Which way is starboard again?

Salt and vinegar

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.

Anyway, enough gloating about being in the tropics. Here’s the blog I have been trying to finish for so long:

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.

End note: Our Vanuatu holiday gave me confidence back too, in terms of scuba diving. I normally get quite angsty at first but this time, with the help of one of Hideaway’s awesome dive guides, it was just like riding a bike (or flying over fields of coral). I was relaxed enough to be able to get my buoyancy right and Paddy busted me doing the Kate Winslet in Titanic ‘I’m flying!’ arms. So I guess that means I’ve got a decent handle on the crazy right now and that really does feel pretty good!

Gumboots and porridge

Porridge in the air

Comedian and mental health advocate Mike King describes depression as feeling like walking through mud. That was the inspiration behind the first Gumboot Up NZ day on April 5.

The idea was for people to walk a day in the shoes of someone with depression, while raising awareness and funds for youth mental health support.

For me, instead of mud, it’s always been porridge. For some strange reason, if anyone asks me to describe what depression feels like I have always said ‘walking through porridge.’

It’s as if the air has turned into a sort of lumpy sludge and for every movement you make through it, a pile more slurps back in to take its place – and that’s just getting out of bed.

Counter-intuitively, something I often can’t do when I’m depressed is cry. God I want to, I really do. But the more I want to, the more I can’t. Sometimes I see the porridge as a mix of all the tears and snot that I want to pour out of me pushing back down on me from the outside.

Now that I think about it, it’s actually a pretty gross analogy and mud is a lot better. The mud was actually what caught my attention about this particular mental health initiative. For the first time I was hearing something that described exactly how it felt for me, and knowing that someone else feels something so scary and internal and personal as depression the same way you do is hugely relieving and empowering.

Boots and suits

One of the things that was really cool about ‘walking through mud day’ was actually just walking around town. I paid a little more attention to people’s footwear than I normally would and I spotted quite a few people in gummies.

The cool part was that those people were obviously doing the same thing, because often we would catch each other’s eye, smile and walk on. It was a quiet acknowledgement ‘I know why you’re doing this, you know why I’m doing this. You get it.’

That small public acknowledgement – from the guy in the suit, from the woman in the amazing 50s style dress, from my workmates – was worth so much. I even appreciated the ‘helpful’ offer from a colleague to pinch me on the soft but under my arm to help with the not-being-able-to-cry thing (you know who you are!)

The teenager I used to be, utterly convinced that talking about mental illness would have landed her in the nuthatch, would have been completely blown away.

Radio gaga

I also have a bit of a soft spot for Mike King, who gave me a spot on his Late Night Nutters Club radio show when I was hawking Starboard when it first came out.

It was a scary and exciting adventure where I got to stay in a hotel in Auckland and blather on the radio about mental health and sailing. Mike and his cohost Malcolm Falconer were really great and made me super comfortable even though I was completely terrified.

I blogged about it at the time and you can listen to the broadcast on there. I have no idea what I said and probably completely blathered. I haven’t listened to it since because I hate the sound of my voice, so I can’t vouch for quality!

Radio Gaga (seamunchkin.com)

I am hope – counselling for youth

I am also quite passionate about where the money goes for this particular fundraiser. 100% of the donations go to Mike King’s I Am Hope charity, which provides access to counselling support for young people.

When I was 15 and diagnosed with OCD, anxiety and depression in Christchurch in the 90s, I was lucky enough to have access to good counseling and support. Sadly, for a lot of young people now, that is just not the case. More people are aware of mental health issues, and this is amazing, but I think what it also means is that more people are seeking help and the resources just aren’t keeping up with it. Some young people in crisis are waiting up to 6 months for their first appointment and that’s just not acceptable or safe.

The way the I Am Hope donations work is that your money is deposited into their Kiwibank account and is then given directly to a registered health professional upon receipt of an invoice. This means 100% of the money goes to help kids get the support they need, when they need it.

Even though Gumboot Friday is over, you can still donate to I Am Hope through their website and Give A Little page:

Gumboot Friday (iamhope.org.nz)

How to Donate (iamhope.org.nz)

When you can and can’t write

From one former Christchurch kid to the current ones, all I can send is hope and love right now. If any youth are going to need access to good counselling and support it’s them.

