Land Ho

Hotspur in the Sea of Cortez

Not ours sadly. As appealing as it is would be we, haven’t slipped the lines and set off for somewhere new. But we have had the privilege of following our dear friends Jim, Meri and Carolyne aboard Hotspur as they crossed the Pacific toward the Marquesas.

 

We miss this lovely family and hope they have a blast in the pacific

Evan provided them with weather routing and as seasoned shellbacks (ha!) Maia and I emailed them with tidbits of information and encouragement. Reading their emails and blog posts brought back a lot of memories of our own crossing three years ago. One thing that felt familiar was their initial unease followed by a palpable joy and excitement as they found their rhythm and discovered just what a wondrous experience crossing an ocean is.

It’s not always easy—like us they had their fair share of breakdowns and testing moments. But I think joy comes from not being knocked out by them—by reaching down through the fear and frustration and discovering you really can make it to port on a broken rudder (us) or that you have the skills to fix an autopilot without directions, several times (them). The fun also comes from being a family out there—you’re together, alone in the middle of the ocean, every minute of everyday, and somehow sometime after you arrive and the world gets busy again, it feels like it may not have been enough.

It might be a long way to come for a play date--but Maia hopes they catch us somewhere

I’m excited and envious for the hours, weeks and months that Jim, Meri and Carolyne have coming up. Making landfall can only be described as magical. Despite our modern technology: the radios, GPS, heck, the charts(!) it still feels like you’ve reached back through the centuries and crossed wakes with the navigators when you sight land.

It’s not often you get to sail into your dreams and live them full on. As I picture them making landfall I can smell the floral sweet tiaré mingled with warm heavy jungle; I can hear the drums back in the hills and kids laughing on shore; And I can recall my own giddy excitement as I stepped on land after several weeks at sea only to have my legs wobble as though they were giggling in glee.

 

Landfall Bora Bora

To celebrate their accomplishment I’ve been playing sailing music and dreaming about our next landfall, wherever it may be.

Sailing into Spring

I checked the blog the other morning (after a few ‘where are you?’ emails landed in my inbox) and realized it had been a while. I guess that’s what happens when life is just ordinary (in its own extraordinary way). The blooming jacarandas are reminding us we’ve been here almost two years. The crews crossing the Pacific this season are for the most part strangers to us. And the crews we crossed with? Well, their lives have moved on too.

 

Jacarandas-a sure sign of spring

New and old friends squeezed aboard as Maia turns 12

 September started off at full speed. After arriving back from a three week trip home I was greeted by our friends from Piko and Britannia. Both boats are up for sale and both of the crews are planning to expand their crews and rebuild their kitties stateside then set off on bigger boats again someday.

 

Buddy boat reunion was sweet as

watching them sail away for the last time was not

Saying goodbye to the friends we meet is the toughest part of cruising. In an ideal world we’d gather up all our favourites, synchronize our budgets and life schedules, and sail the world in company. But we can’t. So we take heart in the fact goodbyes will be followed by reunions.

 

Cake with schoolmates

Skating with her besties for her b-day

Maia also turned 12 this month, and surrounded by love, I’m reassured that this life is a good one for her. Looking back over her four + years aboard I’m able to let go of some of the fears I had. She’s made friends, she’s found a place for herself, she’s strong and capable and she’s happy…

September is spring for us—a time of beginning and renewal. A time to plan for what’s next.

Sydney Siding

Cartwheeling around the World

Sydney is roughly a 1000 km from Brisbane. I mention this because one of the questions we’re frequently asked is whether or not we’ve been there. Or to Melbourne (1700 km), Adelaide (2100 km), Perth (4500 km) or Alice Springs (2600 km). The expectation is maybe we took a weekend jaunt by boat when no one was paying attention (well maybe not to Alice Springs). But at our typical cruising speed (if we could cut a few capes and sail as the crow flies) it would take us three weeks of non-stop sailing (provided we don’t get hung up on a mountain range) to reach Perth—the same length of time it took us to sail across the Pacific to the Marquesas.

 

Bondi Beach

Strolling through the Botanical Garden

Australia is big. Which means we probably won’t be seeing much of it by boat…

 

But our hope, thanks to a crazy invention called an aeroplane, is we’ll still get see as much of the country as our budget will allow. Which is how we ended up in Sydney. Evan was there to check out Vivid for work. Maia and I were lucky to tag along.

The city was lit up with images and lights for Vivid

Arriving in the midst of a view that you’ve seen a million times is one of the things I love about travel. No matter how many times I’d seen it in postcards, movies or on TV climbing the Opera House steps and looking out at the Bridge was enough to take my breath away. Actually, it was enough to make me trip and slice open my toe. And after I sorted out that I hadn’t broken the camera while a kind local thrust Dora bandaids at me and whispered I was missing part of my toe and might need a doctor, I quickly got Maia to move in front of the bridge so I could get her picture. Just in case I had to spend the rest of our trip in the ER…

Happily I think I cut through my toe’s nerves—so once it was taped up I never really felt it and decided to skip stitches and save worrying about it for a more convenient time. We spent the next two days hobbling through the city—admiring the mix of old sandstone, modern glass, gorgeous green spaces and cool creatures.

