Once In A Lifetime

the blog continues elsewhere!

2011-04-02T21:59:00.000+11:00

I noticed that we continue to add followers here.. you'll be disappointed, since we're no longer posting on this blog! To reflect the new start that is represented by our switch to a new boat, we've started chronically our life afloat at a new blog, Twice In A Lifetime.

-Mike

It's A Wrap

2011-03-03T16:06:00.000+11:00

We're in the water again, living aboard in this second epoch of our lives afloat. So the Pelagic years, and this blog, are now over. Please join us at Twice In A Lifetime.

Waiting for the Paint to Dry

2011-03-02T17:34:00.000+11:00

That's exactly what we've been doing. First it was too rainy to paint, then when we did get the paint on it was too cold and wet for the paint to dry. We painted the last coat of bottom paint on Thursday, and it was finally dry enough for us to go into the travel lift slings today - Tuesday.

Now the painting is done, and the new name is on the hull, and the California "champagne" is cooling in the reefer. Tomorrow at 0700 the yard guys will lower us into the water. But before they splash her we'll take a moment for a bit of maritime ritual, and thereby mark and observe this remarkable moment, the launching of this new boat that we have selected to be the home for our family and the vessel for so many of our hopes.

So tomorrow is a beginning for us, a beginning of things that we cannot yet guess at.

But it is also the end of something, the end of what happened when two people, a bit startled at what they found themselves taking on, sailed away from home with their ten month old son, completely unsure of their ability to carry through on the plans they had set.

Those of you who have been following the blog know that the three years that followed that departure day gave us more than we could have reasonably have hoped for.

This will be a different trip; we are four of us now, and Alisa and I (and Elias) know much more of the sea, and ourselves, than when we left on Pelagic. And since we know more, we are of course looking for different things with this second incarnation of our life afloat.

So, to mark the transition between boats, and the "ending of the beginning" of our maritime lives, we'll be moving to a new address for the blog - if nothing else, the name of this blog demands the change. And it's also nice in a way to end this particular blog, to declare a wrap on this particular phase in our lives, and to mark the start of something new. We'll link to that new blog once we've christened the boat - I hope you'll all come along to the new blog to continue finding out what happens next.

-Mike

Cloth Diapers Afloat

2011-03-01T18:18:00.000+11:00

This blog will only apply to the rare (dare I say, mad) sailors who chose to take infants as crew. While I was pregnant with our first son, Elias, our very good friend Debra thankfully informed me how dreadful it is for nonparents to hear about diapers and baby poop. So you have my blessings to skip this blog.

So cute! Elias in 2008. Note the blue swivel lids on diaper buckets.

That said, I know there must be a few crazy parents out there that can benefit from what I learned sailing with 10-month old Elias… Most families we met with children had kids age 4 and older. In three years we met only one family that sailed with infants, and by the time we met them their children were 4 and 6 – but I was reassured that they were still cruising. Living at the dock or on a mooring with children is different from cruising with kids; although many issues are the same, there are a few that are specific to cruising families. Cloth diapers is one of these issues, because with a proper landfill or the ability to burn your own dirty diapers ashore with kerosene, you have the option to at least entertain the thought of disposable diapers. But when you find yourself on a 3 week passage from Mexico to the Marqueses, cloth is the only option. Similarly, when you find that many of the 'landfills' across the Pacific Islands are only a beach on the far end of town, you cannot with clear conscious use anything except cloth.

Jessica (SV Yare) and Marls (SV Sea Dragon) have both asked me for tips about cloth diapers, so I will present what I learned sailing with Elias. The timing is very good, as I am about to repeat the experience with 9-month old Eric this season so I will surely have updates to these methods and I’m hopeful that Jessica and Marls and other sailing parents will share helpful comments and tips as they discover them.

In 1997, months before we left Kodiak , I tried in vain to find a guide for dealing with cloth diapers at sea. So many families have done this very thing, but I could only find one reference to help me (possibly there is one written in French?). Don Street, who I admire as a sailor, wrote something along the lines of 'all you need is 4 diapers, one dragging behind the boat, one hanging on the line to dry, one in waiting, and one on the baby's bottom." Well, now, that's real helpful isn't it?

Enough dancing around the subject - Here are the supplies you will need: 1) enough diapers for 4 days 2) hemp liners for diapers 3) a mesh bag with line attached for towing diapers 4) two 5-gallon buckets with turn lids 5) rubber gloves 6) bungie cord or shot of line and clothes pins 7) a winning attitude!

I washed diapers every other day. I washed 2 days of diapers at once, so you need at least 3 days of diapers so the baby can wear something on the day you are washing and the extra day's worth of diapers are there in case the clean diapers take longer than a day to dry (not in the tropics but yes in Alaska), or if you lose a diaper out of the mesh bag (happened mysteriously to us twice), or if a shark comes and eats the entire mesh bag with diaper (happened to us just outside the pass off Tahiti). In the tropics your diapers will dry in a few hours of sun or wind or even on a calm day if you rinse them sufficiently. But in foggy, rainy, coastal Alaska you will have to pray for wind and then after a few hours of wind you will have to move the diapers down below to hang near the diesel heater while you bake bread. I know they are bulky but if you can take 4 days-worth you will be glad you did. I should probably say that I used the old-fashion cloth diaper that is a Chinese prefold with a cloth insert (or 2 at night) and a plastic outer shell. Elias was using about 7-8 diapers a day when he was 10-months, so we had a duffle bag just for diapers that got moved about 20 times from one spot to another around the cabin. I took approximately 32 Chinese prefolds, 25-30 cotton inserts, 10-15 outer plastic shells, and two huge rolls of hemp liners. Clean Chinese prefolds stack very compactly and they are probably easier to wash than the newer diapers that are on the market…plus, I got them all as hand-me-downs from friends in Kodiak. I think Eric will be the sixth child to use these diapers, and they have no smell whatsoever and only stains from the zinc diaper-rash ointment that I had to occasionally use. Truly amazing!

Hemp liners are disposable and will dissolve in seawater, so while they don't catch all the poop they are helpful and can be immediately tipped over the side as you are preparing to drag the diaper. Also, instead of using baby wipes which are not biodegradable, I used hypoallergenic lotion (a cheap brand – nothing fancy) with toilet paper. Get a lotion with a squeeze top and just squirt some right on baby's behind and wipe with toilet paper. This can then be tossed over the side or flushed down your head, depending how close to shore you are.

Dragging diapers works – yes, I know, I was skeptical at first too. I had a great anxiety about getting the diapers exposed to salt water because I worried that it would be impossible to dry them – especially at high latitudes- if I didn't rinse every last salt crystal out of them. Also I was concerned about diaper rash. When our commercial fishermen friends in Kodiak laughed and said I just had to drag diapers behind the boat to clean them, I would ask 'but have you done this?' and then they would go quiet (very rare reaction for any fisherman and only furthered my anxiety). But I decided I had to try it to find out, and dragging the diaper for 10-20 minutes flushes out all the pee smell. At anchor it is MUCH harder to wash diapers as I had to use the deck hose and it isn't nearly as effective as dragging diapers at 5 kts. A heavy duty laundry bag with large mesh or a mesh SCUBA collecting bag will work fine. A draw-string for easy and quick closure is helpful and can be tied to a towing line.

Once sufficiently dragged, diapers were wrung out to get rid of as much seawater as possible. Then they soaked in either the pee or poop 5-gallon bucket that adorned the stern of Pelagic. I found swivel lids to be very convenient. I put ½ tablespoon of nappy san detergent in the poop bucket and no detergent in the pee bucket. Each bucket had 2-2.5 gallons of freshwater. Cloth diapers that are not rinsed properly will smell, so I used little or no detergent in them. Pee diapers get cleaned by the sea. I am not sure, but I think hanging diapers to dry also lets the sun and wind disinfect them. Initially I boiled water and used that for the poop diapers, but I soon decided I could skip that step. If they smell then they need to be dragged for longer. The poop diapers, after a 2-day soak, would get wrung out and then swooshed around in a bucket with as little water as possible to rinse them. After all the poop diapers were wrung again, they were put with the wrung out pee diapers and then all the diapers were swooshed around in a very small amount of constantly changed fresh water and wrung out. It is important to really wring out all the water between steps. We carried 75 gallons of water on Pelagic and while it was enough, there was none to spare. Aside from the water I had in the soaking buckets (which was changed 1-2 times a week), I only allowed myself 4 liters of freshwater to rinse diapers every other day. Elias got mild diaper rash less than 5 times, and I think the hemp liners probably added a protective layer.

Hanging the diapers to dry could be the hardest part of the entire process when the trade winds were booming, simply because it takes two hands to hang diapers and that leaves you with none for hanging on! I would harness up and hang a line high up out of the spray and once it was done I would always think that clean diapers hanging in the rigging was a happy sight. Over time, make it easy on yourself and cut a bungie line to fit your rigging so you can stretch the clothes line fast and move it quickly while leaving all diapers still pegged on. You will be doing this every other day so each small step that makes it easier adds up to a lot of time saved.

Drying diapers in Mexico. This is not the best way to tie clothesline, because in order to move the line to a better spot I would first have to remove half the diapers and then untie the line.

Elias eventually started to 'help' me wash his diapers and I would let him play with a clean diaper and some water in the cockpit while I worked. I never once let myself complain about the work involved. It is good, honest work and it is much better than putting plastic in the ocean. And it is just part of what has to be done to reap the benefits of cruising with infants and toddlers as crew.

Happy sailing!

What We're Doing

2011-02-20T15:44:00.000+11:00

Well, such fun - comments from what Alisa and I always like to call "our people", both the Holland and Australia chapters...

So, to answer the question from Miles and Melissa, no, we haven't sailed her yet. My parents visited this last week, and we had them all lined out to babysit the day before the haulout so that Alisa and I could sail Taiko for the first time without having to worry about the kids, but then the weather turned out to be crappy so we stayed at the dock. So it looks like all of our sailing on this new boat will be as a family!

And where, you might ask, are we going to be sailing the new ride?

Well, right now we're here, in Alameda, California....

And where we would really like to be is in Iluka, New South Wales...

Iluka is the place that Alisa and I like to think of as our spiritual home within Australia. And right now Iluka seems particularly attractive, a great antidote to all the ambition chasing that we've been up to, with our simultaneous child rearing, working, and preparation for world sailing. It's been a crazy six months or so for the team, and there's no better antidote that we can think of than a few months of beach time in Iluka.

So the plan is to sail to Australia, again.

Please, no comments on how we were just in Australia, and how it might of made more sense to buy a boat there. Believe me, we know.

With the start of the northern hemisphere hurricane season approaching, we'll be looking to leave in two and a half months or so. This idea has quite frankly kept me up at night in recent weeks, something that usually never happens. There's a lot to do to figure out the new boat, and I have significant work commitments to meet. And of course there are our two darling ones, both keeping us busy and making the idea of less-than-adequate preparation for the crossing unacceptable. And, I don't want to say anything until it's final, but there appear to be developments with my book manuscript that will require some time from me before we leave. If everything else wasn't enough.

Stay tuned to see how it all turns out...

Despair, or The Boatyard

2011-02-19T16:29:00.000+11:00

Well, the Romantic Period with this new boat is officially over. Starry-eyed dreams are a thing of the past, and we find ourselves immersed in a sea of inescapable practical details.

We're in the boat yard.

I don't know how other people handle being in the boat yard, but for me it's always been a scorched-earth experience. I always do the work myself, which means twelve hour days, bashed knuckles, and plenty of time to reflect bitterly on the foolishness of dreaming about palm-fringed anchorages.

This time around is no different. We've been on the hard since Tuesday. Every day I work all day but conclusively finish few (or no) jobs. The beautiful weather that we enjoyed in January has left us, to be replaced by a traditional California winter. It's been pouring rain for days and the temperature has been topping out around 45/7 and so the boat sits unpainted. Meanwhile we're staying in a hotel, so every day that we don't get back into the water adds to our boat-related money hemorrhage, and the forecast promises little relief.

And, well, you get the picture. Luckily I have the experience of the Pelagic years to draw on, and the realization that even the darkest haul-outs eventually end.

What we've got

2011-02-12T06:25:00.000+11:00

After a year of looking, this is what we ended up with.

Taiko is a 45-foot steel cutter, one of two hulls built to a design by Gary Noble Curtis. She has a bit of a history - hull completed in 1989, but the boat not launched until 2005, she's only done one round trip from California to Mexico but has managed to acquire five owners in her brief career (we're owner pair #5).

As expected, we ended up compromising on about half of our boat-buying criteria. For one thing, she's steel (though corrosion-resistant corten, and well done), rather than the aluminum that I would have preferred. For another thing she's big - 42 feet was really as big as we wanted to go. And her engine is quite undersized and, because she hasn't cruised, there's all sorts of gear to add to her (more on that later!). And (there seem to be a lot of compromises), she is not a production boat. This means she will be more difficult to sell when the time comes, and she is also a bit of a mystery as far as the design's virtues and vices are concerned.

But, there was a lot of good that came with the package. We didn't get her for a song, but the price was probably "reasonable" for what she is. The mast, standing and running rig, mainsail and staysail are all brand new. Much of the other gear is from 2005. She has a very non-yacht interior, which is something that Alisa and I always wanted - boat builders put a huge amount of money into making sailboats look like floating bordellos, and we were always keen to skip paying for that sort of nonsense. Another huge plus is that she appears to fit the bill as an "expedition" yacht - with some modifications, I think she'll take us to whatever icy corner of the globe we care to explore. And, with all that length, some good things do come...

The "makes me feel like singing" galley.

The "I'm just going to go work on my project" engine room.

The "it's all mine until Eric is out of the crib" forward cabin, complete with roll-away desk for homework.

The "how long can we get away with living like this?" aft cabin.

So that's the new ride. Of course, the only point of having any sailboat is to sail, a lot. We've cooked up a plan for doing just that - details to follow soon.

No Place Like Home

2011-02-07T10:35:00.000+11:00

The 24 days that Mike spent in CA boat buying were a whirlwind for me and the boys. There were so many things to do in order to close up the year we'd spent living in Hobart, Tasmania. In 10 months of living ashore, we stayed in 8 different homes. Only one place was a rental, the majority were housesits, and what we didn't pay in outright cash we paid in the stress and effort of moving so many times. Moving with very young children. It worked for us in a lot of ways – kept us very light in possessions and allowed us to see Hobart from all sides of town. But there was a time not too long ago when a very tired Elias asked me 'where is home, mommy?'. And I began to ask myself the same question. Lo and behold, we have finally arrived at the answer to that question. And it's an answer that I like very much!

How to describe the palace that is now keeping us afloat? She is every bit as good as she looked in the photos online. She is beautiful and has so much storage! The galley is about twice as big yet still narrow enough to be functional while sailing. The deck lines are lovely. I am chuffed, as they say in Australian. In fact I am so starstruck with this boat that I have almost forgotten how awful the flight over was. Almost, but not completely.

Please imagine me with Eric (9 months) and Elias (4.5 years), 4 bags weighing a total of 67 kg (almost 150 pounds), 2 car seats, a stroller, 4 carry-on bags that were heavy and really unmanageable once the strap on the laptop case broke. Thanks to wonderful friends, we were off to a smooth start leaving Hobart. But rechecking bags in Sydney was horrible. I will skip the boggy details and instead ask you to picture me dripping in sweat from neck to ankle after lugging each piece of baggage from the taxi curb to the United desk (all the while wearing 11 kg Eric in my Ergo carrier), I am swooning from the physical effort and I wonder if I might collapse. No exaggeration. Then while Elias is on the floor having a very loud, very epic meltdown, the unhelpful woman representing United Airlines asked me in an accusatory tone 'why are you doing this alone?'. As if I had said to my husband, "no dear, you take the earlier flight and I'll go alone with the kids". Instead of answering her, I hugged Eric and thanked him for not crying during the ugly episode. Once the bags were checked, we regrouped and had a pep-talk and then tackled the lines for security and customs. Elias' pony jumped up and hit a man in the face. This man was not happy about it and my four-year-old said loudly 'but mom, she is soft, it didn't hurt' and I just kept going – not insisting that he apologize. I viewed it all from outside myself, amazed at how exhaustion could wear down my values. Once through all the checkpoints, I looked for our gate and found it flashing 'FINAL CALL' so we got to sprint to gate 61, which was terrifyingly hard to find amidst all the perfume an booze shops. Poor Elias was crying that he couldn't run and his legs were going to fall off. You never see those carts ferrying people to their gates when you really need one. The 13 hour flight was no big deal after all that. I arrived with bloodshot eyes hoping for some due pampering, only to see Mike waiting out side the customs gate looking like he did after I gave birth to our sons…he looked happy but thoroughly trashed and exhausted. I am sorry to say that I didn't give him a proper hug until I downloaded all the gory details that I spared you about the flight over. It was a long rant in the car parking lot of the airport, but then I finally found myself and we were off to see the new yacht!

Where Pelagic was 37 feet long and had only 25 feet of waterline, Taiko is 45 feet long with 40 feet of waterline. She is vast! But she doesn't have a very high freeboard and she looks like fun to sail – oh, I can't wait to sail her!! We are waiting until next week when Mike's parents visit and we can take her sailing without the kids aboard. I need to learn everything about handling her and handling such a big rig, and I want to focus without worrying about the kids. It was fitting that the day we departed Hobart on our way to see our new home, the potential new owner of Pelagic was taking her for a test sail and survey. A very big page was being turned.

