Wahoo! Smooches! Over-confidence!

We always find it a good omen to catch a nice fish when we're heading out on a long trip. So on the day we left Townsville, starting the long trek to Tasmania, we were very pleased to pull in our first-ever wahoo.

One of these days we have to get a picture of Elias' reaction when we land a big pelagic fish - you've never seen such pure excitement.

As I started filleting, Alisa said, "I wish I'd bought a new pressure cooker in Townsville." Pressure cookers allow us to can fish, but ours gave up the ghost somewhere on the Pacific crossing last year.

Meanwhile, I was thinking of all the people out there who would love to go fishing for wahoo, while I was the one doing it, even though fishing has always bored me.

We made some other sailors very happy at our anchorage that night when we came over with fish meat to share.

In Townsville we got a fancy new inflatable to replace our nesting hard dinghy that is not aging gracefully. I love it! The new boat is easy to get into the water, so we can have Elias ashore on some delightful beach a half hour after we anchor Pelagic. The nesting dinghy was such a pain to put together and launch that we usually didn't go ashore if we only had an hour or two in hand.

We've named the new dinghy Smooches.

This picture of Smooches on her inaugural water-hauling run was taken in the "Duck Pond", the anchorage in Townsville. The boat in the background is Sacha B, who we dragged down on a day or two after this picture was taken. It was a real lesson. We had never before dragged anchor in the six years we've owned Pelagic, and we had become so used to our 20 kg Spade anchor and heavy chain holding us tight that we (I) got to thinking that we would likely never drag. And then a northwest wind came up and blew steep waves into the Duck Pond, and we only had 50 feet of scope out, so that the motion of our bow jerked the anchor loose from the thin mud bottom. Luckily we were on board and could just motor away and reset the anchor. If Pelagic had been unattended she would have hit Sacha B.

I had been warned (by the owners of Sacha B, as it turns out) about the poor holding in the Duck Pond. We should have had much more chain out. But we were used to getting away without a lot of scope, and we were more concerned with how shallow the anchorage was, and didn't want to swing onto a shallow spot at low tide, and...yadda yadda yadda. We really just didn't anchor properly.

So, we got a very cheap lesson in overconfidence. We've sailed enough miles to feel very comfortable on the water, but the complacency of routine has to be added to the litany of potential traps that are out there.

Water playground, Dirt playground

We've been in Townsville for nearly three weeks but we haven't stayed in one anchorage very long. We routinely go back and forth between the 'duck pond' where we are anchored just off town and Magnetic Island, which is a lovely spot and only a daysail from Townsville. The days go by quickly with errands and bus rides to various shops, but when we are in Townsville I try each day to get Elias to the water playground. It is centrally located, always packed with screaming kids, and free! The Australians really know how to create delightful public spaces. And now, whenever we ask Elias if he wants to go to the playground he says 'YES' and then specifies if he wants to visit the water playground or dirt playground. Water playground usually wins.

Boy, Discovered

Well, you'd think it would be hard to lose things on a boat. There's only so many places for something to be. But I find a way.

We have a great waterproof point-and-shoot camera that we have used little because the software for it was missing. But just before our Whitsunday trip I found it, and when I downloaded the camera for the first time I got a great surprise.

The first pictures to download were the ones from the Whitsundays. The last of those was this one of Elias with his friends Malachy and Remeny:

But, for some strange reason having to do with the way the camera orders pics, the next one to download was the very first picture we ever took with the camera:

This was taken June 13, 2007, ten days before we left Kodiak, when Elias was ten months old. Whooeee! Coming on this pic unexpectedly gave me a feeling of vertigo, like I was staring down a well of time.

There were a smattering of pics from other points in our trip that gave a great timeline of E's early childhood.

At a restaurant on the malecón in La Paz, Baja California, Mexico.

On a beach in the Sea of Cortez.

At our favorite ice cream joint in La Paz.

Meeting Dolores in Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas.

