Nuku Hiva Redemption

We sailed out of Baie Taiohae under catastrophically low group morale. After the fact it’s hard to remember how low we got, or why. I can list the factors at work. Chronically screaming toddler. Confined space. Intractable mechanical problems. Bad feelings that bounced back and forth between Alisa and me. Despair of ever making the trip work.

All this less than two weeks after the all-time high of our passage to the Marquesas. Almost all you hear about cruising is the good stuff. We might be more prone to the downs because of the inevitable pressures of taking on such a big adventure with a completely dependent little person at the center of our lives. Whatever the case, the lows do come along. There is no magic bullet.

We sailed out of Baie Taiohae and we were instantly in the trade winds again, bounding along with the wind behind us and picturesque tropical whitecaps all around. Our next anchorage, Baie Tai Oa, or Daniel’s Bay, was only about five miles away. I went below to the head to try to get the watermaker working. Alisa stayed in the cockpit with Elias sitting in his car seat and the Monitor steering Pelagic. I came up after a fruitless forty-five minutes of sweating in the head, trying to diagnose an airlock in the feed line.

“How’s it going?” Alisa asked.

“Don’t ask. How’s it going here?”

“Not bad. I think we need to get around that point there,” she said, nodding at a distant landmark.

I went down to plot our position on the chart. Five minutes later I came back up.
“Our course is 020 magnetic,” I announced. I looked at the compass and pointed to the direction we wanted to be going, which was almost perfectly the opposite direction from where we were actually sailing. Alisa had been kicking back in the cockpit with Eli, grooving over the feeling of sailing again and being free of Taiohae, and had sailed right by Baie Tai Oa. Who knows how long it would have taken the little light bulb over her head to light up if I hadn’t intervened.

Spirited discussion then ensued about how our destination on one hand couldn’t be almost straight behind us, and yet, on the other hand, was. Reference was also made to the apparent intention on one person’s part to just sail the four hundred miles to the Tuomotu Islands without consulting the other person first.

“No matter how much grief I give you over this, it probably isn’t enough,” I said.

What ever else it was, this grotesque yet harmless navigational error was good for lightening the mood on board. We turned the boat around back into the wind, and hunted for the entrance to the bay in the imposing lava cliffs that ring the southwest corner of Nuku Hiva. The bay wasn’t obvious from the outside, and the breakers crashing into the cliffs on both sides of us didn’t make it feel like a place to bring the barky in for a closer look. But we trusted the chart, and the GPS, and pulled into the gap in the cliffs and found ourselves in, well, paradise.

Looking back at the entrance to Daniel's Bay.

The mountain wall that surrounded the southern half of the bay began as a jumble of impassable cliffs and angled plains covered with thin verdure. Further up the valley it progressed into a vertical jungle interspersed with incredibly precipitous fins of eroded lava. Towering palm trees at the base shrank into insignificance beneath the mountain wall, lending scale to the sight. Swell rolled into one arm of the bay, where a little village is located. Alisa pulled down the mainsail and I steered into the other arm. The calm water and the simple open-walled house on the beach contrasted with the overwrought splendor of the lava mountains behind us.

Looking up the valley from the anchorage.

We anchored and shut down. The jury-rigged engine had passed its first test. Elias and I fished off the bow while Alisa cooked dinner. Six other boats were anchored in the bay. After the sun set our friends from Sonsie came over in the dinghy to say hello and recommend the local walk up to the base of a 350 m waterfall, meant to be the third highest in the world. “I’ve hiked in a whole lot of places,” said Rod. “But this is the most beautiful hike that I’ve ever been on in my life. The guy who lives on the beach is named Tonga. Wonderful guy.”

The next morning we rowed ashore early, hoping to beat the tourists from Taiohae that were rumored to reach the falls every day at noon. We found Tonga outside his house, tending to his horses. Determined to do things right on our first trip ashore at a little village, we had brought along a couple of fishhooks as a gift for Tonga and asked for his permission to use the trail to the waterfall.

Tonga.

The hike lived up to Rod’s billing. We followed the trail to the other arm of the bay, across a river to the dirt road through the village, where we met Monette, a middle-aged woman who promised us fruit when we came back from la cascade. After the dirt road left the village it joined with an ancient Marquesan road, reputedly the king’s road, leading to the upper reaches of the valley. After we left the village the lava cliffs on either side of the valley closed in on one another. We wound our way past ruined paepae that were slowly succumbing to the jungle, memories of the past glory of this place. Paepae are lava-stone platforms that pre-contact Marquesan buildings were set upon. Marquesas swiftlets and white-capped fruit doves, both endemic to the Marquesas, fluttered overhead in the valley, as did fairy terns and tropicbirds. When we reached the waterfall, we found it shrunk to an insignificant trickle by the demise of the wet season. But the lava walls on either side of us rose overhanging above us for a thousand feet. The tourists from Taiohae never showed up and aside from the three locals we had seen on the hike we might have been alone in our own tropical paradise.

“Alone in our own tropical paradise,” I announced as I lowered Eli from my back and wrung the sweat out of my shirt. “So that’s nice.”

“But not quite alone,” said Alisa. “There’s no-nos.”

I looked down at my legs and saw a cloud of the tiny biting flies that make the Marquesas a famously bad choice for beach vacations. No-nos lie thick on most Marquesan beaches, and, apparently, around Marquesan waterfalls, too.

“That’s not all,” I said, pointing at the cloud of insects around Eli’s tender visage. “Mosquitos.”

“At least there’s swimming,” said Alisa, nodding at the big pool of fresh water beneath the falls.