And so now I am back in America after being gone for nearly 2 years. I enjoy the cultural diversity down every street, but I notice that people seem beaten down in spirit. I am also amazed at how disgusting orange cheddar cheese is, and I am reminded how strange I initially found the yellow (non-colored) cheddar cheese in Australia but I quickly came to prefer it. More on cheese and other observations on America another time. For now, on this third night aboard, I will say with a tired and satisfied smile, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home".

A Full Crew

2011-02-05T05:52:00.000+11:00

Alisa and the boys arrived two days ago. I found my life partner a bit worse for wear when I met her at the airport. The process of re-checking all her bags in Sydney seemed to have taken a particularly large toll - there was her, and the four huge duffels, and the four carry-ons, and the two car seats, and the stroller, and the two boys, all to be gotten from the curb where the cab dropped her to the check-in area inside the terminal. All this with nary a baggage cart in sight, and a security guy warning her that she couldn't leave anything unattended while ferrying the load inside. And, well, there was more. When I met her at the international arrivals lounge in SFO she seemed to need to tell me every detail before she could accept a welcoming hug.

Elias started working on the boat immediately.

So when we got to the marina I showed the boat to Alisa and Elias for the very first time. Alisa has been threatening to write up a blog post about her initial impressions, so I won't steal her thunder here. I'll just say that the act of showing her the boat that we had agreed to buy before she even saw it was a very very special moment, long anticipated. And like many long-anticipated moments it was just as powerful as I expected, and then quickly gone. I made lunch, and we began to settle into the routine of our new life on this new boat.

Eric is nine months old - the same age Elias was when we moved on board Pelagic.

More soon, on both the details of our new ride and our immediate plans.

She's ours

2011-02-01T09:41:00.000+11:00

Just a quick note to share the news that we took possession of Taiko on Saturday. In the picture the seller (Paul) and I are shaking hands on the deal during the "off-shore delivery" - our offer required that Paul had to deliver the boat to us outside of California so that the sale would not incur California sales tax - which is 9% in the county where the boat was docked! So Paul hired someone with a Coast Guard six-pack license to drive the boat beyond the three-mile line which demarcates state waters. Once there we signed all the final papers and took a picture of the GPS to document our location and I made first "functional use" of the boat outside of California waters by sailing around for a couple of hours before we drove back through the Golden Gate. Paul is a Kiwi, and he was very aware of the farcical, only-in-America side of the whole thing. The farce was pretty apparent to me as well, but I was mostly nervous that I would screw up on some trifling little legal detail. But it all went fine.

It's hard now to remember just how nervous I was the night before we took possession - I literally haven't been so nervous since the day that Alisa and I were married. But as soon as she was ours, all the nerves went away. We've now made our choice and we'll be happy to live with it. And, improbably enough, our full year of searching is suddenly over. I love the feeling of living aboard again, even if it is only at a marina dock. Alisa and the boys arrive Wednesday morning.

The picture below was taken much too late last night, as I was cleaning the bilges and taking stock of everything aboard. Paul kindly left some tools and other useful items aboard (but, mate, I noticed that you kept the oil lamps!). So now our big push to get the boat ready to cross the Pacific begins - more details on the boat, and the preparations, to follow soon.

Pelagic

2011-01-28T15:24:00.000+11:00

We accepted an offer on Pelagic today. The offer was quite a bit lower than what we had hoped for, but with Taiko set to close on Saturday, it was clearly time to end the Pelagic years. I have never been very nostalgic about boats, but I must admit that when I was tidying things up on Pelagic before I left Tassie to look at this new boat it felt strange to just be leaving her there, tied up in the marina indefinitely, idle. She's been a very good boat for us, really as good a boat for sailing from Alaska to Australia as we could have gotten on our budget, and I'll be glad to see her passed along to someone else to be sailed around Tassie for a while.

So, we suddenly have agreements to sell one boat and buy another, and the end of the year-long boat-swap process is before us. I hope it's a long long time until we change boats again!

The picture above was taken in the Kenai Fjords, about a week after we left Kodiak.

Doubt

2011-01-27T03:58:00.000+11:00

It looks like we'll be able to take possession of Taiko by the weekend - the blizzard of paperwork that marks the sale promises to be over by then at the latest.

I'll admit to a few sleepless moments over the past week, as my mind refuses rest from the long list of new considerations that come with the new boat.

There are a few kinds of doubt that come with an enterprise like this.

First, there is the powerful doubt of the boat shopping period, as the potential downsides of candidate boats are plumbed and considered. I'm well over that now - I'm comfortable with the bet we've made on Taiko, even though I realize that the days will come (hopefully infrequently) when I say to Alisa, "Why did we buy this boat?"

Then there's the doubt that comes with sailing across the Pacific, again, with such young children. We'll have the huge benefit of experience this time around, and of course if we weren't fundamentally satisfied with our ability to do the trip safely we wouldn't consider it. But still, there will be a part of me that will be on guard and tense until the crossing is through.

But the really big doubt, I find, comes from the big picture stuff. How are we going to make this all work financially with the expense of such a big boat to maintain and no secure income? How does all this galavanting around in our thirties and forties not end with us working retail jobs in our sixties? Are we going to be able to support our kids properly with this haven't-had-a-job-since-2007 model of existence?

This is the source of one of my favorite axioms: true freedom comes when you have no choice. Meaning that someone who is completely caught up in whatever passion has grabbed them will have little time to spare for these doubts, and will be free to pursue their chosen adventure single-mindedly. It's an idea that is economically expressed by the shrugs that a couple of our French friends give when they say things like, "It was my dream, so it is how I have to live."

We're not at all so single-minded about sailing that we can pursue it with no thought to alternatives. But we love living on a boat and sailing far and wide, and (touch wood) we've been able to pay for it over the last three years, even though we left Kodiak with just some savings and no idea at all of what would happen down the line. And that's really the biggest consolation for my doubts - the knowledge that you can never know how an adventure will turn out before you go - you just have to jump, and have a bit of faith that things will work out.

Which is enough for me.

~~

Some snapshots from this period of waiting between agreeing to buy the boat and taking possession:

Previous anonymous hotel room.

Current anonymous hotel room.

And the list of boat jobs begins to grow!

Buy the ticket...

2011-01-21T17:02:00.000+11:00

...and take the ride.

We reached a final agreement on Taiko today. Tomorrow we'll exchange signed copies of the purchase agreement and then an avalanche of events will follow - money will be wired, documentation agents will be engaged, lawyers will offer advice, and insurance agents will be queried.

No one can be good at everything, of course, and I don't know if I'm really cut out for buying boats. We have sailing friends who have swapped boats any number of times, and they have a real sang froid about the whole thing, an icy flow in their veins that gives them the confidence to make quick decisions and live with them.

Me, though, I'm a worrier when it comes to boats. That quality might have stood us in good stead on Pelagic, as my habit of triple-checking things has likely kept us out of trouble at times. But it makes the boat buying process a bit painful - everywhere I look, I see problems. And really, as I've often said to Alisa, I don't actually like boats much at all. The romance is lost on me - I just see the inordinate amount of money and effort that goes into keeping them going.

The trouble is, I really, really, like sailing. And sailing relies on a certain amount of interacting with boats.

Our friend Paul, who has heard me moaning over the boat-buying process as much as anyone, had the perfect reaction to the news about Taiko - "I hope this boat gives as much satisfaction and pleasure as Pelagic", he wrote me.

And really, that's all we could hope. For all the headaches that came our way with Pelagic, buying that boat and sailing across the Pacific as a family was the central event in our lives. We should be so lucky with this new boat.

I can't wait to show her to Alisa and Elias.

Waiting

2011-01-19T04:25:00.001+11:00

I'm waiting for the surveyor's report, so no news on the boat yet.

It's been a hectic visit, but I've grabbed a few moments along the way, like going up to the Marin Headlands at sunset to watch the fog blowing in through the Golden Gate. While I watched the fog erasing the City and the bridge glowing redder red, I was looking at the same scene three times - once now, once three years ago, when Alisa and Elias and I sailed through the Golden Gate on Pelagic, innocent of Eric and trying to figure the whole sailing thing out, and once again twenty years before that, when I used to live on one of those foggy San Francisco streets. That's a lot of time to take in at one glance!

Yesterday was Martin Luther King day, which I observed by driving into the City for a performance by poet Amiri Baraka and saxophone player Roscoe Mitchell of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. A good-to-be-back-in-America moment.

Taiko under sail. That's a big stick!

Back in America

2011-01-12T19:11:00.000+11:00

Arrived in San Francisco after a somewhat eventful flight, featuring an unscheduled stop in Honolulu to fix the plane's bathrooms. Good call there - imagine a 747 without a single empty seat, and every bathroom in economy class out of order...

I met the seller and broker this afternoon, and had a first look at Taiko. Initial impressions are good - fingers crossed that nothing bad comes up on survey.

Afterwards, I soaked up the feeling of being back in the home country. I'm particularly noticing the things that I do here that I don't do in Oz. So far the list includes eating Mexican food, buying a six pack of good beer, and giving a panhandler change.

I find myself wondering why we don't say "beggar" in America. Whatever people might say about declining literacy and the dumbing-down of society, the power of language, and individual words, continues undiminished.

~~

Meanwhile the news out of southeast Queensland has gotten pretty grim. Sounds like all the family is safe, though a couple have been flooded out and a few others are cut of from their homes...

Ipswich, my Dad's hometown, earlier today.

Fast Forward

2011-01-08T09:37:00.000+11:00

Things are moving fast. We're packing everything up, getting quotes from movers ("removalists" in Oz), and getting new prescriptions for the expired drugs from our medical kit. If the California boat lives up to our hopes on inspection, we want to be ready. All the cruising accouterments that took us months to acquire for Pelagic are simply going into boxes, ready to be unpacked on the new boat - IF this is the one.

Organization has never been my long suit, and I don't do well when I'm feeling overloaded with things to do. So this week of packing and dealing with lists of lists, while an inescapable part of busting out of our current routine to go sailing again, is not my favorite part of the the whole process. Then again, this sort of thing isn't anyone's favorite part of the process. We're just putting in our time, hoping that we're earning our way to another series of sublime moments of family life afloat...

What to bring?

Well-rested baby. Tired dad.

Echidna face paint.

Watching the finish of the Sydney to Hobart.

The Allure

2011-01-05T22:23:00.000+11:00

So, our weird split approach to the short-term future continues. On one hand I'm packing up everything to ship to California if the boat goes through, on the other hand we're looking for housing in Hobart if it doesn't.

I'm getting insurance quotes, and shipping quotes, and talking to lawyers and a mechanic and surveyors and the broker and equipment rental stores.

And every now and then I take a break from all that and consider the route before us if we do end up sailing out of California. On the internet I read that the boreal spring will see La Niña or neutral conditions, which bodes for reduced hurricane activity in the eastern North Pacific, and enhanced trade winds. In the storage unit I go through charts, surely the favorite "job" of any sailing romantic. I come across mysterious atolls that I've never heard of, find myself scrutinizing passes through coral reefs that we'll likely never visit. And I see our old positions, faithfully penciled in, from our last crossing that has receded far into the misty realm of Things That Happened Years Ago.

Alisa and I agree that if things do work out with this boat, and we do manage to navigate all the craziness that lies between now and the start of hurricane season, then we have some serious fun ahead of ourselves.

To Leap?

2011-01-04T21:43:00.000+11:00

I've said it before - the romantic part of sailing the world lasts until the moment you buy an actual boat, on an actual budget. From that point on, everything is practical.

Information is starting to trickle in about the San Francisco boat that we have tentatively agreed to buy. We have a mechanic lined out to look at the engine, and a surveyor for the hull and systems, and another surveyor to look at the electrical system and corrosion issues. A couple of these people have been down to take a quick look at the boat, and we eagerly consume whatever bits of information they offer. There are still some big question marks, like the insulation and the state of the water and fuel tanks, and, biggest of all, whether the under-sized engine will be up to what we ask of it. I'll be going over in a week to get the best answers that I can to those questions, and then we'll make up our mind.

Meanwhile, preparations are underway to pull up stakes in Tasmania and shift everything to California. I've got the standard five pages of to-do lists that presage any big trip involving a boat, and the firm hope that I can get everything lined out in the time remaining. The kicker, though, is that we don't know for sure if we are leaving - if this boat proves not to be The One, then we're not going anywhere just yet...

Stay tuned.

Should be Easier

2010-12-28T22:20:00.000+11:00

"Should be easier," our friend Smoke emailed me the other day. "Need boat, find boat, buy boat."

He hit it perfectly.

I remind myself that we are searching for a yacht, after all, and that there are much harder fates out there. But, really, talk to people who have particular ideas about what they want and a limited budget, and again and again you will hear stories of long, hard boat searches.

We're still very excited about Taiko, the steel boat in Sausalito. But a talk with a surveyor has identified a couple of issues that might be real problems.

First, the engine really does seem to be too small for such a big boat. I had resigned myself to the idea of getting along with 50 HP, but the surveyor pointed out that this particular engine will only deliver 35 HP or so at cruising RPM, which really might not do the trick at all.

And then there's the issue of insulation. Both the surveyor and the aforementioned Smoke, who knows a few things about steel boats, get very serious when they talk about the suitability of a metal boat with uninsulated frames for the sort of high-latitude work that we have in mind.

Stay tuned!

Kodiakers in Tas

2010-12-28T22:02:00.000+11:00

We just had a great visit with our Kodiak friends Pete and Margaret and their mob - Clayton, Laurel and Jack. They all came down to Tas and we met up in Cradle Mt. National Park. Here's the crew setting out on a hike, experiencing very stereotypical early summer Tassie weather.

Jack in the buttongrass.

We stayed in a great cabin in the park. Elias was very excited to sleep in the top bunk.

I busted out one afternoon for a walk by myself in the hills, where I got the views above. Cradle Mt. is a very pretty place, and we're keen to go back. Maybe it was the presence of our Kodiak friends, but as I was walking around in the hills I did what I never do when travelling and compared the place to home. "Jeez," I thought. "You could set these hills down in Kodiak and no one would notice them." But that was just my relict Alaskan bias talking and of course comparisons of this sort are odious....

After a day in Hobart we all trekked out to the Bicheno for Christmas. Actually, what we were aiming to produce for our Alaskan friends was an Australian "chrissie" instead of a northern hemisphere Christmas. The northern Christmas is a midwinter festival, but the Australian version is very much a "summertime and the livin' is easy" sort of holiday. Thus our choice of Bicheno, where there is a very nice beach where Elias and I braved the cold water for a swim. On Boxing Day the surf was up and I finally got my longboard wet in Tassie.

We rented a great beach house and set up a little Christmas tree complete with lights. Here's Elias with a plate of cookies for Santa and a plate of carrots for Santa's eight 'roos. (Turns out he doesn't use reindeer down here.)

We had Christmas dinner complete with the Australian touch of party hats and crackers and noisemakers. Good fun.

Pete and Margaret and their troupe caught the ferry back to the North Island on Boxing Day, leaving behind a very warm impression of their family dynamic. We're looking forward to seeing these good people again...maybe our boat search will find us close to Alaska sooner than we know...

Hull Knocking

2010-12-23T22:14:00.000+11:00

One of the things that Alisa and I love to do in anchorages is to row over to a nearby boat, knock on the hull and chat the owners up. It's always a crap shoot when we do this - sometimes we get baffled reactions from the people we approach, sometimes we meet people whose outlook doesn't match well with our own, and often we meet casual acquaintances whom we know for a week or a month while we're travelling the same path. And occasionally we knock on a hull and end up making good friends out of the bargain.

We just had a couple of the latter sort of people visiting - Diana and Alex from Kukka, whom Alisa and Elias met on a whim at an anchorage at Magnetic Island in Queensland last year. They just came down to Hobart and we had a good time catching up on everything that has happened since we last saw them, over New Year's 2010 in Sydney.

Really, cruising is just an elaborate way to expand your circle of friends. The boat stuff is all secondary.

It's your job

2010-12-16T22:33:00.000+11:00

-It's your job to be excited, I said. It's my job to be nervous.

-Good, said Alisa. I am excited.

-Well, perfect, I said. I'm nervous.

~~~

So, the big news: we have an initial purchase agreement on the California steel boat. That was the one that we initially ruled out after we learned the headroom, then ruled back in after Alisa measured me and found that I'm 5/8" shorter than previously advertised. To refresh your memory, this is the beast:

We always knew that we would have to make some big compromises on whatever boat we got... It's just taking me a bit to get used to the actual compromises that we see in this boat. She's bigger than we want (45 feet). She's steel, which I've not quite resigned myself to. And she's a one-off, which I never wanted. But there appears to be some good to go along with all that. And at a certain point, if you want to stop dreaming and start sailing, you've got to go out an put your money down on one particular, imperfect, boat. I fly over on January 11th to see her for myself.

~~~

This is a boat with a bit of a history:

Stay tuned.

