The Cricket, more adventures Down Under

 

 'Why is it THE cricket?’ I asked, as a group of us sat around a table eating prawns, drinking wine and enjoying the dinner that came with our VIP cricket tickets. “Don’t you go to THE cinema? It’s just a definite article,” I was told. (Which made sense.) “Just like going to the tennis or the hockey.” (Mmm, not so much.)

The cricket is like that for me. It almost makes sense: You have a bowler trying to throw a ball at a wicket and a batter trying to hit the ball so it can’t hit the wicket. Good so far.

‘Wait! Are there are two batters running?!’ I was slowly putting it together: An over is six balls. We were at a 20 Over game which meant it would be over in about three hours (or four if you add in dinner and supper breaks) versus a test match which takes five days (six hours a day with tea breaks, and maybe naps). “Test matches,” I was told, “are wonderful. Like watching a waterfall.”

But while I had sorted out the overs and the innings, and took great delight every time a batter got a six (ooh!! Pretty fire explosions and loud music) it took me thirty minutes into my first ever match (thirty minutes!) for me to realize two batters were running at the same time.

Without Alex the game would have been nonsensical...

 It took me even longer to realize that when a batter hit the ball out of the ballpark (cricket pitch?) and into the stands (scoring a six—as in six runs. Fire!! Ooh, pretty.), the guy who caught it didn’t keep it, have it autographed and then later sell it on Gumtree—no, he gave it back. “They only get one ball,” my interpreter, the ever-cheerful eight-year old Alex, explained. Apparently even if the ball breaks they need to sift through a box of other used balls and find one there. A very economical sport this.

Fire, loud music and cricket dancers--what more could you want?

 ‘Hey! Why’d we get the fire?’ No one hit a six, but it turns out you also get fire, loud music and cricket dancers (sort of like cheerleaders who have no skills) when someone goes out. And someone can go out, or be dismissed, for one of five reasons (wikipedia says 10, but my interpreters were an eight year old and a co-worker of Ev’s who had an open bar at his disposal, so we’ll accept five).

Vip section meant fancy food and free booze, and a dress code...

And so went the game. Until the near the end—when using relatively simple maths Evan and I realized there was no way for Australia to catch up. But all around us the crowd kept cheering and urging them on. So we asked about that. “Oh, sure they still have a chance!” We did the math—1.5 overs left = 9 balls or a maximum of 54 runs. Oz needed 51. “Oh, so not so good then… But they could get extras!”

‘Are extras common?’ I asked, as two more batters were dismissed and the West Indies win seemed sealed (as evidenced by one of the fielders doing yoga stretches). “No, not really,” I was told.

Can you see the trend?

 ‘By the way,’ I asked, ‘which countries make up the West Indies team?’ My question got a puzzled look. Not the cheerfully bemused look I got when I asked dumb game questions like ‘why do they keep switching sides?’ (They do it at the end of each over, or after some one is dismissed, unless it’s the last ball of the over—or something like that). The West Indies, I was told, are just that, “The country of West Indie.”

There is no country of ‘West Indie’, I said.

“Are you sure?” I was asked. By a few people.

Raft-up-Small Boat Big Lives

This months raft-up is about relationships: "How do you think you'd do living and working in a studio apartment with your significant other? It's not unlike what cruisers do every day. We live in 30, 40, 50 feet and are with our partners and children all day long. We eat together, sleep together, do chores together, site-see together...you get the point. We are pretty much always together. Cruising will either make a relationship stronger or will cause it to crumble to pieces."

If you read books about cruising, especially books about cruising with a family, you’ll often see titles that allude to the fact that once you’re underway together, you are together. Oftentimes that’s the entire point of setting sail; stepping off the hamster wheel and slowing down enough to see the world and to really see each other. The thing is it’s not as straightforward adjustment as you might think. For us, getting the hang of cruising meant sorting out first how to have no time for each other while we got the boat ready to go, then how to be together because that was the whole goal, and finally how to be together but still be ourselves.

Looking back it feels like the whole thing was seamless—but thanks to the beauty of blogging I can see now we went through some pretty specific steps and a few rocky moments:

Stage One--Someday We’ll Sail but Until Then Our Family Will Just Have to Survive

When you spend years re-building a boat, you stop sailing, you stop hanging out together and, if you’re not careful, you stop dreaming. Every weekend, and often weeknights, Evan would head to Ceilydh. Sometimes I would tag along with Maia and we’d all install hatches, lay-up fibreglass and remove old fittings. But mostly Evan worked alone. The project, while often fulfilling, also wore us down - it taxed our marriage, diminished our bank account and pulled us away from family and friends. If ever there were a time I longed to just go sailing - this was it. But instead, the tasks stretched on.

