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.