I walked over to the pool for a closer look. “Eel,” I reported. The folks on Sonsie had passed along a rumor about really big fresh water eels in the pool beneath the falls. For once the rumor was outrun by reality. “The size of a log,” I elaborated.

“I think I’ll skip the swim,” said Alisa.

We ate cheese and pilot bread and pamplemous, the champion citrus fruit of the Marquesas. And then we ran from the bugs.

Aside from the wildlife, though, all was very good. Outstanding tropical scenery, the ruins of a mysterious culture, and the descendants of that culture, still living in the valley, still speaking the Marquesan language. And the three of us. Not a bad mix for your average Wednesday.

Dad: "This is great!"

Little boy: "What country is this?"

Fording a stream.


A ruined paepae.

The valley got really narrow.

The eel.


The boy, touristed out.

On the way back we spoke with Augustine, who was cutting coconuts for copra. He was a big man, tattooed and wearing a boar’s tusk necklace and, incongruously to our eyes, a knit hat and sweatshirt. He sat in the woods by a fire of coconut husks that gave of a pungent, disagreeable odor that I have come to associate with the Marquesan bush. He held a machete in one hand, and a pile of cut-open coconuts was by his feet. We communicated with my handful of French words and lots of gesticulation. He explained that the copra is shipped to Pape’ete, he is paid 110 CFP per kilo, and can collect 1,000 kilos a week. That works out to $ 1,500 US in a week, at the rate we got from the bank when we posted bond. Not bad, though a six pack in Taiohae costs eighteen bucks.

I also came away from our talk with Augustine with a feeling that I’ve since felt in other bays that used to be heavily populated but then went through paroxysms of violence and epidemic and cultural disintegration and are now the homes of a few descendants of the survivors. I get the impression, accurate or not, of people like Augustine crouching in the ruins of a civilization that has become mysterious to them. As my child’s children’s children might some day.

Augustine. The fire is to keep the no-nos from bodily carrying him away.

We continued down the track and came to Monette’s place. As promised, she gave us bananas and limes and pamplemous, all that we could carry. When you speak almost none of a country’s language there is great variability in how well the locals can communicate with you. Some, like Augustine, zero in on the few words that you know and pantomime up a storm so that you almost feel like you’re conversing, while others, like Monette, just repeat the same phrases that you don’t understand over and over. So we were a little hard pressed to understand her abundant gift. The kitchen of her house almost looked like a little restaurant, and we wondered if she was selling us the fruit. I guess that trade and commerce are a lot easier for us to understand than the sort of generosity that entails gifts to strangers who happen to be walking by your house. Alisa gave Monette a lighter from her backpack, and Monette accepted it, but with an indifference that said she didn’t really expect anything from us. And then we said goodbye, a little baffled by the interaction.

Monette's house.

When we made it back to Tonga’s beach we found the husband and wife crew of Backlash, a west coast U.S. boat, with their dinghy on the beach next to ours. The man was thin and frowning, with a face that reminded me of timeless advice of my mother’s.

Years ago, when I was a little lad, my dear mom said, “Never trust someone with a mouth like a chicken’s asshole.”

The man asked us about the walk. How far was it? Was the waterfall worth seeing? I explained that the waterfall was nearly dry but the walk was fantastic. He didn’t look convinced.

“The fellow who lives here sells mangoes,” he said. “Five hundred francs for eight of them. Not even fruit is cheap in this paradise.” He put the last word in finger quotes.

We started talking about the Tuomotus. They were going soon. I repeated Pierre’s recommendation to stay a week or more at each atoll to make the visit worthwhile.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” he answered. After a pause he added, “It’s rough that we have to go to sea again for four days to get there, right after the three weeks it took us just to get here. They should make these islands closer to each other.” He laughed briefly, a sound like pebbles rattling in a can, laughing at himself for making such an improbable complaint, but also complaining nonetheless. “We can’t wait to get to the Societies. Tahiti, Bora Bora.”

I was deriving a weird pleasure from the conversation, something like that which a dedicated foody gets from a dish that is very nearly, but not quite, revolting. But Elias chose that moment to rub a fistful of sand in his right eye, and a quick retreat to the solace of Tonga’s hose was called for.

“I think I came up with a South Pacific cruiser personality litmus test,” said Alisa as she walked next to me towards Tonga’s house. I was carrying Elias and trying to keep him from rubbing the sand further into his eye. “Beware those who look forward to Tahiti and Bora Bora.”

Tahiti and Bora Bora are famous among travelers for having all the charm of Waikiki, or the Jersey Shore.

“I know it,” I said. “Some people just can’t relax and enjoy themselves in paradise.”

We smiled at each other.

At Tonga’s, Elias submitted manfully to a blast to the face from the hose, coming up spluttering and smiling. The hose was fed by a waterline from the mountains. There is no electricity in Daniel’s Bay and many of the other sparsely settled bays that we have since visited, though some houses do have solar power. But there’s always running water, usually in the form of a standpipe in the yard, fed from a source in the hills.

Elias, the sand in his eye forgotten, checks out Tonga's copra supply.

Tonga gave us a sack of beautiful mangoes, “for the boy!” and several pamplemous. The crew of a Swedish boat was also ashore at Tonga’s. I thought of getting a good picture of Tonga but the Swedish man was already firing away with his Nikon D200, physically adjusting Tonga’s stance to highlight his tattoos. The days when only a few boats worked their way down the South Pacific trades every year are now decades past, and we often have to share our interaction time with the locals. I’ve started to call this effect the Yachtie Scrum. If you’re not careful you can find yourself surrounded by English-speaking yachties on every beach, which ends any chance of overcoming the language barrier with individual Marquesans.

