I am in the process of revamping this website to make it more user friendly, but in the meantime I’m pinning this post for those of you wanting to get your hands on my books.
I’m really thrilled with the way Ghost Bus turned out and even more thrilled so many of you are enjoying it. Below are the details for where to get both e-books and tree books.
What I love the most about these are that every bit of them is made in NZ. The cover is designed by the very clever Catherine Slavova’s Karnstein Designs , the typesetting and editing was done by Jana Mittelstadt’s Kiwiberry Editing and it was printed by Your Books.
You can get your paws on a copy here for $20 – free postage within NZ.
Ghost Bus paperback $20
For those of you who haven’t read my first book Which Way is Starboard Again? Overcoming fears & facing challenges sailing the South Pacific and extra fiver will get you a bundle of both books – free postage within NZ also.
Ghost Bus/Starboard bundle $25
For those who don’t use Paypal
For those of you allergic to Paypal just drop me a line at annakirtlan@gmail.com and I will flick you my bank account details.
For overseas readers – there is an Amazon print on demand option which might suit you guys better as the rona seems to have made international posting a bit of a hit and miss venture at the moment. You can buy it here:
Ghost Bus – Tales from Wellington’s Dark Side is available on most ebook platforms. You can check out which ones here: https://books2read.com/ghostbus
Which Way is Starboard Again? Mental Health Foundation fundraiser
A note that I still have an ongoing fundraiser for the NZ Mental Health Foundation tied up with my first book Which Way is Starboard Again? So if you are interested in that book alone and would like to donate to a great organisation, you can find out more here:
The following story appears in Ghost Bus – Tales from Wellington’s Dark Side. I’m putting it up here so I can have a freebie to give away to lure more unsuspecting victims (I mean readers) and also to showcase an awesome illustration done by the very talented Shaun Garea. Details on where to get all the things at the end of the story.
***
They’re in love. A love so true they need to make a grand gesture to the world of its permanence. Perhaps they can’t afford an engagement ring. Perhaps they don’t believe in marriage. Perhaps they’re teenagers whose love burns so passionate and bright that it’s too big for just themselves.
Either way, they buy a padlock – pretty and heart-shaped or sturdy and industrial – and have their initials carved into it. They go to the waterfront footbridge and thread it through one of its metal links, feeling it close with a satisfying clunk. To show how serious they are, they take the key, and its spare, and toss it into the bay, holding hands and leaning into each other as they walk away.
There are hundreds of padlocks on that bridge. Hundreds of different sets of initials – and hundreds of keys. Not much thought is given to those keys once they are ceremoniously tossed in the drink. Sure, there are concerns about the impact they might have on the environment and marine life but those are concerns, not actual thoughts.
You see, when an object is imbued with so much passion – be it a ring or a plaque – it changes. It absorbs those intense feelings. It gains power. When part of that object is thrown away like trash, the power doesn’t go away. It changes. Hundreds of padlocks publicly basking in the glow of love. Hundreds of keys festering on the seabed, growing strong and bitter and hungry.
I’m 100 percent the sort of guy who scoffs at these kinds of stories. They’re creepy tales to scare kids at sleepovers, nothing more. But I’ve been down in that murk and seen things that have turned every hair on my body white. There are things in this world that we don’t understand and if we’re lucky, we’ll never need to try. Unfortunately for me, I’m not one of the lucky ones.
The stories about the Oriental Bay piranhas began around 2014. I’ve been hearing them for as long as I’ve been diving in the bay. A disturbance in the water followed by a swimmer losing a finger or a toe. Nobody ever sees them but the story is always the same – searing pain, needle sharp teeth, blood in the water and a piece of a person missing.
Like any sane person I scoffed at those stories, not in the least because those particular fish can’t survive outside of tropical waters. My theory was that someone had a run-in with a barracuda once and spun a tale that grew taller with each retelling. Whatever the origin, the Oriental Bay piranha label stuck.
It was a couple of years ago, though, that things started getting outright weird. The first missing person was a reveller from the last time the Rugby Sevens was held in Wellington. It wasn’t unusual for hypothermic partiers to be hauled from the harbour in their Smurf outfits and mankinis after the booze whispered to them a midnight dip would be a great idea. So, at first, it was thought to be another alcohol fueled tragedy. That may well have been the case, but when he washed up on shore near the Te Papa museum two days later, people had more questions than answers.
His leg was completely stripped of flesh, a cleanly picked bone, attached to a foot sitting neatly in a sneaker. The poor guy had clearly bled to death. It was all over the news: the distraught girlfriend and parents, the ‘experts’ trying to work out whether it could have been a shark. Swimming at the bay was banned until they could track down the culprit.
Things eventually settled down, the swimming ban was lifted and the news cycle moved on – until the next time and the next. There were four attacks, over a period of two years – a kayaker, a man fishing and a couple swimming off the beach on a hot day. The one thing they all had in common was that, when they were found, one limb or another had been completely stripped of flesh.
Even then, after all that strangeness, I didn’t accept that anything unusual was going on. I spent nearly every day in the waters of that harbour as part of my work and I was damned if I was going to be looking over my shoulder for some mystery fish.
I’m a sort of scuba everyman for the Wellington City Council. If the storm water drains get clogged, if a fishing line comes loose and gets tangled around something it shouldn’t, if there’s a big blow and a chunk of the marina electronics end up in the drink, I’m their man.
I’m also part of a volunteer diver clean-up group that hits the harbour once a year to clear up what Wellington has dumped in it. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we find down there. Shopping trolleys, fishing gear, kids’ toys. One memorable encounter with a mannequin that had escaped from a movie shoot gave a few of the guys nightmares for a while. Not all of it can be blamed on people though – the biggest litterer in the city is Mother Nature herself. It’s not uncommon for us to find laundry tangled around pontoons after a particularly decent blow. That doesn’t get you lot of the hook though. A fair bit of the debris we do find is due to people being too lazy to secure their litter or too bumbly to be trusted with technology – as is evidenced by the number of drowned cell phones we have brought to the surface.