Taking fruit back to Pelagic.

~~~

Wow, I didn't realize he was that young during the trip!

Is It a Vacation? Or Real Life?

These wonderful people are Miles and Melissa, friends who we met in Iluka at the beginning of the year. We just spent ten days with them at Haslewood Islands, in the Whitsundays, where they camped out on the beach with their two kids.

Here is Pelagic, anchored off the beach where they camped. Haslewood is a fairly out-of-the-way spot in the Whitsundays, and camping is normally not allowed on the island. Melissa and Miles wrangled special permission from the Parks people to camp there. When we arrived, Alisa and I looked at the colors of the place and said - ahh, we're back in the tropics!

Elias LOVED having Remeny, on the left, and Malachi, on the right, to play with. I realize that I am probably not spelling those names correctly. That must of been one of the great consolations of the distant era when people gave their kids names like "John" and "Sue". You didn't have to worry about demonstrating how poorly you really know a friend by misspelling their kid's name.

We had thought that having one child on board a sailboat could be pretty hectic. This photo shows how much more chaotic three kids can be. I love all the action in this pic. Two year old Malachi really really wants a cup and his six year old sister is helpfully holding it just out of his reach. Elias is so excited by having his friends on board that he is clenching a butt cheek in one hand and stomping his foot. Melissa is wondering if she should wade in and referee the fracas between her kids. Miles, meanwhile, is doing his best to eat all the guacamole while the kids aren't looking.

In the evenings, we reverted to our normal routine on Pelagic. Here is Elias, petting the horse ("Gray Mare") that Alisa made for his birthday. He scratches Gray Mare on the nose and says a soothing "wheyyy", just like his Australian uncles do with their horses. As an aside, I will mention that Elias has recently been checking all of his stuffed animals for penises, as a way of seeing if they are daddies. Turns out they are all mommies.

"Boy, some of these connections are really loose!"

Elias is very interested in trying to catch fish with a bucket.

When he succeeds, we get an impromptu lecture on ichtyology.

Apropo of nothing, the view from the spreaders, with the deck awning set.

One day we chucked the kids on Pelagic and took them to nearby Whitehaven Beach, which according to our Rough Guide to Australia regularly makes "ten best beaches in the world" lists. In the background you can see a line of boats anchored off this famous beach - compare that with the earlier picture of Pelagic anchored all alone off Haslewood Island. A few minutes after this picture was taken, charter boats showed up and unloaded scores of daytripping beach lovers. That's how it goes in the modern world of travel - the "best" places are too hectic to be much fun, and the out of the way spots that no one has heard of are the places to be.

These are some longfin spadefish that came to Pelagic, begging for food, at the crowded anchorage at Whitehaven Beach.

This is a beach we went to on Haslewood Island a couple days later - not famous, no one else there. Just right.

Elias flew the kite that he got for his birthday.

Underwater life off the beach. The coral was out of this world, far and away the best coral I've ever seen. The underwater visibility, though, was generally terrible, which is usual for the Whitsundays.

More underwater life. Having Miles and Melissa along to watch Elias meant that Alisa and I got to snorkel together for the second time of our whole trip.

Miles brought his tinny along, and though the engine had troubles throughout the trip, the tinny was great transport.

While we were driving around to different snorkeling spots, Miles commented what a nice break from the hectic routine of working and child-rearing this trip had been for him and Melissa. I answered that it was kind of a vacation for us, too, a nice break from our routine - no work (yes, I have been working a bit in Oz!), no boat jobs, no big writing projects. But then I thought about it, and realized that these ten days weren't really a break from our routine - this was the sort of routine that we try to get into, the purest sort of cruising. We had lots of leisure time each day, in a fairly wonderful spot, and we were doing it with local friends who we never would have met if we hadn't chucked it all to spend a few years living on a sailboat, and traveling the world slowly enough to have the chance to make friends along the way.

Ahh, the sportin' life.

The end.

A Drought Ends

On our Pacific crossing we got well used to the occasional windfalls that trolling lures behind Pelagic gave us - tuna and mahi mahi became regular, though unpredictable, staples of our diet.

But when we reached Australia things changed.

We've dragged lures up and down half of the east coast of Oz, with exactly one bite - something that broke our line off the Gold Coast almost a year ago. And because we've been generally unimpressed by the fish and prawns available in the fishermen's co-ops along the coast (Alaskans can be terrible seafood snobs), fish has largely disappeared from our diets.

But, on our sail into Townsville, things changed.

Instead of the southeast trades, we found northwesterlies that made the few anchorages along this stretch of coast unusable, and kept us tacking back and forth at sea all day and all night. We passed a humpback whale cow and calf that wouldn't stop breaching and slapping the water with their pectoral fins. We passed flocks of pied imperial pigeons, striking black and white birds, flying over the water on their migration from south from New Guinea. And we caught this:

Tuna for dinner.

The last fish we "caught" from the boat was the shark that bit our windvane three times, and our rudder once, 170 miles from the Queensland coast on our passage from New Caledonia.

It looks like the drought is over.

Behold, the Platypus

Well, our email has gone unchecked lately. The blog has been quiet. Op-ed writers on the Times web site have opinioned away without reaching us. For the last two weeks or more we have been blissfully out of range of the internet, doing some great traveling in tropical Queensland. More on that soon, but for now I'll catch up with past doings.

