It’s not a holiday, it’s an adventure!

“It’s not a holiday, it’s an adventure!”

That’s what Paddy always tells me when things get a bit rough, I’m feeling sick or just a little scared – and I guess he has a point.

Before we went on this trip he told me that going through a bit of hardship to get to a destination makes being there even more special, and he’s right. There’s a much bigger sense of achievement in it than just getting on a plane and being there in a couple of hours.

When I was a kid I had a pretty good imagination. I read a lot and I planned to go on loads of adventures when I grew up – although my idea of adventure back then didn’t involve quite so much spewing!

As you can probably guess our trip from Fiji to Vanuatu was a little wobbly – at least at the start. It was also the first passage of more than a day or two that Paddy and I have done without crew.

I have to admit I was more than a little apprehensive about this leg, my biggest fear being that something might lay me up forcing Paddy to do all the work or something would happen to Paddy leaving me to sail the sodding boat on my own. Luckily for both of us neither happened, and now that we have successfully done it I am feeling a lot more confident.

One of the issues with cruising with just two on board is lack of sleep because there always has to be someone up on deck, particularly at night. The usual night shift schedule for a boat of two is four three hour shifts. We do 8pm to 11pm, 11pm to 2am, 2am to 5am and 5am to 8am (though often one of us will give the other an extra hour or two’s sleep if they are looking particularly shattered.)

Generally the skipper is the one who ends up getting the least amount of sleep though, because they are the one who gets woken up if the person on watch is unsure of something. I always feel bad about waking up Paddy so try not to do it unless absolutely necessary.

I found myself having to in the small hours of the morning of our second day at sea though – when I noticed a dirty great fishing boat bearing down on us. I’d been watching it for a while, thinking it might be one of the regatta boats. When it started to head straight for us though, I began to get a little concerned. I got Paddy up and we identified it as a fishing boat. He told me to keep an eye on it and to let him know if it got too close for comfort. I was determined not to get him up unnecessarily, but it just kept on coming – and I’m not talking about your little local fishing boat either. This was a great rusty hulk that could have eaten our boat for breakfast and used the mast to pick its teeth. For a horrible moment my sleep deprived brain was convinced it was trying to ram us. Paddy said it would pass us very closely, and it did – so closely in fact that he had to start the motor up and floor it to ensure there was a decent amount of space between us, which was a little ‘fascinating’.

Paddy tells me the fishing boat was in the process of ‘mowing the lawn’ (fishing in a grid) and we happened to be in its path. Not only did we have right of way because it was motoring and we were sailing, but it was approaching from our port side so even if we were motoring we still would have had right of way. The fishing boat however seemed to see it differently. It was broad daylight and he backed up a little once we moved forward, so the sod definitely saw us. At that hour of the morning I was deeply unimpressed. A second boat appeared on the horizon and the two of them started yammering to eachother on the radio (on channel 16 – the emergency channel – I might add). I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I am pretty sure some of it was Chinese for “ha ha – I just scared the pants off this yachtie girl. You should have seen her face!”

Another thing I have discovered about cruising with two that I hadn’t really thought about was that it can get a little bit lonely. Because you are getting broken sleep during the night it is really important to try to sleep during the day (NOT always easy!). So, while there are times when both Paddy and I are awake together, a lot of time is spent with one awake while the other sleeps, which means you get to spend a bit of time alone with your thoughts (or music or audio books). This, combined with lack of sleep, also means that auditory or visual hallucinations are quite common among cruisers. Paddy has heard radios and whispered conversations where there have been none. I’ve seen lights on ships that didn’t exist. During this trip I heard opera music and saw a man’s face clear as crystal in the early morning clouds, while a pile of ropes morphed into an old man with a walking stick for Paddy – hey, who needs drugs?

We actually managed to make pretty good time on this leg – mostly thanks to the ‘new’ second-hand headsail we picked up in Denerau. Wildflower doesn’t go particularly quickly directly downwind – and can be pretty wobbly to boot – so headsail number two was a bid to combat that. Paddy poled one sail out on each side in front of the boat so we were effectively set up like an old square-rigger (translation for non-boaties: the sails in front of the boat were kind of a stingray/diamond type shape instead of a triangle.) This made the boat a lot more stable and meant we were averaging 5 and a half knots (we were up to 7 at a couple of points) which is pretty good for a floating steel housebus!

The wind was pretty much all over the place though. In between good bursts we had a bunch of squalls (a few wind changes and a lot of rain) and then no wind at all, which could be extremely frustrating.

The lack of wind got me to thinking about boats I have read about in novels and poems that all seem to have ‘sails gently flapping in the breeze’. I have read it a tonne of times and never given it a second thought, but I am afraid I am going to have to pour cold water over that particular image.

If a sail is flapping – gently or otherwise it means;
a) there is no flaming breeze. Sails need wind to fill them and if there is no wind they become useless, floppy hankies. and
b) you are probably doing damage to your sails. Sails don’t like flapping – it puts strain in all the wrong places. In racing boats they reckon it costs $10 a flap.
So I am terribly sorry to all romantic readers, but there will be no gentle flapping on this boat if we can help it.

In other news – the Mighty Speights Lure had a bit of plastic surgery after getting munched by a few fish and became the Mighty Some Other Brand of Beer that Comes in a Blue Can Lure and managed to snag us three tuna on the way here. None were as big as the Tuna of Doom from the Tonga passage but they were pretty decent nonetheless – photos to come

What we have seen of Vanuatu so far has been beautiful and the people are lovely, but that’s a whole different blog. We are thinking of you all heaps – particularly those in the snowy isles at the moment. Try to stay warm! xxxooo