First Bites

If you're wondering if this will ever again be a blog about sailing the world, take heart.  We have resolved to make an offer on a boat this week.  Unfortunately we just heard that the boat that was edging towards the top of our list is under contract.  But the search continues!

Meanwhile, to paraphrase someone, life is what happens while you're looking for your next boat.  We had a big milestone yesterday - Eric's first solid food, which Alisa kindly delayed by a couple weeks so that I could be present.

I don't know if waiting for me to get back had anything to do with it, but he was clearly ready, following each spoonful of rice cereal with his eyes and leaning forward, mouth open, as they came within range.

The entertaining part for us was his reaction as each mouthful went down... apparently the sensation takes a little getting used to.

Another milestone passes...

~~~

Elias in his wooly mammoth mask.

The end.

Home

I went back to North America without a camera, so all I have is the five pictures that I took with my computer during the flights.

It was a work trip - one week in Oregon and two weeks in Alaska.

I don't miss Alaska when I'm gone, I think because I'm still enjoying our traveling so much.

But I was surprised at how powerful an experience it was to fly into Alaska on this trip - it was really a bit overwhelming to be back in that place.

Part of it is the scale and the beauty.  Alaska is so much more, and more beautiful, than anywhere that we've been lately.  The state is as wide as the continent of Australia, and you could lose New Zealand in Chugach State Park and forget where you put it.  I've always thought that Alaskans who go traveling to compare things unfavorably with home are particularly tiresome.  But when you return after an absence, the comparison with everything that you've seen since you've been away is inescapable.

But the draw of the place is more than the roadless mountains and wild rivers.  Alaska is just home, the place where we still have good friends in a whole bunch of different places, the place where Alisa and I each put our roots down seperately and then built a life together, the place where we plan to return.  We were lucky enough to be young in Alaska and to feel it as a place that was equal to our boundless energy, and now it's just part of us.

So I enjoyed the trip, and seeing our friends, even if about half of them did let me know that if only one of us could come back, they'd sort of prefer that it was Alisa and not me.  And when I got back to Hobart I found Eric with croup, and Alisa with a fever, and Elias with ants in his pants.  If we're lucky Alaska will be home again, but for now home is wherever the four of us are, and I got home just in time.

What do we want?

Heather asked, so here it is - the list of things that we are looking for in our next boat.  This will likely be most interesting for people who are really into sailboats!

1) A metal hull.  If we really want to sail the Northwest Passage, we want a metal hull.  Aluminum if we can get it.

2) An insulated hull.

3) Total length 39-42 feet.  A little bigger if we had to.

4) Three sleeping cabins.  One for us, one for the boys, and one for the survival suits/cockpit cushions/bikes/sails/deck awnings and everything else.  Or alternately, two cabins and some very serious additional storage space.

5) A cutter rig.  Or a sloop that we can convert to a cutter.  Or a ketch, if we had to.

6) A skeg-hung rudder.  Or even (god forbid) a keel-hung rudder.  But not a spade rudder.

7) A well-maintained boat, with good sails and standing and running rigging.

8) A u-shaped galley.

9) Big water tanks.

10) A hard dodger (optional!).

11) A specific set of bells and whistles: windvane, radar, a good autopilot, an over-sized windlass, over-sized anchors and chain, solar panels, life raft, folding propellor, wind generator, ham/SSB radio, steps on the mast, cruising spinnaker.  As many of these as possible.

12) 195 cm of headroom.

13) In our budget!

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable list.  But though we've seen many boats with eight or nine of these items, we've never seen one with ten or more.  

Some serious compromises seem inevitable.

How'd that happen?

This one really snuck up on me: Alisa reminded me that October 22nd is the second anniversary of our arrival in Australia.

The pictures are of me raising the courtesy and quarantine flags on our arrival Down Under, and poppin' the Dom to celebrate the end of our Pacific crossing.

Auckland airport, international departure lounge

Aotearoa

Before anything else, the awareness of again being in Polynesia.  Signs in a Polynesian language and Polynesian faces create inescapable images - of the Land of the Long White Cloud, of voyaging canoes, and tapu and a cosmology expressed in swirling tattoos.  Having sailed a small boat through the vowel-rich archipelagos of the Marquesas and Tuamotus and Tonga, it will be forever impossible for me to be aloof towards Polynesia.

Signs

Driving to meet a yacht broker at a marina, I see the unmistakable signs that I'm entering the uneasy territory that yachties at times cannot escape.  In this case, the signs are literally signs – street signs.  People living on sailboats, as much as they resist, at times find themselves needing a marina.  And the marina, so often, is the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar coastal development scheme, soulless and expensive and straight from the imagination of an inadequately-talented designer of some sort.  Terrible places just because they are so diametrically different from the dream of palm-fringed anchorages that beats in the heart of any yachtie.   I know I'm arriving in one of these places when I start passing signs for "Spinnaker Dr" and "Trimaran Ct" – in the US and Australia and now NZ, it seems that designers working on these sorts of places cannot resist these specific names.

The Joy of Fatherhood Travels with You

Driving along a twisting two-lane highway through countryside that is lush and hilly but not mountainous, offering the visual delight of family-scaled farms passing one and another.  And then, around a bend in the road, a vision: a small flock of sheep all inexplicably dyed bright pink-red.  A sign announces "Sheep World: sheep and dog demonstrations daily".  A dismissive thought about impossibly rustic Kiwi attractions might have come to mind.  Instead, that cringing feeling that I get right where the heart is meant to be as I think, oh god, Elias would LOVE that.

Is it Their Fault?

I viewed four boats beside the one that I came to 'en-zed' to see.  One was very nice.  Painfully, dreamily nice.  Nearly too nice to be true.  A 40-footer, 1987 hull.  Bought in the U.S. by a Swiss couple who had already circumnavigated the aqueous sphere in a different chapter of their lives, on a different boat.  They knew what they were about.  They refitted the boat, and where normally a "refit" is broker-speak for a bunch of big jobs done on a boat poorly, these two did it right.  New rigging, new sails, new liferaft, all new electronics, new fuel and water tanks, a new Monitor windvane glinting like yacht jewelry on the stern.  And all of it done proper.  Not "professional", since being a shipwright is usually halfway to being a criminal, and a "professional" job in the sailboat world typically means something done to a standard good enough only for boats that live in marinas.  This boat is better than professional.  And so it offers half of what we want – proper kit, used enough to work, but not tired.  But the other half of what we want, a particular set of design criteria, isn't there, so I move on.

And then I see three disaster yachts in quick succession.  One a terrible design, and two others that will be ready to cruise again just as soon as someone spends a year or two working full-time on them.  I walk through these two, noticing dozens of jobs that need doing.  Meanwhile, on each boat, the broker is standing in the background, muttering things like, "they knew how to build them back then", and "for the price of a little new gear, someone's going to get themselves a rock-solid yacht here".  And all I can think is how impossibly hard it must be to remain honest with yourself if you flog over-used boats for a living.

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.