While I was able to write about the quakes that struck my home town, I just can’t find the words for the recent tragedy that happened there. I’ve tried and I just can’t do it. I honestly don’t know if I will ever be able to.

I was proud though, through my work at PPTA, to be able to share the words of others, and that is what I’ll share here:

Against hatred we send love (ppta.org.nz)

One thing it has done though, is throw into sharp relief the little light-hearted ‘Gators, guns and keeping calm’ piece on our trip to the US that I was working on. I will still use the material in some way but it needs a different lens and a lot of different thinking, that I’m not quite ready for yet.

There is another project in the works however, and I promise I won’t rip it out from under your feet this time because it actually is finished. I’ve had some super helpful feedback from beta readers and it is now with a manuscript assessor to help me iron out the rest of the wrinkles before I decide what to do with it. It’s something a bit different in that its my first foray into fiction – and it’s a nice escape from reality for me right now. Its a young adult novella, and never fear sailors, it has boats, scuba diving and various other marine activities in it (it also has bitey mer-people who farm dolphins for snacks). I will fill you all in when there is more to tell, but whether I self or ‘trad’ publish it as young folk say, I promise it is something you will actually be able to have.

For those who aren’t into that sort of thing, don’t worry, I am going to keep up with the non fiction about sailing and being bonkers, it’s just always fun to try new things!

Of love and refrigerant

RIP big fridge

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.

A couple of top examples for the geeks:

AC Service Tech LLC (YouTube channel)

HVAC in SC (YouTube)

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

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

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!

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.

If any of this rings a bell to you, leave a comment or email whichwayisstarboardagain@gmail.com

It’s alive (kind of)!

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.

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!

The case of the disappearing teeth

When I look back on it, my mental health blogs seem to jump from ‘bugger I’m bonkers again’ to ‘yay I’m better!’ with nothing much in-between.

That’s because in-between isn’t much fun, and writing when you are in-between is not an easy thing to do. But it’s probably the most important time to write, because in-between is the time that people need to hear that what they are going through happens to us all. That the ups will eventually stick around longer and the downs won’t last forever. I think we have a tendency to block out the in-between when we start feeling better because we don’t want to focus on the crap stuff. So we don’t write about it and we don’t talk about it.

So my blog for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week (which kicks off tommorrow) is about what in-between being sick and being well looks like for me.

Why do I feel sad? I’m better dammit!

In-between is having an awesome, productive weekend where you do all the things that seemed so insurmountable for so long. You mow the lawns and remember how much you love spending time in the garden. You tidy your room and hang up those pictures that have been gathering dust. You feel successful and, for the first time in a long time, really happy.

In-between is coming home the next day and crying your face off because you have felt sick and sad and anxious all day and you shouldn’t be feeling that way because you are better now dammit.

Poor, long-suffering Paddy says getting better isn’t a straight path, it’s a continuum. And he’s right. When you start to see little glimpses of sunshine you take it so much harder when it starts to cloud over again. But the sun is still there and eventually it will stick around longer and longer.

Okay, who stole my teeth?

In-between for me this time was also finding out how much damage my anxiety had done to my body. It was going to the dentist to have a filling replaced and finding I had anxiety-clenched my teeth so hard, for so long, I had ground down the enamel so far you could almost see the nerves.

It was also having to be a grownup and working out a payment plan so I didn’t have to sell a kidney to get it fixed.

Funnily enough, I had actually noticed in a couple of pictures friends had posted online that I seemed to have a weird gap in my teeth when I smiled. I remember thinking ‘that’s odd. I don’t have a gap there’ – not after all the money, time and trauma my parents went through getting me braces as a teen.

Then the dentist broke the news to me.

“You have the mouth of an 80 year old,” he said.

“What?!” I spat.

“Well, maybe a 70 year old…”

“Dude, that’s not much better!”

It turned out he was talking about wear. I had done about 80 years worth of wear and tear to 37 years worth of teeth.

Yeah alright, it was me.

After the initial shock, I wasn’t actually surprised. I most likely grind my teeth in my sleep, and I have experimented with sleeping with a mouthguard before, but the real issue was during the day. When my anxiety was up I could judge how tense and jumpy I had been by how much pain my jaw was in by the end of the day. I wouldn’t even realise I was clenching my teeth until I unclenched them. My jaw would pop and my back teeth would be stuck together like glue.