Stage Two—We Worked Hard to Get This Time Together So I’m Going to Cherish It No Matter How Annoying You Are

We’ve been at this cruising thing for eight months now. For the past 34 weeks it’s been me, Maia and Evan; sailing, exploring, and hanging out together. 240 days of just the three of us. 5,760 hours where time spent apart has been the exception, not the rule.

When you are together. All. The. Time. It’s the little things that start to grate: the messes that seem to materialize where ever Maia is sitting; Evan’s half-finished projects that give our boat a semi-derelict feel; the fact the two of them try and talk to me while I’m working; and the way they seem to hover when I’d rather be alone…

The problem, when you’ve just spent 345,600 minutes together, is there is no unique perspective to give things a fresh energy. Maia and I can anticipate the joke Evan will tell before he tells it (although we still give a half-hearted laugh to keep his confidence up). Maia and Evan know what I’ll order in a restaurant before I do. Maia tends to surprise us still (especially when she waxes poetic about something like the beauty of a burro in, “the soft morning light”), but even she’s becoming staid and predictable.

Stage Three—Balance For Now

I pretty much have all the same balancing/time issues as every mother everywhere—I’m just doing it on a small boat far from girlfriends, gyms and therapists…

But sometimes, like mothers everywhere, I do find a way to take time for myself. I decide we can skip laundry wear dirty clothes for one more day and join our buddy boats for a yoga class. And I realize that Ev and Maia can fend for themselves for an evening while I sneak off to have a girl-night on Britannia.

And while eating a double batch of popcorn and yawning, and watching a lushly romantic movie that husbands and kids would never want to see, it seems that for one day, at least, we found just enough time to fit the important stuff in. And maybe tomorrow I’ll get to the laundry.

It’s easy to feel guilty if you are not happy all the time. For us our happiness as a family and as a couple often comes down to how we’re doing as individuals. And sometimes it’s hard to sort out your individual needs when you are crammed together like sardines. But for us that’s the clue—when the boat suddenly feels too small it’s time to find out why.

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.

Sewn Souvenirs

With vibrant fabrics like these available it's hard not to want to take some home. The fabric.

 "Oh, mum! Do we have space?”I heard it over and over. In every market. In every country.

Sailing to new and distant shores is one of those things we want to hold with us. Not just by memories and photographs (though those are #1 and 2) but having tactile things—a hair stick carved in the Marquesas to wind my hair up out of the humidity, serving dishes from Mexico for fresh salsa—keep the memories that much closer.

But we don’t have the money, the space, the need (you name it) for so many of the beautiful things we see. So we search out small things—a hand woven basket to replace a plastic crate, a mask to add to our wee collection. But mostly we admired the pretty things and move on. Fabric though—fabric we can use. Or so I thought as we loaded up on gorgeous South Pacific prints.

We have a big beastly sailrite, but when it came time to make the little girl dresses I used to love to sew (or teach the little girl to make them) the sailrite was a bit cranky. A lot cranky. So recently we bought a cheap light weight machine, called it Maia’s and let her pull out some of her lovely Fiji fabrics and start learning to sew.

Fiji fabric gets a new look

 I can almost smell the frangipani.

Sharks on the Sidewalk-Oswald in Oz

 

Braving Oswald

Aside from the huge trees, the navigation buoy, and the clumps of debris floating down the river at high speed, and the wind that stops then starts howling with gusto, and the people scurrying around their boats securing things and checking lines, and the fact that ferry service is shut down, news helicopters are flying overhead and the walkways and lower parts of the city are under water you’d hardly know ex-cyclone Oswald passed through Brisbane recently.

For a long holiday weekend this one sort of sucked. We started with a mild downpour—and giving up on doing anything outside we celebrated Australia Day and Robbie Burns day inside in tandem (Waltzing Matilda chased by scotch). Then the wind picked up and the rain fell harder.