***
It was on one of those clean-up dives that my nice comfortable denial bubble popped. My dive buddy Craig and I were in Oriental Bay near the waterfront, filling catch bags with the usual junk. I pointed towards a submerged shopping trolley a couple of metres away and, wiggling two fingers like miniature legs, mimed swimming over. He gave me the OK hand signal and I headed over to tie on an inflatable buoy to mark it for later pick up.
As I fumbled with the inflatable clipped to my suit, the ocean boiled to life around me. Rising from the seabed was a swarm of something I’d never seen before. A massive school of tiny rust coloured fish, only a few centimetres long, were buzzing and vibrating like a swarm of metallic bees. They were heavy too, bonking against my dive tank and scraping skin off my face as they surged past.
As I turned to Craig to signal “what the hell was that?”, I froze on the spot. He was absolutely smothered in the things. All I could see was a mass of bubbles and flailing fins as he tried to beat them off with his catch bag. I launched myself towards him, brandishing my dive knife. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it. Stabbing hundreds of tiny fish wasn’t really the most practical option.
It must have done something though because as I approached, the things started to drop back, letting me through. Frantically, I scraped as many of them off my friend as I could, copping a couple of nasty bites through my gloves for my efforts. Craig had stopped flailing and was instead making frantic slashing motions across his throat – “Out of air”. I discovered to my horror that the little bastards had chewed through the hoses connected to his tank. I quickly hooked him up with my spare air supply and buddy swam with him to the dock, scraping the last of the creatures off him with my knife.
Thank goodness we weren’t diving deep and didn’t have to stop to decompress as both of us were desperate to get out of the water. I hauled him up and checked his vitals. He was deeply in shock, struggling to catch his breath and covered in scores of tiny bite marks but he wasn’t going to die.
“What the hell was that?” I gasped as I wiped the blood from his face.
“Keys!” he said in between ragged breaths.
“What?”
“Keys. Fucking keys. With fucking teeth. The kind you unlock things with. But with teeth. They went straight for my air hose!”
Certain my friend was delirious, I helped him up. “Mate, I think we need to get you to the hospital.”
***
I left Craig in the hospital, still blathering about keys with teeth. I’d never seen him that spun out before. A couple of gashes on his forehead needed stitches but otherwise he was physically fine. They wanted to keep him in overnight for observation though, theorising concussion or nitrogen narcosis. I don’t recall him hitting his head at any point and we hadn’t been deep enough for him to be narced, but he certainly wasn’t himself. I left him in the capable hands of his fiancé and decamped to the pub.
Three pints in and I was decided – I was going back down there to find out what was going on. I was certain there was a logical explanation. I had never seen my friend like that before and I wanted to put his mind at rest.
Two days later, I was back at the waterfront, armed with a specimen jar borrowed from another friend who worked at a local aquarium. I went solo this time. I know, diving on your own isn’t smart, but I wasn’t going far and I honestly didn’t want to bring anyone else in on this insanity.
I dropped down into the water and swam around to just underneath the footbridge where we’d been gathering junk before Craig was attacked. At first, I didn’t see anything, just murk and rocks and the odd bit of snot-coloured seaweed. But then I spotted them – about two inches above the sea floor was a metallic cloud of creatures, just milling about, taking no notice of me at all.
I swam closer, watching them lazily weave along the current, darting in and out of the weeds. They seemed solid and heavy-looking but they floated easily, like they weighed nothing at all. The water was too grimy to make out too much detail without getting up closer than I would have liked, but whatever they were, it certainly wasn’t fish.
They showed no sign of the aggression they displayed when they launched themselves at Craig. So, while all was calm, I grabbed the specimen jar, scooped up the nearest one and screwed the lid up tight. I dropped it in my catch bag and headed for the surface.
Once out of the water, I pulled my mask off to get a better look and – more shakily than I care to admit – took the jar from the bag, holding it up to the light. Swimming in lazy circles, occasionally doinking into the side of the jar was – exactly as Craig had – a fucking key.
Be careful what you throw away!
***
Three of us stood around the aquarium table, staring down at the jar.
“Yep, that’s a key alright.”
“Definitely the most key-like thing I’ve seen in a specimen jar.”
I was rather surprised at how blasé they were about the whole swimming key situation and told them so.
“I can tell you right now,” Kim, the friend who loaned me the specimen jar said. “This is by far not the strangest thing we’ve seen in this aquarium.”
One look at her face and I could tell she was deadly serious.
“Let’s give it a bit more space to swim around and see what it does,” she said, gently placing the jar into an open topped tank and letting the key swim out.
She didn’t move her hand fast enough. As soon as it escaped, it lunged at her, its oval ‘head’ somehow stretching and splintering into tiny metallic teeth. She snatched her hand out of the way before it could do any damage.
“Well, that certainly woke it up!”
“So, it didn’t react to you at all?” Kim asked, as she, I and her colleague James watched the key/fish/thing fling itself at the glass.
“Is that going to be strong enough?” I asked, taking a step backwards.
“Bulletproof,” she said.
“Oookay …” I said, still dubious. “Well, it certainly wasn’t carrying on like that.”
“Interesting,” she said, staring with fascination at the frenzied creature trying to smash its way to freedom. “Leave it with me. I’ll let you know if I have any ideas.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said, heading for the door, quietly glad to see the back of the thing.
***
The next day, my phone rang.
“Where did you say you found it again?” Kim’s excited voice asked.
“By the waterfront, under the footbridge.”
“The one with all the padlocks on?”
“Yes, that one,” I replied, only just making the connection.
“I’ve got an idea. I’m going to need you to come in.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” I replied, actually dying of curiosity.
Kim and James greeted me at the aquarium.
“Right, experiment time!” Kim said, rubbing her hands together gleefully as the three of us moved behind the front counter towards the tanks.
“You go first,” she gestured to me, keeping herself out of the creature’s sight line – if the thing even had eyes to see.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Just trust me on this. Walk up to the tank.”
I did as I was told, moving slowly towards the glass, bracing myself for the onslaught. They key-thing barely acknowledged my presence, floating calmly just above the bottom of the tank. I moved closer, peering through the glass. Nothing.
“Great!” said Kim from behind the door. “Now, it’s your turn, James.”
