Leaving Iluka

Our friend Michelle organized a barbie at Woody Head last weekend for the whole Iluka crew. After everyone had eaten we all went for a walk along the shore. These pictures of that walk sum up the best of Iluka for me - good people, a big crew of kids for Elias to slot into, and a setting where those kids have every chance of enjoying an idyllic childhood - a place that is very beautiful and not crowded, where life can be reasonably slow of pace and (though this part doesn't appear in the photos) families are not organized around earning two incomes.

Cronies.

The next morning as we were heading out for a surf, my friend Miles said, "Yeah. They're not a bad mob."

The inescapable condition of social life in a small town is that you are dependent on the chance collection of peers that is available to you - there's little room for searching out a more convivial social scene, as you might in a city. And that's the joy of Iluka, that there's such a good group of people here. It's fun to think of us settling down here long enough to have the next baby, and Alisa and I have considered it... but the horizon still calls! Tasmania is in the offing! Winds allowing, we're out of here on Saturday!

While we're excited, it's also sad in a way to leave - we can look down the path of a potential life here and see ourselves quite content. And that's one of the real tensions of our permanent state of travel. We move far enough afield, and travel slowly enough, that we end up meeting wonderful people in places that we never even heard of before we left home. But then we keep moving.

~~~

Tasmania is a thousand miles away, and we've left ourselves about a month to get there before Alisa's third trimester begins. Today Alisa and I realized that this trip to Tassie will most likely be our last cruise aboard Pelagic. We are firm in our conviction that a fourth person will make this boat too crowded for us, and the plan is to sail to Hobart, buy a car and rent a house, get into the boatyard, get a coat of fresh paint on the old barky, and put her on the market.

Although we're excited at the prospect of a new home afloat, we're a bit gobsmacked that the end of the Pelagic years is suddenly upon us.

Our Australia

My dad was born and raised in Australia, but has spent most of his adult life in the U.S. On his trips back to Oz through the years he has of course mostly visited family, and hasn't spent much time exploring new parts of the country.

He just visited us in Iluka for two weeks. This was a great chance for us to catch up with him, and it was also a chance for Alisa and me to show him "our" spot in Oz - a place that we discovered on our own, and that, not at all incidentally, is similar in some ways to the more rural, more lightly populated coastal Australia that my dad remembers from the good old days - a place, in other words, where you can still find solitude on a beautiful beach without trying very hard at all.

Elias slept over at my dad's holiday unit a lot - half the nights dad was here, or more. The first night he had trouble going to sleep - "I don't want you to go!" he said as I was tucking him in, losing all his bravery. He woke up that night crying and didn't fall asleep again until my dad had sung Waltzing Matilda ten times, and in the morning he was inconsolable until Alisa and I returned from Pelagic. But within a few days he was volunteering how much he liked sleeping in a room of his own, and by the end of the visit he was crawling into bed with my dad early in the morning and falling back asleep.

Elias also enjoyed playing cricket with my dad. Cultural milestone - cricket, not baseball, was his first sport with bat and ball! The cricket-savvy among you will realize that Elias isn't quite using the wicket in the accepted manner.

My Dad arrived with goodies we had ordered from the U.S. - including Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Alisa, let loose in the vast expanse of a real kitchen, as opposed to our tiny galley, outdid herself. She even made pork chops, which I have been requesting(fruitlessly) for two years.

Having Elias and my dad together brought up inescapable thoughts about time, and the march of us from one generation to another. My mom's dad is 94, my dad is a hale 71, I'm banging along at 41, and Elias is 3. Early in the visit I got to trot out my authoriatian persona when I looked up and saw Elias kicking his grandad on the couch ("DON'T YOU KICK YOUR GRANDFATHER!"). Later that day dad told me that when his father visited us in the States, my dad looked up at one point to see three year old me kicking my 80 year old grandad. What an idea - I don't have any memories of my dad's dad, and I would give anything to know what he sounded like, to talk with him for an hour and see how similar he was to my dad, hear some of his life experience, etc. But when I was three, I was happy to just sit there and kick him.

Elias, meanwhile, has only the foggiest notion of time spans greater than a year. But when he asks us if we love him, and we say "yes", his next question is, "Will you love me forever?"

Having Been There

I was sitting in the cockpit in the anchorage in Mooloolaba when a dude motoring by in a beat-up inflatable stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted something.

-What's that? I shouted back.

-Were you in Aitutaki? he shouted again.

I scanned my forty-year old synapses while he motored over. Aitutaki. Aitutkai? By the time he had pulled alongside Pelagic I was able to report - No, we weren't in Aitutaki.

-Oh. Well then. Must have been another Pelagic.