Yesterday, as the storm ramped up even more, Ev and Maia headed into the city so she could start back to circus school. Maia called walking the streets eerie; an empty city (even emptier pubs), broken discarded umbrellas, wailing wind, and rain: so much rain that her raincoat and rain pants simply gave up the effort and turned to sponges.

watch for sharks is not a normal comment to make when walking on the sidewalk

 Last night we kept up on the news—listening as the evacuations kicked in—wondering if we’d be next. The rain fell harder (truly at this point it was more like a solid mass of water). Luckly we never got the worst of the wind and gusts rarely topped 35 knots. But with the city beside us acting as an echo chamber it was monstrously loud. Charlie the cat didn’t like it at all. And our phones kept ringing--message after message offering refuge, assistance, meals and help.

If you’ve ever tried to sleep through bucking and heaving, moaning and screaming (hmm—that reads wrong) you’ll know it’s not an easy thing. And then there was the unknown: what would we wake to.

The beautiful jacaranda at the Botanical Garden was severely damaged

The walkway is underwater

 

We woke to more noise. And by this time I was really, really sick of Oswald (shut up already!) sick of the damp (it seems if you essentially immerse your entire boat it springs leaks faster than you can fix them).

But the worst has passed, and many, many people have flooded and destroyed homes. We just have lots of wet towels, the risk of sharing the sidewalks with sharks and a bit of uncertainty as we wait for the flood to crest-sometime tomorrow or Weds.

Summer Nights (and days)

 

Rainforest hike

 Do you recall when you were a kid how summer seemed to be imbued with a special sort of magic? The days were long, the light was bright and little adventures seemed like big ones?

You’d think for a kid who spent almost three years of her life travelling and exploring during what seemed like an endless summer break that a normal summer holiday, the kind school kids around the world sit at their desks and dream about on rainy days, would disappoint. We haven’t headed out on some fabulous family vacation and there haven’t been cool summer camps; all Maia has are long lazy days, swimming pools, nights with friends and sunshine.

Our search for a waterfall and swimming hole took us to Cedar Creek--though the waterfall has slowed to a trickle a dip in the pools was great

 And oh, that sunshine... Technically it’s rainy season. Statistically December in Brisbane should include enough cloud cover to produce somewhere in the region of  160 mm of rain (we had 50mm—making it the driest in decades and contrasting it dramatically with 2010 when they had 480 mm) and January we’ve had 3mm (compared to an average of 133 mm). And if you missed it, Australia is also in the midst of the hottest heat wave they’ve ever recorded. So it’s hot, it’s dry and the best swimming pool ever is a short dinghy ride away, the evenings are mosquito free and summer is unfolding as it should (minus nagging climate change concerns…)

board games for kids from around the world

 Summertime is working her magic for Maia and as we explore swimming holes, stay up late eating banana splits and start our days slowly I can’t help but feel a bit nostalgic for the years when our entire life felt like summer vacation. But then I realized the reason these days sparkle a little brighter is because they are fleeting.

Dancing in the cockpit and dinner with friends

 

This is the time for Maia to experience the delights of ‘normal’ life; the rhythms, the predictability; the long summer days followed by the rush through winter’s busy schedule. And interestingly when you are just visitors to regular life it’s kind of awesome.

Raft up--The Pink and the Blue

 

If you’ve been on a cruising boat you may have heard the phrase ‘pink job and blue jobs’ when it comes to stuff that needs done. Mostly the terms are used in jest to describe the 1950’s-style delineation when it comes to who’s found barefoot in the kitchen vs. who’s covered in grease and grime in the bilge.

The fact grime falls along gender lines is something my inner-feminist chafed at when we first started cruising. But when Evan asked me if I wanted to change the situation by rebuilding the head, or changing the engine oil I could have claimed I couldn’t because dinner would burn—but the truth is I don’t really like messy mechanical jobs though I'll certainly do them in a pinch.

Must be a blue job if guys are working...

 Okay—so here’s the point in the blog where I should tow the party line and say the whole pink vs blue job thing is myth, and that while each person on the boat should work to their strengths both genders should be competent in all things boat. And while the idea has a lot of merit (heck—I even took a diesel maintenance course), the truth is most of us only have so much time in the day that we want to devote to chores and having someone who can build a remote throttle kit (without directions) while someone else replaces a damaged zipper and makes lunch means there is more time for the stuff you actually went cruising to do (hint: not repairing the boat in exotic locations).

Boat chores are a fact of cruising. And while you can try to hire someone to do the nasty stuff (good luck with that in more remote locations) typically this means one person is going to need to become mechanically competent while the other person develops strong support skills and becomes responsible for keeping the kids alive.

Pink or blue job? Doesn't actually matter--it's something that needs done.