James had barely taken two steps into the room when Keyzilla started throwing itself at the walls of the tank, snapping at the glass. I could have sworn the thing actually hissed. He very sensibly backed the hell out of there. Kim was smiling broadly.
“You look like that’s exactly what you expected to happen,” I said.
“Correct. Want to hear my theory? It’s got nothing to do with fish science and everything to do with Marie Kondo.”
“The ‘doesn’t spark joy’-woman who wants us all to fold our undies?” James asked incredulously.
I shook my head, having zero idea what either of them was talking about but concerned about where it might lead.
“I am NOT going to fold my undies,” I said.
“Settle, petals. The last thing I want is to have anything to do with your underwear,” Kim said. “This is going to sound a little woo woo, but hear me out.”
“No more woo than a key-fish that wants to bite me,” James interrupted.
“Good point!” Kim agreed. “Now for those of you who have been living under a rock,” – she looked directly at me – “Marie Kondo is a famous declutterer. She has a TV show and a bunch of books about getting rid of your junk. She’s very gentle and respectful about it though. She gets people to touch each item to ‘wake’ it and only keep those that ‘spark joy’, and when it comes to the things that you want to let go, she thanks them for their service.”
I raised an eyebrow, utterly clueless as to what was going on.
“It’s something that kind of fascinates me,” she continued. “Not the cleaning, but the philosophy behind it. Her method is heavily influenced by the Japanese Shinto religion. Shinto includes the belief that kami – the sacred – exists in everything. That everything, even inanimate objects, contains an essence or power. This power can be good or bad but it is everywhere and in everything. Even the things we throw away.”
I stared blankly, thinking her stark, barking mad but not wanting to come across as an insensitive douche bag. “I didn’t know you were religious,” was the best I could come up with.
“I’m not, but my grandmother was. She had a shrine and talked to everything in the house. The garden too. I used to follow her everywhere when I was little. I completely forgot about it all until the whole Kondo thing started getting air time.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with ‘that’”, I said, jerking my head towards the thing in the tank.
“Well, think about where you found it. The bridge with the padlocks, objects that have powerful kami, created by people’s love. And after people attach those padlocks to the bridge, what do they do with the keys?”
“Chuck them in the ocean – probably not thanking them for their service when they do,” James interjected, struggling to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
“Okay, it may sound ridiculous, but might I point out there’s a very angry key in that tank,” Kim said.
Having been forced to face the existence of flesh-eating keys, I tried to let myself follow Kim’s logic. “So, what has it got to do with the fact that Bitey McBiteface over there doesn’t want a piece of me?” I asked.
Kim’s eyes lit up again. “I worked that part out when you mentioned that your friend was being looked after by his fiancé while he was in hospital,” she said. “He was engaged. I’m married. James has just met a new fella. We are all, to one degree or another, loved up. You, on the other hand, are the biggest bachelor I know, and as far as I am aware that hasn’t changed, has it?”
“No, it hasn’t,” I replied, smiling. It’s not that I haven’t had the odd bit of fun in the past but I really don’t have that much interest in it all. I appreciate my friendships but really have no desire for romance or relationships. I don’t think I ever really had. I know some people feel sorry for me, but they shouldn’t. I’m happy, it’s just the way I’m wired.
“I did some research into the Oriental Bay ‘piranha’ attacks and sure enough, all the victims had partners,” Kim continued. “I think the keys somehow detect and react to the love pheromone, because that was why they were rejected. At least, that’s my theory. You’re probably one of the few people in Wellington who can get near them unscathed.” James was turning purple.
“Are you trying to say that lump of bad-tempered metal is one of the Oriental Bay piranhas? Are you insane? I grant you it’s bizarre, but it’s just a key. It can’t really do any damage!” Having seen the thing in action, I had to disagree.
“I think that it might be,” Kim said, looking towards the tank in quiet awe.
“Are you buying this crap?” James asked me.
When I didn’t answer, he stomped across the room, opened a cupboard and grabbed a pair of industrial looking gloves. “I did not spend four years studying marine biology to listen to this kind of rubbish. It’s a key. It can’t hurt people. I’ll prove it!”
“James, no!” Kim and I cried in unison but we were too late. James had stalked across the room and thrust his hand into the tank, attempting to scoop up the creature inside. The whole thing took seconds. One minute, James had his hand in the tank and the next, he was writhing on the floor screaming in agony, the water in the tank above him stained with blood.
Kim dispatched me to get the first aid kit and, when I returned, was gently prising James’ hand open.
“How bad is it?” he slurred, clearly delirious with pain. “I can’t look!”
I looked and wished I hadn’t. The top half of his index finger was stripped bare of flesh – a clean white bone sticking out of a bloodied knuckle. I suddenly thought of Skeletor from Masters of the Universe, stifling a hysterical laugh as I thrust a bandage into Kim’s hand.
“I’ve seen worse,” she lied expertly. I had no idea how she managed to keep a straight face when all I wanted to do was vomit. “But I think we should get you looked at.”
So, for the second time that week, I found myself driving someone to hospital.
***
Sitting in the hospital waiting room I turned to Kim. “Okay, this is way out of my comfort zone but I’ve seen two people put into hospital, and if you’re right, there are hundreds of angry carnivorous keys, lurking around a popular swimming spot. Do you have any idea what we can do about it?”
“Yes, but you’re not going to like it.”
“That I don’t doubt. Now fill me in.”
“Well, we’re going to have to conduct some more experiments, but I figure since you are the only one they seem to let near them, it could be that they respond to your interactions with them as well.”
“Interactions?”
“Words and feelings specifically. Like the objects imbued with kami were meant to respond to offerings and prayers. If it’s a similar sort of situation, then maybe you could talk it off the ledge, help it not feel discarded. Let it know it wasn’t tossed away for no reason, that it was sacrificed for love and we honour that sacrifice.”
“You want me to give it a pep talk?”
“Exactly! Maybe we can reprogram them not to respond badly to people who care for one another.”
Before I had a chance to respond, a doctor came out to meet us. Kim stood up. “Is he going to be okay?”
“He’s going to need reconstructive surgery on his finger, but otherwise he’s going to be fine. You say he was attacked by some sort of fish at the aquarium?” he asked.
“Yes, a fish,” Kim said firmly.
