Month: April 2019

Back in the Water

To be honest, I’ve been trying to do another blog post for about the last three weeks. I start them, even finish them, but then can’t seen to find a time when the internet connection is good enough for long enough without interruption to actually upload everything. Then we are onto something else. Besides, this part of the journey is different than the previous couple of years. Then, like people going for a walk in the woods and wanting to go a little farther to see what’s up ahead; to maybe find that storied hidden glen they’d heard so much about, only to get there, see it, and then discover that the woods have grown dark behind them when they turn around to head home in time for dinner. Well, we sailed our own boat across a big chunk of latitude until the sun was in the north and the moon was upside down. We made it to New Zealand, saw it, did it, even bought a few T-shirts. But now we gotta get back home to mow the lawn and finish painting the house. That means that this part of our trip is for an entirely different purpose. It’s all about sailing back home. It’s all about moving an old boat from Point A to Point B. Sure, we did give a thought or two about selling the boat. But hey, what’s the fun in that? We got ourselves this far into the woods, we’re going to get ourselves back out.

It hasn’t been easy so far. This is the tail end (we hope) of the wet and hot season in Fiji. Being from Seattle, those seem like opposite weather concepts, but here the heat and humidity literally takes your breath away. We both had some first-hand experience with that. On the Thursday before Easter, we had two—or three if you count the taxi driver—groups of hired help doing physical labor for us. A couple guys washed, waxed and polished the upper hull—so easy while just about everything below the waterline is in a pit (actually, more like a trench), no ladders required. We had another group emptying our rented storage unit and loading everything into the back of a taxi. Then the taxi drove it all to the boat, and the guys unloaded everything and put it up on the deck. The distance was only a few hundred meters, but it sure beat lugging it all by hand like we did last year (right, Robyn?). Besides, all the rain had turned the road into pretty much a gooey, slippery mess. In addition to the hired help, Bill from the boat Ballena (Martin’s dad) had offered to help us with a few of the projects, such as getting the self-steering system back together, reinstalling the wind generator on the mizzen mast, and best of all, helping us fix a problem that has plagued us since the beginning of our trip: a liquid (okay, sewage) leak in our marine head. Marine Sanitation & Supply in Seattle had supplied us with a few parts and several suggestions, but Bill did the really hard physical heavy hitting. Literally, pounding with the biggest, heaviest hammer we could borrow from the guys in the boatyard workshop. In the middle of this productive and successful day, Julie was the first to have trouble. Suddenly unable to continue working, lying flat on her back and feeling sick, she asked for water and then started dumping it on herself. A little later it was my turn. It hit suddenly. I could not catch my breath. I was breathing hard, way too hard, but it was almost like I was getting no oxygen. I needed to sit down, but we were in the middle of something, and questions needed answers. The hard breathing continued and still I couldn’t catch my breath. This was not normal. I had never felt like this before. It went on and on, and I actually got a little worried that I was going to pass out and keel over. I had never felt like that before, either. We all called it a day, cooled off and went to the marina restaurant for lunch and cold drinks.

Finally, the day came. After the travel lift spun its wheels in the soft ground, only getting traction after enough shovel fulls of gravel, old tires and chunks of wood were thrown in front of its wheels, all 26 tons of Mysticeti was lifted from the pit and moved to the water’s edge where it was put up on stands beneath swaying palm trees in full view of the South Pacific sunset so that more hired help could put on another coat of bottom paint (plus a little extra leftover donated by our new friends on Crazy Love) while we bolted on the last remaining missing replacement piece of our Saye’s Rig self-steering: the broken off and sunk tiller arm. Not knowing the dimensions and bend angles of the stainless steel tiller arm that had been custom fitted during the original installation in the early eighties, all we had to work with was a few key measurements and whatever photographs we had taken over the years that just happened to show the original tiller arm. From that, we spent much of last January with a computer making a scaled drawing that, to the best that we could know, closely matched the dimensions and bend angles of the original. Then we gave it to Tim at Meridian Stainless, in Port Townsend, WA. We picked up his finished creation a few days before we flew back to Fiji. We haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it fit the rudder perfectly without any tweaking or screwing around.

We have a plan to sail back home. Of course, we had a plan last year too. But a few things will be different this time. For one, we got rid of the SPOT tracker. It had given us something to do: push a button twice a day. But it didn’t have enough satellite coverage away from land, and it would only keep our positions for six days. We never really knew if it was working or not. We plan to stick with the Farkwar map, if it still recognizes us. We won’t spend as much time around land as we did before, so we won’t have as much internet access, and we’ll rely on SSB Sailmail, and a new Garmin InReach. We plan to sail (or power, since it’s likely upwind) from Fiji to Apia, Samoa. We hope to only stay there just about long enough to refuel, refill the water tanks, and provision for the long haul. From Samoa it is hopefully a direct shot to Hawaii, with a potential stop along the way if necessary. We already have a marina reservation on Oahu, so we have to be there. And after Hawaii, we should be home in early August. Another new thing this year is we have a third crew. Her name is Jan, she came to us after spending time in Central America.