Then a South African crew came ashore. It would have been fun to just hang out and mingle with the other cruisers, but Elias was operating on a very short fuse and it was time to retreat to the boat.

We were hot and thirsty after hours of walking and Alisa was starting to suffer from her no-no bites. Elias began squalling on the way back to Pelagic and Alisa and I were trapped in the little rowboat, forced to listen to every incoherent syllable of one-year-old angst. By the time we were back on Pelagic, the mood was in danger of going sour.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s close our eyes and imagine that we’re anchored in a bay in some tropical paradise. In our own yacht. With coconut trees on the beach and the sound of lapping waves all around us. Maybe that will help.”

After we got Elias asleep Alisa and I sat in the cockpit drinking gin and lime juice beneath the stars. Savoring the feeling of having suddenly arrived in this sparsely occupied dreamscape. The kind of place that should be famous around the world, but isn’t. The kind of place that delivers the tropical elixir that Hawaii and Tahiti can only promise. Daniel’s Bay.

“They were so friendly,” said Alisa. “Tonga and Monette and Augustine.”

“And we’re only five miles from Taiohae.”

“Where no one will look us in the eye.”

"You always hear about the indolence of the South Pacific. But did you notice how everyone we saw today was doing some kind of work?"

“What an incredible day. Imagine how difficult it would be to get here if you didn’t have your own yacht, what it would cost.”

“A lot less than it did for us with a yacht.”

“Yep, a lot less.”

The next day we got going early and sailed around the west and north sides of Nuku Hiva to a place called Baie Anaho. We had calms and then stiff winds right on the nose and we caught a beautiful tuna. The north side of the island was a mix of vaporous mists and incredibly steep lava plugs and spires. We buried the rail of first one side of the boat and then the other as we tacked towards Anaho. We pulled into the bay just at dusk, satisfied with a great daysail and mystified at the good fortune that found the three of us circumnavigating a little island named Nuku Hiva, where the people are friendly and the scenery is beautiful and the fruit grows everywhere.

We dropped the hook in Anaho, uncertain how long we would stay. And everything that happened there is part of another story.

The north shore of Nuku Hiva.

The crew, bringing Pelagic into Anaho at dusk.

The end.

And If That Wasn’t Enough

I forgot one crucial happening from our darkest days in Taiohae, which should have been included as an event in the “Yachtie Decathlon”. An event known as “Fish your wife out of the drink.”

As in, Alisa went overboard. Not the metaphorical way that she sometimes does, but actually. With a splash.

It was night. We were anchored in Taiohae. I was below, sweating on some damn part of the boat that was broken. Eli was asleep. Alisa was adjusting the dinghy painters to stop the Fair Dinkum from banging into Pelagic. I heard a splash that sounded more like a commotion alongside than it did the sound of someone falling overboard.

Then I heard Alisa calling my name with an intensity and an earnestness that I hadn’t heard in a while. I came upstairs to find her in the water, holding onto the side of the boat, and very clearly wanting to be back on deck.

I rigged the swim ladder and she was quickly aboard, surrounded by the big puddle of water that was flowing out of her soaked clothes. “All I could think of was the sharks that Eli and I were watching around the boat today,” she said.

(For the record, they were small sharks. But still.)

Someone had closed the gate in the lifelines (the wire fence that surrounds the decks and keeps us aboard) without closing the safety latch all the way. Not Alisa, not Eli, but Someone. So when Alisa leaned against that section of lifeline the safety latch popped open and she went for a moonlight swim.

When you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll.

Going overboard is the biggest taboo on Pelagic. Forgetting to mention this event just shows me how much other stuff was going on in Taiohae.

And so, now you know.

Trouble in Taiohae

Pelagic swung to her anchor among the thirty-odd yachts in Baie Taiohae. I threw the last of the jerry cans into the dinghy and started rowing in towards land. Alisa held a tear-stained Eli in the cockpit and watched me row away. As the distance between dinghy and sailboat grew I called back to her.

“Dad went out for twenty gallons of water,” I said, “and we never saw him again.”

“Don’t make that joke too many times,” Alisa said.

Ever since we left Alaska, we have been prone to let-downs after completing passages. When places like Eureka and San Diego were our landfalls, it was easy to blame the destination. But there is also an effect of stepping away from the simplicity and purity of life at sea, and back into the complications of life ashore, however tangential, that tends to bring the group vibe crashing.

Sighting Ua Huka in its glorious tropical repose after twenty one days at sea was such a distinctive experience. On our last night at sea we ate fresh tuna as the sun set behind towering squall clouds. Alisa made her nightly call to the Pacific Seafarers’ Net. We observed the ritual of putting Eli to bed, going through the commonplace steps of brushing teeth and reading books and giving goodnight kisses, all in the exotic setting of a tiny ship pitching and rolling her way down the southern trades. Alisa went to sleep and I took the first watch, slowing Pelagic down and conning a route between Ua Huku and Nuku Hiva. These young volcanic islands reared up thousands of feet into the sky on either side of Pelagic, blocking out the stars with elementally black silhouettes unmarred by any electric lights. When the squall clouds caught up with us and it started to rain I took off my clothes and sailed the boat naked beneath my deck harness. To Alaskan sailors, nothing says “somewhere far far away” like naked sailing. As many landfalls as we may ever make as a family, I trust that there will be nothing quite like this end to our first long passage.