***
If you told me a couple of months ago that I would be paying nightly visits to the aquarium to whisper sweet nothings to a key in a jar, I would have told you to lay off the weed. Yet here I am. The scary thing is, it actually seemed to be working.
We tested Kim’s theory last night when James returned to work.
“How’s the war wound?” I asked, gesturing towards his bandaged finger.
“Not bad. They couldn’t fix the nerves but they can make it look a bit more like a finger. They are going to graft some skin from my butt. Guess that will remind me not to be such a butthead about things I don’t understand.”
I smiled, glad he’d managed to keep a sense of humour.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Don’t worry. I plan to keep my hands to myself.”
“Okay then,” I said, nervously leading him towards the tank. He walked right up to the glass and – nothing. No reaction. The key-fish barely raised itself from the bottom.
James raised his eyebrows. “Hey! Key thing! I love my boyfriend!” he yelled, taking a step back.
A little waggle, but otherwise nothing.
Kim walked up to the tank, nervously playing with her wedding ring. The key showed no interest in her whatsoever.
“It worked!” she said, grinning and hugging me. I couldn’t help smiling as well, scarcely believing it myself.
The next part of the plan was for me to catch another key (goody) and see what happened when we put it in the tank with its newly chilled-out mate. Kim’s hope was that they’d somehow communicate and, if I could talk enough of them out of their homicidal rage, they might calm down the rest of the pack. School? Bunch? I don’t know what the collective noun is for a bunch of angry sentient keys, do you?
“So, catch and release?” I asked Kim.
“Something like that,” she said with a smile.
I don’t know if it will work, but it’s all we’ve got right now. This is going to take a long time and we can’t guarantee how many we’ll be able to round up. So, if you are loved up and fancy going for a dip this summer, and you don’t want to end up with a butt-skin graft or worse, might I suggest giving the waterfront a miss for a while. Particularly, a certain bridge.
And if you absolutely must do the padlock thing, a quick thank you to a key is not much to ask in return for keeping your limbs.
Want to read more?
Ghost Bus – Tales from Wellington’s Dark Side is available on most digital platforms here:
If you live outside of New Zealand I would recommend ordering your Ghost Bus paperback via Amazon because postage overseas from here is all over the shop thanks to the rona.
Shaun Garea – the creator of the awesome bitey key image is the artist behind The Legend of Gareus – a hilarious webcomic about Gareus, the David Brent of fantasy. You can check it out here:
It will also be available on Google Play and Apple books shortly (there was a slight hiccup with the upload because apparently I didn’t put enough capital letters in the title). I will update the link above as soon as it goes live.
Don’t worry print purists, there is a paper copy in production. I will let you know as soon as it is available.
Tomorrow I will be publishing my second book and it is a million percent not what I thought my second book would be.
At first my second book was going to be the story of another trip around the South Pacific, but life – in a good way – had other ideas about that.
Then my second book was going to another travel tale about our adventures in the United States when we went there for Paddy’s 50th birthday. That one was called Gators, Guns and Keeping Calm. I got quite a way through writing it and then something terrible happened in my home town involving firearms and I just couldn’t. The tone was all wrong. One day I might resurrect that book. It was a fascinating place and we met some amazing people. I’ll know when the time for that is, but it’s not now.
And then there’s the one I actually finished
My third attempt at a second book is one I have actually finished writing. It’s had a manuscript assessment and needs a bunch of editing but it won’t be long before it’s good to go. It’s the first book in a nautically themed YA fantasy series with a lot of underwater shenanigans and it will see the light of day I promise!
This second book though, my actual second book, started life as a writing challenge. I decided I would take a crack at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for the first time at the end of last year.
Book stores and pick up artists
It started with a running gag I had with a friend that came about after her insistence that a woman chatting with me about the cover of I book I was holding in Unity Books was actually chatting me up. We then started joking about how book shops would actually be an excellent place to score and that there probably was a secret code among browsers in the know. The idea fascinated me and I ended up writing a short story about it for her. With a bit of a supernatural twist it became a tale called ‘The best pick up joint in town.’
After I wrote it I discovered it was NaNoWriMo time. The challenge was to write a 50,000 word novel in a month and a short story collection counted, so I decide to give it a crack.
A creepy love-letter
Well I didn’t make the 50,000 word mark, but what I did end up with was a collection of short stories that formed a sort of warped love-letter to Wellington New Zealand – the home I have chosen for myself. A collection I felt proud enough of to have a crack at publishing.
Some of the stories are spooky, some of them are silly and some have a pretty high body count, but all, I hope, in some way will make the reader smile. It’s escapism, pure and simple – my gift to a world that might need a little bit of that right now.
The Wellington that was
This is my first foray into fiction, but when I was putting the stories together for publication, it wasn’t the ghosts, aliens and witches that stood out. It was the normal things that aren’t so normal anymore. Hanging out in bookstores, sitting on a crowded bus, buying a kebab at 3am.
What my second book actually turned out to be was a love letter to a Wellington that was. A Wellington I miss, and one I very much look forward to seeing again.
A socially distanced hug
So here it is, book number two. A very different book from number one in many ways, but similar in the most important one. It’s for you. It’s to make you smile if you are feeling shit. It’s a distraction if you are feeling scared. It’s not the great New Zealand novel – instead it’s a written hug from me to you.
I hope you enjoy it was much as I enjoyed writing it and tomorrow I will let you know where you can get your hands on it.
In the meantime check out this amazing cover, designed by the very talented Catherine Slavova’s Karnstein Designs
This is a blog I have been putting off writing for a while. It’s about letting go, but I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not about giving up.
We’ve talked about this for a while but it wasn’t until the last time we took the boat away that we officially made the call.
We’re putting Wildflower up for sale.
It’s a really hard thing to do. She’s been a massive part of Paddy’s life, and a big part of mine for the last 10 years. It’s like letting go of a family member or, the way I prefer to look at it, preparing your child for every possible eventuality and sending them out into the world.
Wildflower is tough and beautiful and created by Paddy to be the ultimate ocean-going vessel – but she’s not crossing oceans. All the little things that went wrong when we last took her out were simply due to lack of use. She needs to be out on the ocean waves.