It's All Good

2010-12-05T20:41:00.000+11:00

Well, no boat in the offing and our latest short-term housing situation will end in about three weeks, with nothing secured to take its place. Oh, the joys! Alisa and I have agreed that if we ever swap boats again we'll do everything we can to buy the new boat before we move off the old. Of course, we could move back onto Pelagic, but at this point that feels like a lot of effort to take a step backwards, so we're going to try to hold out for a while before we play that card.

I'm reminded of hunting deer in the mountains of Kodiak - on those days when I spent hours tramping around in the tall wet grass, seeing nothing, I'd remind myself that it just took one second for everything to change...

I also told Alisa today that I sure never thought our boat swap would put the family through such a long spell of uncertainty.

Through all this uncertainty, though, things continue to be generally great for us in Hobart.

We celebrated Thanskgiving for the first time in Oz... the last two times we just went to the beach for a barbie. But this time we invited over two North American friends (and an Australian significant other). Alisa baked two chickens and two pumpkin pies and the friends brought salad and ice cream and we had a great time.

And our friends Robb and Emma invited us out for a sail on their 40-footer, Aratika. We had a great time sailing, and Elias always has a great time with their girls.

AND, my dad dropped in for a just-under-a-day visit, part of a whirlwind visit to all the Australian family over nine days or so. Check out how sick Elias was.

Actually we've all been sick. Right now it's my turn, and it's been going on for almost two weeks, and I missed a very very fun barbie today as a result, and I'm just about fed up with it. Anyway, Alisa got a great "three generations of blokes" shot with my Dad.

It's all good.

Chalk and Cheese (and a bit of a revelation)

2010-12-03T20:55:00.000+11:00

This boat search will come to an end.... I'm sure it will.

As of three or four days ago, we were onto two candidates, neither of them metal. They were the proverbial chalk and cheese - it would be hard for two boats to be more different. Here are pics of each:

The underbody of the top boat is very similar to that of Pelagic. A deep, modified fin keel, skeg hung rudder and a deep hull sections. The bottom boat is completely different: twin rudders, a very flat bottom and a centerboard. The only thing that unites the two is that they each appear to well kitted-out with reasonably new gear, and ready to start crossing oceans on short notice. This has always been our top criterion in the search.

But then, predictably, after we got excited about each, they both seemed to go pear shaped. The listing broker for the top one is in the hospital, and he works for a large brokerage that is apparently so disorganized that no one else has any info about the boat, not even the seller's contact details, so no one can tell us if the boat is even still for sale. And while there's a lot to like about the bottom boat, it is very very light indeed - as near as I can figure, she displaces 8400 kg half loaded, on a 12.8 m waterline, for a displacement/length ratio of 112(!), which, if I'm figuring it correctly, is about half of the D/L of an OVNI 43.

Our friend John, who may have more first-hand knowledge of boats than anyone else we know, said, "Mate, she's too light. You'll feel every pothole in the road. You'll wake up every time you go over a ripple."

We tend to agree.

Which brought about a low point in group morale - "When will we ever find a boat?" I wailed. So many of the boats that we are interested in don't have the required 1.95 m headroom, and that seems to be making a tough search much tougher.

So, today, on a whim, Alisa measured me.

My height is something that I've always known about myself - 6' 3 3/8". But I have no memory of ever measuring myself - the last time must have been in high school.

Alisa made my height at 189.5 cm, or a hair under 6' 2 1/4". So either I've been wrong all this time, or I've lost an inch. Either way, it's a bit embarrassing to have been ruling out so many boats because of a faulty piece of information.

Hopefully this revelation will breathe a little life into our search.

Headroom. And headroom.

2010-11-27T20:51:00.000+11:00

Well, the hard-luck, "I coulda been a contender" epoch in our boat search continues...

We were very enamored with this steel 45 footer, lying in San Francisco Bay. We got used to a few drawbacks, including an undersized engine, and were about to make an offer. But we had asked the broker to check a few details on the boat for us, and to measure the headroom.... It was advertised as 6'4", but he measured it at 6'3" on the centerline, and dropping from there as you go outboard. So suddenly she was off the list, after four or five days of frenzied interest as we queried our friends about various aspects of the design and built up to the emotional apogee of deciding that she might be "the one". But luckily we had a second choice in hand:

41 feet, steel, lying Queensland. We had ruled her out back in April because we didn't want a full keel design unable to sail out of its own wake. But she's new, with quite good kit. We gave her another look and she ended up second on the list. I had a chat with the broker and he assured me that she had enough headroom...But then he called Alisa a day or two later (the same day the previous boat fell through) and recanted - he had been aboard and realized that at 6'3" he was unable to stand up...

So, on one day, two good possibilities vanished and we were back to the beginning.

On the rebound we briefly considered this steel 45 footer in Sydney:

But the displacement is listed at 17 tonnes, which is a bit rich for us, and also 2.5 tonnes over the design displacement... We'll take another look, but at this point our heart isn't in it.

But we don't stay down for long! Our current first choice is something completely different, this cold-molded, Kiwi-built, French-designed 43 foot dériveur, lying Raiatea. Stay tuned!

Why we love Hobart

2010-11-21T00:16:00.000+11:00

It's spring in the southern hemisphere. Today we went for a "wander" ("hike" in American) up on top of Mt. Wellington with some friends. Elias absolutely loves these two little girls.

The trail was challenging, and we continue to calibrate our sense of what is and isn't good fun for a four-year-old. There was some carnage - check out the rock rash below on the little fella.

But he generally had a great time. And the landscape up there was unreal:

As were the views. That's Hobart spread out along the water below.

And then after dinner Elias and I went for a walk and saw a playtpus in the Hobart Rivulet, ten minutes from the house where we're staying.

The Hunt

2010-11-20T23:31:00.000+11:00

Some snapshots from our search over the last week...

43 ft., steel, lying Malaysia. This boat had been high on our "maybe" list during the months we were waiting for the aluminum boat in New Zealand that eventually fell through. I emailed the broker this week with the idea that we would probably put in an offer and found that someone else had gotten there first...

I heard about this one at a get-together in Anchorage... a friend's sister knew these people and knew they were about to sell the boat after having reached New Zealand. Turned out to be a 50 footer, much too big for us...

44 feet, aluminum, lying New Zealand. Was working up to the top of our list until we checked the specs again and saw the 2.5 meter draft. Fuhgettaboutit!

38 feet, aluminum, lying east coast U.S. Took a while to get over the draft - 6'9". And getting her back to Oz in our time frame would be a push. But, oh dear - the price. We just couldn't get past the very very good price. When we first contacted the broker, she estimated the head room at 6'4" or 6'6". We got her to go measure and it turns out it was 6' or 6'1". A deal breaker. On the plus side, I had a chat with another broker in the same company who turned out to be the pushiest a**hole used boat broker in the whole world. So at least that's behind me.

40 feet, steel, lying Melbourne. Appears to be very nice, doesn't need to be imported into Oz (a big plus!), and is right in our back yard. But also has a spade rudder, only supported by a stainless steel rudderpost in an oxygen-starved environment. Maybe I'm being too picky, but I just don't want a spade rudder.

So that's what we've been doing this week. Many are close, and we think that means that the right one will soon be at hand. Our current list of hot prospects includes two boats in New Zealand and one in the U.S. Stay tuned...

First Bites

2010-11-15T21:00:00.000+11:00

If you're wondering if this will ever again be a blog about sailing the world, take heart. We have resolved to make an offer on a boat this week. Unfortunately we just heard that the boat that was edging towards the top of our list is under contract. But the search continues!

Meanwhile, to paraphrase someone, life is what happens while you're looking for your next boat. We had a big milestone yesterday - Eric's first solid food, which Alisa kindly delayed by a couple weeks so that I could be present.

I don't know if waiting for me to get back had anything to do with it, but he was clearly ready, following each spoonful of rice cereal with his eyes and leaning forward, mouth open, as they came within range.

The entertaining part for us was his reaction as each mouthful went down... apparently the sensation takes a little getting used to.

Another milestone passes...

~~~

Elias in his wooly mammoth mask.

The end.

Home

2010-11-15T02:46:00.000+11:00

I went back to North America without a camera, so all I have is the five pictures that I took with my computer during the flights.

It was a work trip - one week in Oregon and two weeks in Alaska.

I don't miss Alaska when I'm gone, I think because I'm still enjoying our traveling so much.

But I was surprised at how powerful an experience it was to fly into Alaska on this trip - it was really a bit overwhelming to be back in that place.

Part of it is the scale and the beauty. Alaska is so much more, and more beautiful, than anywhere that we've been lately. The state is as wide as the continent of Australia, and you could lose New Zealand in Chugach State Park and forget where you put it. I've always thought that Alaskans who go traveling to compare things unfavorably with home are particularly tiresome. But when you return after an absence, the comparison with everything that you've seen since you've been away is inescapable.

But the draw of the place is more than the roadless mountains and wild rivers. Alaska is just home, the place where we still have good friends in a whole bunch of different places, the place where Alisa and I each put our roots down seperately and then built a life together, the place where we plan to return. We were lucky enough to be young in Alaska and to feel it as a place that was equal to our boundless energy, and now it's just part of us.

So I enjoyed the trip, and seeing our friends, even if about half of them did let me know that if only one of us could come back, they'd sort of prefer that it was Alisa and not me. And when I got back to Hobart I found Eric with croup, and Alisa with a fever, and Elias with ants in his pants. If we're lucky Alaska will be home again, but for now home is wherever the four of us are, and I got home just in time.

What do we want?

2010-11-01T17:27:00.000+11:00

Heather asked, so here it is - the list of things that we are looking for in our next boat. This will likely be most interesting for people who are really into sailboats!

1) A metal hull. If we really want to sail the Northwest Passage, we want a metal hull. Aluminum if we can get it.

2) An insulated hull.

3) Total length 39-42 feet. A little bigger if we had to.

4) Three sleeping cabins. One for us, one for the boys, and one for the survival suits/cockpit cushions/bikes/sails/deck awnings and everything else. Or alternately, two cabins and some very serious additional storage space.

5) A cutter rig. Or a sloop that we can convert to a cutter. Or a ketch, if we had to.

6) A skeg-hung rudder. Or even (god forbid) a keel-hung rudder. But not a spade rudder.

7) A well-maintained boat, with good sails and standing and running rigging.

8) A u-shaped galley.

9) Big water tanks.

10) A hard dodger (optional!).

11) A specific set of bells and whistles: windvane, radar, a good autopilot, an over-sized windlass, over-sized anchors and chain, solar panels, life raft, folding propellor, wind generator, ham/SSB radio, steps on the mast, cruising spinnaker. As many of these as possible.

12) 195 cm of headroom.

13) In our budget!

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable list. But though we've seen many boats with eight or nine of these items, we've never seen one with ten or more.

Some serious compromises seem inevitable.

How'd that happen?

2010-10-21T21:59:00.001+11:00

This one really snuck up on me: Alisa reminded me that October 22nd is the second anniversary of our arrival in Australia.

The pictures are of me raising the courtesy and quarantine flags on our arrival Down Under, and poppin' the Dom to celebrate the end of our Pacific crossing.

Auckland airport, international departure lounge

2010-10-20T21:57:00.000+11:00

Aotearoa

Before anything else, the awareness of again being in Polynesia. Signs in a Polynesian language and Polynesian faces create inescapable images - of the Land of the Long White Cloud, of voyaging canoes, and tapu and a cosmology expressed in swirling tattoos. Having sailed a small boat through the vowel-rich archipelagos of the Marquesas and Tuamotus and Tonga, it will be forever impossible for me to be aloof towards Polynesia.

Signs

Driving to meet a yacht broker at a marina, I see the unmistakable signs that I'm entering the uneasy territory that yachties at times cannot escape. In this case, the signs are literally signs – street signs. People living on sailboats, as much as they resist, at times find themselves needing a marina. And the marina, so often, is the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar coastal development scheme, soulless and expensive and straight from the imagination of an inadequately-talented designer of some sort. Terrible places just because they are so diametrically different from the dream of palm-fringed anchorages that beats in the heart of any yachtie. I know I'm arriving in one of these places when I start passing signs for "Spinnaker Dr" and "Trimaran Ct" – in the US and Australia and now NZ, it seems that designers working on these sorts of places cannot resist these specific names.

The Joy of Fatherhood Travels with You

Driving along a twisting two-lane highway through countryside that is lush and hilly but not mountainous, offering the visual delight of family-scaled farms passing one and another. And then, around a bend in the road, a vision: a small flock of sheep all inexplicably dyed bright pink-red. A sign announces "Sheep World: sheep and dog demonstrations daily". A dismissive thought about impossibly rustic Kiwi attractions might have come to mind. Instead, that cringing feeling that I get right where the heart is meant to be as I think, oh god, Elias would LOVE that.

Is it Their Fault?

I viewed four boats beside the one that I came to 'en-zed' to see. One was very nice. Painfully, dreamily nice. Nearly too nice to be true. A 40-footer, 1987 hull. Bought in the U.S. by a Swiss couple who had already circumnavigated the aqueous sphere in a different chapter of their lives, on a different boat. They knew what they were about. They refitted the boat, and where normally a "refit" is broker-speak for a bunch of big jobs done on a boat poorly, these two did it right. New rigging, new sails, new liferaft, all new electronics, new fuel and water tanks, a new Monitor windvane glinting like yacht jewelry on the stern. And all of it done proper. Not "professional", since being a shipwright is usually halfway to being a criminal, and a "professional" job in the sailboat world typically means something done to a standard good enough only for boats that live in marinas. This boat is better than professional. And so it offers half of what we want – proper kit, used enough to work, but not tired. But the other half of what we want, a particular set of design criteria, isn't there, so I move on.

And then I see three disaster yachts in quick succession. One a terrible design, and two others that will be ready to cruise again just as soon as someone spends a year or two working full-time on them. I walk through these two, noticing dozens of jobs that need doing. Meanwhile, on each boat, the broker is standing in the background, muttering things like, "they knew how to build them back then", and "for the price of a little new gear, someone's going to get themselves a rock-solid yacht here". And all I can think is how impossibly hard it must be to remain honest with yourself if you flog over-used boats for a living.

Oh, no! Not another learning experience!

2010-10-17T17:43:00.000+11:00

Whangarei, NZ

It's been a very whirlwind existence for the crew of the good ship Pelagic over the past 72 hours.

I flew into Auckland on Thursday, just three days and (it seems) a full lifetime ago.

I came on a very special mission, shoehorned between the demands of my family life and work life back in Hobart and my upcoming trip to the States.

That mission: to see if a particular boat might be the one.

The answer, disappointingly, is a resounding "maybe". And on the way to that fun-as-kissing-your-sister answer (sorry, Jenny), Alisa and I had a few intense conversations via a very poor skype connection, and I gained all sorts of insights into our approach for this whole boat search.

Insights into the self are really best left to the 20-somethings. Given my druthers, post-40, I'd rather skip any further experiences in self awareness.

The main insight had to do with our standards for the next yacht. In our sailing experience we have met people who put all sorts of different amounts of effort into preparing their boats for the grand voyage. At one extreme, we met a South Australian who spent 12 years working full-time to build the boat that he finally circumnavigated on. At the other extreme, we met a Kiwi family who bought a boat in the U.S. that really was "ready to go", and left on their trip across the Pacific two weeks after the purchase. Alisa and I have been generally hoping to replicate the experience of that Kiwi family.

But after seeing this boat, I'm thinking that our expectations might be unrealistic. I realized that I came over to see the boat with fairly utopian expectations, and what I found was a typically non-utopian 15-year-old cruising boat. It really is in pretty good nick, but it's the same sort of ongoing project that any cruising boat is. And when I first saw the boat I decided that for the kind of price that we've negotiated, we really need something better than an ongoing project.

But by the end of the second day of looking the boat over, I was starting to come to grips with the ongoing-projectness of it. After all, I said to myself, it's a damn boat. What do you want?

And today the seller and I went out for a test sail, and really I was very impressed. We had a fantastic day for a test sail: spitting rain and average windspeed of 25 knots for a good part of the day. (That's him above.) We reefed her down and pointed her into the wind, and I was impressed. This dériveur, an internally-balasted centerboarder with absolutely no keel at all, tacked into that wind just fine. Maybe we had some tidal current helping us out, but I couldn't see much leeway at all, and the boat felt solid solid. Jeez, I thought to myself, this really could work for us.

But then I remembered the kicker – on the first day I had discovered that the boat has no insulation at all.

Our whole idea for spending the big dollars on an aluminum boat like this is to be able to travel high latitudes at will: to winter in Patagonia, and sail the Northwest Passage, and then after we get back to Alaska, to live aboard through a winter in Kodiak harbor, where the winds gust to 90 knots and the temperatures can fall to -20° F. I know that people have done all of these things in uninsulated boats, but Alisa and I are nothing if not savvy about living at high latitudes, and both of us recoil at the idea of anything but a factory-insulated boat for situations like these.

So, for now it's back to the drawing board. I've realized how important it is to see a boat in the flesh in order to judge her, and we'll have to figure out a new plan given how far Tassie is from places where we might look at a number of possible boats, and how long the whole search might reasonably take. We've been very impatient to stop moving the family from house-sit to house-sit, very keen to be on a boat, and eager to find a boat that is in good enough shape that we can have it in the South Pacific tropics by the next cyclone-free season, even with me working full time in the intervening months. But now we're thinking that we might just have to take a deep breath, rent a house for six months so that we can shop for a boat without the pressure of needing a stable home, and then see what happens.

Meanwhile, if any yachties with high-latitude experience might want to weigh in on the issue of insulation, we'd love to hear your views.

Shack Weekend

2010-10-12T22:50:00.000+11:00

Tasmanians have this endearing habit of calling their beach houses "shacks". We're not sure why. But if nothing else calling a place a "shack" is a great way to resist the urge to over-fancy it up. Last weekend we went with some friends to a shack in the delightful seaside town of Bicheno, two and a half hours or so from Hobart. We walked on the beach and went for a bushwalk to a billabong and stayed up late at night drinking wine and playing games and slept late the next morning. All good. Plus, there were penguins nesting under the bushes around the back porch, and in the woodpile, and under the house itself, and they all groaned and roared through the night. Too cool. Our friends ended up staying an extra night, but we had to get back to town as the dogs we're watching at our current house-sit needed our attention. Plus the fact that I'm heading to New Zealand this week to look at a boat, then I'll turn around two days after I'm back in Tassie to fly to the States for a three-week work trip. Things are suddenly feeling a little rushed.

Top picture is backyard cricket at the shack - the dads are playing and the four year olds are lying around in the grass. Middle picture is of the mob on the bushwalk, and the bottom picture is Elias drinking out of the billabong. He LOVED drinking this way, and did it over and over, though inevitably it ended with a slide into the water, soaked clothes, and tears.

Pelagic Sails

2010-10-03T22:10:00.001+11:00

Spring has made it to Tassie. Today we observed the change of season by taking Pelagic out for a daysail. What with our second child being born and all, it's been something like six months since we were sailing.

The experience was a bit nostalgic - Pelagic, after all, was our home for more than half of Elias' life, and therefore for more than half of our life as a family. The top pic is of Elias burrowed into a duvet and deep into his afternoon nap on the outboard side of the forward bunk, his old bed and the scene of hundreds of good-night books and songs in his past.

We had a great sail. Hobart has one of the greatest settings for sailing of any city I have seen. We glided along, pointing out penguins to each other, and looking up at the dwindling patches of slush on Mt. Wellington.

Alisa, Elias and I all felt the old magic coming back. Ah, Alisa and I both thought, this is why we're so keen to be living aboard again. And we gave Eric the first lesson for sailors who begin as infants - the joys of playing with lines (third pic).

And we had a quick taste of what it might be like to sail full-time with two little people on board instead of one. We didn't have a crib rigged up where we could leave Eric to sleep soundly on either tack, and, denied the chance to lie down when he really wanted it, he cried and cried, and we didn't leave the dock until he was finally asleep. Meanwhile Elias was taking a bit of our attention, and our two-hour sail was only accomplished after about four hours of preparation.

Alisa and I agree that for all our bold schemes for sailing from New Zealand to the fabled Austral Islands, and counting seabirds in the less-visited of the Cook Islands, we will in fact be starting off on some very slow cruising, some very no-goal adventuring, when we do move aboard the next boat.

Cheap, Fast, Out of Control

2010-10-03T21:39:00.000+11:00

Our friends who crossed the Pacific with us might remember the cherubic little one- and two-year-old who lived on Pelagic with us at the time.

Well, that was yesterday's Elias. Today's Elias seems to be a little, well, high on testosterone for someone who's only four.

Lately Alisa and I have noticed a pattern developing in our interactions with the little guy. We ask him nicely to stop doing some incredibly disruptive thing. Then we ask nicely again. Then we ask nicely a third time. Then we yell. Then he throws a completely nuclear fit. We (well, I) scream. Afterwards we wonder how it all went so wrong.

(Don't get the idea this happens all the time. But it does happen!)

It's really just the common lot of parenthood, and we're blundering our way through it just like everyone else. But I have noticed how much my mood at a particular moment plays into these interactions, and whether they escalate or dissipate. And that, logically enough, has gotten me thinking about the current state of our funny little society's ethnopharmacology.

Apparently it's become over-the-top popular in America to feed kids behavior-modifying drugs.

I'm starting to think that this approach is just another way that our lazy society rewards the guilty.

If anyone needs a some big pharma magic to get through childrearing, shouldn't the parents get first dibs?

It's just an idea...