We spent a raucous night hove to off of Nuku Hiva and in the morning sailed into Baie Taiohae, thus in a moment transitioning from one world into another. Yachts clustered at anchor at the far end of the bay, all recently arrived after three or four weeks at sea just as we were. Waves crashed on the beach and pickup trucks drove along the beachfront road. Heavy green trees clustered over tin-roofed buildings. Houses and gardens clung to the incredibly steep hills over the bay. The town and bay were ringed by the walls of an old caldera, a vertical wall of lava that made the little town look like a stage setting.

Three hundred years ago raiding parties from neighboring valleys paused on that ridge top to whoop victoriously as they carried away the body of an unfortunate local to serve as the main dish for a chief’s funeral feast.

After our three weeks of blue skies and blue seas and the constant, illimitable horizon, we found ourselves in a place that was close and green. The water nearshore was brown with the soil washed off the mountainside by the rain. We could smell the earth, our natural home that we were returning to after our journey through the vastness of the eastern tropical Pacific, a place that we could transit but where we could never come to rest. We smelled the earth, and its familiarity, but the specifics were all new – smells of the vibrating growth and quick rot of the tropics. It was like we were coming home to a place where the language was universal but spoken in a strong accent that we couldn’t place. This, I imagine, is the dissonance that seafarers have always experienced when making landfall on distant coasts. Everything before us promised a new world – new culture, new foods, new languages, a new adventure. Alisa and I grinned at each other with excitement, brimming with the accomplishment of having reached this little corner of the oceanic world.

This first look was very nearly the peak of our experience in Taiohae. And, as is usual in these situations, we brought the seeds of our own misfortune with us.

After we had set the anchor and shut down the engine, we looked over the side to see Pelagic surrounded by an oil slick.

When things electrical or mechanical go bad on board Pelagic, our first recourse is to reach for Nigel Calder. His Boatowner’s Mechanical and Electrical Manual has steered us through many a dark and tortuous crisis of boat maintenance, and really no English-speaking sailboat crew should be without it. For the current situation, though, the big guns were called for, and I reached for the same author’s Marine Diesel Engines. A quick read identified the oil cooler as the likely cause. Oil from the engine passes through 36 little tubes in the cooler which surround a big tube of cooling water drawn from the sea. As hot salt water passes through cooler the walls between the little tubes slowly corrode and voilá, oil is suddenly free to pass into the cooling water and leave a big slick on the ocean after it exits the exhaust. Perhaps even more chillingly, Nigel also advised that there was the possibility that water could siphon into the engine through the corroded cooler.

“Water in the engine” is one of those phrases of boat ownership that I do everything in my power to avoid using.

Especially in some place like Nuku Hiva, so remote that it makes Dutch Harbor, Alaska, look like the fifth arrondissement.

Especially when my wife and one year old son and I are living on our boat with all of our household goods, and we are completely dependent on that boat to get us the next four thousand miles or so to Australia.

Nigel offered me a ray of hope: “The engine can still be run until you find a replacement cooler, if fittings can be found to bypass the oil and water sides of a failed cooler.” The italics are my own, and they describe the quest that burnt up a week or more of our first stop in “paradise”.

I figure that nobody knows everything, and when we have a problem on the boat that stumps me my approach is to chat up everyone I can, in the hopes of learning enough to find a solution. Providentially, Tilicum, a boat that we knew from Mexico that carried a real, live diesel mechanic on board, pulled in the same day. I rowed over and introduced myself to Robert, then threw myself on the mercy of whatever useful guidance he could give me. He supported the bypass idea. John on Gingi suggested finding a tractor oil cooler to get us to Pape’ete, the capital of Tahiti, where we could get a proper cooler shipped to us. Pierre on Ke’a and his friend Maurice, both hugely experienced yachties, suggested that I pull the cooler apart, find which tubes were leaking, and block them off.

Robert’s advice, backed up as it was by the gold-standard advice of Nigel Calder, led me down the road of just bypassing the darn thing until we got to Pape’ete. It was also the simplest solution.

Except for the problem of finding suitable hardware to link together the 15 milimeter banjo fittings that take oil to and from the cooler. Whatever I came up with would have to hold up to the pressure of the hot circulating oil, as a sudden failure of the bypass would result in the complete loss of engine oil pressure. Between us and Tahiti lie the Tuomotus, a vast archipelago of atolls that are entered and exited through narrow, highly tidal passes through the coral. A sudden loss of the engine in one of those passes could make for a really bad day. Touch wood.

All of this weighed on my mind as I made the rounds of the local hardware store and various boats, looking for the raw ingredients for a skookum jury rig. Alisa, meanwhile, was stuck watching Elias in a boat that was half torn up to provide engine access. Elias seemed to be in a terrible mood half the time, banging his forehead against the bulkhead in anger and frustration and screaming his fierce little wild animal screams that make our teeth vibrate in our skulls. I was spending most of my time on board crammed into our tiny engine room, sweat pouring off of me as I struggled to pry various pieces free from the engine. Spirits on board plummeted.

Every attempt to come up with suitable fittings failed. Finally Robert helped me pry the damn oil pipes completely free from the engine. We took them to the vice on his boat and hacksawed the ends off, then triple hose clamped and epoxied 5/8 inch fuel hose over each sawn off piece, thus joining the two together. I spent another few hours getting the patched-together pipes back onto the engine, and then had massive second thoughts. What if the patch didn’t hold? I checked in with Moe Tai, who runs Polynesian Yacht Services in Taiohae, about getting a cooler sent out from the Yanmar dealer in Pape’ete. When we finally left Taiohae five days later, he was still waiting for an answer.