New adventures
Part of me is really struggling to fight the feeling that this is giving up. I gleefully signed off my book with plans to take her away again in 2016 (note to self: never put a date in print). That year came and went and we are still here in Wellington.
We have taken the boat away on smaller adventures – across to Tasman Bay and Nelson and over to the Sounds, but also embarked on different adventures of our own.
We bought a house, I tamed a feral garden, we got engaged (there’s a half-finished blog about that too. We had a party which involved putting 3000 ball pit balls in a spa pool. It was awesome.) We inherited a new fur child, I wrote a book and got it published and I am writing more.
When we moved from living between the boat and a flat to a house (a move that went amazingly smoothly and, I would like to point out, was Paddy’s idea so no rubbish about me making him swallow the anchor) we thought we would have more time to sail the boat because we weren’t living on her. We could keep her set up for sailing all the time and it wouldn’t be such a drama having to pack up our life every time we wanted to take her out.
The best laid plans
Unfortunately things didn’t happen that way. For a million, very valid reasons, we just didn’t get the chances we thought we would. As I have mentioned before, one of the issues with having a cruising boat in Wellington is the fact that you are in Wellington. You can’t just pop over to the Sounds for a weekend and be back for work on Monday. You need several days either side to make sure you get the Cook Strait crossing conditions right. So, while it’s a lovely idea, it doesn’t happen that often in reality. And in reality, with the new directions our lives have taken, we aren’t going to be able to take a year or so off work to get the boat ready and head over to the tropics any time soon.
This isn’t a bad thing. We are both in a really good place right now and I am happier and less crazy than I have been in a long time. It’s just that it’s a different place than we thought we would be.
Not the end of the adventure
This isn’t the end of sailing for us. There will always be a boat, just a smaller one that means less maintenance and more sailing. One thought is a trailer yacht that Paddy can actually sail and maybe get back into racing. The other possibility is to get a berth down in Picton and have a smaller boat there, so we can fly over in the weekends and already be in the Sounds.
One of the things Paddy asked me when we were talking about this was “what part of sailing do you like best, getting to places or being in places?” And when I honestly think about it, being in places is the winner for me. What I loved about our Pacific trip was the access to islands and villages and people that you normally wouldn’t have on your standard tourist holiday. And while I am super proud of myself for crossing oceans and it gave me a huge amount of confidence, I can’t say I enjoyed it hugely.
The odd clear night with bright stars and a calm sea made it all worth it, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Most sailors I have spoken to don’t enjoy long passages. A couple of days between countries is all good, but I can’t say I get much out of anything longer – other than bragging rights. So another option for us could be flying and chartering a boat. The sailing isn’t over, it just might be a different kind of sailing.
Rules for dating our daughter
It’s not the end of adventures on Wildflower yet either. It can take years to sell a boat and we are certainly going to vet potential purchasers. Our baby isn’t going to go to just anyone. It has to be someone who will love her and look after her and can handle the fact she’s a little bit ‘extra.’ If you are going to date our daughter, you are going to have to get past us. (So don’t worry Mum, you will get your ride round the harbour!)
So, as Paddy has said ‘the star of Which Way is Starboard Again? is up for sale’. She’s strong and beautiful and has more whiz bang gadgets than you could possibly need (don’t even get me started on the fridge) and a piece of me will go along with her.
She is sturdy and safe and got my anxious arse around the South Pacific and back. She is the goodest girl and we are very proud of her. We want to find someone who will love her as much as we do but give her the freedom to sail she needs.
The deets
For those interested, Wildflower is a Bruce Roberts designed R432.
She has a “Solent” cutter rig and an 80hp Ford D series engine.
On board there’s a generator, water maker, dive compressor and SSB radio.
A few months back something truly sad happened. After 13 years of loyal service, the mega boat fridge Paddy built – the one that made it all the way round the South Pacific, helping out cruisers with less functioning fridges and housing the 50kg Tuna of Terror – cooled its last cold thing.
Since we were no longer living aboard, it took a while before we actually noticed it. It wasn’t until I stayed over on Wildflower to make it easier to catch an early morning flight that I made the discovery. First the lack of noise tipped me off – the fridge’s comforting buzzing and whirring was part of the boat’s soundtrack – then it was the smell.
While we didn’t have much food in there, it was enough to make it smell like something had died and was in the process of quietly decomposing. So I did what sensible adult would do, I slammed the lid shut and hoped the problem would go away.
It didn’t.
The cleanup
On getting home and finding the problem hadn’t fixed itself, there was nothing for it. We picked a weekend, gathered all the cleaning products known to mankind and set to. The smell was horrific. We grabbed black rubbish bags and threw the freezer’s contents in them without pausing to identify what anything used to be (the former bait was fairly easy to work out though.)
Once the offending former-frozens were jettisoned (stuffing black bags into the marina rubbish bins while stifling gagging noises when fellow yachties walked past) we scrubbed the living daylights out of the fridge and freezer cabinets.
Being a chest freezer this necessitated extended periods of time hanging headfirst over the edge of the cabinet, holding my breath while the blood rushed to my head. I am pleased to say though that this and a combination of cleaning products, bleach, vanilla essence and airing the thing out, means Wildflower is now blessedly stink-free.
A new obsession
Wildflower’s lack of refrigeration left Paddy with a couple of choices. He could buy a new fridge or he could build the Mother of All Fridges. I’m pretty sure you can guess which option he went with. Building Fridgezilla is actually something Paddy had been talking about for a while when the old fridge was starting to reach the end of its life.
And so the research began. I would come home to find Paddy mesmerised by YouTube videos on how to build a boat fridge. So many YouTube videos… I had no idea so many people were so passionate about refrigeration – and that so many of them had YouTube channels.
Note: Paddy says most of the stuff on YouTube is biased towards air-conditioning but the principals are the same for freezers and refrigeration.
I joke about it but it’s actually pretty cool that people are so generous with their time and prepared to share information that otherwise giant nerds like Paddy you wouldn’t know.
Goodbye kitchen table
It started off with a few packages arriving at the back door with the odd switch or coil in them
Who knew our back door had a signature?
