He asks us to retell the story of the how the shark attacked Pelagic, oh, two hundred times a day.

Nearly There

Well, if everything comes together in the next few hours we will be shoving off from Noumea, New Caledonia, bound for Australia. Will have to catch up on New Cal doings when we reach Oz, in about a week. Meanwhile, here's a post from Alisa.

***

I am doing an experiment to see if eating a hazelnut chocolate bar eases a sore back. So far so good, although an increased sample size might be needed. My back hurts from bending over a sewing machine for 2 hours this afternoon while stitching long patches on another boat’s mainsail. They were unlucky and got caught in a squall between Fiji and here that brought sustained winds of 60 kt for an hour. Stories like this give me the creeps and I find I have to remind myself that no one was injured and their boat is fine – therein telling myself that if it had been us, Pelagic also would have faired as well. Being in a crowded anchorage like this one in Noumea, New Caledonia, we are subjected to frequent electrified conversations regarding the weather and passage to Australia; along with this is the need for people to retell and elaborate on the misfortunes of the previous passage.

This next passage to Bundaberg will be our final passage on this trip and it is nearly 800 miles of offshore sailing, which I mostly enjoy. Today Mike made a point of telling me how glad he is that I am looking forward to our upcoming passage. Then he made some offhand comment about the large number of wives that we’ve met that fly from port to port and let their husbands sail the boat. True, our last passage between Fiji and New Caledonia was a challenge. The winds ranged from southeast 20 – 30 kt with steep seas that were on our beam. One night on the Pacific Seafarers Net I reported seas of 8 – 15 feet. Imagine trying to keep a 2-year old on his toilet seat that keeps sliding around as the boat pitches and heels. Every cabinet on the port side would spill its contents when opened; a quick reach for a screwdriver would lead to an avalanche of glue, varnish cans, tools on the cabin sole. I took my trusty seasickness pills that I discovered in Mexico – Stugeron – and managed down below with Elias. But due to the violent motion it was pretty much impossible to allow Elias to walk unaided. I had to strap him into his chair whenever I needed two hands for myself. He did not go into the cockpit for 3 days, poor kid. On top of it all, the deck leaks returned and we had a soaked v-berth and an unusable starboard settee. And did I mention that after lunch on the second day of our passage Mike got sick, vomited, and then passed out for the rest of the night. It was blowing 26 – 30 kt at the time but thankfully the boat was well tuned and the monitor was doing its job so I just had to watch for traffic and do minor sail adjustments while I tended to Elias and to Mike. As you can imagine, there were a few times during the passage when I thought longingly of that sweet little house on Kodiak that we sold.

Yarrr, but the ocean is a marvel, and to venture out on an 11 meter sailboat you have to accept that you will occasionally be reminded how very small you are. While I can do without the nausea, exhaustion and squalls, the salty night breeze and limitless sea-scape await. And at the end of the passage my tendency is to remember the bright moments and not dwell on discomfort. Each day progresses with amazing speed, and all the days of this voyage have zipped by. Have we really been gone for over a year? I miss my family and friends a great deal. My first purchase in Oz will be a cell phone. I am eager to return to yoga (cures a sore back better than chocolate) and fitness and be near a library for Elias who devours his books – and heck, maybe even a laundromat. But before we get there, we have a week of sailing to do. Onward and onward.

Fiji, almost

We arrived in Fiji on September 17th and found ourselves for the first time facing the strict math of getting out of the tropics before the start of cyclone season. In order to be conservative we have long been planning on being in Australia by November 1. But Bundaberg, where we aim to enter Oz, is 1,500 miles from Suva, and we also had to plan on spending some time in New Caledonia on the way. What this all boiled down to is that we only had two weeks in Fiji. After months and months of wandering through the South Pacific mostly at our own pace, we were suddenly on a schedule.

No problem, we thought. We’ll just take care of a few chores in Suva and then identify a completely fantastic locale to visit for a week or so before we start thinking about heading west. We chose Kandavu Island, about fifty miles southeast of Suva. Our Lonely Guide said that Kandavu would be a great place to visit if only you could get there, and even better if only there were anywhere for a tourist to stay once there. For much of this trip we’ve used the Lonely Guide as a tool for deciding where not to go. If a place has a big write-up in the guidebook, with restaurant and accommodation choices organized by price, we figure that’s a place to leave to the unwashed masses who aren’t traveling the South Pacific by yacht. So Kandavu passed that test. Another yacht crew that had visited said it was great. Our bird guide listed tons of interesting species as resident there. And just north of Kandavu is the Great Astrolabe Reef. Just look at that name – Great Astrolabe Reef. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect place to park the yacht, mix up the rum punches, and catch up on your snorkeling?

We thought, Fiji in two weeks? No problem.

What actually happened reminded me of what happened to my mountain climbing career after I got a real job and began trying to squeeze Alaska Range climbs into two week vacations.

We left Suva with a forecast of northeast winds coming around to the southeast the following day. All well and good – since Kandavu is to the southeast of Suva, we would coast down on the northeasterlies and be safely snorkeling the Great Astrolabe Reef before the southeast headwinds came up.

