“I wish everyone who knew me could know the sailing me!” I posted this on Facebook today. It was one of those thoughts that popped into my head ready to publish, and didn’t require a lot of fact checking. As the day passed though, I found myself coming back to that thought. What makes the sailing me noteworthy, why do I prefer it to the geeky me, or the business me, or the city slicker me? ...
There are many kinds of books and as many kinds of book lovers. So please read the following from your own perspective and not through my eyes. You know that feeling when you pick up a good book, and you just can’t put it down? You know the feeling when you get to the end and desperately hope that the author writes a sequel, or another book as good as the one you just put down? I love that feeling. That’s how I want to feel about my life. ...
You have seriously got to be kidding me. I love this city so much I want to dig up the homes of my family and friends and move them all here. Today we went to the Queensland State Library with the kids. We tricked them (yes, I am that devious) by telling them about the Augmented Reality treasure hunt that uses the ipad to find clues. In reality it is the best ruse ever to get kids to follow their parents on a magical tour of the coolest library I have ever been to. ...
Krister summed it up pretty perfectly over margaritas the other night, “This place is like a joke, it’s like they said let’s take all the money the US spends on the military and spend it on public services.” Nail, meet hammer. Brisbane has free museums, free multi-city-block-long-swimming-lagoon-with imported sand, free public transportation in and around the city center, free bikes to ride, reliable water fountains, tons of live music, and a government mandate that building owners provide public facing art installations. This place is like a joke, and I love the punchline. ...
We’ve got a wordy type post in the making. In the meantime you can feast your eyes on some photos from Port Vila and the most spectacular Chesterfield Reef. Chesterfield was a safety option for us on our passage to Australia. I was pretty sure that we wouldn’t stop there but as we got close fate forced our hand. Am I ever glad it did. Chesterfield deserved a week but we had only a few days to enjoy it. We made good use of the time, fixing boat problems, snorkeling, beach combing, and hanging out with our friends on Britannia. Our time was up too soon and we headed out into some nasty weather to make it to Australia before the rally ended. Next time around we will definitely make more time for this sweet spot!
Mystery Island is a little sand spit in the lagoon that we anchored in at Anatom. The island is haunted—or so the locals believe—and this makes it uninhabitable for any ni-Vanuatu. The interesting thing is that they don’t mind going over there for the day to sell cheap “made in China” trinkets to cruise ship tourists. They get a lot of opportunities to do this too as a cruise ship pulls in every 3-5 days (in season) to barf out a few thousand pink gaudily dressed tchotchke-hungry consumers. As a result the island has been “developed” into a kind of Survivoresqe theme park, part tasteful thatch shelter, part gauche photo-op, but all very interesting if you happen to go over there when the show isn’t on. ...
As we made our way across the Pacific we were perpetually asking “can we spend a little more time here?” After ~10 years of putting off today’s desires in favor of tomorrow’s dream it was finally time to say “Yes, why not!” The down side to this was that we knew that every extra day we spent in today’s paradise would be borrowed from tomorrow’s. You can only defer for so long before the cyclone threat starts making your choices for you. ...
Four days after making landfall on Hiva Oa we sailed into Baie Hanavave on Fatu Hiva, the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It is the most beautiful place I can even imagine. The hills are high and covered with a hundred colors of green. Palm trees lean toward the ocean cliffs. The grassy areas are dotted with mountain goats. The sky is a dark blue, heavy with mist, and threatens to explode into a squall or a rainbow. I wonder if rainbows are overlooked here. I can’t find a local person that can tell me what they’re called in French or Marquesan. ...
Q: How about pulling watch all alone with the family below… How is Victoria handling the watches… how long are you on deck for at night? Are you clipping in? How are you staying awake? What was the sea state like? A: My first overnight passage was from Monterrey to Morro Bay California, early on in our trip. By morning I [Victoria] was so entirely exhausted that after dropping the anchor over the bow I just lay down to take a nap right there on the foredeck. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open enough to get back to the cockpit to sleep never mind peeling off my 14 layers of warm clothes to crawl into bed. ...
There is a distinct playful, childlike pleasure to be found in sailing a small boat. Sailing a bigger boat is blissful, calming, empowering, but it requires serious prep, planning, and attention too. When Olive woke up on Monday morning and exclaimed “Today looks like a GREAT day for sailing,” I immediately petitioned the Interwebs for local friends with boats. You can imagine my elation when, a few hours later, a Facebook friend (Diana Roberts) offered up Liliana, a Herreshoff 12.5 (aka, Buzzard’s Bay Girls Boat) for our pleasure. ...