The yachtie circle of life.
So here I am on holiday, finally getting the chance to finish writing up the blog I started last time we went on holiday. If that isn’t a wake up call to take more time to tell life to get bent and do more writing, I don’t know what is! (Of course I say that every time and as we all know, life can be terribly persuasive.)
We are in Vanuatu at the moment (actually we are back now but the internet was really bodgey when I wrote this). We took a plane rather than a boat this time because, as Paddy likes to say, nothing goes to windward like a 747.
We are staying in our favourite Vanuatu spot, Hideaway Island. It’s a resort but it has a much more laid back village type feel about it, which is about my comfort level when it comes to resorts. It is on the edge of a marine reserve and so there is good snorkeling and great diving spots. They have their own dive shop and it is where I got my scuba licence many moons ago. I really love the staff here too. You can always tell when they are around from the gales or raucous laughter, which makes me happy.
We are also happily taking part in the yachtie circle of life. Last time we took our boat round the Pacific we had friends act as mules, bringing over boat parts and other necessities (like Clearasil – the tropics did terrible things to my skin!) This time round it was us bringing supplies for our friends Mike and Dani on their boat Mirabilis – spare parts and a paddle board oar. Dani and I met when we were both doing our Boatmasters course and discovered we lived down the pier from each other and Mike crewed back from us from New Caledonia to New Zealand to get experience for when they took their boat away for the first time.
This time they had an extra hitchhiker – 8 month old Arlo, adding yet another awesome chapter to the yachtie circle of life. Arlo is officially the most chilled out child I’ve ever met. He’s like baby Buddha. He just takes everything in his stride and has this whole boat kid thing down. The boat kids I have met all seem to be pretty cool and well-adjusted and I think his parents are giving him an awesome start in life.
Dusting off the cobwebs
For various reasons (life) it has been a long time between swims for Wildflower – and us. Give or take a couple of little outings it’s been roughly three years since we have been able to take her for a good run.
So we both took a couple of weeks leave to head over to Queen Charlotte Sounds over Easter.
In getting ready to go we discovered parts of the poor old girl had seized up due to lack of use and we felt like the worst boat parents ever. There was also a slight concern that the same thing may have happened to us, in sailing terms at least.
We were both really ready for a break but also a little nervous. Heading to the Sounds means crossing Cook Strait – a narrow stretch of water between the North and South islands of New Zealand known for wild and woolly sailing.
It something we had done a frillion times before but you can make things much bigger in your head when you haven’t done them for a while. I kept telling myself I had made it round the South Pacific in her and that this was just a New Zealand puddle jump, but I’m not always the best at listening to myself.
Waiting on the weather (again)
Once we’d carved out the time to go it was the usual story of waiting for the right weather pattern. The good thing about that was by the time we fond a window where the wind was blowing in the right direction, at a reasonable speed and without too many lumpy bits, I was ready to go.
Things were starting to come back to me too. How to tie certain knots, how to attach ropes to cleats, everything except how to decently throw a rope – which I was embarrassingly reminded of when we were at the diesel dock. I’ve said it before and will say it again, I deeply lament the location of the fueling dock on Wellington’s waterfront.
It’s exactly the spot where people stroll past with their morning coffee looking over at the goings on in the marina. Hell, there’s handy public seating right in front of the frigging thing. So I can pretty much 100% guarantee that when I am ineffectually flailing a piece of rope in the air as I utterly fail to lasso a bollard to make us fast to the wharf, there will be an audience. I don’t know what happens, the mechanics of it work fine when I am practicing on the boat, but when I need it to work I revert back to the kid in primary school who can’t throw or catch anything and nobody wants on their sports team. Luckily there wasn’t too much wind though and with a bit of teamwork we go there in the end.
Flashbacks
By the time we got Boaty McBoatface out of the harbour and towards Cook Strait there was stuff all wind – which was both good and bad. It means you aren’t getting shunted along at an alarming angle, but it also means a lot more sudden flapping and banging noises as the sails flop from side to side looking for wind to fill them. We had about 10 knots of wind, but anything less than 15 and Wildflower just says ‘no’. She’s a fuller bodied lady and it takes quite a bit to push her through the water. It was a good thing we had Big Red the engine to keep us chugging along.