Then our kitchen table turned into a steampunk nightmare of copper piping, wire and dials. Every day a new package arrived and the mountain grew bigger. A hermetic compressor, suction line accumulator, sub cooler, liquid refrigerant receiver, a water cooled and air cooled condenser appeared, along with lots of copper pipe and fittings, various valves and (after some negotiating) a big orange bottle of refrigerant.
Note for nerds: Paddy says he was going to put the whole thing on a basal platen made of prefabulated amulite, but when he discovered that didn’t exist he used aluminum, which he got from his mate Gregor’s workshop
There’s a table here somewhere!
Man and refrigerant
I am also learning a lot of things about fridges.
For example I know Wildflower’s new fridge will use British thermal units, which Paddy tells me are the best kind of thermal units you can get.
“BTUs have always been better than kilowatts. If you don’t believe me just go on Google and see how many BTUs there are in a kilowatt. There’s more, so it must be better” – So sayeth Paddy.
A mysterious love note
Things got even more fascinating one weekend when Paddy was away for work and I spotted a hand written note on the coffee table in our living room.
‘That’s nice,’ I thought. ‘Paddy’s left me a note. I wonder what it says?’
I picked it up and quickly realised Paddy hadn’t written it. In a woman’s handwriting was the very un-Paddylike sentence ‘I love you, you handsome (something a little tricky to make out) wonder’.
I was, understandably, a little surprised.
Examining the note more closely I discovered it was not exactly a new one, and apparently not from New Zealand. It was written on the back of a deposit slip from the Camden National Bank in Maine USA and the empty date section started 19– , so definitely not written recently!
The mysterious note
So what was it? Where did it come from? Was it a memento from a past love? Did a time-traveler from the US have a crush on one or the other of us?
When Paddy got back I handed it to him and said ‘sweetie, do you know what this is?’ It turns out he was just as puzzled as I was. When I told him where I found it he had a eureka moment and burst out laughing, then fished out a retro looking book.
He had bought a second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats by Nigel Calder online and when he opened the package a piece of paper that had been used as a bookmark fell out. He didn’t think much of it and put it on the coffee table. Mystery solved.
Help us find the handsome wonder
Except the mystery isn’t solved, not really. Who is the handsome wonder? Did he ever get his note? Was it a secret admirer? Unrequited fridge-building love? Did he and the note-writer live happily ever after? We need to know!
My workmate Liz helped with one piece of the puzzle – the two words in the note I couldn’t quite make out.
I love you, you handsome ‘car heart-clad? car hat Dad?’ wonder.
I was puzzling those two words out loud in the office when she said ‘I know, it’s Carhartt!
It turns out Carhartt is a US brand of work wear (Liz was gifted a pair of Carhartt overalls and says they are brilliant).
So we now know the full text of the note reads: I love you, you handsome Carhartt-clad wonder. Which in the context makes a lot of sense!
As for the rest of the mystery, if anyone can help us, we would love to hear from you.
Our clues so far are:
A second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats bought on Amazon.
Richmond – written on the side of the book in vivid. It could be a surname, it could be a place, it could be the name of a boat.
A deposit slip from Camden National Bank in Maine.
After migrating from the kitchen to the lounge the parts made it to the garage and formed the shape of a fridge (or at least a condensing unit – which Paddy tells me is all the smarts of a fridge). It makes all the whizzing and whirring motions a fridge should make and passed its tests with flying colours.
For the fridge nerds: Fridgezilla was pressure tested with inert gas to 300 PSI (pounds per square inch of pressure) – 50 PSI more than it is going to use when it’s running – to make sure there weren’t any leaks. He found a couple and fixed them. Then it was vacuum tested to suck out all the moisture and it vacuum tested down to 200 microns.
From the lounge to the garage
One happy engineer!
Even more for the fridge nerds
If you know the lingo, are building a fridge or are just really interested in enginerding, then here’s a five minute video explanation of the condensing unit of the Mega Fridge.
Stay tuned for when Fridgezilla is on board and cooling its first ice cream!
A while ago I learned it is never wise to put a date you are going to do something in print.
If you miss that date for whatever reason its just staring at you and you spend more time beating yourself up about it than getting on with things.
When it comes to work or writing for other people, I eat deadlines for breakfast. When life gets in the way of my own self-imposed ones though, I get unreasonably mad at myself.
I should have learned after publishing Which Way is Starboard Again? the book, which I ended by saying we would do the South Pacific trip again in 2016. For various reasons that didn’t happen. Life moved in different, and amazing directions. There will be more sailing and there will be other trips, they may just be at a different time and in a different form. I don’t regret that at all, but I still have that 2016 date glaring accusingly at me from the page.
I did the same thing to myself when I announced the new book ‘Gators, Guns and Keeping Calm’ about our trip to the US. It started with a hiss and a roar, I had the chapter summaries ready to send to publisher and was all ready to self-publish as an e-book if they weren’t keen this time. I was taking regular ‘writing days’ as leave from work when I could and, if I’d stuck to my self-imposed deadline, I would have finished by now. But I didn’t, and I haven’t. And the reasons I haven’t have been mostly out of my control, but I am still bashing myself up over it.
And don’t even get me started on the half finished fiction…
I realised it was getting beyond a joke when I found myself getting all panicky and angry at myself and the world because I hadn’t written a blog. Well I had written it, but in a notepad, which has been sitting on the coffee table looking disappointed in me for months now, waiting to be transcribed.
It’s an important blog. It’s our engagement blog. (For those that don’t already know, after 10 years, the Captain finally proposed -spoiler: I said yes!) It was getting so long between the event and the blog that it was ridiculous. At least that was what I was telling myself. Yes I had a whole lot going on in my life, but what kind of writer am I if I can’t even make the time to write about my own engagement?
It was a couple of days after that last meltdown that I realised the only person who was upset and angry about this was me. That the voice I thought I had chased away during my earlier battles with mental illness was coming back.
“You’re a failure.”
“You’re letting everyone down.”
“Who do you think you are calling yourself an author? You’ve written one book. You should give up now before everyone realises you are a fraud.”
It is a voice that a lot of people have and it can be really hard to accept that it is a voice that is actually full of shit.