He had a great English accent that I couldn't identify at all, something rural and lilting, and he had that lived-in look that yachties get when they haven't had to fit into an office environment for years.

We quickly established that he had crossed the Pacific the year before us. He had been in Nuku'alofa for the funeral of the previous king of Tonga, we had been in Neiafu during the coronation celebrations for the new king.

We fell into the delightful conversation that transpires between two strangers who recognize each other as initiates. He told me about bottoming out on every wave trough in the pass into Haraiki. I told him about wrapping our anchor chain in twenty meters of water in Makemo, and tearing up our list of atolls to visit in Tahanea. He told me a frankly unbelievable story about family interactions on Maupiti and I told him about hunting goats on Ua Pou.

-So what are you doing now? I asked.

-Ah, I've been here in Mooloolaba for two years. Working. You've got to work to make some money, but then there's no time to keep up the yacht, and well, then you're trapped?

We agreed it would be great to cross the tropical Pacific again. We could spend time in places we had loved, see some of the places that are harder to get to. And we would have the benefit of knowing what we know now, and wouldn't have to spend so much time figuring things out.

Then, after talking for ten minutes, he left. When Alisa came back to the boat I told her about the interaction, but it was hard to explain why that little chat seemed so important.

Maybe it was because, casually talking about this island and that, we each realized how lucky we had been to cross the Pacific once, and how improbably lucky we would have to be to do it again.

Dolores and Elias, Taipivai, Nuku Hiva.

The Three Lies

On this blog we mostly write for a non-sailing audience. But over time a lot of fellow sailors have asked us what it's "really like" to chuck it all to go sailing full time. As always, becoming adept at cruising long distances is a very personal journey, and what works for us will not work for some. But, for what it's worth, Alisa and I can boil down some of the biggest lessons we've learned about full-time sailing into the three "lies" of conventional wisdom about ocean cruising:

Lie #1 - You can be comfortable at sea.
Alisa and I were both lucky enough to work on commercial fishing boats in Alaska before we went cruising. Those boats were BIG - 90 to 150 feet, and, even though they were working boats, pretty luxurious - they didn't roll anything like as much as Pelagic, and we could always get a hot shower after our work was done. Even so, we spent a significant amount of our time on those boats being slightly uncomfortable to completely miserable. We figured that was just part of going to sea.

But a lot of cruisers seem to have this slavish devotion to being "comfortable" on their boats, and people tell us they don't like passages because being at sea for a long time is so uncomfortable. We (subtly, I hope) roll our eyes at this. "Comfortable" at sea - WHATEVER! Forget about it. People who want to be comfortable on their boats end up sitting in marinas. Sailing long distances across the ocean in a small boat is an adventure, it's a damn spirit quest, it's an act of self-directed will so intense as to be almost mythically beautiful. Who cares if the sheets are salty, or you're vomiting over the side?

Lie #2 - You will have lots of free time.
Here, our experience may not be representative at all, since we set out from home with a 10-month old child, our boat is 27 years old, I have continued to work on and off while we lived aboard, and I've also pursued the time-devouring task of trying to write as we go. That's a lot to tackle. But, understand this, anyone who would go to sea full time for a year or two: there is NEVER a time when we don't have some desperately long to-do list of boat maintenance jobs hanging over us. That list is usually posted over the chart table, for all to see, and we long ago gave up any hope of ever seeing the end of it.

Lie #3 - Technology is your friend.
I'm no Luddite. I love roller furling. I couldn't explain why anyone would want to sail without GPS. But, the hyper tricked-out, super-complex state of cruising yachts that people take as a given has nothing to do with what's best for going to sea. It's a state of affairs dreamed up by yacht gearmakers and advertisers and the sailing magazines that serve them. Fancy stuff like watermakers can be nice, but it's a mistake to get stuff like that until you've been cruising for a year or three, you're on top of all the basics, and you know that you really really want a watermaker. Otherwise, you'll turn out like so many who were convinced that you "gotta have" a watermaker to cruise, and you'll find yourself wasting money and time (see #2), trying to get the thing to work, when you could have just been taking a nice dinghy ride to get a few jugs of water.

The same argument applies to networked electronics, big freezers, gensets, long-range internet access, and a lot else. All those things can be nice, individually, but paying for and maintaining and learning to use all that stuff will, collectively, keep you from a lot of sailing. Read some Bernard Moitessier before you go sailing, and go sailing to be free!

Fellow Travellers, Wrecked

If we had a totemic bird on Pelagic, it would have to be either the short-tailed or sooty shearwater. These two bird species nest at high latitudes in the southern hemisphere, in places like Tasmania and New Zealand, and they venture as far south as Antarctica to gather food for their chicks. And then when the breeding season is over they fly all the way to the Bering Sea for the northern summer.