Because we’d had a strong southerly blowing through over the previous few days we also had a bit of a southerly swell (2 meters and easing). It wasn’t much, and while hearing it described over the radio made me nervous, I was surprised at how minor it seemed and how easily I handled it after so long out of the water. It did mean things were a little bit bumpy through some of the rips though. There are three rips near Wellington and you have to go through two of them to reach Cook Strait. It was a little wibbly wobbly through the first rip, but not too bad. Next was the infamous Karori rip.
Because it had been a while since Wildflower had been on the water, Paddy and I were both in meerkat mode, poking our heads up and checking that everything was okay every time she made a sound that wasn’t quite the norm.
We were both still meerkating through the Karori rip when we heard a bang from below deck. In my new ‘don’t jump to the most terrifying conclusion straight away’ mode I said “It’s probably just something falling off a shelf inside”. Paddy nodded quietly and headed downstairs. Unbeknownst to me the bang had been followed by the engine sounding slightly different.
I tried to keep my cool, but the last time Paddy quietly headed down to the engine room like that ended in a Mayday call, Paddy having to use brute force, towels and hose clips to stop water pouring into the engine room and me on the radio to our would-be rescuers – who we didn’t need in the end because Paddy is awesome (see Which Way is Starboard Again? the book for the full story).
So ‘don’t catastrophise’ went right out the window and was replaced with ‘okay, can I remember how to use the radio, it’s channel 16 for emergencies right?’ It didn’t help that we were pretty much in the same place where the last incident happened either. So when Paddy popped up I was braced for the worst and doing my best not to lose my shit. It turned out the bang was just the engine room door swinging open, hence the change in engine noise. When we got to the Sounds we also discovered there was a crack in the engine mount – but there were three more holding the engine up and it was working fine. We needed to get that welded up but through one of Paddy’s friends based in Picton we managed to find someone to do that – and on Easter Sunday too!
Absolutely everything was fine, we were completely safe, and there was nothing at all to worry about. The problem was I had a bunch of adrenaline dumped into my system and it had nowhere to go. Once upon a time that would have been the cause of a screaming panic attack. It’s always when things stop and I am completely safe that these things happen. This time though, I just sat down on the floor of the cockpit and took a bunch of deep breaths. Paddy asked if I was okay and I said yes, and actually meant it. I was a little bit jumpy for a while but I was fine. It wasn’t actually the fact that we were safe that was the win, it was the fact that I actually managed to convince my brain that we were that was. I was quietly proud of myself.
Salt and vinegar
With my regained calm I decided to pop below deck and make a pot of coffee. This began with me muttering about what a good job I had done stuffing the cupboards with pillows to stop everything crashing around before we left. After I managed to wrestle the coffee pot out from under several pillows I discovered one of them was soaking wet. Pulling it out I discovered a couple of pots were filled with what looked like water too.
I remembered the first thing you should do when finding water on the inside of the boat that shouldn’t be there is check if it is salt or fresh. If it’s fresh it’s not great as it could mean you are losing your drinking water, but if it’s salt then you really have a problem because it’s coming in from the outside. So I grabbed a potful, gave it a big sniff, and nearly burned all my nose hairs off.
It turned out it was neither salt or fresh water, but white vinegar. I located the culprit – a plastic bottle of cooking vinegar that had expired in 2014. I gently picked it up and promptly got squirted in the eye by a geyser of vinegar through a tiny pinprick hole in the bottle. It turns out that while vinegar doesn’t really expire, it’s packaging certainly does! So instead of getting a nice cup of coffee I ended up covered in vinegar and smelling like that one fish and chip shop in Christchurch that served chips in brown paper bags covered in vinegar.
After I peeled off as much of the vinegar covered clothing as I could (unfortunately it was also all over my sailing overalls) I got the coffee on the boil. Paddy actually said he was proud of me because once I would have seen water where it shouldn’t have been, freaked out and got him to come down and fix it. This time I assessed the problem, worked out the issue and found a solution (de-vinegaring the cupboards when we got to the Sounds.) It sounds pretty obvious but when you run on fear and adrenaline as much as I do , that can actually be a big thing. It was really nice of him to recognise that, because I probably wouldn’t have.