~~~

Elias and his mates. Australia above all is a place where it is easy to make friends.

Alisa and Eric the morning they flew up to the U.S. consulate in Melbourne. He's now officially American.

Citizenship

2010-09-22T19:08:00.000+10:00

The crew is concerned with citizenship lately. We on team Pelagic are firm believers in having two passports each, since you never know when one nation or another might let you down. (Joke. Sort of.)

Yesterday Alisa checked into the necessary steps for parlaying her permanent resident visa into Australian citizenship. We've long known that Oz inconveniently doubled the required length of residency for new citizens just before her visa was granted, and she was calling to find out about allowable waivers to the current four-year requirement. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile Eric, who already has his Aussie passport, has an appointment at the U.S. consulate in Melbourne for early next month to be registered as a Yank. Alisa will fly up with him for the day while Elias and I keep things going here, so I had to sign an affidavit giving my consent for him to obtain a U.S. passport. And that affidavit gave us a great interaction with a nearly bygone world of trans-border paper shuffling.

First I had to have the affidavit notarized, which is a bit of a production in Oz - you can't get it done at a 7-11, the way you can in the U.S. And then I had to get an apostille, which is French for "you give me 80 bucks and I give you this nifty green ribbon."

That's the apostille above - certification of the notarization by the Australian government for use by a foreign power. It did cost 80 Australian dollars, which lately is about $77 in real money. But for that price I figure we got a great look at a nearly-vanished world, the world of official seals and Ribbons that Mean Something and ink-stained clerks laboring at high desks.

And what a treat it will be to recount this tale to Eric twenty years from now: "I had to sign a piece of paper, with a pen. Then I took it to one office to get it certified as authentic. Then I took it to a second office, where they certified the certification that I got at the first office. Then mom got on a plane with you and flew to a whole other city, where she surrendered the piece of paper. And then the people in that office sent the piece of paper to a different country. That's how things were done back then."

I reckon that's one of the joys of this fast-changin' modern world: the chance to savor a situation as anachronistic, even as you're living it.

Elias getting a haircut yesterday. "How do you want it cut?" I asked. "Like yours," he answered.

Penguins!

2010-09-20T08:46:00.000+10:00

Two house-sits ago.

One house-sit ago.

Current house-sit.

Three diaper blow-outs ago.

Most recent dinner party - baked Alaska!

Four precious moments ago.

~~~~~~

Last night after dinner Elias and I set out to look for penguins. We had heard of a colony of little penguins (Eudyptula minor) right here in suburban Hobart, on the Derwent estuary, and sure enough after a quick drive and a ten minute walk down a narrow track in the dark, holding hands and shining a red-filtered flashlight so we didn't trip over roots, we found it.

We only saw one penguin who happened to stumble into us on the track in the dark and went squawking into the undergrowth to escape. A local had told me to put red cellophane over our flashlight to reduce the impact of the light on the birds. But even with that precaution I didn't want to shine the light around the colony too much, and the brief stabs of light that I did allow myself revealed thick bushes that would make seeing any more penguins pretty unlikely.

But we could hear the penguins calling around us. We were in a little drainage above a tiny pocket of beach between the cliffs that dominate that part of the coastline, and all around us in the dark penguins were calling, sounding very much like common murres from the northern hemisphere and also very much like the dinosaurs that they are. So Elias and I just found a comfortable place to sit down and listen to them. He was very good about whispering so as not to disturb the birds, and though he was disappointed at not seeing any more, he was happy enough to sit there and listen to them, and now he can do a mean penguin imitation to boot.

We likely won't go back. Little penguins can be very tolerant of people at their colonies, but the population that nests in the Derwent is facing the same sort of pressures from urbanization that are slowly killing off the belugas and salmon of Cook Inlet in Alaska. So I figure that the local penguins have enough to worry about without being harassed by an ex-seabird biologist and his kid.

But what a moment that one visit was. It made me remember how exotic Tasmania really is to us. Sitting on the cool ground in an oceanside forest, moonlight shining down through the trees, surf breaking on the beach, the penguins calling out their lust from the bushes. And Elias whispering into my ear with his four-year-old's sweet voice: "Daddy, I'm smiling."

Modern Kastom

2010-09-16T20:20:00.000+10:00

Here's some recommended reading in case your Twitter account has gone silent. Our friend Diana has been writing about her travels in Vanuatu with Alex aboard Kukka. She does a great job of describing the strange cultural mix that awaits modern sailors: http://malo39kukka.blogspot.com/2010/09/under-volcanoes.html

The Logical Route and Aluminum

2010-09-16T09:28:00.000+10:00

With the search for the new boat dragging on, it’s perhaps inevitable that we’re living in the future when it comes to our sailing life.

We think about how our next boat might match up with the kind of sailing that we want to do, and that raises the question of how we might get home to Alaska, if we’re lucky enough to keep sailing for the next eight years or so.

I've long thought that the best way for us to get home, in a Grand Poetic Gesture, Logical Route sort of way, would be via the Northwest Passage, the most legendary and ill-fated sailing route of them all, right across the top of Canada.

Only thirty years ago, the Northwest Passage was a horror show of ice-choked waterways, completely unsuitable for a small sailboat with two children aboard. No private yacht made it through the Passage until 1977. But the shrinking of Arctic sea ice has been so dramatic that the Northwest Passage has suddenly turned into an adventure that is accessible to anyone with a reasonable bit of ability and a reasonable boat. The high-latitude sailing grapevine has it that ten yachts made it through last year, which is really astounding when you think about the misery and mortality that attended so many of the historical attempts at the Passage.

We would have to be quite lucky and quite determined over the coming years to have a go at that route. But we figure we might as well get a boat that would be suitable, just in case.

So that’s why, at this point at least, we’re only looking at aluminum boats – strong enough to operate thousands of miles from repair facilities with a reasonable amount of peace of mind, but without the maintenance issues of steel.

In a way, we’re making things hard for ourselves – there are a lot of boats out there that would be great general-purpose cruising boats for us, but the Anglophone sailing world is very short on aluminum boats.

“There seem to be so few aluminum boats in the southwest Pacific,” Alisa said the other day. “Do you think we can find one?”

“Well,” I answered. “I did find a Lebanese wife in Alaska. So maybe lightning will strike twice?”

Stay tuned…

Transit of Venus

2010-09-01T19:54:00.000+10:00

As every aficionado of South Pacific sailing knows, it was a transit of Venus that brought James Cook to Tahiti in 1769. His expedition successfully measured the time it took Venus to pass across the face of the sun, and thereby contributed to the global effort to calculate the size of the solar system. (It's so easy to imagine the response of climate science deniers, had they had been around then: "How could you possibly measure such a big thing as the solar system by timing that little dot in front of the sun? How can you know that little dot is really Venus?" And on and on. But I digress...)

So, Cook successfully observed the transit of Venus. And, perhaps more importantly, he brought back the stories that begat the Western perception of Polynesia as a slice of paradise on earth, a perception that all these centuries later can still motivate otherwise responsible people to sell their houses and start traveling the world in inconveniently slow sailboats.

Transits of Venus occur in pairs, eight years apart, with more than a century between pairs. Before the transit that occurred in 2004, there was not a person alive who had seen the phenomenon. The next transit of Venus is coming up in June of 2012, and if you miss that one you'll have to wait until 2117 for your next chance.

If you were in the southwest Pacific, looking to buy your next world-girdling sailboat, how could you not take the opportunity to voyage to Tahiti and observe the transit from Point Venus, the very spot where Cook did the same?

I can a Family Quest coming to life.

We just need to find that sailboat.

Making a dawn landfall at Tahiti, 2008. We both looked younger then.

The north shore of Tahiti.

Second Draft

2010-08-24T16:18:00.000+10:00

It's not completely finished, as Alisa is still helping me proof the last eighty pages or so. But today I finished all of the substantive edits to the first draft of the book manuscript, which means I now have a completed second draft.

Anyone know a publisher?

To the Polls

2010-08-21T21:06:00.000+10:00

Quick, those of you in North America - who's the prime minister of Australia?

Really, someone outside of Australia should know...

Anyway, the answer is Julia Gillard, who is Australia's first female prime minister. She's also in danger of becoming something of a historical footnote, since she's only been in office since June 24th of this year, and an election was held today that apparently has an even chance of ending her time in office at a smidge past two months.

Turns out these things can happen in a parliamentary system - who knew?

And I voted today - my first participation in an Australian election. Good fun. And a good idea, too, since voting is apparently mandatory here, and you can be fined for failing to cast a ballot. I'm happy to report that while politics here appear to be about as unsavory as you might expect, they're nothing like as messed up as U.S. politics. No one publicly calls for the center-left candidate to be assassinated. How civilized. And, added bonus, there's a quite strong Australian Greens party that you get to vote for...

Peripatetic

2010-08-18T20:59:00.000+10:00

Well, our dreamy four-and-a-half month housesit is over. Here's Alisa over the weekend, in the midst of the final clean-up.

We're now in our third Tasmanian housesit, a two-bedroom flat in West Hobart that a friend of a friend very kindly made available to us while she was away.

We continue to believe that we'll be living on our next boat before we know it. But meanwhile, this bouncing around between housesits is what we're doing. I don't particularly love the feeling of being a 42 year old serial housesitter, dragging the kids and our stuff from place to place like this. But then we're also not prepared to sign a lease on a place and settle into Hobart for six months.

Luckily Elias seems completely unfazed by all this moving around. And Eric of course has no idea what's going on. And Alisa, let me say, is a complete champ about it all. Few moms with a three month old and a four year old could handle moving around like this so gracefully.

I think it's a sign of how strongly she's committed to continuing the sailing dream, and the inconvenience that she's willing to put up with to make it happen.

Either that...or maybe I'm such a wonderful husband that she's willing to put up with the occasional bout of homelessness just to be with me?

Pelagic For Sale

2010-08-09T13:27:00.000+10:00

Hard to believe we would ever arrive at this milestone, but I suppose that milestones in boat ownership are a lot like milestones in life, in that they have a way of arriving, will you or no. Which is to say that we have stuck to our decision that a growing family and (inshallah) years still to cruise mean that we would like a (slightly) bigger boat. Pelagic is for sale in Hobart, Tasmania, listed here.

Seven Months

2010-08-07T09:30:00.000+10:00

Well, it was a bit of an anti-climax when it finally happened. I went down to the customs broker's office yesterday, paid him quite a lot of money, and received a little pile of paperwork in return. And, voilà, Pelagic is imported into Australia, able to stay as long as she pleases, and legal to advertise for sale.

I wonder if she can go on the dole, too?

The whole process took just two days less than seven months. It's all in the past, now, except for a snarky bill or two that I'm sure we'll get from the first customs broker, who was unable to complete the job in the five months that he was on it.

Meanwhile, the boat is in great nick as I've had heaps of time to get her up to snuff.

In that regard, I'd like to make a particular mention of the contribution made by my dad, who spent a good bit of time helping me on the boat when my folks were visiting a couple months ago - in this picture he's topping up the batteries. Dad also helped me work on the boat when we first bought Pelagic, and he's been a big supporter of the dream all along.

Four!

2010-08-05T21:33:00.001+10:00

Big day in the fam today - Elias turned four...

Alisa baked the cake yesterday. Elias helped out.

There was some frosting-induced euphoria.

This morning they decorated the cake. Elias had picked this cake out of a book that's here in the housesit.

He was well pleased with how it turned out. (It's a horse.)

Then we went to the playground. Elias and his mates had a play, I grilled some snags on the barbie, and then we all ate the cake.

Then we went to the aquatic center. Elias was over the moon.

We wore out the water slide.

I love the way he goes in with one hand pinching his nose and the other hand over his mouth.

Elias is really comfortable swimming under water - he might even be snorkelling the next time we're in the tropics.

And then, shortly after this pic was taken, everything took a sudden change for the worse... an everday bathroom break went very horribly awry. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the neat rashie that he's wearing in these pictures is no more. I had thought events like that were well behind us... at least he made it out of the pool!

We recovered our equanimity and enjoyed the rest of the day.

The end.

Get Me Rewrite!

2010-08-02T22:25:00.000+10:00

Well, I met my self-imposed deadline for finishing the first draft of my manuscript about our trip across the Pacific. I got it done before Eric was born, even if it did take the fortuitous circumstance of his being born six days after his due date for me to make the deadline.

For a while now I've been mentally setting aside August for the rewrite that will get me from first draft to second draft. For the last week I've been marking up the first seventy pages or so (see the examples above), and today I actually sat down and started writing.

And...it was kind of fun. This is a new experience for me and this manuscript. For the most part, I've found writing it to be about as much fun as drilling a hole in one of my own teeth.

Anyway, I have high hopes that I can knock out a one-month rewrite. Stay tuned.

Six months, 25 days

2010-08-01T22:35:00.000+10:00

I just read The Totorore Voyage, a book describing a fantastic (and utterly nuts) circumnavigation of the earth at high southern latitudes by a Kiwi named Gerry Clark. Just out of Cape Town, his 32-foot boat was rolled and dismasted. He managed to limp into Marion Island, a South African possession in the sub-Antarctic, where he dropped off his two crew at a research station. He then set out grimly, alone, to try to make it to Australia to fix his yacht. Before him was a beyond-epic solo voyage over thousands of nautical miles of the Southern Ocean, navigating under a jury rig and sails made from a tarpaulin and a bedsheet. He was capsized again and again, going through something like four or five separate jury rigs in the process. He repeatedly despaired of ever surviving the experience. Things got so bad that he contemplated just stepping off the side of his boat to hasten the inevitable.

Finally, against all odds, he limped into Fremantle, Australia, his boat a sodden mess, having performed heroic feats of seamanship to reach port safely and unassisted.

What did the Australian authorities do to greet him?

They brought a sniffer dog down to the boat to make sure he wasn't smuggling drugs. They put him through entry formalities that lasted for seven hours.

I cannot think of another Anglophone country that would treat a distressed mariner this way. It turns out that Australia has a spectacular talent, and tolerance, for bureaucracy. It's a trait that's very surprising given the informal character of the country, but there it is.

This is the part where I mention that we have now been trying to import Pelagic into Australia for 6 months and 25 days. Until she is imported, we cannot advertise her for sale.

It's not like we've been struggling through the bureaucracy on our own - we've employed two different customs brokers to assist us with the process. Nor are we involved in some lengthy fight with Customs. As far as I can tell, it's taken 6 months and 25 days to get us this far in the process...just because. In addition to the over-developed bureaucratic streak, Australians can also demonstrate an amazing capacity to not get stuff done. I think those two characteristics have come together to put us on the 7 month boat import plan.

I've learned that calling the customs broker four or five times a week is the only way to keep the process from succumbing to inertia. And generally, I'm pretty Zen about the whole thing. The boat will be imported when she is imported.

On the bright side, I've had plenty of time to get the boat ready to sell!

The Pulse Quickens

2010-07-24T09:22:00.000+10:00

With the boat search getting longer and longer, we're digging our heels in, determined to find the boat - the one that will carry us all the way until Elias is ready for high school (inshallah!), and through the Northwest Passage as well (inshallah, inshallah!).

We don't want to go through a boat swap again.

Our internet search has lately taken us off the well-trod paths of the slick yacht broker websites and into the overgrown byways of Francophone for-sale-by-owner sites. "Our boat's gotta be here somewhere," we mutter as we push the button on Google Translate for the 1,000th time...

And, then, a few days ago, we found our best candidate yet. A fantastic design, a bit old but not geriatric, properly set up to sail great distances, and apparently well maintained. And, conveniently enough, already in the southwest Pacific.

Our pulses quickened. We made enquiries, and received satisfactory replies. Figuring that Fortune favors the Bold, we prepared to make an offer.

But then we discovered that the boat is out cruising for the next three months or so, and the owners would rather not discuss a sale until the cruise is over.

Fair enough, we figured. But it was a bit of a come-down from the plateau of excitement we had reached.

So we'll get in touch with the sellers in a few months. And meanwhile the search continues.

The Backyard

2010-07-19T09:14:00.000+10:00

The feeling of sustained uncertainty that has been the hallmark of our time in Oz continues. When we arrived in October '08, a bunch of big questions were open before us. Would I find work? Would we have another child? Would we decide to sell Pelagic? For that matter, would we like Australia?

As it turns out, we came up with answers to all those questions. In order, they were: yes, yes, yes and yes.

But of course those answers have lead to new questions: When will we find the new boat? How closely will I end up working with the science community here in Hobart? Should we buy a small place to be our home during our stay in Tasmania, or should we cast ourselves on the mercy of the very expensive rental market, or should we continue to put together a string of housesits to cover our time here?

The impending end of this delightful five-month housesit in Kingston is bringing all these questions to the fore.

But, on the bright side, we have recently become smitten with a used cruising boat that we found in internet-land.

We'll let you know how that goes.

~~

Meanwhile, we have of course not been spending all our time pondering questions about the organisation of our lives, but have mostly been getting through the hectic day-to-day of people with small children. I've been keeping regular hours in the home office, laboring away, and taking the weekends off - it's a great indication of how non-overcrowded Hobart is that I'm not tempted to take my days off during the week, when parks and such are less crowded.

Lately we've been going for a family hike each weekend. Normally I'm not so great at exploring my immediate backyard - I've always put my time and energy into exploring beyond the horizon. But with an almost-four-year-old hiker in the family, and the goal of one family outing a week, we have a great setup for exploring our immediate environs. It doesn't hurt that there are heaps of good trails around Hobart, and that the Tasmanian winter, which we were warned of at great length, turns out to be a complete and utter fiction. Many a summer day on Kodiak is colder than what we've been having here.

We've decided to concentrate on the trails on Mt. Wellington, the backdrop for Hobart. The mountain is a 20 minute drive from the housesit, it's covered with trails, there are no crowds, at least this time of year, and Charles Darwin hiked up the mountain when he visited Hobart, giving it a nice history-of-science touch.

This is what we saw on our hike on saturday:

Alisa and Elias looking down on the Derwent River and Hobart.

South towards Storm Bay and the Southern Ocean.

Lunch at the Junction Cabin. Eric is the white lump beneath my chin!

Elias once again was a great little hiker, even though we had somewhat negligently put him in his new gumboots, which are a size or two too big, and therefore made for treacherous footing (read 'falls and tears') on the rockier sections of trail. It was a four-hour outing. Elias was very happy for the first three hours and forty minutes, and completely over it for the remainder - a good reminder to temper our ambitions!

Spotlighting

2010-07-17T08:02:00.000+10:00

One of the most fun things that Elias and I have found to do at this housesit is spotlighting - we take a big 6 v flashlight out to the neighborhood golf course just after dusk and look for marsupials, which are mostly nocturnal. This picture was taken before we went out last night, as Elias practiced his search image with 'possum', one of his many stuffed animals.

Every time we go spotlighting we see brushtail possums, which are big and impressive for arboreal animals, and also not very fleet, which makes them a great viewing species for an almost-four-year-old. We also see pademelons every time - little kangaroos 70 cm tall or so. One memorable time we saw a potoroo, an even smaller, and, at least for this individual, much more shy kangaroo - one flash and it was gone.

Alisa and Eric came along for the first time last night. It was a brisk night, good for walking but after a while a little too cold for an almost-four-year-old. At first we walked a little faster than normal, which is often the case when you go wildlife-viewing with a new group, and so we didn't see much. At one point Alisa asked, "Do you normally see something by now?"

But then we got a real treat - an eastern barred bandicoot, which we normally see only about every third time we go. They're not at all shy, and this one hopped along the fairway right towards us, getting within 7 or 8 meters or so. We even got a picture.

Bandicoots are delightful little marsupials that, in our experience of them, bound frantically from one spot to another on the golf course, nosing around for worms and other invertebrates. It's amazing how easy it is to see these little critters right on the edge of Kingston.

There's a poignant twist, though. Eastern barred bandicoots are common in Tassie, but they're on the verge of extirpation from the mainland, with the population estimated at 200 individuals. The main cause of their demise has been introduced European foxes.

Pademelons are already extinct from the mainland, due to...foxes.

Ditto bettongs, another kangaroo species still common in Tasmania.

And now foxes have reached Tassie, either as deliberate introductions, or as stowaways on ships from Melbourne. Since 2002, 56 scats from the island have been genetically confirmed as fox scat. There's an effort to eradicate them, but Tasmania is a very big island, with lots of places to hide, and foxes are incredibly wary. If the fox population becomes established here, the bandicoots and pademelons and bettongs and a heap of other species are looking at the abyss.

Australia is the global capital for historical vertebrate extinctions - according to Wikipedia, if you count both species and sub-species, 23 birds, four frogs and 27 mammals have gone extinct here since 1788. Although millions of dollars are being spent on fox eradication in Tassie, it's hard to look at the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on extending the highway south of Hobart without seeing where true priorities lie.

A big theme of our trip across the Pacific was enjoying the world as we found it, and not getting stuck on always bemoaning the changes that have inevitably come along to this place or that. I guess that's what Elias and I are doing when we go spotlighting - we're delighting in how easy it is for us to see animals that remain very exotic to my eyes. Hopefully an adult Elias won't look back in wonder - did it really happen? - at a time when he and his dad could go out with a flashlight and look at bandicoots and pademelons, just like that.

Square One

2010-07-04T09:20:00.000+10:00

"I guess it couldn't hurt to ask?" I said to Alisa. The boys were asleep, we were in bed, and I had the laptop balanced on my knees. Before we started looking for our next boat, I never took the laptop to bed.

"No, it couldn't hurt," she answered.

So I left a message on the webpage of the builder of the hottest thing on the seven seas - the Boreal 44. This is a new production yacht designed specifically for high latitude sailing and, significantly, the company was started by two long-term cruisers. So there is a lot that we like about the design. But the company hasn't been around long enough for used versions to be on the market, and we knew that a new boat would be way outside our budget. But still, it couldn't hurt to ask.

The next day a very nice note from one of the company's founders arrived, along with the answer to my question - base price 308,000 euros, without even getting into necessities like a windvane.

"Ooof," I said to Alisa. "We were wrong. That did kind of hurt."