 So the trick, as I see it, isn’t to decide who’s pink and who’s blue, but to come up with the way you work best as a team. For us this means Ev’s the project guy—he’s the engineer and knows how stuff works and why it does what it does. And I’m the people person—if a project is too big for him (or simply big enough to be a social job) I either chip in and help, or hunt down helpers and then supply the food, find the missing tools, add a an idea here and there, hide the hammer if it looks like it’s all going to hell and then pour the cold drinks when it’s time to celebrate, or quit for the day.

It took me a while to feel good about that role. It just felt so icky to be so, umm, pink. See the other problem with that 1950’s stereotype is it comes with a 1950’s value judgements about the worth of different types of labour. According to a pink vs blue stereotype managing to eek a fabulous meal out of sketchy 3 week old veggies, two tins and a box, while keeping the kid busy, helping hunt down tools and strategizing a plan 'e' for getting part 'd' to fit into slot 'a' because we've run out of spare part 'a's' is somehow less valuable than managing to actually fix a water pump with a borrowed part 'g' and duct tape.

But the reality is stuff needs to get done and someone needs to do it. And when we’ve done it (whether we’ve ended up covered in paint and engine oil, or flour and olive oil) we all need to be thanked and appreciated by our partner: Because this living on a boat stuff is hard, whatever the job.

There's a reason to work so hard--the rewards vary, but are oh, so worth it...

More raft-up 

Jan 1st - Dana - svnorthfork.blogspot.com
Jan 4th - Stacey - sv-bellavita.blogspot.com
Jan 5th -Steph - http://www.sailblogs.com/member/nornabiron

 Jan 7th - Behan - sv-totem.blogspot.com
Jan 8th - Diane - http://maiaaboard.blogspot.com
Jan 9th - Jessica - mvfelicity.blogspot.com
Jan 10th - Lynn - www.sailcelebration.blogspot.com
Jan 11th - Verena - pacificsailors.com
Jan 12th - Toast - http://blog.toastfloats.com
Jan 14th - Ean - morejoyeverywhere.blogspot.com
Jan 15th - Dana - svnorthfork.blogspot.com

Damn It Freda Make Up Your Mind--Cyclone Season

Is it going to be this:

 

Or this:

Or something else entirely…

Weather watching is something we do more casually now that we are way up the Brisbane River and tied to pile moorings. We do get the occasional wild summer squall and after the devastating floods of 2011 we pay more than typical attention rain fall warnings. But big picture weather watching is something that occurs by happenstance—mainly when we’re checking weather for far flung friends.

We’ve been watching Cyclone Freda for several days though. Initially it looked like she'd hit New Caledonia then continue straight on to Auckland. Bummer for our friends there, but NZ typically has such crap weather they might not even notice a little cyclone. But then the models changed and showed Freda heading for us.

Brisbane does not have much of a history of cyclones, but I was curious what happens if they do get close. Through a quick search I learned about these storms:

1950 - Tracked to Sydney;

1954 - Crossed at Coolangatta

1963 - Cyclone Annie - Sunshine Coast

1964 - Cyclone Audrey - Travels from the Gulf To Coffs Harbour

1967 - Cyclone Dinah - Damage from Rockhampton to Grafton

1967 - Cyclone Barbara - Coolangatta to Lismore

1967 - Cyclone Elaine - Flooding at Logan/Brisbane

1967 - Cyclone Glenda - Off Brisbane 16 M waves recorded near the Gold Coast

1971 - Cyclone Dorra - Hit at Redcliffe

1972 - Cyclone Diasy - Hits Fraser - with Flooding to the Gold Coast

1974 - Cyclone Wanda - Huge flood in Brisbane

1974 - Cyclone Pam - Crosses 500 km east of Brisbane - was an intense system and caused severe flooding

1974 - Cyclone Zoe – Coolangatta (thinking Coolangatta is a bad place to live)

1984 - Cyclone Lance - Wind damage to the Gold Coast

1990 - Cyclone Nancy - crosses near Byron Bay

1993 - Cyclone Roger - Passed near Fraser - back out to sea before heading towards Southern NSW Brisbane Station records 13.2 waves

1994 - Cyclone Rewa - Passed 100 km out to sea and causes flash flooding

1998 - Cyclone Vale - Passes Brisbane and hits near Grafton

That’s just a sampling—for a bigger picture these are the storms which came within 200km of Brisbane in the past 100 years:

Then I started looking up the impact of each storm. Yes, just one of the many ways I like to terrify myself: looking up storm devastation in Australia over the past hundred years. This place is deadly. Back to Brisbane though--the take away seems to be this: Sometimes storms hit Brisbane, not super often though, but when they do it can be a big freaking deal or not.

