Leaving Iluka

Our friend Michelle organized a barbie at Woody Head last weekend for the whole Iluka crew. After everyone had eaten we all went for a walk along the shore. These pictures of that walk sum up the best of Iluka for me - good people, a big crew of kids for Elias to slot into, and a setting where those kids have every chance of enjoying an idyllic childhood - a place that is very beautiful and not crowded, where life can be reasonably slow of pace and (though this part doesn't appear in the photos) families are not organized around earning two incomes.

Cronies.

The next morning as we were heading out for a surf, my friend Miles said, "Yeah. They're not a bad mob."

The inescapable condition of social life in a small town is that you are dependent on the chance collection of peers that is available to you - there's little room for searching out a more convivial social scene, as you might in a city. And that's the joy of Iluka, that there's such a good group of people here. It's fun to think of us settling down here long enough to have the next baby, and Alisa and I have considered it... but the horizon still calls! Tasmania is in the offing! Winds allowing, we're out of here on Saturday!

While we're excited, it's also sad in a way to leave - we can look down the path of a potential life here and see ourselves quite content. And that's one of the real tensions of our permanent state of travel. We move far enough afield, and travel slowly enough, that we end up meeting wonderful people in places that we never even heard of before we left home. But then we keep moving.

~~~

Tasmania is a thousand miles away, and we've left ourselves about a month to get there before Alisa's third trimester begins. Today Alisa and I realized that this trip to Tassie will most likely be our last cruise aboard Pelagic. We are firm in our conviction that a fourth person will make this boat too crowded for us, and the plan is to sail to Hobart, buy a car and rent a house, get into the boatyard, get a coat of fresh paint on the old barky, and put her on the market.

Although we're excited at the prospect of a new home afloat, we're a bit gobsmacked that the end of the Pelagic years is suddenly upon us.

Our Australia

My dad was born and raised in Australia, but has spent most of his adult life in the U.S. On his trips back to Oz through the years he has of course mostly visited family, and hasn't spent much time exploring new parts of the country.

He just visited us in Iluka for two weeks. This was a great chance for us to catch up with him, and it was also a chance for Alisa and me to show him "our" spot in Oz - a place that we discovered on our own, and that, not at all incidentally, is similar in some ways to the more rural, more lightly populated coastal Australia that my dad remembers from the good old days - a place, in other words, where you can still find solitude on a beautiful beach without trying very hard at all.

Elias slept over at my dad's holiday unit a lot - half the nights dad was here, or more. The first night he had trouble going to sleep - "I don't want you to go!" he said as I was tucking him in, losing all his bravery. He woke up that night crying and didn't fall asleep again until my dad had sung Waltzing Matilda ten times, and in the morning he was inconsolable until Alisa and I returned from Pelagic. But within a few days he was volunteering how much he liked sleeping in a room of his own, and by the end of the visit he was crawling into bed with my dad early in the morning and falling back asleep.

Elias also enjoyed playing cricket with my dad. Cultural milestone - cricket, not baseball, was his first sport with bat and ball! The cricket-savvy among you will realize that Elias isn't quite using the wicket in the accepted manner.

My Dad arrived with goodies we had ordered from the U.S. - including Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Alisa, let loose in the vast expanse of a real kitchen, as opposed to our tiny galley, outdid herself. She even made pork chops, which I have been requesting(fruitlessly) for two years.

Having Elias and my dad together brought up inescapable thoughts about time, and the march of us from one generation to another. My mom's dad is 94, my dad is a hale 71, I'm banging along at 41, and Elias is 3. Early in the visit I got to trot out my authoriatian persona when I looked up and saw Elias kicking his grandad on the couch ("DON'T YOU KICK YOUR GRANDFATHER!"). Later that day dad told me that when his father visited us in the States, my dad looked up at one point to see three year old me kicking my 80 year old grandad. What an idea - I don't have any memories of my dad's dad, and I would give anything to know what he sounded like, to talk with him for an hour and see how similar he was to my dad, hear some of his life experience, etc. But when I was three, I was happy to just sit there and kick him.

Elias, meanwhile, has only the foggiest notion of time spans greater than a year. But when he asks us if we love him, and we say "yes", his next question is, "Will you love me forever?"

Having Been There

I was sitting in the cockpit in the anchorage in Mooloolaba when a dude motoring by in a beat-up inflatable stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted something.

-What's that? I shouted back.

-Were you in Aitutaki? he shouted again.

I scanned my forty-year old synapses while he motored over. Aitutaki. Aitutkai? By the time he had pulled alongside Pelagic I was able to report - No, we weren't in Aitutaki.

-Oh. Well then. Must have been another Pelagic.

He had a great English accent that I couldn't identify at all, something rural and lilting, and he had that lived-in look that yachties get when they haven't had to fit into an office environment for years.

We quickly established that he had crossed the Pacific the year before us. He had been in Nuku'alofa for the funeral of the previous king of Tonga, we had been in Neiafu during the coronation celebrations for the new king.

We fell into the delightful conversation that transpires between two strangers who recognize each other as initiates. He told me about bottoming out on every wave trough in the pass into Haraiki. I told him about wrapping our anchor chain in twenty meters of water in Makemo, and tearing up our list of atolls to visit in Tahanea. He told me a frankly unbelievable story about family interactions on Maupiti and I told him about hunting goats on Ua Pou.

-So what are you doing now? I asked.

-Ah, I've been here in Mooloolaba for two years. Working. You've got to work to make some money, but then there's no time to keep up the yacht, and well, then you're trapped?

We agreed it would be great to cross the tropical Pacific again. We could spend time in places we had loved, see some of the places that are harder to get to. And we would have the benefit of knowing what we know now, and wouldn't have to spend so much time figuring things out.

Then, after talking for ten minutes, he left. When Alisa came back to the boat I told her about the interaction, but it was hard to explain why that little chat seemed so important.

Maybe it was because, casually talking about this island and that, we each realized how lucky we had been to cross the Pacific once, and how improbably lucky we would have to be to do it again.

Dolores and Elias, Taipivai, Nuku Hiva.