Postcard New Zealand
We had a fabulous time in the Sounds. It’s such a beautiful place and when you are staying on a boat it’s like waking up to a different postcard of New Zealand every morning.
We settled in at our favourite chill out spot Erie Bay which offered us eerie fog and stunning blue skies alternately. The use of a friend’s mooring in Milton Bay meant time spent in another idyllic spot – and the Easter Bunny even managed to find us there (though Paddy needed a little bit of help with the Easter egg hunt.)
When we began to run low on supplies (and get sick of stir-fries) we headed to the Bay of Many Coves resort, where cruisers often pop in for lunch and a drink. However it turned out that the entire place was closed for a private function, and given the disappointed looks on the family who had dinghied in looking for ice creams, we weren’t the only ones surprised at that fact. We were able to stay on their moorings overnight and on the up side, with the employment of walkie talkies, I was acing picking up mooring buoys.
Next stop was Punga Cove, where the cafe was open. It was awesome sitting there watching families play on the water’s edge and people coming in covered in mud from the cycling tracks. Sometimes you forget how lucky we are in this country, being able to take a break and go play in paradise.
We both splashed out on fancy fish and chips – no vinegar in sight!
Waiting on the weather (again) part 2
The only drawback was, as soon as we arrived in the Sounds we had to start planning when we would leave. When you are sailing back to Wellington you have to get the timing right when you hit Cook Strait, in terms of weather and tides. It’s not a stretch of water you want to take your chances with. So if you have a deadline you need to get back for (work, family, pets), working out when you are going to leave is pretty important. So as soon as we hit the Sounds we were listening to the marine forecast and checking the tide tables to see when the best time to head back would be.
We had a lovely time, but it’s not super easy to relax into a holiday when you are constantly checking ‘are we leaving tomorrow? Maybe the next day?’
Paddy managed to get the timing perfect and, in contrast to our ‘no-wind’ trip over, we had the perfect amount of wind to actually sail on the way back. Wildflower loved it (so did the skipper). She really does feel better when she is sailing, like a big dog being let out for a run. She puffed out her sails, heeled over and made quick work of the crossing.
A strange quirk of the ocean is that celphone reception is better in the middle of Cook Strait than it is in the Sounds. This meant I was able to snap a couple of ‘hey, we’re sailing!’ shots to send to our Whatsapp family group chat. I think the smile on both our faces said it all.
Little legs
We literally had a one day window to get back to Wellington before the wind switched back to the opposite direction we needed it to blow and we timed getting back just as it started to change. Everything was going swimmingly until we were just outside the marina and attempted to drop the sail.
One of the facelifts we gave Wildflower when we got back from the Pacific was a much bigger main sail to help push her along in lighter winds. A larger sail meant we needed a longer boom and when this was replaced it was also raised a bit to stop it banging on the roof of the pilot house. Since one of my jobs on berthing/anchoring was to clamber round the front of the boat and a help pull the sail down, I voiced concern about the extra height. Paddy’s response: “It’s only a couple of inches!”
It turns out when you are four foot eleven, ‘a couple of inches’ is actually an awful lot. It also turns out that we probably should have practiced lowering the new sail a few more times before having to do it in earnest. Because the wind was getting up, Paddy headed us right into the harbour where it was more sheltered and would make dropping the sail easier. That would have been a great plan, if the East-West Ferry wasn’t trying to berth at the same time.
The extra two inches meant I had to clamber as far up the mast as I could reach (not very). I had also completely blanked on how to get the mast steps to go down properly so I was balancing pretty precariously (don’t worry Mum, I was clipped on!) trying to yank down the sail as Paddy dropped it. Another problem was the whole system hadn’t been used for so long it was a bit stiff and my puny arms just weren’t up to the task. So there we were, circling around with a bunch of ferry passengers and people on the waterfront looking on as I stretched as far as my little legs would let me, flailing my arms ineffectually. Even my dad, who was stalking us via GPS, was wondering why we were sailing in circles. In the end Paddy pointed the boat into the wind and headed up to the bow to help me with the final few yanks and we decided that perhaps next time I would point the boat into the wind, while he acted as sail monkey.
All’s well that ends well though and, even though it was just a little trip, it gave me my confidence back in a lot of ways.