People aren’t thinking those things. They never have. But it doesn’t make it feel any less real. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the hardest battle anyone can fight is the one against their own brain.
But I am telling that voice to shut up and get back in its box. No doubt it will pop up a few more times, but I fully intend to slam the lid shut.
I am capable, and I will do all those things I said I would.
There will be a trip.
There will be a book.
There will be a blog (with lots of lovely photos from our engagement party).
But they will happen when they happen and I refuse to feel guilty about that anymore.
Speaking of deadlines, another one we missed, through no fault of our own, was getting Wildflower back in the water for summer. Instead of the usual paint and scrape, her butt was due for a major overhaul – sandblasting 14 years worth of antifoul right off and giving her a whole new beautiful paint job.
Wildflower takes up stilt walking
Last time Paddy did this he had a bit more time on his hands (and he was also 14 years younger) so this time we decided to enlist a bit of help.
Events that were mostly beyond our control meant the process took a lot longer than anticipated and crept into the colder season which meant then having to wait on the weather. The end result was that we missed the summer’s sailing, but Wildflower now has a lovely arse.
Last weekend we made a massive splash, plonking her back in the water again, where she is most definitely in her happy place.
Poor thing had been sitting so long that a bunch of gunk had clogged the switch of my nemesis the bilge alarm and jammed it on, meaning alarm bells ringing in the middle of the harbour.
Paddy calmly said “would you mind steering the boat for a bit?” and popped down to check things out and I only (internally) freaked out a little bit. Firstly over whether I could actually still remember how to steer the boat and secondly, well, those who have read the book will know why that particular alarm gives me the heebie geebies. It was good news though. I did remember how to steer and the issue was with the alarm, not the boat sinking. I kept my nerves in check and any anxious meeping stayed inside my head. I was quite proud of myself!
I don’t see the point in dwelling on past frustrations, so while it was sad we missed the summer sailing, I am super happy our boat is back in the water and look forward to restoring her from a cesspit of dust and toolboxes to our floating home away from home again.
Also, if you pick your days, winter sailing in Wellington can actually be more settled. We might even enter her in a couple of races in the cruising division of the Evans Bay Yacht Club winter series – though no firm commitment, and definitely nothing in writing!
I’m super excited to see that 1000 lovely people have subscribed to this blog (especially since I have been a bit rubbish at regularly updating it of late) and a big wave hello to the new followers on the Starboard Facebook page!
This is an awesome surprise and a good wake up for me to share more with you all.
To celebrate I’m selling signed paperbacks of Which Way is Starboard Again? for NZ $9.99 with free postage in New Zealand.
50% of the proceeds still go to the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation . Mental health is severely underfunded in New Zealand and this is a fantastic organisation that deserves all the support it can get. I have already made our first donation of $200 so thank you so much for everyone who has been a part of that.
For those of you who would like to donate more the $19.99 full promotion is still available and there is more information about it here
If you live outside of New Zealand and are interested in buying a copy, drop me an email at whichwayisstarboardagain@gmail.com and we can sort postage. The book is also available on most ebook platforms, but I don’t have control over the pricing of those. Do shop around though, I have spotted it on sale at different sites. At the moment Amazon has it at $6.59
In other news, book number two is definitely on the way and I will share a sample with you shortly. I am also investigating turning Starboard into an audio book, I just need to get my head around the technological side of that!
Will keep you posted.
Again, thank you so much for the support. It might just be a matter of pressing a subscribe button, but it means an awful lot to writers like us – so yay you!
Last mental health awareness week I recycled my coming out of the cray cray closet blog but a lot has happened between then and now so I think it’s time for a new one.
One of the drawbacks of writing a book about being a functioning nutbar is that it puts a whole lot of pressure on you to be exactly that.
You’ve just gone and revealed your biggest weakness to a bunch of strangers.You have told people they can get through it because you have gotten through it. You’ve told them you’re okay so you have to be okay. Otherwise you’re a big fat fraud.
The funny thing is I was okay. Everything was going great. I’d had a book published, I’d made my dream come true. I’d been getting all sorts of great feedback, I’d been in the paper and on the radio, I’d done a bit of public speaking. My life was full and busy, but it was full of good things. There was absolutely no excuse for my brain to break.
In hindsight the warning signs were there. Things had been going so well for so long that I had slipped back into bad habits, I was staying up too late, drinking far too much coffee and having energy drinks for breakfast. Then I was wondering why I wasn’t sleeping. I was permanently wired – jumpy, paranoid, clenching my teeth and counting on my fingertips (an old OCD habit). I was getting slack about remembering to take my meds.
It’s exhausting being on edge all the time. Eventually you are going to crack – and I did quite spectacularly.
It had been a great day. I’d caught up with some very dear friends who were visiting from overseas. It was lovely and sunny so we started the day with a boozy brunch and went from there. We ended up back on the boat that evening. We had a brilliant catch up and loads of fun. Then everyone went home – and I kept drinking (I’m not a big drinker so this is quite unusual for me). I had decided I wanted to turn my brain off and that was how I was going to do it. When Paddy tried to get me to stop I shut myself in the bathroom with a bottle of wine (again, this is not normal behavior for me).
The night ended with me lying on the floor of the boat screaming unintelligibly and refusing to move. It have been quite frightening for poor Paddy. Eventually I crawled into bed, freezing cold, and passed out.
No surprises that the next morning I felt awful. But it was a frighteningly familiar kind of awful – the thick, black hole in my stomach told me this was no ordinary hangover.
I spent the day alternating between feeling like my heart was going to pound out of my throat and just feeling leaden. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I felt empty and numb.
I finally had to admit it to myself – I was not okay.
I talked with Paddy, who had noticed I hadn’t been ‘present’ for a while. Like I was going through the motions but I wasn’t really there. It was such a relief to finally admit it.
It is so important to let people know when you are not okay, but it can be a massively hard thing to do. When I was a teen living with mental illness I didn’t know how to. I have a letter a friend wrote me when I was about 15 that I keep to remind me how important it is to communicate. It says “it’s like you are lying on the floor crying out in pain but not telling anyone where it hurts.” I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. But for the first time my friend got me thinking about how what was going on with me was affecting other people. I thought by bottling it up and keeping it to myself I was protecting my friends from having to deal with the mess in my head, what I didn’t realise was that what I was doing was even more frustrating and confusing. It took a long time and a lot of trial and error before I felt safe and comfortable sharing with people I cared about, but it was definitely the best thing for all of us.