So I finally fired up the engine, and the patch held. Touch wood again. When I changed the oil before firing it up, two thirds of a liter of seawater came out of the crankcase in addition to some heavily emulsified oil. I then got nervous about our engine oil pressure. It read low when we bought the boat, but the mechanic who we hired to survey the engine told us that was typical of our engine model. I had taken that as sound advice and gotten used to running at lower oil pressure than our owner’s manual called for. Leafing through Nigel, I came across his section on low oil pressure: “Many people, confronted with low oil pressure, assume that the gauge is malfunctioning…and ignore the warning. Given the massive amount of damage that can be caused…this is the height of foolishness.” I suddenly didn’t feel like taking our low oil pressure for granted anymore. And when we ran the engine at idle and saw the gauge plummet to an astonishingly low fifteen pounds of pressure, I was complete spooked.

I normally hate to write about boat maintenance, a topic that vies with wallpaper hanging for minimal reading interest. But in this case, that’s the point. We were finally in the Marquesas, and sweaty bouts of engine maintenance dominated each day. Elias was being, well, a typical one year old, and not the little sailor angel who had accompanied us on the passage. Alisa and I fell, one after the other, into the funk that often visits us when we reach port after a period at sea. I gravitated towards the worst possible interpretation of our low oil pressure and bad oil cooler, and the drawbacks of a twenty-thousand dollar engine replacement were freely discussed. When we looked on the bright side we reminded each other that we could just sail to Tahiti or all the way to Oz if the engine conked out. But with the engine problems, and the difficulties of getting anything done with Eli, and his hourly screaming temper tantrums, the wheels of our collective vibe really started coming off. People who wonder about sailing with such a young baby always ask about diapers, or him getting seasick, but it really is boat maintenance that we find to be the hardest part of having Eli on board. Our space is so limited to begin with, and then we tear up half of it to get at some project, and suddenly there are all these things around that Eli isn’t allowed to touch, and we can only get him off the boat for so many hours before it’s time for him to come back and eat or nap, and he gets frustrated and starts venting as only a one year old can, and Alisa and I one after the other descend into Neolithic rages at the heat and the confinement and the constant baby care and Eli’s high-pitched screams. And well. You really don’t want to hear any more.

There were, of course, bright moments mixed in with all this. We went ashore that first day after the passage and found a group of Marquesans taking shelter from the rain under a covered section of the wharf. They had an instantly recognizable look, something very Polynesian with a hint of eighteenth century English sailor mixed in; broad hips, flowered shorts, flip flops, tattoos and top knots. We made our number at the gendarmerie, and the gendarme who checked us in was friendly. Ethereal Gygis alba (wonderfully called Common Fairy Terns in our one field guide, more prosaically White Terns in the other) fluttered in the trees lining the sodden main street along the beachfront. Young men with striking facial tattoos riding bareback galloped by on horses. Out on the water, Brown Boobies (Sula leucogaster) and frigate birds (either Greater, strangely enough Fregata minor or Lesser, F. ariel) made a steady commerce preying on the little fish that aggregated around the anchored yachts. From Pelagic we looked down on blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus) cruising around us in their endless motion. Occasional feeding frenzies broke out beneath the barky as two species of bigger fish mercilessly worked the schools of baitfish around us. One memorable dawn we all sat on the side decks and watched three manta rays (Manta birostris?), each of them four feet across, filter feeding in graceful arcs around the boat.

But Taiohae offered an indifferent welcome. Alisa bought a watermelon at the store for 1,000 Cour de Franc Pacifique, or CFP. She did the conversion as we were walking back to the boat and announced, “That’s a fourteen dollar melon!” And then there was the remoteness we felt from the locals. The people that we came across on the first day that we rowed in to the wharf were reluctant to make eye contact with us as we huddled under the same little shelter to let a downpour pass, although big smiles on our part and Eli’s presence did earn us a slight thaw. That experience proved to be representative, as we found evasive eye contact and restrained smiles to be the rule.

Meanwhile we were meeting some of the boats we had heard on the ham radio on the crossing from Mexico, and hearing rhapsodical stories about the smaller villages they had visited where the Polynesian warmth was almost overwhelming and the superabundance of fruit was enough to keep Marquesans and yachties satiated. And we were stuck in Taiohae, trying to figure out the engine. Cloudy skies and high temperatures were keeping our solar panels just barely ticking over, and we couldn’t charge the batteries with the engine. We cut down to run the fridge for two hours or so a day, and our boxed milk started going off.

It must sound a bit self-pitying. But sailing huge distances from our familiar Alaskan haunts with a completely dependent one year old keeps us working with a small enough margin that the typical ups and downs of traveling become ups and disasters.

In addition to the various engine woes, we also dealt with a range of chores that I came to think of as events in the Yachtie Decathlon: Haul forty gallons of diesel in five gallon jerry jugs after tying the dingy up to a wave-swept concrete wharf. Post bond at the Banque Socredo. (Four thousand dollars U.S. for the three of us, including fees, and we get to pay the exchange commission twice: once to change all that into CFP when we check into French Polynesia and again to change back to dollars when we check out.) Borrow a hookah from another yacht and dive forty feet in abysmal visibility to unwrap your anchor chain from the wreckage of a steel boat. And so on.