Any bird that migrates between Alaska and Australia has got to be close to our hearts!

I was walking on the Iluka main beach the other day and discovered a tiny "wreck" of short-tailed shearwaters. There were eight carcasses on the beach, all but one of them very fresh and left by the last high tide. There was another bird on the beach still alive, awaiting its fate. (These are very pelagic birds that normally come to land only to breed, so one that is just sitting on the beach has clearly just about had it.)

And, most touching of all, there were two swimming in the surf - paddling away from land, but slowly, inevitably being washed into the beach by the waves.

"Wrecks" are a big part of seabird ecology. Very numerous birds like short-tailed / sooty shearwaters (I have seen them described as the most numerous bird in Alaska, or even the most numerous wild bird in the world) require large concentrations of food, especially when they are spent by the demands of an Alaska-Australia migration. It's common for these highly aggregated bird species to die en masse when foraging conditions are bad. So I assume the birds I saw had made it all the way to Australia on their pre-breeding migration, and then starved.

I brought a carcass back to the boat to ID it:

Separating the two species at sea is notoriously difficult, but the bill of this bird perfectly matched the short-tailed shearwater bill in our field guide.

Seabird geeks out there will notice how light the underwing of this bird was. If I'm not mistaken (?), it's the sooties that tend to have lighter underwings.

This all ended a bit freakishly. After we were done with the carcass, we chucked it into the harbor. Twenty minutes later, we got int the dinghy to go meet some friends at the pub for dinner. And what do we see right off the stern of the boat?

A short-tailed shearwater, swimming straight at us.

Seeing a short-tailed in a place like the Iluka harbor, on the Clarence River, is so unusual that we couldn't shake the feeling that it was the bird we had been handling in the cockpit, come mysteriously back to life. We had to drive around the harbor until we found the dead bird before we were sure that the second bird was a different (and also obviously very distressed) individual.

The next day I walked the beach and saw only one fresh carcass. And there was a feeding flock of gulls and terns in the surf, with some short-tailed shearwaters joining in.

So it looked like the travellers were getting a much-needed feed.

Spelling

Alisa and I spell out loud as fast as a teenager texts. Spelling key words of our conversations gives us a tiny bit of privacy in the cramped confines of Pelagic. It's our way of talking about topics that we don't want processed and repeated by a three year old.

We have often rued the day when Elias would learn to spell.

Like most things parenting, it came sooner than anticipated.

This morning at breakfast Alisa and I were spelling the same word a little too frequently. It was a short word, one that Elias could master with a little repetition. And so, with cups of tea and coffee steaming beside us, and bowls of yoghurt in our laps, we got to listen to our little pride and joy spell his first-ever word.

S-E-X! Elias said triumphantly. S-E-X!

Widen the Gutters

There are a few towns that you look forward to revisiting - places where you know you'll find like-minded people, places that fill you with a bit of elation when you return to align the actual sights with the memories of your last visit that you've been keeping alive. There's a great line from On the Road that I always think of when I'm coming back to one of those towns - when Dean Moriarty is about to arrive in Denver, Kerouac writes that

"preparations had to be made to widen the gutters and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies".

I repeated that quote to Alisa as we were lining up the entrance to the Clarence River, finally arriving in Iluka after two weeks of hard yakka and mostly upwind sailing from Mackay.

Hmm, she said. Widen the gutters and foreshorten certain laws? Is it going to be all that?

It sure will, I said. And in this case you're the suffering bulk, and I'm the bursting ecstasies.

~~~

We headed south from Mooloolaba on the last leg of the trip with a sense of optimism that translated the forecast of SE-NE winds into a better-than-even chance of not having southeasterlies. Well, we found southeasterlies, so we spent the afternoon and evening beating into the weather, yet again. But the night fell calm, and a light northerly arose in the morning, and by noon we were running gloriously before a northerly wind, sailing wing and wing just like we did on tradewind passages, making 8 knots with the current behind us and revelling in the dry decks and level boat. Here's Elias at dawn on that last day:

And here's how salty Pelagic became during all that spray-flying, deck-soaking windward sailing. Wipe your hand over any surface above decks, and you come away with a handful of salt crystals:

But now we're here, and all that uncomfortable travelling on a deadline is behind us. There was even an early groundswell behind the idea of just staying here to have the new crew, in a town where we know some wonderful people, instead of heading off to Tasmania where we know no one. But that idea didn't last long - when we settle down again, we're going to do it in Alaska. For now we're in travelling mode, so we're going to keep moving and see a few more places before we leave Oz.

~~~

Here are a few pics I took on my first walk around Iluka. What else could a couple of Alaskans far from home want?