Deadline

Our friend Robb says that it happens with research trips to Antarctica. Everyone rushes to get ready, and then, if the departure is delayed for some reason, they find themselves rushing to get ready all over again - even though they had been ready to go the first time.

And so it is with us - it's always a bit of a circus getting ready to put to sea, even if we were ready to go a week ago.

There are just so many details to look after with a boat, and so many of them are vitally important for the safety of the crew.  Starting a passage gives you a natural deadline for taking care of things that you've been meaning to get to - so the list of jobs grows in proportion to (and slightly faster than) the amount of time you have to prepare.  Even if you're six years into the sailing life, aboard your second live-aboard boat.

Alisa just read the boys a chapter of The Horse and His Boy for their bedtime story, and the boat is feeling quite shipshape.  We have a load of duty-free fuel on board, and a bit of duty-free booze to go with it, and we're cleared out for Neiafu, Vava'u, Tonga.

Here we go!

Waiting Isn't Hard

No story here - just noting that passing on a high pressure system for getting to Tonga means that you get to hang out and enjoy the sunny weather of the high in situ.

Today the winds between New Zealand and Tonga are northerly at 25 knots - the forecast for headwinds is what led us to take a pass on the last weather window, and it was pleasant to see that we called it right.  Getting to Tonga means getting a fair ways to the east, which is upwind in the trades.  So we're being picky with the weather, looking for the pattern with a lower-than-average preponderance of easterlies to help us get there without too much carrying-on.

So instead of sailing to Tonga last Friday we just picked the hook and sailed out to the Bay of Islands.

Moturua Island (above and below) is one of many anchorages we've shared with James Cook here and there through the Pacific.  And now it's got a great walking track - just right for the ambitious six-year-old, and just a little too much for a three-year-old, no matter how ambitious.

And this is enough for me to take back everything luke-warm that I ever said about En Zed.  The Department of Conservation mows little lawns by the ocean to make picnic spots along the track.  Love it.

How do you know where the dolphins are in the Bay of Islands?  Easy - just look for the fleet of boats following them around:

There's that terrible stage when they're too young to walk all the way up to the lookout, but too heavy to be carried. 

 "We want a house."

Eric imitating a Kiwi kid, who are famously inured to the cold.  It didn't quite work out for him.

In between bouts of outdoor family fun, I did all the analysis for a new paper and solved a few boat problems that I hadn't known I had.  Now we're back in Opua, about to go through the last-minute prep for a second time.  A nasty low is supposed to blow in tomorrow and make everything miserable for a day, and after the low passes the southerly winds are meant to blow towards palm-fringed anchorages...

Boy to Man

One of the spoils of our trip back to North America was a stack of back issues of the New Yorker from my mom.  Once piece, in particular, caught my attention - in the house style, it was a review of several books treating the same topic.  In this case, the topic was why American children (to generalize) grow up without learning to do anything useful for themselves or their parents, and then go through a protracted period of immaturity in their 20s and sometimes (god forbid) beyond.

The piece struck a chord with me - particularly because it opened with a description of how self-possessed, able, and mature a particular six-year-old from a particular traditional society (the Matsigenka of Amazonian Peru) might be.  This is something that I've noticed many times while traveling - how the  children of some societies are so much more capable and mature than the children of our own.  And when I (figuratively) looked up from the magazine, I saw our own six-year-old, who was apparently not able to pour himself a bowl of cereal.  And the piece resonated even more when I thought of my own back story.  I was raised by wonderful, loving parents (shout-out!) in a suburban American setting where kids did little meaningful work.  And I went through a spectacular period of aimlessness in my early 20s - guess who's hitchhiked the Alaska Highway three times?

So we're on a kick to change that part of child-rearing on Galactic that has to do with how much work is expected from six-year-olds.  No more paying Elias to do little tasks.  And being six, we (I) have decided, means being old enough to take some of the load of daily tasks - none of the typical American BS family choreography about kids tasks - "chore lists" that are monitored and rewarded by the parents, and the like.  Our attitude is that a kid should just help, and getting that help shouldn't mean more work for the adults.

I'm happy to report that, if nothing else, Elias can now fix himself a bowl of cereal.

We'll see how this experiment in parenting goes.  We have, if nothing else, plenty of work to share around in the family.  And it would really be a delight if Elias could, for instance, cook breakfast for the family, or run to the beach in the dinghy to pick someone up.  And it would be even more of a delight if he could do these things within the next year, while he's seven.  But I'm also, as always, cognizant of how difficult it is to escape the constraints and expectations of your own culture.  We had been thinking about the right way to start getting Elias to help out for quite a while before I read this particular magazine piece.  But that's just the point - in a traditional society, we wouldn't think about that at all - our role in teaching a kid to work, and the kid's role in learning to work, would be ingrained in the daily lives of everyone around us.

Stay tuned.