 

Fun with cockatoos

 

Maia fell in love with the museums—or one museum in particular. We made two visits to the Powerhouse Museum, a museum which defies description and categorization but still managed to bring together the Wiggles and the International Space Station in a cohesive way.

Maia and Sirena fulfill a dream and drive the Big Red Car

The last two days of our visit were spent with our wonderful US/Mexico cruising friends from Orca in their home on a river that looked (and felt!) more like the Pacific North West than I could have imagined. Then it was back on a plane, back to Brizzie and back to dreaming about the ‘where next’ in our life.

First Friend

Now and then

Way back in the beginning, when our new-to-cruising kid asked Santa for a friend for Christmas, I wondered if cruising would ever be right for us. But not long after Maia made her lonely little request, a boat we recognized pulled into harbour. We had hopscotched down the US west coast with a boat called Orca. We were always a little out of sync, but usually one of us would delay a departure by a day or so, so our cruising kids (two only girls with more in common than we could have imagined given a 3-year age gap) could get their fill of little-girl chatter. This went on for months; starting in Neah Bay, then on to Coos Bay, Eureka and Morro Bay.

A few months into the trip, injury waylaid Orca and we lost touch. But then Maia’s Christmas dream was answered—Maia and Sirena, who were each other’s first (and, at that point, only) cruising friend, had a chance to catch-up in Newport Beach.

 

Brisbane breakfast brings back memories of a La Paz lunch

 

By the time we reached La Cruz, Mexico Maia’s social life was filled to overflowing, and those first lonely months were a memory. We still ran into Sirena and family, and the meetings were as sweet as ever, but the fear; that Maia would be lonely forever and cruising would never work, was gone.

“Will I make friends?” Is the question every cruising kid asks before they cruise or shortly after they begin. In most places (the ones where big packs of cruisers gather for months on end, or where groups of cruisers migrate with the seasons) the answer is ‘yes’. And most families tend to modify cruising plans a bit to go where the kids are.

 

Swimming in Brisbane, paddling in Morro Bay

 

But as the years have passed (has it really been almost 4 years?!) Maia’s question has shifted a bit. She now knows she’ll make friends, but now she wants to keep them too. She wants a group of buddiess she knows are hers and who know her, not just for a season but for years on end.

It had been a few years since Maia and Sirena last played together. But when the fates brought them together this weekend the years apart disappeared. Their conversation lasted for hours, went late into the night and continued on the next day. Plans were made for the next meeting, and the one after that. It’s not the same as being neighbours year in and year out. But I guess when you live a nomadic life, and half your friends are nomadic too, you accept the gifts of friendship the way they come.

Sewn Souvenirs Part Deux

We’ve learned so much while out cruising. I don’t just mean the things you’d expect to learn: offshore sailing, local history, how to say ‘where’s the bathroom’ in smattering of foreign languages or even how to husk a coconut. No, we’ve learned all sorts of cool things we never even knew were out there to learn: how to custom dye fabric, how to set up a slack line, why that weird looking fish is doing what it’s doing…

Cruisers have some of the most diverse skills and backgrounds of any group of people we’ve ever met. We’ve met botanists and biologists, astronomers, engineers and IT guys, doctors, lawyers and investment bankers, jewellery makers and stunt drivers, and the guy who invented the forth squeeze for orange juice.

And from so many of them we’ve learned things. Real things. Useful things—like which leaf makes a poultice that can help heal wounds, and how to find constellations in the new-to-us southern sky and how to take that huge coin collection and turn it into beautiful keepsakes.

Lauren girl from Pico was our jewellery maker in the Pacific. Lauren’s grandmother taught her to make gorgeous embroidered bead jewellery, and she passed on her skills and knowledge to Amanda from Britannia, who also makes stunning embroidered bead jewellery, and Amanda kindly passed on some of her skills and knowledge to Maia, who aspires to make wonderful embroidered bead jewellery.

Amanda and Lauren's work as inspiration

 Maia is actually doing really well with her new found skills. Her first piece caught the eye of the kids on Viatrix (a lovely French Canadian family we’ve been spending time with) and they asked to learn so she invited them and the girls from Dorénavant (another lovely French Canadian family we’re spending time with—in fact there are currently six Canadian boats here in Brissie, the most we’ve encountered in one harbour since Mexico) over for a jewelry making class.