~~~

Now, I know that in the range of possible problems to have in life, the travails involved in finding your next yacht don't count for much, might in fact be the kind of problem that about 99.5% of the world's population would dearly love to have.

It's just that I'm realising that we really are going back to square one - searching out a reasonable boat on a tight budget, getting her ready to the point where chronic-worrier me feels ready to take her to sea with All I Hold Dear In the World on board. Meanwhile, Pelagic is apparently setting a modern-era record for being stuck in customs limbo (more than five months!) as we try to import her to Australia, and so is still not on the market, and until we sell one boat and buy another we are looking at dragging our kids through a period of short-term housing gigs. (I can already hear Elias trying to exploit the nurturing side of girls at college with the stories of how he never had a permanent home when he was growing up.)

In other words, the process of switching boats is turning out to be slower, and harder, than we had hoped, and land life is turning out to be as sticky as we had feared.

But we are, of course, holding onto the long view. Eric is only 2 months old. We'll be patient in our boat search, and choose wisely, so that we don't have to go through another boat swap any time soon.

And, meanwhile, we can easily lose ourselves in the quotidian delights of family life - like setting Elias loose on the bike that his grandparents bought him, and watching the purest state of joy that results. If only the next boat would make us so happy!

The Circle, Unbroken

2010-06-24T08:56:00.000+10:00

This shot was taken on board Pelagic, way back in our home port of Kodiak. That's my grandfather on the left. He and my parents and sister were in Kodiak to meet Elias.

My grandfather and I were close from the moment we met in the Detroit airport, when I was an infant on my first trip to the U.S. An established bit of family lore has to do with the way I immediately took to him in the airport, and how my grandmother had to drive home while my grandfather held me, since I cried in anyone else's lap. A complementary bit of family lore was established in our old house in Kodiak (above) when Elias cooed and smiled at my granddad with a display of obvious affection that seemed improbable from a six-week old.

Three months ago my granddad asked me on the phone what we were planning on naming the new baby.

-I've got an idea, he said. Why don't you name him after your grandfather Elmer? He paused a second before he answered his own question - I wouldn't name a dog Elmer! He laughed and laughed at the joke, then dissolved into a coughing fit that had me fearing for his 94-year-old heart.

There was a story that we always told each other about the time that he gave twenty-year-old me a ride out to the highway in Colorado. I was excited at the hitchhike to Alaska ahead of me, and just barely aware of how tough it was for my grandpa to drop me off on the side of the road. Before he drove away he said, hey, you don't have a hat! And then he gave me the one he was wearing. I wore that hat for years, until it was in ribbons, and I still have the remains of it in storage back in the States.

And there's the more recent story about the time Alisa and I were eating dinner with my grandparents. Alisa, making conversation, asked Elmer what sort of gun would make a good deer rifle for her. He didn't answer, just excused himself from the table and came back a few minutes later with a rifle. To people who get into that sort of thing, it was a very special gun: a pre-'64 Winchester Model 70 6.5x55mm. More important, it was a rifle that was light to carry, didn't kick much, and could shoot accurately over the long distances that you want to shoot if you hunt deer in the mountains of Kodiak. In other words, the perfect deer gun for Alisa. He handed it to her, to keep, and it was her deer rifle from that moment until we went sailing.

~~~

My granddad died last week.

My parents, who spent a good bit of their time in recent years looking after him, found themselves in the strange position of being here in Tasmania, half a world away, when his end came.

~~~

If you make up stories to answer unanswerable questions, or if you accept answers to unanswerable questions from your own tradition, or from other peoples' traditions, then you are religious. If you don't do those things, then you are not religious, and you're left to live with the unanswerables and imponderables.

My granddad's death came less than two months after Eric was born. The day that Elias was born, Alisa's wonderful uncle Ray died.

These sorts of matched events don't answer the unanswerable. But I do suspect that tell us a fair bit of what we need to know.

Adrift

2010-06-02T22:33:00.000+10:00

This is the state of Pelagic's interior lately - complete disarray as I pursue the much-anticipated day when she will be on the market, with all trace of our family life removed, anonymous and sparkling.

This scene is weirdly similar to the disorder that attended various stages of preparation for our trip across the Pacific. The days are short this time of year in Hobart. When it's getting dark at five o'clock my memories of all the work that went into preparing to live on Pelagic blend with the present work of preparing to leave Pelagic, and I find myself brooding on the futility of things...

In the light of day, though, Alisa and I are cheered by one thought: it's time to find the next boat!

Our very wonderful housesit overlooking Kingston Beach ends in two and a half months, and we're starting to feel the pressure to find new accommodation for our young family.

-Without a boat, says Alisa, we're just homeless.

Elmer Mallon

2010-05-28T11:14:00.001+10:00

My mother’s father was born in 1915. This picture of him was taken some time in the 1930s. It’s a hand-tinted black and white print. And this is him last week:

A week before this picture was taken he came very close to dying.

-Just think about whether you want to see him again, Alisa said. I’ll be fine here.

For a few days I called back to the States to get updates on his condition and then I booked a ticket from Hobart to Cleveland with 20 hours advance notice. I chopped enough kindling to last for a week and I left Alisa to look after Elias and Eric.

Once I was back in the States I spent most of my time in the nursing home, giving a short break to my parents who have been providing end of life care to my mom's parents for years.

My grandfather was very tired. But he talked for hours. I let the conversation build and drift at his pace. He was very sharp, very much the same person who I've known for my whole life. I enjoyed the easy companionship of this man who I know as well I possibly could, someone who is mysterious to me in very few ways.

-It’s a good life, he told me. And I say it is a good life, not it has been a good life. Even with my troubles in the last few years, it’s a good life.

-And later: I want to live life. I want to go right up to life and touch it and see it. And I don’t want these people [at the nursing home] telling me don’t do this and you have to do that.

He told me the hunting stories that I have known all my life, stories that have grown comfortable through repeated retelling, like old leather gloves that have molded to the shape of your hands. For hours he told me stories about people in our family who I never knew. One night my sister and I drank beers in his room and he told us stories all the way until eleven o’clock.

-You can ask me anything you want, he said. I’ll try to answer you.

The next day I asked his advice about raising children and he told me what he knew. He told me about the mistakes that he still bitterly regretted, a half century after the fact.

After a week I said goodbye. When someone is 94 years old you have already gotten used to the idea that their life is nearly over. So saying goodbye this time was not overwhelming in the 'I'll never see you again' sort of way. But the chance to stand in the courtyard of the nursing home and hug him and to look in his eyes while he was completely coherent and present and very much still himself was a pleasure that I will remember for a very long time.

What Blokes Know

2010-05-12T09:51:00.001+10:00

Gender roles are ascendant among the Pelagic crew.

Alisa, looking a bit gobsmacked (as they say here) by the physiological rigors of first, parturition, and then, lactation, glanced up at me from her nursing station in the front room of our housesit the other day and said, "Oof, I feel like one giant breast."

Meanwhile, I have been spurred by the arrival of son number two, and the continuing, sometimes startling, precociousness of son number one, to think about what it takes to raise boys into balanced, capable, well-adjusted men.

Because, let's face it - if you're not careful (and often enough even if you are), one moment you have a delightful three year old boy, and the next you have a glue-sniffing sixteen year old wastrel on your hands.

So I've been thinking, in a disorganized sort of way, about what sorts of qualities I might try to instill in Elias and (eventually) Eric to help ease their path through teenagerhood, and to make them into the sorts of men that I can be proud of in my dotage.

Here's the first bit of essential male-ness that I came up with to pass along to the little fellows... Men Should Know the Score. They should know what's going on, in a practical, man-of-the-world sort of way. Men should be able to buy and sell things, they should have a grasp of how decisions are made in the world, and they should have a sense of how to bend those decisions in their direction.

Alisa is much too subtle and good-humored to ever roll her eyes at this sort of thing. But she is also of that part of the world that is a bit dubious of anything so broad as "essential male qualities". When I explained this to her I saw her eyes light up with a poorly-hidden smile that spoke volumes of her opinion about the whole thing.

Elias, meanwhile, is a beginning to identify with the male world. When I visit on the front verandah with a male friend he comes marching out of the house, hands thrust manfully into his pockets, shoulders swinging in a John Wayne sort of walk, to "hang out with the blokes".