~~~

Alisa needed a quick visit to the doctor on our sail up the coast, so we pulled into the town of Mackay ("muh-KAI"), a regional hub in sugarcane growing country. There is no anchorage in Mackay, just a marina sitting inside an artificial harbor. Normally we would just do a hit and run in such a place, but our visit to Mackay also gave us the chance to fulfill a quest we've been discussing ever since we came to Oz. So we spent three nights in the marina, and hired a car to boot.

Elias catching a ride in a marina cart. Yes, he is sitting on two cartons of beer.

Once we had taken care of our errands, we spent a day at Eungella National Park, an hour from Mackay. Like every other foreigner who comes to Eungella, we came with the goal of seeing a platypus in the wild. Before staking out the platypus habitat at dusk, we spent a few hours rambling around the upland rainforest of the Finch Hatton Gorge.

Elias taking an apple break in the rainforest.

The "Wheel of Fire" waterhole, at the end of the track. The day was very hot. The water was perfectly cold.

Alisa shamed Elias and me into submerging in the chilly water. Then we kicked it on a sun-warmed rock, ate another apple, and watched the big flock of swifts high overhead.

Along the way, we did some birding, and saw three species we'd never seen before. We didn't get pictures, of course, but I got pics of all three off the web:

Wompoo fruit dove.

Azure kingfisher.

Red-headed honeyeater.

I'm not much of a birder back home, but I love to bird when I travel. Birds are the easiest part of a foreign natural history to learn, and looking for new birds gives you something to do in those odd travel moments when you're waiting for something else to happen. Plus, in the tropics, the there are just so many bird species, and they are so beautiful.

The real quarry, though, was the platypus, which as everyone knows is a monotreme, or an egg-laying mammal, and one of the marquee stars of Australian natural history. Platypus are typically retiring and difficult to see in the wild, but there are one or two spots in the country, like the Broken River in Eungella National Park, where they've become habituated to observers.

And, to break the suspense, we did see one. Most of the people who were at the viewing platform with us had already given up, and it was starting to get dark, when a platypus came paddling down the river below us, diving to the bottom to forage and stirring up mud clouds in the clear water as it probed for food. We watched for ten minutes as it went about its business with no concern for us, and for those ten minutes we were able to behold one of the true curiosities of the world, a sleek little water beast with a duck's beak (a great example of convergent evolution, by the way) that is the only mammal to produce venom (in spurs on the males' hind legs, and strong enough to kill a dog). They're such odd bods of the living world that European naturalists examining the first stuffed specimens to be transported back from Oz immediately assumed they were fakes. And we got to just stand there and watch one do its thing. We even got a pic:

Not bad, considering the light.

It was, in addition to the happy event of seeing a wild platypus, a great all-around day, a reminder of how fun it can be to get away from Pelagic every now and then to do some exploring ashore.

And, now that we have ticked this must-do of our "while in Australia" list, we have been prompted to consider what other items should be on that list. For while we're at that point where our Australian stay seems to stretch unbroken to the time horizons before us and behind, we know that the end will come suddenly, and we'll have the chance then to regret anything that we left undone.

Pancake Creek, Mostly

We left Mooloolaba just before sunset and we felt sick. There wasn't enough wind to steady the boat's motion, and the piddling little swell kept us jerking back and forth in an unpredictable way. Alisa and I both felt miserable, immediately.