After nine days we seem to have the engine worked out, but we spend another day in Taiohae to talk to Pierre, who has lived in French Polynesia for sixteen years. He’s sailing to Alaska, and we’re heading to his stomping grounds of the Tuomotus and Societies, and we spent a delightful few hours trading local knowledge. All, or nearly all, of the yachts currently in the Marquesas are next heading through the Tuomotus, a vast expanse of coral atolls. Known as the “Dangerous Archipelago” in the pre-GPS era, these islands still offer a very challenging mix of tricky passes, submerged reefs, mandatory night time passages, and strong currents. There are also more than forty atolls that can be entered by a cruising yacht, and which of the islands to visit is one of the most-discussed topics among yachties in Nuku Hiva.

Pierre shares our passion for getting off the beaten track, and he styled us with what sounds like a very sweet four-atoll itinerary. I was satisfied to see that his recommendations began with two islands we had tentatively identified to visit. The accounts that he painted of those islands, full of phrases like “this is very very very nice!” and “it is magnificent!” made me realize what a once-in-a-world spectacle we have before us. “It is very important,” he said to me. “You must respect the tide when entering the pass. And you must spend at least a week in each place! Otherwise it is too much hurry, there is no point!”

And no, I’m not going to put his suggested itinerary on the blog.

We had dinner with Pierre and two French cruising couples on board Compay, the boat of a Swiss singlehander named Eric who is planning on leaving the Marquesas in mid-May for a non-stop passage to Kodiak, of all places. Alisa and I dropped our jaws to think of a boat simply sailing strait back to our home port after we took ten months on the roundabout route. The dinner was a blast – the French sailors all looked to be in their fifties or sixties but they had an openness about them, especially the men, a quick willingness to smile that really contrasted with the cynicism and bitterness and just plain tiredness that we find in so many U.S. and Canadian cruisers of the same age. Part of that impression might come from their simplified self-expression as they spoke English. But I think there was a fundamental difference in evidence, too. Not to judge a nation based on five individuals, but Alisa and I came away from the meal with our Francophilia confirmed.

Elias had been acting up so badly before that dinner that we thought that one of us would have to just stay home on Pelagic to watch him. But we rallied, and he sat on our laps for most of the dinner with a stunned look on his face. He’s so verbal right now, and so quick to assimilate language, that I think all the strange conversational noises left his head spinning. We made our excuses early to get him back to Pelagic before he got too tired, and we heard the laughter and vigorous conversation floating over the anchorage from Compay far into the night.

Alisa had baked bread and chocolate-chip cookies earlier in the day, and we had brought the cookies over as a contribution to dinner. “God,” she said once we got back to Pelagic, “as soon as I saw that scene, I wished I had brought the bread.” In Kodiak, we felt that our cuisine of game and fish could hold its own with the food eaten anywhere in the world. But on the barky, our diet of grains and legumes and other hardy fare, including the occasional chocolate chip cookie, while it keeps us as happy as can be, might also lend itself to a little Anglo-Saxon gastronomic inferiority complex.

Finally, finally, we were ready to leave Taiohae. I used up our last minutes of internet time ordering engine parts to be shipped to Pape’ete, and found that the two foot-long oil pipes that I had sawed off would cost $320 to replace. We were only sailing about ten miles to our next stop, so we got a late start after packing the boat up all morning. Elias was screaming and adult tempers were at an all-time low. It was hot and we were sick of always being on top of each other with no possibility or expectation of privacy and a little peace and quiet and we were exhausted by the big push of getting the boat back out to sea and it was all of it, the whole trip, suddenly not seeming at all worth the constant headaches. More than once in the previous days each of us had wondered aloud if we would make it. We kept up our smiles for strangers on other boats and then in the privacy of Pelagic wondered aloud if our old happiness was gone forever.

We finally got the hook up and moved out of the bay, motoring slowly on our patched-up engine. We got into wind in the mouth of the bay and I started making sail while Alisa steered. Elias started fussing in his car seat in the cockpit. Not bad, but too much for me, and I screamed at him to pipe it down. “This isn’t working,” I said to Alisa as Pelagic started feeling the tradewind swell. “Let’s just sail straight to Australia and get this kid into daycare.”
The bad: big dude, small engine room.

The good: quality time on the beach in Taiohae where we landed the dinghy...

...taking the squirt fishing...

...and swimming...

...and giving him a shower in the cockpit afterwards.

Alisa's Odds and Sods

14 May 2008: Alisa’s musings about the Passage and Marquesian life.

The passage from Baja to Nuku Hiva Island ended 3 weeks ago but it feels like years. Something about being on the open ocean for so many days and nights causes a response from the senses that I cannot recapture in text. In a word, it was marvelous. There were challenges, as we expected there to be. There was fatigue and sloppy swell that made the cook [yours truly] both frustrated and cautious. Also, the day prior to our departure for the Marquesas I injured my tailbone when I sat down on our forward hatch. It took nearly the entire passage to heal. I assumed it was a badly bruised tailbone – only once or twice did I consider following Mike’s advice to raid the narcotics from our emergency medical kit. About 3 days before landfall I was able to sit down without any pain. Our last night before landfall we hove-to rather than make anchorage in the dark and we experienced our first lightening storm at sea. It was very scary for me and I spent my 5 hour watch counting the intervals between lightening flashes and staring at the darkness between. But despite all this, I loved the long passage and a large part of me wanted to continue sailing.