But I'm not sure that he's quite ready to absorb my lessons on desirable male qualities - when he gets over-excited he runs around the house, yelling to Alisa and her mom, "I'm a bloke, so I know what's going on!"

What Am I Doing Here?

2010-05-05T20:59:00.000+10:00

Since Eric happened to be born at eight in the morning, right as the shift in the hospital was changing, there were two midwives at the delivery. But I was the only family member in the delivery room with Alisa. So while the midwives did their professional thing, I took my best stab at playing the role of loved one providing coaching and support.

Like most men of my generation, I took it for granted that I would be involved in the birth of my child. I was proud and happy to be there, and wouldn’t have been anywhere else. But during the final hour, when Alisa was approaching, and then inhabiting, the animal state that saw Eric into the world, it did occur to me how blind I was in the coaching role, with no personal access to Alisa's experience.

Which raises the point of how unusual it really is for male family members (i.e., non-doctors) to be involved in labor. When you consider the full range of birth customs around the world and through time, hasn't it nearly always been a woman’s female family members who helped her during labor? But, viewed through the standards of our time, my presence at the birth was completely unremarkable. It shows you how malleable human social behavior really is. And it's also a great example of how much we expect from marriage these days - I am fairly certain that my father's mother and father did not enjoy the degree of empathy (if you will) that would have seen her looking to him for emotional support during labor.

Oz Health

2010-05-05T09:40:00.001+10:00

Well, it's true: no Australian has ever set foot on the moon, nor are they showing any signs of getting there soon.

But there are some things this nation does very well, thank you very much.

Eric's birth was our first in-depth interaction with the public health system here. And we have been very impressed by the care that Alisa and Eric received, in particular by all the "extras". In the hospital, Alisa got a visit from a physiotherapist to get her started on recovering from the birth, and a lactation consultant came by to fine tune Eric's latch-on. And after we left the hospital, we received three home visits from nurses and midwives to make sure that everything was going well. These weren't fly-by visits, either; the first nurse visit lasted two hours. We didn't pay for these home visits, nor will Alisa pay for her post-partum physiotherapy/exercise classes. Nor, for that matter, did we pay the hospital for the delivery. There's no monetary profit generated by any of that stuff. It's just part of a public health system that is available to all infants and moms in Tasmania.

I'm sure that no one in the US wants to hear about health care policy at this point. But I will note in passing that the UN lists Australia, with its none-too-healthy general population (fatty diets, lots of smoking and drinking), as number 17 in a worldwide ranking of infant mortality rates, which puts it firmly in the middle of the pack of western nations. The US, meanwhile, comes in at number 37, right behind New Caledonia, Brunei and Cuba.

So, when I want to play Aussie jingoist, I'll say to all our kith and kin back in North America - "Keep trying, you Yanks! Someday you can have standards of public health every bit as good as the western world's!"

The Sailcover, and What Else Happened

2010-04-30T22:25:00.000+10:00

Alisa sewed most of the day on Monday, and most of the day on Tuesday. By Tuesday night she was finally finished with the sailcover. Here she is, lying on the completed project, a little too tired to enjoy her triumph. We went to bed at 11 that night.

Two and a half hours later her water broke. By three thirty Wednesday morning we were in the pregnancy assessment room at the hospital.

At eight in the morning this guy was born.

We named him Eric Leo Abookire Litzow (the First).

Alisa and Eric are both doing fine.

Baby's First Budgie Smuggler

2010-04-28T23:25:00.000+10:00

OK, we're officially in limbo - Alisa is now five days past her due date. She had a visit with the midwife a couple days ago, and mentioned in passing that she had been trying to finish sewing a new sailcover for the boat before the baby came along. "Well," the midwife said, "the baby's waiting for something - you go home and finish that sailcover."

That's what she's doing right now - sewing the final seam on the sailcover in the next room, Elias asleep, Alisa and her mom chatting companionably over the noise of the sewing machine. And here's Alisa two days ago, doing the last fitting on Pelagic.

Meanwhile, the portable baby shower has continued - good friends in Sydney ("I think they'd be the most sophisticated Australians that we know, except she's a Kiwi," I say to Alisa) sent down a wonderful collection of gifts. A highlight was this tiny little Speedo.

This very kind gift gave us, first off, the chance to say "budgie smuggler". In this land where professional comedians starve in the face of all the competition from amateurs, Speedos are widely called "budgie smugglers".

It also got me thinking.

Alisa started it when she said, "We'll have to get Elias a Speedo, then all the blokes in the family will have one." (Extremely dedicated readers of Once In A Lifetime will recall that I was given a Speedo for my first birthday in the tropics, though I have manfully resisted the urge to share any pictures.)

"Oh, hey," I said. "I think you're onto something."

"Hmm?"

"Well, you know how it is these days - pretty much everyone we know is out sailing the world, and blogging about it, and blathering about how they're 'gonna write a book'?"

"Uh-huh?"

"We clearly need something to set ourselves apart."

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, there used to be the Swedish Bikini Team in those beer commercials in the States. Maybe we could do something along the line of the Pelagic Speedo team? Me and the boys. You know, we could do public appearances, marina openings, that sort of thing."

"I'm going to finish that sailcover."

First Draft

2010-04-25T20:43:00.000+10:00

This morning the excitement level had lifted noticeably. Elias was running around the house and babbling nonsense from the moment he got up. Alisa was extra animated, and I felt it too, a constant buzz in the back of my skull as I worked through the morning, a sense of immediate change in the offing. I started to wonder - we were all picking up on some subtle clue of biology that told us the moment was nigh, or was it just the psychology of suspense that was making us all antsy?

Either way, nothing happened.

I haven't got Pelagic on the market yet, but today I did manage to finish the first draft of my book about our Pacific trip, the other task that I was aiming to have completed before Little Baby Brother came along. The real action I have decided is in the all-important second draft, which is still months away. But, as Alisa's mom pointed out, you have to finish the first draft before you can start on the second. And it was a fun moment to finally print out the whole thing. One hundred and eighteen thousand words - not a doorstop, but not a magazine piece either!

Baby Shower

2010-04-23T22:58:00.000+10:00

Well, you know how it's meant to be with the second baby - people naturally don't make as big a fuss as they did for the first. That, and the fact that we're a long way from anyone who we've known for more than three months (except Alisa's mom!), meant that the idea of a baby shower for Alisa and Little Baby Brother hadn't even crossed my mind.

But a box arrived from Kodiak today. And when Alisa opened it, she found a portable baby shower inside: a collection of very sweet gifts for her and the Newest Addition, from some of our very good friends back in the home port.

You know how much effort it takes to get together this nice a selection of gifts and get it to the other side of the world in time for the big event, for friends you haven't even been in regular contact with for almost three years? A lot. There are no people like our friends in Alaska.

Meanwhile, yesterday was the day before the due date. Alisa stopped by Pelagic to replace a broken gear in the main halyard winch and to check the fit of the new sail cover. And right now it's 2300 on the due date, and she's knocking out a few more seams on the sail cover project.

Cruising dudes of the world, continue to eat your hearts out!

~~

I've overheard Alisa telling people "I'm as ready as I'm gonna be." I guess I am too, but I also have a father's feeling of contingency about what's about to happen. This new little dude-to-be is still so hypothetical. I look at Elias, who is such a particular person, and such a force in my life, and realize that my imagination would never have been equal to the task of predicting him, of describing his individual self, before he was born. Little Baby Brother is still in that stage of pure mystery, but very soon he will be a pure fact, and then none of us will quite remember what things were like before he was around.

For Elias, with his much more circumscribed life experience, our future as a family of four is even more hypothetical.

If I run, he says, will he want to run too?
Yes, I say.
If I play, will he want to play too?
Yes.
If I pretend to hunt, will he pretend to hunt too?
Yes.
Ummm, if we ride in the car will he want to ride too?
Yes.
Will we let him?
Yes.
If we run errands will he come too?
Yes.
Why? He asks. Whywhy?

The Life Aquatic?

2010-04-23T13:48:00.000+10:00

Today is the due date. So we're thinking about... the next boat!

I came upon this 47' steel morsel on a Kiwi website last night. Not at all what we're looking for, but that didn't matter - a quick look and I felt that Palvovian response - elevated heartbeat and all that. There's something wonderfully non-yachty about her, the combination of a ship-built interior and a do-it-yourself look to the cockpit and deck layout.

Lots of things we didn't really want, like a ketch rig and a full keel, but it's just so easy to picture ourselves on this big, serious boat, with lots of space, sailing hither and yon all over the globe, in a family-circus-afloat, Life Aquatic sort of way. And...it looks like she's in our budget.

I just keep reminding myself that there's nothing more expensive than an affordable large boat.

Meanwhile, we've got a new idea for how we might find a bargain.

"Do you think it's poor form to hope for a European sovereign debt crisis?" I asked Alisa. "Then maybe we could afford one of those slick French centerboarders that are priced in euros."

I Should Really Be Writing...

2010-04-21T07:50:00.000+10:00

...since I'm on deadline. (Once the baby comes, who will be able to write?) And I also have a standard for blogging - Blog Only When You Have Something to Say. The business of clogging up everyone's computer with the mental chaff of the moment I try to leave to others.

But I will take a moment to share this picture from last night... And to note that Elias was born spot on his due date. And that Little Baby Brother's due date is in two days.

The Big News...

2010-04-19T08:52:00.000+10:00

...is that there is no big news, yet. But Alisa's mom has arrived, the bags are all packed for the hospital, and the car is full of ~~gas~~ petrol. We are no longer in danger of being taken by surprise. We hope.

And, we've enjoyed an immediate benefit of having Sandy here - the ability, last night, to go out for dinner and a movie. Just leaving the squirt with a responsible family member (whom he adores) gave us an insight into how much easier child rearing must have been in the days of extended families.

Meanwhile, I've been getting up EARLY most mornings to write. And this is the sight that greets me from the window at the start of each day.

We Need A Boat!

2010-04-13T14:39:00.001+10:00

With Pelagic not yet on the market, we haven't yet been searching systematically for the next boat. But of course I've been trolling the internet occasionally, looking at what's on offer, but not feeling any urgency, and not getting particulary excited about anything I see.

Last week, that changed.

I found an ad for a six year old boat designed by Denis Ganley, a respected New Zealand naval architect. She had just finished three years of Pacific cruising, and was sitting in Queensland, waiting for a new owner. The gear looked good - a fleet of Anderson stainless winches, a low-hour Yanmar diesel sitting in a proper engine room. Forty feet long, looking a good fit for our growing family, and with drawbacks, like a fugly center cockpit, that we could live with. And, most notably, we could afford her, if the 'negotiable' tag on the asking process was a guide.

Suddenly, Alisa and I were entranced. Could this be the one, the boat that would (inshallah) carry us hither and yon until high school beckoned Elias? Our pulses raced, our pupils dilated. We suddenly felt how lovely and relaxed it would be to just fly up to Queensland when this housesit is over and move onto our new boat, instead of taking the family to the other side of the world, our future in limbo, to some place where yachts are meant to be 'cheap'.

Unfortunately, a call to the broker revealed that she was a full keel design, something that is on our list of deal-killer criteria. There was a comic interlude while he trotted out his Sales 101 techniques over the phone in an attempt to convince me that he, a man saltier than Poseidon, would never cruise in anything besides a full keel design. ("And if the tide goes out on you some time, and you go aground, the rudder will be protected.")

So that was not the one. But now our appetite is whetted by the whiff of success, the feeling that in all those overpriced dogs that are the world of used sailboats for sale, in all those other people's broken dreams that masquerade as deals, Our Boat is out there.

We'll let you know how it goes.

~~

Meanwhile, Alisa had something to say about my last post.

"Playgrounds and beaches?" she asked me. "How about taxes and sewing projects and a three year old all day long?"

"But I only put that thing about playgrounds and beaches in there because you're such a hard worker," I pleaded. "Otherwise it wouldn't be funny."

Here she is as I found her at eleven o'clock last night, as I was going to bed, learning the ins and outs of a borrowed sewing machine in preparation for getting deep into the new sail cover project:

And for the record I am now of the opinion that she will finish the sail cover before Little Baby Brother is born.

But it might be close.

Endearing Australia

2010-04-11T15:01:00.000+10:00

Check out our calender for April - it's a great example of two attributes of Australian culture that I find so endearing. First of all, Oz is a place that doesn't wear its theism on its sleeve. Note that Easter day is not indicated on the calendar. On the other hand, Australians are known for their love of a day off. So Good Friday gets a mention on the calendar - it's a public holiday. The Monday after Easter is also a public holiday, so it needed a name, too - thus "Easter Monday", which Alisa and I had never heard of before. The Taswegians, figuring that the only thing better than a four-day weekend is a five-day weekend, went ahead and added "Easter Tuesday." And, to make the whole thing complete, there is the touch of mystery that still governs our interaction with this country. Saturday isn't a special day off, so why is it called "Easter Saturday" if there isn't any Easter Sunday on the calendar?

~~

Meanwhile, we got a text letting us know that Marls, one of our good dopplegangers, had her baby this morning. Alisa's due date is only four days after Marls', so I guess we're now on high alert. We have an overnight bag packed for Elias, and Ingfried, our Maria Island friend, has kindly offered to take him if the baby arrives before Alisa's mom gets here on Friday. We asked Elias if he would mind staying overnight with Ingfried and Mike and their two girls if Little Baby Brother came early and he said, "I would love it!"

There's a world of self-confidence in that simple answer.

Realizing that Everything Is About to Change, last week I took a break from my routine of boat work and writing, and Alisa and Elias took a break from their routine of going to playgrounds and the beach, and we all went up to Mt. Field National Park.

We savored the feeling of taking a day out without packing diapers.

Our yachtie friend De also came by to help Alisa get started in the job of making a new sail cover for Pelagic.

I'm taking bets - will Alisa finish the sail cover before the baby comes, or not?

Tie, Cut, Cut

2010-04-03T20:42:00.000+11:00

Well, you give your kid an honest answer to the question of where meat comes from, and it comes back to haunt you in the strangest places. Like in the supermarket on the day before Easter.

Elias and I were walking the crowded aisles, looking for ingredients to make Easter egg dye. He dutifully tagged along, dodging among all the people shopping for their holiday feasts, and started telling me what he was going to do if he saw the Easter Bunny.

-I'm going to tie the Easter Bunny up. This in his piercing, high-pitched voice.

-Um, OK, honey.

-And then I'm going to cut the line.

-Keep up, honey.

-And then I'm going to use a really sharp knife and cut his throat.

Silence from me.

-Tie, cut, cut. And then I'm going to eat all of the meat and not waste any. Isn't that very good of me?

My only consolation was the sure knowledge that the Australians around us would have a hard time understanding his three year old's American accent.

He really is a very sweet child. He just might have seen one too many tuna butchered in our cockpit, and heard one too many Alaskan hunting stories from me.

~~~

Once we got home, we forgot about Tie, Cut, Cut and got the childhood Easter onto a more traditional footing.

We dyed Easter eggs:

And before he went to sleep Elias made a nest of his clean underwear for the Easter bunny to fill with chocolate during the night:

This is a tradition in my family, coming down I believe through my maternal grandmother. I have often asked, but I have never met anyone else who grew up making nests from their underwear for the Easter Bunny. Imagine my shock when I went forth in the world and found that this wasn't a central event in the way most people observed the holiday...

She Swims

2010-04-01T22:12:00.000+11:00

We relaunched today. Our stint in the boatyard is over, and Pelagic made the transition from land-bound lump to swimming vessel, nearly animate in her natural realm. Even if it was just for the 300 meter passage from the ramp to the marina dock.

To get us to this point, I worked in the yard for three weeks and two days without a day off. In a perfect world, this is more than fun or good sense would allow. And this is a good indication of why cruising boats and full time jobs are such a poor match - there's just not enough time for both. Of course, some people pay other people to work on their boats, but our model for affordable cruising involves us doing all our own boat work. Not having the full time job means not being able to afford professional boat yard help. And we find that we typically do better work than the pros. At the end of the day, the pros go home, and the sailors go sailing - who's going to do a more carfeful job?

The grand finale was the two days that I got to the yard at 0630 so that I could put the final coats of paint on the topsides (the part of the hull above the water) before the day heated up and the paint became too difficult to work with. Repainting her was a huge job, maybe 100 hours all up. Luckily, all that time seems to have produced a good result.

And, in a curious, circle-within-a-circle sort of twist, the boat that came onto the hard just before we launched was named Iolanthe.

This is only the second Iolanthe that I have ever seen. The first was a Crealock 37 that had been sitting in the back corner of a boat yard in Annapolis for a little too long, waiting for a new owner, and which we proceeded to buy and rename Pelagic.

Meanwhile, the rest of our life is going on. Elias is enjoying his weekly swimming lesson at the Hobart Aquatic Center, one of those public sport facilities that Oz does so well.

And we are settling into our new housesit in Kingston Beach, about twenty minutes south of Hobart.

Alisa has been busy, too.

The end.

On the Hard

2010-03-22T23:43:00.000+11:00

"We're in the boat yard."

This is what I've been telling our new friends in Hobart, but it's not strictly true. We're actually living in a housesit in Blackmans Bay, and it's the boat that's in the yard. But I say that "we're" in the yard because I'm conflating our identity with that of our boat, a long-standing habit of thought for people who spend too much time on the water.

We've hauled Pelagic every year we've owned her, so counting the two months we spent in the yard right after we bought her, this is our seventh haulout. Normally when we're in the yard I'm impatient to get back into the water - both because the yard isn't much fun, and because of that habit of commingling our identity with the boat's. As long as the boat is on the hard, immobilized, we're in limbo, unable to sail anywhere, living for some hypothetical future when we'll again be in the water and free to go as we please.

This time, though, I'm not too anxious to get back in the water, even though it's a three-week haulout, with me working a full day every day. I've been enjoying the feeling of being pretty capable in the yard, which contrasts with my clueless stabs at yard maintenance early in the Pelagic years. I'm spending lots of time repainting the hull, which is fairly meditative work. As I sand and sand and sand to get the hull smooth and fair before I paint, I have lots of time to think.

I think a lot about what sort of boat we might get next. And I think about how Alisa and I are so much at the peak of our lives, how we find ourselves swimming in the full tide of things. We have a baby on the way, soon, which places us right on the cusp between our generation and the next, and places us also at the very quick of things, in the midst of the fecund years that will soon be the source of our reminiscence. And we also have a child already, a child who is the focus of our every day, the little person who we have made ourselves hostage to as we have, in the normal run of things, given over an essential part of our lives so that we can raise him up and see him off into the future.

And there's a lot of less profound stuff, like finding ourselves still living this waking dream of a life that is built around living on a boat and traveling the world slowly and (if we should be so lucky) at great length. There is the writing that I have been doing, and the feeling that it might actually come to something, and a bit of recognition that has come my way in the marine biology world, and the inevitable, heady plans for future research that intoxicate people who work in science.

And we have this envigorating experience of making a raft of new friends, and the delight of getting to know a new city that is very different from anywhere we've ever lived. And we find ourselves in no danger of the loss of bearing, the dissipation of everything that was vital and good in youth, that can sometimes come when people reach their forties and begin to rise to positions of authority in the organizations where they work. We have no organization! We are beholden only to our responsibilities to our child(ren) and ourselves!

Having read Hemingway, I of course pause to touch wood often as I think of these things.

And, finally, all this time in the yard gives me the chance to savor that feeling that comes when all my waking hours, day after day, revolve around what's best for the boat. Total immersion in the physical object of your boat is the only route to successfully sailing across an ocean on a small vessel, and I'm enjoying that complete concentration, that nautical monomania, one more time as our between-boats period looms.

