The Logical Route and Aluminum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.