But by the time we motored out of Suva Harbor, the winds were already blowing from the southeast. Blowing hard. Directly from Kandavu.

We were not going to tack back and forth into a near-gale, getting soaked and trying to feed, maintain and entertain a two year old in a world that was tilted over twenty degrees and bashing up and down ten feet every ten seconds.

So we eased the sheets and fell off for our back-up choice, Bengga Island. We figured we’d spend
a few days there and then head down to Kandavu once the weather was better.

This is the view from our anchorage at Bengga:



There was a village a little ways down the coast, and we rowed ashore to present sevusevu, the gift of kava root that outsiders traditionally present to a village chief when requesting permission to visit the surrounding area. We were met at the beach by a woman named Elizabeth. She told us the name of the village, and if I could find my notebook I would tell you, too. Everyone was very friendly. I found the chief and presented the sevusevu. Alisa and I then explained to Elizabeth that we were hoping to walk around and look at birds. Our expressed desire was clearly outside of Elizabeth’s experience of visitors to the village. “What kind of birds do you want to see?” she asked. “We have chickens. And pigs.”

We ended up trooping around the village with Elizabeth and her little kids, Alisa and I occasionally pointing our binoculars at birds in the trees. Houses in the village were really just shacks, but they did have the galvanized roofs and cement floors that are the defense against really absolute poverty in a rainforest environment like this one. The houses were clustered around a cement walkway, and as we passed people waved from whatever they were doing inside. The houses were open enough and close enough that people could talk from one to another in a normal voice. Elizabeth’s kids all had thick strings of mucous running from nose to mouth, and they of course all wanted to touch Elias and play with him. It was a very poor place, and gave the sense of being a real backwater, true or not I don’t know, but it felt like a place where people might go their lives without seeing the next village over. We walked around the village with our binoculars and we got a tour of the poverty of the place as much as we saw the local avifauna. And then we got back in the rowboat and retreated to Pelagic.

Elizabeth and Alisa and kids.

Birding Bengga Island.

After our visit to the village we stayed on Pelagic for a few days, blowing in circles around the anchor and listening to the rain fall. Elias got sick, his little lungs barking a cough during the night and snot running from his nose. Just as in Uiha, Tonga, where we couldn’t keep Eli from picking up pig turds in the street, we felt that we had crossed over our comfort threshold for travel with a two year old. The clouds fell low enough to be called mist and the days were gray and if I squinted my eyes our surroundings could almost look like some steep-sided lush glacial valley in southeast Alaska. Almost.

Bengga Island is home to a tradition of firewalking, a tradition that is now restricted to performances at a resort on the other side of the island. We have managed to avoid resort demonstrations of “traditional culture” all the way across the South Pacific. But when Monday rolled around, which was firewalking day at the resort, it was also our seventh wedding anniversary. So who could resist? We prepared to pick the hook and head over for a cook’s night out.

But then someone (the cook) had a Human Moment while trying to switch the battery from battery #2 to battery #1 and switched through OFF instead of through BOTH. This is a feature of our electrical system that British sailing magazines call “fail dangerous”; if you switch to OFF while the engine is running, even for a teeny moment, the alternator blows up.

So the alternator blew up.

And we spent the next hour swapping out alternators, and we had noodles and white wine on board Pelagic for our anniversary meal. And we listened to the rain fall. And the next day we gave up waiting for the weather to improve and sailed back to Suva.

In Suva we checked out of the country. Then we sailed overnight to the Mamanutha Islands, in western Fiji. Here there is a resort on every small island and several resorts on every big island. We anchored in front of a sleepy little resort where there were six paying guests and we were the only yacht. The staff was preparing for the arrival of three hundred guests from New Zealand in a few weeks but in the mean time they had plenty of time for us. Every man with a paintbrush in hand, sprucing things up for the big influx, had time to say hello and ask where we were from. This was a big change from Tonga, where we found people to be much more cautiously friendly. It gave us our one little insight into what a great place Fiji might be to visit, and how much more time we could profitably spend there. For a few days we looked at birds on the beach and snorkeled among great fish schools in bad visibility, and the weather continued to be stormy and gray and rainy. And then we left for New Caledonia.

The resort on Malolo Island.

For months we approached the South Pacific with ease and languor – 42 days to visit two islands in the Marquesas, three weeks to visit two islands in the Tuamotus. Arriving without any immediate plans to leave, we found the islands and people and reefs opening before us, taking us in and showing us more and more of this distant part of the world. Fiji was our first taste of a different kind of cruising, the kind that is often the fate of those people who are sailing all the way around the world in two or three years or who are sailing the world in a pre-scheduled group, as has become popular. We had time to see the capitol city, and to take care of the chores that had to be taken care of, and no time to wait out a spell of bad weather that kept us from experiencing the tropical ease of the country. So from Fiji we remember a particular smile at that last resort, and a cab ride to a curry house in Suva, and little else.

But who knows – we may be back.