~~~

Elias in the door of our housesit.

Boat, Life, Time

2010-03-06T20:58:00.002+11:00

We're back in Hobart, after two and a half weeks of knocking around the third trimester-appropriate cruising grounds of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. Pelagic goes into the boatyard on Tuesday, and we move into a house sit. After the time in the yard is finished, Pelagic goes to the yacht broker, and Alisa and Elias and Little Baby Brother and I will officially be Sailors Between Boats.

I am determined not to be nostalgic about the impending sale. We've decided that we need a boat more appropriate for a family of four, and we assume that we'll be happy with what we get. But still, as the end of the Pelagic years draws inexorably nigh, I am struck that boat ownership is like life in two ways.

First (not to be morbid!), it's over more quickly than you expect.

Second, it's never quite as perfect as it might be. After all these years aboard we still don't maneuver the boat in close conditions under sail nearly as much as we might, opting instead for the ease of the engine. The light that I'm writing by still has a dodgy switch that I haven't gotten around to changing. A full-time liveaboard, traveling boat is inevitably a set of compromises and contingencies, a mish-mash of the good enough and (in the case of Pelagic) the great. But perfection is forever beyond us, both in the physical state of the boat and in the skills we bring to bear on sailing her.

~~~

During the two and a half weeks we spent in the Channel, we weren't trying to get anywhere. The furthest anchorage that we reached was an easy day from Hobart. We were really just sailing around to enjoy ourselves. I wrote, we took family walks on beaches and forest tracks, Elias and I fished, and we visited with friends. We took a nice break after the three weeks we had spent beginning to get settled into Hobart. We enjoyed life.

That two and a half week sail was the fulfillment of one of the promises of the cruising life that I most fervently hoped would come true when we set out from Kodiak: the promise of redefining our relationship with time.

In our old lives, we would have planned a two and a half week vacation months ahead of time. Back then we worked a certain number of hours a week, enjoyed a two-day weekend, and had a certain number of weeks of vacation every year. But in all that careful accounting of hours and days and weeks, life was passing us by.

On the boat, we've regained something of the fluid relationship with time that I enjoyed during my spectacularly dysfunctional twenties. We use time as we see fit, deciding ourselves how much to allocate to work, and family responsibility, and Everything Else.

It's almost like we have reverted to a pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyle. Our seasons of hard work come and go. But our routine is not so constant that our very connection with life is dulled by the monotony of the all-too-predictable.

And that's a situation that we like very much.

~~~

Some highlights of our time in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel:

Elias in Recherche Bay.

Going fishing.

Abalone for dinner.

Feeding the swans.

South Bruny Island.

A palliative at Cape Bruny Light.

Bliss.

It was also a social trip. Our good buddies Catriona and Fraser came down from Iluka with their two daughters. Here's Catriona and Erin...

...and Elias and Islay.

Our Maria Island friends, Mike and Ingfried, came out for dinner the first night of the trip. Here's Elias and Emily on their motorboat.

We crashed the annual Southport Regatta. The crowd has gotten older, and the regatta has devolved into a great get-together on the beach. The only coordinated on-water activity took place the next morning, when the tsunami warning sent all six boats in the anchorage out to sea at once.

The end.

Idyllic childhood

2010-02-20T22:02:00.000+11:00

Bruny Island.

Whatever else we may have buggered up in life, I am more and more of the opinion that raising Elias on board a sailboat has been a very good decision. There is the valuable closeness with us, of course, and the way that he is enmeshed in all facets of our daily lives. But more than anything I love watching him grow up as an outdoor child. For all its inconvenience and less-than-romantic realities, living as a family on a sailboat seems again and again to give us an out from those widely recognized, but hard to change, difficulties of life in the 21st century rich world. Like, for instance, children who grow up sedentary, mesmerized by digital images, and indoors.

Looking for fur seals.

Listening to a hunting story. Elias loves hunting stories.

Cleaning the flathead we caught.

Picking mussels. Elias likes to say "hunting mussels".

Cleaning the mussels.

Elias talks a lot about his little baby brother.

The end.

On not making fun of Australians

2010-02-16T22:14:00.000+11:00

Confession: when Alisa and I arrived in Oz, we used to make fun of things Australian, and Australians themselves, in the privacy of Pelagic.

And we used to do it every day.

To a newcomer, Australia just screams out its stereotypes. There are the nicknames: I have had grown men introduce themselves to me as both "Macca" and "Razza". There are the strange conversational traits: some Australians have this frustrating habit, when trying to get across a vaguely complicated idea, of just giving up mid-sentence with a defeated, "and, yeah..." that segues into silence, and seems to be a plea for their interlocutor to start up with another conversational thread while they locate their scattered brains. There are the incredibly crass billboards around Brisbane that advertise dubious pharmaceutical sexual aids to men. There is the rigidly defined social norm of being a "regular bloke" in all-male social interactions. There are the baffling Royalist tendencies.

There are the meat raffles at pubs around the nation every Friday night.

And, perhaps more than any of these trifling details, there is the palpable lack of ambition that blankets vast swaths of the cultural landscape. This is the country where anyone will understand what you mean if you say "tall poppy syndrome": the collective, and nearly universal, desire to bring down anyone who aspires to something beyond the common lot.

"Say what you will," I said to Alisa just about every other day in our first six months here, "but these people have never been to the moon."

And, while I'm at it, here's my very own Australian joke:
Q: Why aren't Australians religous?
A: Because communion service has a one-drink limit!

Pretty good, no?
~~~
A few weeks ago, though, I noticed that I wasn't making fun of Australians anymore.

This society is starting to make sense to me. I begin to glimpse the nation of individuals behind the stereotypes. I have developed real admiration for the "it's not complicated!" attitude of some particular Australians who are, very quietly, leading lives that are admirable mixtures of adventure, louche dissolution, and family responsibility.

And the upsides of this society are starting to seem particulary attractive. The sense that everyone deserves a fair go is bedrock here, and contrasts painfully with the attitude in the U.S. Australians have a well-developed sense that the common good is something that everyone has a stake in promoting. The upside of the "it's not complicated!" attitude and lack of overarching ambition is that this is a developed society that does a very very good job of enjoying life. I have not yet been to a boring Australian barbecue. Which is to say that while Americans are (stereotypically) forever thinking about ways to get ahead or get to heaven, or to get something, Australians are (stereotypically) forever thinking that everything is pretty OK, but might be better still if they were at the beach.

No points for guessing which attitude resonates with me, the peripatetic yachtie.

And, finally, Australians are not laboring under the sense of exceptionalism, and divine mission, that is slowly suffocating the U.S. Americans are forever carrying on about how the slaveowners who wrote up the Constitution were actually God-fearing Christians. Australians just know that they have a good thing going, and call theirs "The Lucky Country."

God knows, things are not perfect here. But still, I'm starting to feel at home. I'll never pass for a fair dinkum Aussie, and I'm determined to see the inside of my grave before I know the difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union. But I am starting to think that our family may have an association with this place that goes beyond our current stay. I'm starting to feel a little Australian.

So much so that Alisa has told me that while she doesn't mind being addressed as "matey", she would prefer it if I'd stop calling her "mate".

Mt. Wellington

2010-02-09T21:23:00.000+11:00

We've moved from the dock at the yacht club out to a mooring. This is the view we wake up with - the southern suburbs of Hobart, with Mt. Wellington behind.

Today Nick, one of our Hobart doppelgangers, showed us around up on Mt. Wellington. Nick and Marls are our dopplegangers because they just crossed the Pacific on a Crealock 37, they are expecting their first child a week before Alisa is due, and Marls is a marine biologist. We think they are the good kind of dopplegangers, though, not the bad.

We walked up to the Organ Pipes, the dolerite cliffs at the top of Wellington. The trail started as a steep scramble, which Elias did much of under his own power. "I've never been rock climbing before!" he said as this picture was taken.

Elias enjoying the fruit of his efforts. We had brought along the climbing gear, and while Alisa and E. had a hike and a play in a spring and a snack, Nick kindly hauled me up a two-pitch climb called Blue Meridan. I was glad that Alisa and Elias weren't watching from below, as I grovelled my way up both pitches, and Alisa would have had to answer endless questions along the lines of, "Why is Daddy falling?"

As far as I can recall, this was my first climb since the boreal spring of 2000! Time was when mountain climbing was mostly all I wanted to do, but now I mostly want to do other things. Great fun to get out, though, and great to jump right onto a two-pitch climb. And now, I don't have to worry about crossing rock climbing off the must-do list before we leave Tasmania.

Tasmania!

2010-02-01T15:00:00.000+11:00

Well, we seem to have landed on our feet in Tasmania. After finishing up the cruise down the east coast of the island (some pictures below), we landed in Hobart last Sunday. Within days we had concluded that the people of this place are just as wonderful and friendly as you would expect from the fantastic physical setting of the island.

Constitution Dock, right in the center of town, where we had expected to stay, has recently instituted a policy of discouraging liveaboards, and turned us away. Since Alisa had a prenatal appointment the next morning, we decided to splurge on a week at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania (at $190 a week, a bit of a splurge!). This gave us a base for getting to her appointment, and also for finding our feet in this new town, and it also turned out to be a great place to meet friendly local sailors and to catch up with members of the long-distance cruising fraternity who used to collect at Constitution Dock.

I think the best measure of how warm our welcome to Hobart has been is that in our first week here, we either had new friends aboard for dinner or went to someone's house for a barbie five of the seven nights. A variety of people have gone out of their way to make us feel welcome here, but I think that the highest marks for hospitality must go to Mike and Ingfried, who met us briefly on Maria Island, where they were camping with their two girls. They told us to ring them when we got to Hobart, and when we did, they had us over for a barbie, where they served muttonbird, or short-tailed shearwater, which is a real treat for any Alaskan seabird biologist. It's the full-grown but not-yet-out-of-the-nest chicks that are eaten, and it appears that you have to be well connected in Tassie to get a hold of muttonbird. Mike and Ingfried also introduced us to a variety of their friends and relations, who all turned out to be interesting people, and then at the end of the night Mike had everyone write down their contact info for us so that we could kick-start the building of our own Tassie community. And all of this after a few minutes' aquaintanceship on Maria. Very nice, of course, and the night also gave us a great answer for the inevitable ice-breaking question that we get from other locals. "So what have you done in Tassie so far?" people ask, and they invariably love it when we answer, "We've eaten muttonbird!"

We've still been here only a week, and are still looking for a car, though we have a couple good leads, and we also have a good lead for a five-month housesit that would get us through the birth of crewmember #4. Alisa likes the birthing center at the hospital, I've been putting out feelers in the local marine biology community to get to know some of my local professional peers, and Hobart generally feels like it will be a good place for us to live for a year or so.

Here are some pics from the second half of our cruise along the east coast of Tasmania, which already seems a lifetime ago, though it was only a week.

Shouten Island in the morning light.

Shy albatross.

Canoe Bay, where we anchored behind a wreck.

The walking track from Canoe Bay.

Motoring between Tasman Island and Cape Pillar.

Motoring up Storm Bay to Hobart, we had a great display of leaping Pacific offshore bottlenose dolphins.

Darn autofocus!

The end.

Bass Strait

2010-01-20T22:50:00.000+11:00

We spent our last day on the Australian mainland flushing saltwater out of the outboard and rinsing the sand out of our clothes. We recuperated that night with a feast of local mussels kindly passed along to us by the crew of Ice Dancer, another Alaskan boat that was waiting to make the crossing to Tasmania.

We began the crossing of Bass Strait, the body of water between the mainland and Tasmania, with 20 hours of motoring, most of it into a light southerly wind and a confused swell. Since, two years into this adventure, we still do not have a working autopilot, this was a dreary experience in constant hand-steering. Things were made worse by the fact that Alisa and I both turned green with the motion. Elias, as always, was completely unaffected.

The next morning a northeast breeze came up, which meant that the wind was behind us, and we were soon flying along under jib and main with the windvane steering. But the swell was still confused, and Alisa wasn't feeling great. We were both tired, and considered spending a night in an anchorage off one of the islands scattered off the northeast corner of Tassie. But even the most optimistic reading of our average speed showed us falling short of the closest anchorage by nightfall. So we kept going, consoling ourselves with the idea that we had a great sailing wind.

The next day was gray, as you would expect for the forties, south latitude. Alisa was at this point completely laid up by the combined negative effects of pregnancy and offshore sailing. Nothing serious, but her third trimester is nearly here, and she is clearly getting past the point at which overnight sailing is a very good idea.

Elias and I kept each other company in the cockpit most of the day.

Lighten up, kid, this is supposed to be fun!

By this point we were only about ten miles off the east coast of Tasmania, but we couldn't see land because of the intervening clouds and mist. We had great views of pelagic birds as we sailed along, including these short-tailed shearwaters:

and lots of shy albatross, which I believe nest in Tassie:

Two days and a few hours after we left Eden, we ended our crossing at Shouten Passage. By now the weather had progressed from windy and wavey to windy and wavey and rainy and foggy. We began to feel at home.

Crap weather - we like it!

Our first impressions of Tasmania have been very positive, even when the inclement weather ended and we were left with more monotonous Australian sunshine. It's been fun meeting a few locals and, when they ask us how long we plan to stay in Tassie, answering, "a year!".

The anchorage at Wineglass Bay, where we spent our first few days in Tasmania.

The end.

Bugger!

2010-01-18T22:57:00.000+11:00

I didn't recognize the risk until we were halfway to being upside down.

Elias' grandmothers may want to stop reading at this point.

We were in Woodchip Bay, a couple of miles outside Eden, New South Wales, waiting out a couple days of southerly breeze before we made the jump to Tasmania.

Alisa and Elias were going ashore for a play on the beach and I was going to stay aboard to knock off some boat jobs. Before Alisa left we talked about the swell that was rolling through the anchorage, and the fact that the left-hand corner on the beach would likely be the easiest spot to land our inflatable, Smooches. She zoomed off, but then came back a few minutes later.

-Maybe you should drop us off, she said. It looks fine to get ashore, but I'm not sure I could get the boat back into the water alone.

I drove them in. On the way we changed our plan from landing on the left-hand corner to landing on a spot closer to the middle of the beach.

-That way you won't be stuck on the other side of that creek, and Elias will have more room to run, I said.

When we were ten meters off it looked like the swell was breaking as little lapping waves. I gave the motor a final burst of throttle, then shut it off and swung it up out of the water. I was about to hop out when Smooches accelerated. And turned sideways. And started turning over.

We couldn't do anything.

The wave that had lifted us up curled and broke and flipped the boat completely upside down. Elias ended up under the boat. Alisa did, too. I fell out the back. My head stayed above the water, so that I could register that they had both disappeared completely.

Then they popped up. Elias had the completely startled look of a little boy who hadn't even know that dinghies could flip over. His eyes and mouth were three circles in his face. He was wearing a lifejacket. Alisa scooped him up. I righted the dinghy. A guy walking along the beach helped me get Smooches out of the waves.

I'll say one thing about human nature. Flip a boat with your three year old and your heavily pregnant wife in it, and people will come running to help.

Alisa and Elias and I stood stunned on the beach, sand in our clothes, water running out of our hair. Alisa and I watched the waves roll in. They looked much bigger from the beach side. She hugged Elias and I studied the sets coming in, aware that getting off the beach through breaking waves is harder than getting into the beach, which I had just completely botched.

A bloke named Michael, from the yacht Polaris II, rowed ashore and kindly helped us launch. It all went smoothly. The motor of course did not start, and I rowed back to Pelagic where we all had warm showers and hot drinks and dry clothes.