"I can't believe we were just talking about sailing to Patagonia," she said.


The night before we had been inspired by the video that our friends on Six Pack had shot in southern Chile, our imaginations stoked by the idea of heading there ourselves.


"I mean, we're getting sick outside Mooloolaba," she added.


The only person on board who wasn't sick was Elias. He sat in the cockpit, completely unruffled, and asked us why.


"Why does a motor boat float?"


"Because that's what boats are designed for, honey."


"Why?"


"Just because."


"Oh. Why do sailboats float?"

"No more questions, honey."


"Why?"


Alisa and I were gruff with each other, and short with him. Seasickness is death on tolerance for other people, no matter if those other people are your spouse and adorable child. Alisa even came up from the cabin when she was getting Elias ready for bed and hugged the rail for a moment, just on the verge of throwing up.


But we had that useless kind of seasickness that makes you unable to do anything properly - you can't even throw up when you need to.


"Right now," I said after choking down my dinner of one steamed sweet potato, "living in a house and going to a soul-destroying job every day sounds pretty good."


Eventually we got over it. We sailed into the night and left the seasickness behind. But the bug that has been stalking Alisa off and on for the last few months flared up again, and she had to return to her bunk only two hours after she relieved me on watch. Taking into account the state of the crew, we ditched our plan of sailing straight through for 36 or 48 hours and pulled into Great Sandy Strait, the first haven to the north. Here's me and Elias, in the cockpit at anchor the next day. See if you can tell which person slept the night through and which slept two hours:



We made it to Bundaberg the next day, taking advantage of our knowledge of the very well-lit entrance to arrive after dark. In Bundie Elias helped his great-uncle Ken collect eggs from the chooks:

We left Bundaberg after only a day. We're on a mission to meet up with our Iluka friends Miles and Melissa in the Whitsundays on August 24th, so no dallying for us. A long day took us to Pancake Creek, farther north than we have yet been in Oz. That night we celebrated my 41st birthday:

When it came time to make a wish, I thought to myself, "There's nothing else I want." And then I blew out the candles.

The next morning, since we were in Pancake Creek, we breakfasted on pancakes in the cockpit:

Later Elias helped me fix the compass light:

Northerly winds set in, so we stayed put in Pancake Creek. Luckily there were great tidal flats to walk:

And some birding to do:

And we went on a great "bushwalk" up the hill to the Bustard Head light, and over the hill for this view of what I am told is the second spot that James Cook went ashore in Oz:

We met some very nice people among the 15 or so boats that were anchored in Pancake Creek, mostly waiting for the northerlies to pass. We did notice, however, how overwhelmingly retirement-age the demographic was on other boats.

"Why are there no other kids on these boats?" Elias asked.

Pancake Creek was beautiful, though it's also an inscrutable beauty. We're learning the birds, but everything else is completely mysterious to us: the flora, the geology, the indigenous culture and history. So different from being in Alaska, where we lived long enough, and arrived early enough in our lives, to make ourselves feel so much at home. And at the same time that Australian natural history is so foreign, the human side of the country has this very non-exotic, proto-North American feel. Very strange combination...

So, our march north continues. We left Pancake Creek, and have crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and so are back in the tropics that we have begun to love so much. Every yacht anchorage and every town that we stop in is a place where we've never been before, but also somewhere fairly familiar just because it is Australian, and so repeats what we've experienced elsewhere in Oz.

We're in a marina today, in to run some quick errands in town and to get a mechanic to take a look at the diesel. The winds are forecast to come up strong from the south tomorrow, so we're looking forward to some good traveling. Meanwhile, Alisa and I have both had a funny feeling of loneliness as we toodle up the Queensland coast. There are no other foreign-flagged yachts about, as they have mostly left Oz for the cyclone-free season in the tropics. So we're without the company of fellow voyaging sailors, a group of people who are always capable of surprising us with sudden good friendship. Aside from the close interaction among the family on board, our social life mostly consists of waves to other boats and brief conversations with strangers. We miss the state of belonging to some sort of community, even if it is the ever-so-loose community of vagabonding sailors.

So it's good to have the visit with our Iluka friends before us, and the goal of meeting them in the Whitsundays to spur us along.