Oh, no! Not another learning experience!

Whangarei, NZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shack Weekend

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

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

Pelagic Sails

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


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


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


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


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


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

Cheap, Fast, Out of Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's just an idea...

~~~

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

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

Citizenship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penguins!

Two house-sits ago.

One house-sit ago.

Current house-sit.

Three diaper blow-outs ago.

Most recent dinner party - baked Alaska!

Four precious moments ago.

~~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Kastom

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