Christmas at Sea

As you can probably tell by the title of this blog, we didn’t manage to make it home for Christmas day.  The original title was ‘Weather Forecasters are Lying Bastards Part 3’ – but after the lovely Christmas day we had on the water I decided that was far too negative.

When we were finally able to leave Auckland it looked as though our biggest problem would be not enough wind – and for the first couple of days that was pretty much true to form. When the wind did blow from the South (the direction we were trying to travel in) there was so little of it that it was inconsequential – which was why the 30 knot Southerlies we got in the middle of the Bay of Plenty came as such a rude shock.

We’ve been in stronger winds and much more uncomfortable conditions in Wildflower before and coped fine, but I think that must have been the last straw for me, because I kinda lost it. I was still able to do everything I needed to, including clambering up on deck in the howling wind (with a harness on Mummy!) to reef the mainsail and frantically pulling on ropes while the poor boat’s sails crashed and banged, but once all that was done I am ashamed to admit that I hunkered down on the floor of the cockpit and bawled like an angry kitten. I had had enough, I wanted off the boat, I wanted out of these shitty conditions and most of all – I just wanted to get home.  It felt like we had been trying to get down south forever. We had already planned to have a belated Christmas with my family in Christchurch, but I was really missing them and was just a teensy bit over it all.

Paddy handled it like a champ. He held my hand and let me rant and rave, which was exactly what I needed. In the end we tacked out to sea for most of the night to keep us clear of the land and tacked back in again in the morning so we could round East Cape. It meant we lost about a day going out of our way but by the time we got round East Cape (which has a reputation for being a little windy) conditions had settled down and it was pretty uneventful.

Unfortunately for Paddy my next attack of Neurotic Crew Syndrome came the following day when we finally got the chance to check our Winlink radio email. Paddy came up to the cockpit, gave me a hug and said “there’s been a couple more quakes in Christchurch, but everybody’s okay.” Dad had emailed us to let us know because he had assumed we would have heard something on the news and been worried, which was absolutely the right thing to do. Unfortunately we hadn’t had any traditional radio access for a while so I didn’t really know the extent of what had happened – though I had figured if Dad was able to email then things must have been alright. I replied straight away and then checked our email before I went on my first night watch. We hadn’t had a response (though it turned out Mum, Dad and little sis had all taken turns writing in an email but for some reason it hadn’t gone through then). This meant I had spent a large chunk of my first watch glaring at my celphone and waiting for some sort of reception and when I got it – at 1am – I immediately woke my poor parents up to make them tell me they were okay. After hearing their voices everything was so much better and when the email came through in the morning it really made me smile.

So when Christmas day dawned, I was in a much better headspace. It helped that it was a lovely, calm, sunny day. Sure, we had to burn some diesel because there wasn’t much wind, but at that point I was okay with that!

Neptune started giving us our Christmas presents at first light, when the fishing rod started going nuts. We caught three decent sized tuna in quick succession before I made Paddy put the fishing rod away (we hadn’t managed to get anything done that morning because we were constantly running to the fishing rod, and there’s no point in being greedy!) We had a couple of albatross fly around us for a bit after that and, no sooner had I started thinking ‘the only thing that would make this more perfect would be dolphins’, they started to turn up.

First it was just a little guy on his own who jumped out of the water a couple of times and then disappeared but he must have got some of his mates because the next thing we knew we had a couple of pods of them hanging out with us for the rest of the day. It was really lovely.

Paddy and I and the goodluck trolls pulled Christmas crackers, wore silly hats, told awful jokes and ate scorched almonds – so all in all it was a pretty awesome day.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and we even got a bit of good sailing in and were able to give poor old Big Red the engine a bit of a rest. We got a classic Wellington welcome home this morning though, with a couple of knots of tide against us going up Cook Strait. It was reasonably comfortable though, just made the going a little slower. The wind pretty much dropped off completely until we hit the South coast of Wellington, which decided to remind us what city we were heading towards by cranking things up from about 2.5 to 35 knots in rather quick succession. There is a bit of a wind funnel effect there with the land but, because there is such little sea room between the land and you, there is very little swell. So you have a lot of wind but the boat isn’t bashing around. It is a little surreal.

Once we got into Wellington Harbour though everything had settled down and we were able to enjoy watching home appear over the horizon (in between the ferries and mad buggers kite surfing). Once we had managed to get the boat docked at Chaffers Marina we jumped off and hugged each other. We’d made it! Around the South Pacific and back all in one piece and without killing each other. It has been an incredible experience and one I will not forget in a hurry.

I also – despite the way I felt in the Bay of Plenty – definitely want to do it again. There is a line in an Irene Quinn song about a rotten sail in wretched weather that says ” it’s a good thing sailors have got short memories” and I think that’s pretty much it. The rubbish stuff feels like it is going on forever while it is happening, but it is only a tiny part of it. A chap we met in Opua before we left summed it up pretty well too, while climbing soaked out of a dinghy in rough weather, “sailing – the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff” he said, before shaking himself dry and heading towards the yacht club. And, having now experienced it, I couldn’t agree more!

We are headed to Christchurch (on a plane!!!) tomorrow to spend Christmas with the whanau and will be back in Welly early Jan when I will be forced to get used to being back in the real world again by starting back at work. I am actually really looking forward to catching up with my friends and workmates, so it should all be good.

I still have a couple of retrospective blogs to write when I get the chance – so don’t think this is the last you will be hearing from us! I am also working on converting this blog into a book (with lots of extras of course!) so I will keep you posted. If you love me, you will buy it 😉 xxx