The class was both a French lesson (Maia can now swear and threaten to eat small children) and a jewelry making class. And as the kids sewed and giggled and Maia struggled with the ‘r’ sound in Merde! while the other kids tried to keep their beads even, I thought about how far this lesson had traveled: from Lauren’s grandmother to her, and then across oceans and cultures. And soon it will spread even further.

How to Wreck a Boat

So here’s the deal—even with lots of ocean miles and plenty of experience you can still wreck your boat—in the span of a few heart beats.

When we came down the river Friday morning it was on a spring tide (it’s a full moon thing—not a season thing) which meant there was a lot of water pushing us to the sea adding 3+ knots to our boat speed in places. There was also 15 knots of wind in our face.

We needed to pull into a fuel dock—so the choice was dock into the wind? Or into the current? A sustained strong gust made us choose the wind—but as we approached the dock, and the wind died, we realized we chose wrong. But we bounced onto and along the dock and managed to stop ourselves after losing only a little paint.

But then it was time to leave. Leaving into a strong current is a cake walk if there is nothing directly ahead of you—but if you have mega-yacht row downstream, with the first big shiny yacht a boat length away—leaving gets trickier. Or technique was to angle our bows out into the current by going in reverse—then when we were pointed into the middle (and past the power boat) we hit it with full forward throttle and the wheel hard over.

The boat was promptly pushed back into the dock by the current and we were now hurtling toward a huge, expensive looking powerboat. Evan called for me to turn harder and raise the rpms to redline—hoping to get the boat to turn. Which it did, inch by inch. We could have kissed the powerboat as we swept by—literally.

Then the engine died.

We are still on Fiji fuel. But we filter fuel as we it bring aboard and we have two more inline filters. But the engine still laboured and died. And then laboured and died again. Evan decided it was a fuel issue. I decided we needed a sail. So we unfurled the genoa and tacked down the river until we reached a wide spot where we could anchor. Only to discover that the hateful Italian anchor windlass, had after three months of non-use, had turned bitter and seized up.

So you got this? We just about flatten the boat, and live. Then the engine dies on a busy river and we set a sail and live. We get to a safe place to drop the anchor and the windlass won’t work… It feels like we should just go home. But can’t.

But Ev drops the anchor manually then set about replacing the fuel filter. The engine starts—so he sets out to fix the windlass. His multimetre (which would diagnose the problem) has a flat battery. So we decide to haul up the anchor by hand and fix the windlass out on the bay.

So we head off—and after ten mellow minutes the engine starts to die. A freighter is coming—so I aim for the river bank where we drop anchor—again.

 This seemed like a good time to sit down, have lunch and decide if we really wanted to go out for the weekend after all. Because it sort of seemed like maybe we weren’t meant to. But then Maia mentioned the Easter Bunny and we rallied. Evan completed a repair on the windlass sans helpful tools and changed the fuel filter and the next morning we headed to join our friends.

the sort of sailing mishap that is fun--rather than fraught

Under 30 Cruising Club Reunion

We were right there. I point out to sea for Maia—showing her where our boat sailed down the coast just six weeks ago. Do you remember what a nice spinnaker run that was…

Evan looked at me oddly—waxing nostalgically for a sail that was less than two months ago was odd—even for me.

 But we were walking on the beach with friends from a boat called Mangoe who we hadn’t seen in 15-years. The last time we saw them was… Well that was the thing. None of us could exactly recall the last time we were together. Maybe La Cruz, maybe Barra, maybe somewhere else. And as we reminisced over our escapades we realized we couldn’t really come up with any shared memories.

“We formed the under 30 cruising club—I remember that one night, it was on your boat,” Stephanie said. And we had. The handful of us that were under 30 on under 30’ boats formed a club—we had to stay up past midnight at least twice a month, couldn’t play dominos and I’m guessing we might have imbibed in alcohol—thus the fuzzy dream-like memories.

 But they are good fuzzy. Stephanie, who is a vet, helped save our cat Travis’s life—twice. And Todd played the guitar—or maybe it was drums. And I remember beach bonfires, and potlucks, and bus trips, and dinners—or maybe I just recall looking at the photos of those activities in the years that followed.

And then they sailed to the South Pacific, and we went through the Canal. And letters were mailed that told about the first three of four babies born in New Zealand (theirs), and one born in Annapolis (ours) and gradually we lost touch.

Then two years ago we found each other again. And we discovered that all though we might not recall specifics we recalled the pleasure of knowing each other.

 Mangoe has always been part of the story of our first cruise. And Ceilydh stayed such a nice part of their life that there is now a little Ceilyh in their family, who is three, and who Maia adores (the older three were at camp).

 Those early adventures together may feel more like dreams than something real now, but as we sat on the beach (now part of the under 50 cruising club—thanks for that observation Todd!!) and watched the kids play I realized that maybe it’s okay when memories merge and then slip away. There is a knowing that comes from having shared something special: A sureness that is more tangible and has even more depth than a dreamy memory.