A new challenge during the crossing from Baja was hand washing cloth diapers every other day, but it gradually became part of my routine tasks. I cringe when I think of how we took care of our trash along the west coast of Baja, figuring that we could get by with what the locals did – which amounted to adding our trash to an open heap at the far end of the ‘town’. But a little too late it occurred to me that by doing this we were essentially tossing our trash over the side. The poverty of Baja Tortuga and even Baja Magdelena was more than I had ever traveled in and I was unprepared. To our credit, we did try to burn our plastics in Baja Magdelena about ½ mile from the village and were stopped by a local teen who actually smothered our fire with rocks and waited awkwardly and defensively for us to leave, insisting that we leave our trash with him. My heart sank as I watched him dump out our trash bag when we finally rowed back in the dingy – he was looking for glass and cans to recycle but couldn’t care less about the plastic bags and diapers that would pollute the waters where hundreds of humpback whales breed. After that, I became convinced that only two options exist for sailing with a baby in places without proper landfills - either use cloth diapers or personally burn all the disposables yourself. And as long as the swell was less than 6 feet and my tailbone wasn’t too bothersome, I did the diaper washing with a smile on my face…and now that we are anchored the washing is no big deal.

Right now the first thing about Marquesian life that comes to mind is tropical insects. The ‘no no fly’ plagues the beaches and sand of the Marquesas and I have been attacked voraciously. The ‘no no’ is tiny and you don’t feel them while they take a chunk of your skin, but later as the blister forms over the bite, it itches really badly. The 10% of my legs and arms that are bitten up actually kept me from wanting to go ashore yesterday. We have had some terrific hikes on Nuku Hiva and it was worth it – but I did not expect my mantra in paradise to be ‘don’t itch, don’t itch it will only make it worse’. On the flip side, the generosity of the Marquesian people is staggering. After leaving Taiohae where the prices were untouchable (small watermelon $13, potatoes at $6/lb, a small cabbage head was $12, a load of wash cost $9) in the smaller villages we have been given bags of mangos and stalks of bananas and tried at least 5 new fruits that I didn’t even know existed before I got here. What Alaska has in wild salmon, the Marquesas has in fruit. I don’t think I will ever fully enjoy a banana or mango from the grocery store again. I am glad I read Herman Melville’s Typee before we anchored here in Baie de Controleur – there is so much history here in the Taipi valley and we toured some ruins the other day while Elias had his premier horseback ride. I am looking forward to another week in the Marquesas before head further west, and I hope in this time to find someone to sell me a goat so I can add some canned goat to our dwindling and monotonous food stores. Wish me luck!

On Sunday last, in Baie d’ Hakahetau on the island of Ua Pou, I was seated in the last pew of the Catholic church. The entire service was in Marquesian, with the exception of the sermon which was partially in French. There was singing and in the front row a family waved flowers side to side in time with the hymns. Women covered shoulders and knees and I was glad I had the foresight to dress accordingly. The entire congregation was in flipflops, with the exception of one grandmother who wore a fine set of 2” heel black pumps along with her surfer t-shirt which was two sizes too big. The foreign language and the rhythmic surf crashing just outside the church and the staggering heat inside the church all added up to me realizing how far removed I am from my previous life on Kodiak. This is some serious traveling. As I processed how out of touch I feel from all those I know and love, Elias remained dazed and sweaty on my lap – or on my hip if we were standing…that is, until he suddenly decided it was time to go and began to say ‘bye’ really loudly to our neighbors in the pew as he waved at them. I took the hint and we walked out into the fresh air of a glorious seaside morning.

Landfall

Nuku Hiva
April 19, 2008

The passage is over, and I immediately begin to forget what it was.

I remember that for days the GPS in the cockpit was counting down the miles to Nuku Hiva. The favorable current kicked behind us and we could suddenly calculate how many more days the passage might last. During the day the sun was white and its light fell like knives on the sea. All the hatches and portlights were closed against blowing spray, and the cabin was an oven. We huddled in the shelter of our little electric fans.

The moon was growing full. After Elias was asleep we sat in the cockpit with cocktails. The stars were everywhere, the sails and waves illuminated by the moon. The cockpit heeled out over the water and we braced ourselves on the high side.

I remember Alisa saying that she didn’t want the passage to end, I remember that for days she looked surprised every time she told me how much she was enjoying the trip.

I remember that after weeks of tracing our wake across the sea the constant motion was part of us. We pulled tuna out of the water and ate them an hour later. Elias watched me fillet and learned to say “meat”. The boat travelled and travelled while the three of us stood still, sleeping in the same bunks every night and walking the same decks every day.

I remember that we had a strong sense of reaching the other side of something. I know that feeling was related to all the years we worked to save for the trip, the years we worked on the boat, and the months we travelled down a coast that we didn’t care to visit, trying to shoehorn our familiar lives into the new constriction of life in a space 37 feet long and eleven feet wide. The feeling had something to do with the dreaming and preparing, and then the doing, we finding ourselves competent in a new way of doing things and liking it, and suddenly feeling unbounded in possibility of where we might go.

The feeling of the passage had something to do with all that, but that wasn’t quite it. It might have just been something about how each day was built around the same schedule of meals and diaper changes and on-deck chores and ham radio nets, and therefore each so similar from one to another, but also how different each was in the details of fish caught and winds encountered and moods that suddenly swept through the little ship for no reason.

I think that we’ll have to go to sea again to remember exactly what it was, but we did get to the other side of something in ourselves.

***

Twenty-one days out of Cabo San Lucas, we sighted the island of Ua Huka. Our destination of Taiopae Bay in Nuka Hiva was about ten miles distant at night fall, and rather than enter the bay in the dark we hove to for the night.

That night gave us the only bad weather of the whole trip. Squalls had been moving over us for the last few hours of the day, the islands appearing between squalls and then disappearing again in the clouds. In the early hours the squalls intensified. Rain poured out of the skies, as if for the construction of a new ocean. Lightning surrounded us, thirty bolts in an hour.