So here I was admitting defeat and calling in the professionals. I called in sick at work the next day (one of the few times I have ever let myself do that for because of my mental illness) and visited my GP. I would have had no qualms taking the day off if I had the flu or a tummy bug but, despite my preaching in print, this was so much different. I couldn’t possibly show that kind of weakness, what if people thought I wasn’t going to be able to do my job?
There was no choice really. I had to go private. I could have gone into the public system but would have ended up on a waiting list – and when you are a sweating, shaking, twitchy mess, a waiting list just isn’t going to cut it. I was lucky,I could afford it. So many people can’t and that’s so wrong. I won’t start ranting about the state of our mental health system or I won’t stop, but I will say everyone needs access to this type of lifeline. There are good public services out there – they just need money and support so they are available to everyone, everywhere in the country.
My nerves about talking with my work about things proved utterly unfounded. They were great, and totally fine with me leaving an hour early once a week to take my brain in for a tuneup.
So I sat down with the head doc to see what we could do. We decided not to mess with the meds because they seemed to be doing their job, it was just me being rubbish about taking them. Instead we tried to unpack some things. We talked about what was going on in my life and every time I went down a new tangent she would gesture towards the carpet and mime putting something down. ‘Okay we’ll put this one in that basket and come back to it later. By the time we were done I was convinced she was going to run out of space on the floor for all the imaginary baskets.
“So basically you’re saying I’m a basket case then,” I dad-joked. This was to set the tone for most of my visits. We would talk about stuff, I would get uncomfortable and start cracking jokes. By session three she worked out we weren’t getting anywhere. Every time we scratched a surface I would throw walls up by trying to make her laugh.
In the end she said to me “you seem to have a real problem with having a mental illness”. I was outraged. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’ve written a book about having a mental illness, I tell people there is nothing to be ashamed of because, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Of course I don’t have a problem with having a mental illness!”
But I had to be brutally honest with myself – I did. I had to be okay because I had told the world I was okay. I’d told everyone that battling with your own brain does not make you weak – but I wasn’t drinking my own Koolaid. Do as I say don’t do as I do. It’s okay not to be okay, but not for me.
Realising that was a turning point for me. I actually started working on things. We reached a natural conclusion where most of the baskets were empty or at least only part full. I was looking after myself, taking breathers, easing up on the coffee and booze and getting my medication levels up again.
I still get twitchy at times but I am on top of it now. I’m enjoying life and I’m healthy again.
I guess my messsage is- and it really is – it’s okay not to be okay. The busiest, toughest, most outspoken of us are all allowed not to be okay and realising you aren’t okay is the first step towards fixing it – no matter how many invisible baskets you have to use.
PS – this is not a recipe to follow for everyone by any means. Talk therapy works for some people and it doesn’t for others, medication works for some people and doesn’t for others, exercise, getting out in nature, eating and drinking healthy -it’s the same deal. I find a combination of all three – meds, talking and making time to get out and about works for me, but none work on their own. It’s a process of trial and error and whatever works for you is totally legitimate.
Six months ago I lost my idol. The man very much responsible for me being me. I was devastated at the time and so was much of the world. David Bowie was such a huge part of so many lives – it was impossible to believe that someone who was so brave, intelligent and downright magical could be gone.
I said everything I needed to say in a blog I wrote at the time but what I didn’t share was a tattoo I got two weeks after.
It didn’t seem right at the time, the internet was wall to wall Bowie and it just seemed a bit soon and a bit twee. I got it for me, it was part of my grieving process and I wasn’t ready to share it with the world.
It all just sort of came together. The idea popped into my head fully formed while I was talking to my Mum on the phone. I wanted the black star from his final goodbye album, but that on its own was too dark for me.
Then the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt flashed through my mind, cutting across the star.
It represented everything that was sparkly and spiky and magical about him, that was it. That was my tattoo.
A friend of mine recommended a tattooist (Craigy at Union Tattoo) who just happened to have a cancellation, so what I was expecting to wait a while for happened within two weeks.
(Unfortunately the only decent pic I have of it is the one taken just after it was done. Have you ever tried to photograph your own wrist?)
It’s only little but it’s perfect. It makes me sad, but it also makes me feel strong and I smile every time I look at it.
It also turns out to have a very practical purpose.
I wanted the design on my wrist but didn’t really think too much about which one. In the end I just went with the one I didn’t wear a watch or fitness tracker on. It wasn’t until I was doing pilates (yes I do pilates – I may not be particularly good at it but I do it!) and I was having my usual issues of working out left from right, that I suddenly thought – I can use my tattoo!
It turns out it’s on my right side – my starboard side. I suddenly had an epiphany – I have a star on my starboard side. I wrote a book called Which Way is Starboard Again? and Bowie has answered that question for me forever!
Next time I’m out sailing, if a boat is heading towards Bowie I’ll know to keep clear.
I also conducted my own nerdy celebration of Bowie on the six month anniversary by helping orchestrate an augmented reality tribute. Before there was Pokemon Go there was Ingress (and before that Geocaching) – both are GPS based games that get you out amongst public art and sculptures and places of significance. My Dad got me into both, being a retired airforce navigator and fascinated with that sort of stuff.
I won’t go into too much detail but basically two warring teams united to create a digital lightning bolt across Lyall Bay.
The details are here (you don’t have to understand the lingo – the pictures say it all.)
Bowie was always an early adopter of new technology – I like to think he’d get a kick out of it.
I’ll end on a quote from a book I have recently read – Simon Critchley’s On Bowie, which sums him up perfectly for me.
“Bowie has been my soundtrack. My constant, clandestine companion. In good times and bad. Mine and his.
What’s striking is that I don’t think I’m alone in this view. There is a world of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, more exciting…He was someone who made life a little less ordinary for an awfully long time.”
PS. SHAMELESS PRODUCT PLACEMENT! Which Way is Starboard Again? the book is on sale $19.99 for blog readers. Free postage within NZ