The good news is even if Freda stays organized enough to hit us she shouldn't be very big. But just to be safe everyone chant with me: Freda, Freda go away...

Boats Break; living on them is stupid

A walk in the woods

Last night while making dinner I switched on the light over the counter and got, nothing. No, there was a faint glow, and if I squinted, I could chop carrots. Then, when I went to rinse the beans, I had another problem, no water. Our water pump has been cycling for no reason—so we need to turn it off when not using it. So up I went, across the cabin, into the other hull to turn on the water, then back to the sink to rinse the beans, then back to the other hull to turn off the water, then back to the beans, only to realize I’d forgot to put water in the pot to cook them. I called to Ev to flip on the water but he and Maia were dealing with a deflating dinghy so back I went…

There does seem to be some sort of law on boats that when one thing goes on the fritz, several more follow suit. On our first boat we had it happen many times, but the most significant occasion (read costly) was when we reached Panama. First the rigging needed replacing, and then the depth sounder died, then the windlass—but my breaking point was when the stereo stopped working. Using a lead line to find the depth and pulling up an anchor by hand are two old-school sailing traditions I can cope with if required—but I’m wasn't quite up for listening to Evan singing sea shanties.

Afternoon entertainment--a play starring Charlie the Reluctant Reindeer

 Last night’s breakdowns were not in the same league as Panama—a new light fixture, tinkering with the water pump, slapping a patch on the dinghy (if we could find the leak) are all affordable—just time consuming. But it made me realize how much of our boat chore time is spent in triage. Even when were not actually going anywhere, most of our efforts are spent just trying to keep things functioning and afloat. While Evan worked on the inflatable he had to step over the carcass of one engine, past the brand new one that’s waiting to be installed and fish for tools in the projects-under-way pile.

It’s no wonder really that heavily cruised boats go into refit every few years (or every few oceans). And last night as we tinkered and fixed, while trying to catch up on each other's day and actually eat dinner, it all felt frustratingly endless.

Maia's school dance

But afterward when we turned on a Christmas movie (at least the computers still work), and started to hang up our lights and ornaments, and watched a quarter moon rise up over our current city, the small and not so small inconveniences began to feel manageable. The to-do list may grow at the same rate as mildew (time to add de-mildewing to the list again) and boat stuff may break at a rate that leaves us feeling we are always a few steps behind, but the reminders of why we live such a challenging life are always there: When we can stop fixing stuff long enough to lift our heads and look out past the bulkhead that needs painting and at the world we've made such an inconvenient journey to see…

Maia's class performing at the end of year concert

*the pictures obviously don't match the post, they are just a few from life lately

Weather - a very brief tutorial

The following is an email I sent to friends on s/v Totem who have been cruising Papua New Guinea and just arrived in Indonesia today. During their time in PNG I have been weather guessing for them since I have a fast internet connection aboard and they had basically only Grib files via sailmail.




I sent this email 22 November.  What I describe became Super Typhoon Bopha hitting the Phillipines 4 December.  Frankly I was lucky to notice this event so early in its development but all the signs were there.

When I write a forecast to them I usually jump back and forth between weather websites and then gather my thoughts and write. This happens to be an unusual email because I was writing as I was looking.  Very stream of conciousness. And sorry for the shorthand - when sending emails via sailmail (where every character counts) I try to be concise.




Wx : to your NE there is a wee CLOSED low that pops up next Friday on ECMWF model. GFS has it further east (more N of Soloms).  It is persistent so probably not a model artifact. When I see closed lows so close to the EQ I pay attention.

Whoops. Looking at GFS precip it's really moist and spiraling.  Serious L? Cyclone? ECMWF 500 mB has it right around surface L (reinforcing), advancing to N of big island PNG next Sunday (2 Dec).  So I've got a closed Low, close to EQ, warm water, spiralling, etc.  This is one to pay attention to folks I think.  More attention over the weekend. Spidey sense is tingling on this one. 

OK. Checked GFS wind gribs (something I sometimes do last). [eventually] Tropical storm force winds at least, located at 5N-10N 150-140E heading WNW so not a threat to you. Pull a wide area sparse GRIB starting +96 hrs out if you can with sailmail and you'll see it clearly. Storm swell will start arrive maybe next Wed. 14m seas at core of storm! 1st time I've seen Passagewx just print a number on map instead of using colour legend.