In the morning the sky was yellow with anger. We bobbed along, still hove to, then sailed the last ten miles downwind. Tradewind swells smashed themselves to a heaving nothing on the lava islands on either side of Taiopae Bay. And then we were through.

Passage Pics #2

Pantropical spotted dolphins, Stenella attenuata.

The spinnaker sheet left this big welt on Alisa's arm.

We each swam a lap areound the boat when we crossed the line.

The shave and haircut at the equator: before,
during,
and after. Note King Neptune's crown and trident, univerally recognized emblems of his office.

Alisa baked bread every other day.
Working the barky.
One that didn't get away.
Our first sight of land, the island of Ua Huka. It's at the center of the picture, underneath the squall clouds that intensified after sunset and turned into...

...the worst weather of the passage.
Sunrise was very welcome the next morning,
Once the sun was up the weather moderated.
Sailing into Taiohae Bay.

And finally, this was the scene in Los Frailes, Baja California Sur, our last anchorage before the passage...

...and this is Taiohae Bay, Nuku Hiva. Twenty one days at sea really did get us somewhere different.

South

April 15, 2008
6° 18′ S, 137° 19′ W
Day 20

“I wonder when we’ll be in the Northern Hemisphere again,” says Alisa. Emigration is such a big part of this trip. We are sailing to reach Australia, and some sort of new life there, the misty contours of which are suddenly much discussed. We aren’t those who wander and yet are not lost, we are those who are changing horses, and nations, in mid stream. Now that we are in the South Pacific, Australia is real, immediate, although months away. Brisbane, our likely landfall in Oz, is currently 4140 miles away, according to the GPS.

When ships and boats cross the equator at sea, King Neptune comes aboard to initiate first-time crossers. Since we lacked a shellback to act the part, Elias stood in. He decreed that the two initiates on board should each swim one lap around the boat. He was particularly hard on the captain, as befits a long-recognized moment when the hierarchies of life afloat may be reversed, and decreed a shaving of the head and a close trim to the locks. Tots of seven-year old Cuban rum were drunk, and King Neptune’s dram was poured overboard for his enjoyment. And then we sailed on, all three of us now confirmed shellbacks, Elias reaching this status at an astonishingly tender age.

The change from north to south was accompanied by a gratifyingly immediate change in our environment. The first night in the ITCZ was the only night when we had any inclement weather, but light winds plagued us for days. We motored due south to try to reach the southeast trades as quickly as possible. When the wind did come up it was from some direction between due east and due south and we sailed southwest under main and spinnaker. Pelagic won us over once again with her ability to make four knots in only six or seven knots of wind in spite of the huge cruising payload that we have crammed into every available storage space on board.

The skies were always blue to the south and cloudy behind us, but we could never quite make it to the new weather. A current of a knot and more was working against us. We motored through the night that brought us across the line, with the RPMs bumped up to 2300 to keep our speed above five knots.

After our line-crossing ceremony we fired up the engine and promptly ran out of fuel, the increased RPMs having made short work of the last 15 gallons in the main tank. I transferred the ten gallons that we carry on deck into the tank. We figured that we could motor for seven and a half more hours, and then we’d have to stop in order to have five gallons in reserve for motoring into our first anchorage in the Marquesas.

We motored for five hours, then shut it down to check into the two ham nets that we participate in. After the nets were done and Elias was asleep, Alisa and I held council. The wind was blowing a staggeringly insufficient four to five knots. We had two hours and change of fuel left to use on the passage. Should we use it now, and gamble that ten miles of southing would get us to the southeast trades, or should we sail southwest on this little breeze that would barely move us, and keep a little fuel in reserve? Even though the sun was down, sweat was running freely down my face as we sat in the salon talking. It was too sunny in the day to be in the cockpit, and too hot down below both day and night. Boats as much as a hundred miles south of us were reporting insubstantial winds on the nets. We had dodged the bad weather of the ITCZ, but we might be in for just a little grief from the doldrums.

We decided to sail. I put up the spinnaker and main. At first we were just moving at a knot or two. But in an hour the wind came up to ten knots, and then twelve, and it never left us again all the way to the Marquesas.

The southeast trades turned out to be what we had in mind when we thought of tradewind sailing. The swell was gentle, the wind was behind us, sea and sky were flawless blue. Sapphire blue. We moved along effortlessly, flying the spinnaker when the wind was light and jib and staysail when it came up to fifteen knots. We finally had current with us, and started to record ridiculously good 24 hour runs: 140, 150, even 160 miles. And it was brutally, blisteringly, despotically hot. We huddled in the shade of the dodger when we ventured out into the cockpit, and kept Elias down below for days at a time because the sun was just too much. When the wind came forward of the beam and freshened to sixteen knots or so we closed all of the hatches and portlights against spray. Then we actually began to suffer from the heat. We were always covered by a film of sweat, awake and asleep.

The child-rearing book encourages us to let Elias run around without a diaper as a step towards that dreamed of state, toilet-trainedness. Today I look down from the cockpit to see him starkers in the cabin, running circles in complete glee. A half hour later Alisa calls up, “Uh, Mike, I need your help.” She speaks the sentence slowly, as if willing herself to put together the words for effective communication at the same time that her brain is struggling to make sense of the sight before her. When I come downstairs she is leaning into the head and holding Elias by both arms. I peek through the door and see that he is surrounded by the wreckage of a bowel movement that, in its scale and narrative complexity, can only be called Homeric.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” says Alisa.
“I know what we’re doing for the next hour,” I say.
“Poop!” says Elias.