So, we’re out of the pit and back in the water. Still working to prepare the boat, we’ll be in the marina for a few more days. Then we’ll sail around a bit to test things out before checking out of Fiji and heading toward Samoa.

Original tiller arm bolted to upper edge of rudder, 2011
New Tiller Arm, 2019


Back in Fiji

Does this thing still work?

After being home for one of the strangest spans of eight months I can remember, full of surprises both pleasant and not, where things happened, but not always in the way we would’ve expected; where so much of what had been familiar became some kind of bizarre topsy-turvy world where true was false and fake was real; where, at one of the lowest lows, we discussed selling the boat right where it was in the pit; we have, instead, returned to the heat and humidity of Fiji. It’s time to get the boat and deliver it home.

We arrived on a crowded, cramped, eleven hour night flight from San Francisco to Nadi. Other than being painfully uncomfortable for both of us (A few days earlier Julie had fallen through a rotten porch and banged up her leg–which already had a bad hip), I realized during the night that for all the years Julie and I have been married, and all the places we’ve been to together, we can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we’ve actually sat next to each other on the same airplane. It was a rarity to be seatmates. Once on the ground, we breezed through Immigration with the help of a “Facilitation Letter” from the Vuda marina, signed and stamped by officialdom, explaining why we were traveling with no return ticket. Don’t leave your boat and go home without one.

We brought along at least 300 pounds of luggage spread over seven separate bags. With virtually zero sleep during the previous 48 hours of final preparation and travel, the first thing I did in Fiji was forget to pick up one of those seven bags at the baggage claim. I pulled it off the carousel, but then apparently left it behind on the floor as we moved on to the next stop in the carnival fun-house that is arriving by air in a foreign country: Customs. The letter from Vuda was again very useful at clearing our way without having to pay import duties on the more expensive items we brought along with us, such as the custom-made replacement for the critical piece of our self-steering system that broke off and is somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific offshore of New Zealand.

The bag I had forgotten to pick up was full of odd-looking metal parts: a carburetor for an outboard motor; a hefty, solid-bronze pump shaft; various stainless-steel and aluminum parts including axle hubs designed for robots (don’t ask), and lots of things with wires and circuit boards. I would imagine that to an x-ray machine or Customs officer (all bags are x-rayed in Fiji Customs), none of these things look like normal tourist items for a beach holiday. It wasn’t until more than an hour later, while we were sitting at an airport coffee shop trying to wake up from not sleeping, that I realized this particular bag was not with the others stacked on the cart next to us. Slightly panicked, I could not remember seeing it since it came off the carousel.

I could only imagine what might’ve happened had this been a US airport. You know, “unattended suspicious package,” terminal evacuation, remote-controlled bomb-sniffing x-ray vision robot, police barricades, sirens, flashing lights, news helicopters, etc. Fortunately, this is Fiji. It was a relatively painless process to be escorted back into the secure area, claim my missing bag, which had already been taken to a separate room, and go through Customs with it again. Good to know that there are people in the world who still see the simplest explanation as the most likely to be true.

So, momentarily awake, or so it seemed, we were ready for our next mistake. Since it was still early morning, we asked our taxi driver to take us through the nearby Denarau Island area because we wanted to see where a certain marine store was located before going back the other way to Vuda. I would guess that only when not thinking clearly following 48 hours of sleep deprivation, would one decide that being driven around aimlessly by a taxi driver was a good idea. I fought hard to keep my eyes open. I think I mostly did, but not sure how much I actually saw. I remember stopping at a very impressive, intricately-colored temple (or was it a dream?) where our driver asked if we wanted to take a picture or tour the inside. But I don’t know if we ever saw the store we were looking for. I guess it could’ve been worse. We had agreed to a set price before we left the airport.

Once back at the marina, we were greeted and welcomed back like old friends. Someone asked if our daughter was with us this time. We said she was home finishing her first year of college. Martin, the ten-year-old, multi-lingual child-of-the-world that we continually ran into last year, first in Nuku Hiva, then all along the way to New Zealand, is a year older now. He recognized us and said, “You’re back!” Obviously, many of the other boats we sailed with last year have long since moved on by now, but there is still enough familiarity here that we feel like nothing much has changed. Even our boat is exactly the same as how we left it.

We had hired Ritesh Kumar, of Krishna Yacht Services, to mind our boat while we were gone. He monitored the batteries, aired the interior, placed dehumidifiers in the cabin, washed the deck and periodically ran the engine while we were gone. He also took photos every month or so, which he emailed to us. He’s an engine guy, knows his stuff, and we can’t say enough good things about him.

Unfortunately, while we were gone the boat didn’t get any younger, fix itself of the things that were broken, or magically make more space inside. I guess we need to get to work on all of that. That is, maybe as soon as we sit a little longer in the cooling afternoon breeze. And have another beer. After all, some acclimatization is in order since we made a pretty sudden change from a colder than normal Seattle winter.