~~~

It's been ten years since I flipped an inflatable in the surf. (The last time was on St. Matthew Island, in the Bering Sea.) Ten years is not too long a time to go between dinghy-flippings - it's really something that anyone should only do once. And the crazy thing is that the waves were really really small, and with a little concentration we could have landed easily. But I didn't even recognize that the chance of flipping the dinghy was there. I just wasn't paying attention.

And not paying attention is something that you can't get away with on the water.

Elias warming up with a hot Milo after it was all over.

South of Sydney

2010-01-13T23:57:00.000+11:00

Our stay in Sydney was brief. On January 4th the northerly winds returned, and we were back on the road.

After all, we have a deadline.

South of Sydney, we got that delightful feeling that you get when you're travelling on a sailboat and everything goes better than you had hoped - the feeling of getting away with something almost illicit. We turned steady north winds and a strong south-setting current into cracking-good days of travel - we made 81 miles on one day sail with time left over to fuel and water at our destination - something completely unheard of. When the northerlies built to 30 knots, we found a great open roadstead anchorage where we bobbed on a calm patch of ocean and slept soundly. When the southerlies returned, we spent a few days exploring the delights of the vast natural harbor of Jervis Bay - turquoise water and white sand and penguins (!) seen from the decks of Pelagic.

There are other signs that we are getting closer to high latitudes - the water is noticeably colder, and we are beginning to see Diomedea albatrosses. Excitement builds.

We also, two days out of Sydney, had our best-ever experience with bow-riding dolphins. This small group stayed with us for about an hour, long enough for Elias to get a very good look.

I was able to leave Elias on the bow, alone, while I went back to get the camera. He was wearing his harness, and Alisa was watching him from the cockpit, and he just stood there, holding on with two hands, watching the dolphins. This is really a huge milestone - a year ago, we would never have thought about getting so far from him on deck. Things get easier for us.

They were (I'm pretty sure) short-beaked common dolphins, Delphinus delphis.

And now we're in Eden (don't ask me how it got that name...), the southernmost port in New South Wales, and our jumping-off point for the two-day crossing to Tasmania.

Time to get to Tassie!

Sydney

2010-01-13T22:59:00.000+11:00

We came to Australia, largely, so I could get to know the place. Even though I've been an Australian citizen since birth, I had spent all of six weeks of my adult life here before we arrived on Pelagic. When we got here, I had the bright idea that being on a yacht, and around yachties, might be a great entrée into Australian life, a way to meet remarkable Australians whose paths we might have otherwise never crossed.

It mostly hasn't worked that way.

We have met some fantastic people in Australia, really good friends, who have nothing at all to do with yachts. We have met some other wonderful people here who have lived on yachts for years and years and years. But the first group we met in spite of living on a yacht, and the second group has so much in common with us that it feels almost inevitable to meet up with them. So the idea of the sailing life as a shortcut to meeting remarkable Australians has generally not panned out.
~~

Sydney was the second great city of the world that we have sailed to on Pelagic, the first being San Francisco. We felt the same wonder of viewing iconic landmarks from the decks of our little boat that we felt in San Francisco, the same aesthetic delight in a city that benefits from a perfect setting, the same satisfaction of viewing the city from the detached perspective of the water. But while San Francisco was once my home, Sydney was totally new to us.

After we had our fill of dodging ferry traffic and staring at the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge we set a course to meet up with Alex and Diana, seen above next to their yacht Kukka. We had met them briefly in Queensland last winter, and based on that brief acquaintance, they met us at the dock and rolled out the biggest red carpet that you could imagine.

Alex and Diana helped us with our dock lines and then handed us a key ring with two keys on it - the key to their house, and the key to their marina. They had arranged for us to tie up Pelagic, for free, at the guest dock at their marina for the duration of our stay. So all the urban headaches of rolling, insecure anchorages and difficulties finding a safe spot to leave the dingy were immediately forgotten.

We had dinner at their house that night, and found that we had broad areas of overlapping interests, so that we could talk and talk and talk - about favorite authors, and travel experiences, Australian politics and culture, U.S. politics and culture, and so on. We even talked a bit about sailing.

Alex and Diana both traveled extensively back in the day, and they treated near-complete strangers us with the sort of complete hospitality that is the hallmark of the former traveler. They had us over to their house night after night for dinner and showers and laundry, they drove us around the city, they introduced us to their kids, they took us to see the mighty New Year's fireworks over the harbor, and (joy of joys!) they babysat Elias so we could go see the new Pedro Almodóvar joint.

More than all that, they turned what would have been a very impersonal visit to the big city into a little taste of daily life around their house in Balmain. So we got to hang with the locals, which is all that a traveller really wants.

And it all happened because we shared an anchorage with them near Townsville last winter.

Elias touring a replica of the Endeavor, Captain Cook's ship on his great first voyage of discovery, at the Sydney maritime museum.

A Pittwater Christmas

2009-12-31T15:20:00.000+11:00

Christmas 2009 found Pelagic in Pittwater, an arm off of Broken Bay, the waterway that abuts the northern suburbs of Sydney. At first glance Pittwater is a soul-less place where the leisure class keeps its generic, expensive, lightly-used pleasure boats, and we were a bit stunned by the anonymous water-scape of thousands and thousands of moored pleasure boats where we would spend the holiday. But we quickly went about generating a family's worth of Christmas spirit on board, beginning by decorating Christmas cookies:

We also decorated our Christmas tree. Note that Elias' friend Koala decided to spend the holiday in the tree.

On Christmas Eve, Elias left out cookies and beer for Santa. I find this Australian-styled hospitality for Father Christmas a decided improvement over the milk-and-cookies tradition in North America.

In the morning, Elias was very excited that Santa had left him Six White Boomers.

Our big reason for stopping in Pittwater was a visit with our friends Peter and Vanessa, long-term local sailors who we met on the tail end of their New Caledonia-and-back cruise last year. We had Christmas dinner on board their yacht, Akimbo. Things started off seriously enough:

But the night soon descended to a three year old's level:

For a couple of days after Christmas we knocked around from anchorage to anchorage inside Broken Bay. There were thousands and thousands of these beautiful jellyfish in some places:

And the weather was gray and drizzly:

This had the benefit of keeping the holiday crowds we feared at bay. I'm sure it will be different in Tasmania, but Australians in this part of the country seem to completely deflate when the weather is cold and rainy. It's kind of an endearing trait.

We could have explored the different nooks in Broken Bay for a week. It's a neat spot, with big areas of National Park that provide a nice escape from the city life of Pittwater. But we decided that we'd rather spend our discretionary time before the new baby arrives cruising Tasmania instead of Broken Bay. So we travelled back to Pittwater, where we had a great couple of days rafted up with Akimbo:

During our stay, Peter kindly took me surfing a couple times in conditions that he wouldn't have bothered with himself. Surfing in Sydney over Christmas - how cool is that? And then, yesterday, we made the 15 mile hop from Pittwater to Sydney Harbor. That's where we are now, on the last day of 2009, awaiting tonight's fireworks in the harbor, which is reputed to be the biggest fireworks display in the world. More on that later, I'm sure.

This May Be The (Second To) Last Time...

2009-12-23T16:37:00.007+11:00

Should this woman be sailing down the coast of Australia?

Our first overnight sail on Pelagic was in 2004 - the 1,100 mile, 11-day passage from Vancouver Island to our home port of Kodiak. With our rookie's feel for the perfectly wrong time to depart, we left just as 25 knot head winds were kicking up. Along with our friend Dan Ruthrauff, who was helping us with the delivery, I braced myself in the heeling, spray-lashed cockpit as night fell. Alisa, confronting a rolling, pitching galley for the first time, served a dinner of top ramen - not cooked, but with luke-warm water just added to the noodles in the bowl.

The jump that we just made from Camden Haven to Pittwater, in the northern suburbs of Sydney, will likely be, next to the the crossing to Tasmania, our second-to-last overnight sail on Pelagic.

It was a fitting outing for our nearly-last overnight trip, offering a certain majectic symmetry to the Pelagic years, this epic ocean-going chapter in our lives.

Which is to say that as much as you might learn about going to sea, some things don't necessarily improve.

Camden Haven.

We spent five days in Camden Haven, waiting for favorable sailing weather to return. When the forecast finally called for moderate northerly winds, we plotted our next hop to the south. We had three basic options - hop to an intermediate anchorage 35 miles away, hop to Port Stephens 80 miles away, or go all the way to Pittwater, a bay in the northern suburbs of Sydney, 140 miles away.

The stop 35 miles away was awkward because crossing the Camden Haven bar at the proper tide would mean arriving at the new anchorage at the wrong time for crossing that bar. And, because the best tide for leaving Camden Haven wouldn't arrive until 0830, making it the 80 miles to Port Stephens in daylight seemed pretty improbable.

So I suggested that we do the overnight to Pittwater. When some of the other yachties at Camden Haven said they'd just leave early in the morning, while the tide was still ebbing over the bar, so that they could make Port Stephens in daylight, I wasn't tempted to change our plan.

"We haven't had any favorable current yet coming down the coast," I said to Alisa. "So making it 80 miles in 14 hours of daylight would be a huge push. I'm sick of that part of coastal sailing, where moving along at five and a half knots isn't good enough because you're trying to make it to a bar before the tide turns, or to a new anchorage while it's still daylight. Let's just leave here at the right tide, put up the sails, be happy with whatever speed we're making, and get to Pittwater some time the next day."

It all sounded so reasonable. But it all went so horribly wrong.

When we got sailing the next day, we made an effortless 8 knots over the bottom. We had found the current. It was hard not to think of how easily we could have made Port Stephens, and thereby enjoyed a quiet night asleep at anchor.

Then, at nightfall, the "local thunderstorms" of the weather forecast revealed themselves as a black wall bearing down on us from the west, backlit by evil-looking flashes of lightning. I wasn't quite keeping up with all the sailhandling that would turn the gusty, shifting winds into a course that would keep us safely out of the way of the three ships that were all within five miles of us. We heard one of the boats that had left Camden Haven early checking in with the Volunteer Marine Rescue, reporting that they had safely arrived in Port Stephens. The motion had been rough for hours. And then Alisa ran up to the cockpit and vomited voluminously into the sea.

"Don't lean over so far, for Chrissake," I snapped. "Kneel down and hold on tight."

(This is the very first time that Alisa has ever puked off of Pelagic. Up to this point, it's been all me. She felt sick all night. I got two hours of sleep. And we had ships to deal with and shifting winds all the night long.)

It was hard not to think of how easily we could have made Port Stephens, and thereby enjoyed a quiet night asleep at anchor.

Safely anchored in Pittwater - haircuts in the cockpit.

"I told Santa that I've been very very good this year."

Farewell Tour Begins

2009-12-16T21:23:00.005+11:00

We're on the third anchorage of our Iluka-Tasmania tour.

We started our last day in Iluka wondering if the weather forecast was really right for us to leave, or if we should wait a few days for a better window. But then we had a get-together with a few of our Iluka friends at the pub, and said goodbye, and made ourselves feel completely awful, and then we were bound and determined to leave.

Nothing is so awkward as bidding a tearful goodbye to someone and then bumping into them at the grocery store the next day.

We motored down the Clarence River at dawn and took a right hand turn when we reached the ocean. Every mile we travel from that point on will take us further south than we have ever been on Pelagic.

We reached Coffs Harbour after a long day. Coffs is an artificial harbor, created in part by a giant causeway that joins Muttonbird Island to the mainland. "Muttonbirds" are several species of shearwaters whose chicks get so fat in the nest that they are a traditional food in the Antipodes. My Inner Biologist, the one who is no longer suprised at the conservation disasters of the world, looked at that name on the chart and said out loud, "Well, there won't be any muttonbirds there any more."

Wrong again! There are thousands of muttonbird nests on Muttonbird Island, and a nice paved walking track that takes you right through the heart of the colony. From the top of the island you look back over Coffs to verdant valleys disappearing into the rainclouds that occasionally drape the east coast of Australia this time of year. And the marina in Coffs Harbour has this nice flow through feature from the waves breaking on the causeway that keeps the marina so clean that we could stand on a walkway and look down on a sea turtle grazing on macro algae inside the marina.

All that, plus there was a great beach where Elias really rode waves on his boogie board for the first time.

We left after one day, the perfect length of a stay if you want to keep a utopian opinion of a place.

The famed East Australian current, which is supposed to make southward sailing an exercise in trying to slow your boat down, has been nowhere in evidence. So the 70-odd mile trip from Coffs to Port Macquarie took all day and then some.

We woke at 0430, made it out of the marina at 0500, and then motored south for eight hours, hand steering all the way. The wind finally came up, but so did the swell. With ten miles to go I took down most of the sail so that we'd reach the bar at the correct stage of tide. With little speed, we rolled viciously, dipping one side of the boat and then the other into the seas that came sweeping down on our beam.

Alisa was gamely trying to take on all of the Elias care so that I could concentrate on the boat, but reading "A Year On Our Farm" for the 18th time while fighting off nausea was nearly more than her maternal instinct could bear.

-Oi, she said to me. I can't remember a time when this kind of sailing was fun.

-Fun? I said. Never! This kind of sailing was never fun! I'm not pregnant, and it still isn't fun.

We reached Port Macquarie and went through the "stranger" cruiser routine: pick out the leads to the bar with binoculars, come screaming in past the breakwater with the full flood tide behind you, speeding over the bottom at seven and a half knots with the engine just ticking over enough to give you steerage, trusting that you've figured out the chart correctly and so won't hit anything, then follow the reticulate little channel that leads through shoals to a little anchorage at the head of a creek, all the while guarding against the hazards that the locals know all about, but which are all mysterious to you.

I didn't realize how much that took out of me until Alisa said "Um, Mike" as I was rooting around in a locker for a mooring line after we had reached the anchorage. I had completely let my guard down after the long day, and was letting Pelagic drift right into a moored cat as I dug through the locker.

Port Macquarie (from the water) appears to be one of those places that has crossed a certain threshold so that it is more of an economy than a community. We took a mooring for the night, then woke at dawn, motored the 13 miles to Camden Haven, a sleepy place that looks to be more our style, and here we are, snuggly anchored for the 3 or 4 days of rough weather that is currently forecast.

That's Elias and me at lunch in Camden Haven today.

I Had Her!

2009-12-16T20:37:00.003+11:00

I had her... Alisa had officially reached the apogee of cruising-partner status.

She woke up on one of our last mornings in Iluka and said, "I had the greatest dream. We had this really basic brand-new aluminum yacht and we were choosing the electronics to install."

Ha, I thought. This is it. Every other cruising dude in the world can officially eat his shorts in pure burning envy. My six-months pregnant wife closes her eyes... and dreams of buying electronics for a new aluminum yacht!

It's a good thing that I reveled in the moment so fiercely. Because, dear friends, (and this may be news) NOTHING GOOD LASTS.

Yesterday, on hour twelve of our thirteen-hour "day sail" from Coffs Harbour to Port Macquarie(new rule - if it's longer than 12 hours, it doesn't count as a day sail), as we were slatting along under a draconically shortened rig, trying to delay our arrival at the Port Macquarie bar so that the tide might reach a more genteel stage for the crossing, as we were slamming from one side to the other in the growing swell, Alisa, gently cradling the new life within her with a protective arm on top of her swelling belly, uttered the words that every cruising dude trying to work the Good Life Trifecta (Family, Sailing, Miminal Work) dreads to hear:

"I wonder what catamarans are really like."

UGH! Make it stop make it stop, I thought to myself. Catamarans, it is said, don't roll from side to side in a seaway. But used cruising catamarans, as near as I can tell, start at around a million five and go up from there. You see lost souls out on the water in cruising cats, worrying about whether they remembered to send in the insurance premium, and they all seem to fall into two groups: oldsters who are trying to put off life in a caravan ("RV" to those of you in North America) for another year, or dudes who are blowing all their money in a losing battle to convince the non-sailing spouse that life at sea can be comfortable.

~~

(If anyone who lives on a catamaran actually reads this, please know it's a joke! You're not old, and you're not trying to keep your partner happy:)

Dolphins Afrothing

2009-12-13T21:18:00.010+11:00

During February and March of 2009 while anchored in Iluka Harbor, we observed dolphin pups as they swam past Pelagic. Just a few days ago, while Mike was out surfing, I was lucky enough to see dolphins mating...at least that's what it looks like to me. I am no expert but I know what I saw was not a feeding frenzy. And aside from food and sex, I can't imagine what else would result in dolphins afrothing. Don't worry, the following photos are G-rated.