It was actually one of the first signs for me that the new medication was starting to work. I would get to the end of the day and think – ‘hey! My jaw doesn’t hurt!’

So while I wasn’t exactly surprised, I was rather shocked that something that was going on in my brain could do that much damage to my body without me realising it. (I may have had a minor meltdown over that, but seriously, who wouldn’t?)

Goodnight, sleep tight – don’t let the tooth monster bite!

The next step was, what to do? Leaving it was an option – for six months or so anyway, much longer though and it would be the difference between $3000 for building up what was there and $50,000 for getting crowns on everything.

I decided to rip the bandaid off. I knew that if I put it off I would just keep putting it off. There was a psychological component to it too. What’s more symbolic of getting better than taking a ragged, crumbling, anxiety mouth and giving it a proper smile again?

So I booked in to get some scans and moulds made. When I saw the mould of my mouth I was horrified. It looked like something parents would use to scare their children. It turns out I had ground several millimeters from both the top and bottom of my front teeth. I needed nine teeth built up with the equivalent of 11 fillings worth of schmoo.

They probably aren’t lined up exactly right as I was balancing them on a chair in the dentist’s waiting room while taking the pic, but you get the idea.

New gnashers!

It all happened quite quickly. A week after seeing the funhouse horror moulds I was in the dentist’s chair having scaffolding put on my teeth. Two hours in the dentist’s chair later (no fun drugs, just lots of injections) and I pretty much had a new set of gnashers.

It was actually a fairly painless process, the crick I got in my neck was the worst of it really. Hearing comments to the dental assistant like ‘look at all the wear there’ and ‘have you seen many procedures like this before?’ and learning that one of my front teeth was actually loose from all the pressure I’d put on it was a little more traumatic.

The dentist looked pretty proud of his work and he had every right to be. I thought I looked like a whole different person. He said I looked younger but he would – I was paying three grand and he had that ‘mouth of an 80 year old’ line to make up for!

I’m pretty happy with it though and think it’s an awesome symbol that things are getting better.

It does feel rather strange though, like I have someone else’s teeth. I tried to bite my nails the other day and I actually physically couldn’t. Maybe after all these years I might be able to quit that habit!

Four weeks of schmoo

The only drawback now is that for the next few weeks I am pretty much on a diet of mush until things settle down. So for me in-between is now soup and smoothies and sneaky KFC potato and gravy – but it will be worth it to have my smile back.

I have also developed a whole new respect for people on special diets. I got my teeth done just before a big work conference that involved catered meals. Everyone was fascinated when my dinner looked different to theirs and I got the third degree. By the end of three days my answers ranged from ‘I have new teeth and can’t eat solids’ to ‘I anxiety clenched my teeth to oblivion, please leave me alone to eat my schmoo’ – I seriously couldn’t do that all the time.

I love my new chompers though, and they are helping me in more ways than one. When I have a rough day and (as Paddy so eloquently puts it) ‘the black dog takes a dump on my brain’ I can look in the mirror and see that no matter how ratty things get, they can be fixed. It won’t be an easy fix, it could be the equivalent of four weeks of eating slush, but there is a fix there. In-between sucks, but it’s exactly that, in-between. You will come out the other side, potentially with a whole new smile (even if it’s one held together by plastic and dental goop).

Mental Health Foundation fundraiser

As always, and especially this week, 50% of paperback sales of Starboard the book go to the NZ Mental Health Foundation. Depending on how financial you are feeling you can either pay $20 and donate $10 here

Or take advantage of the sale price and pay $10 and donate $5 here

Free postage in NZ. If you are overseas just drop me a line at whichwayisstarboardagain@gmail.com and I’ll investigate postage costs.

Where to get help if you need it (in NZ):

Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor

Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)

Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

Healthline – 0800 611 116

Samaritans – 0800 726 666

The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand also has a great list of specialist helplines which you can find here:

Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand helplines (mentalhealth.org.nz)

Harry Potter and the Customs Official

Note: This is one of those blogs that travels all over the shop, from New Zealand to Samoa and back – so I have broken it up into bite-sized chunks so you can easily stop reading when you get sick of the sound of my e-voice. You’re welcome.

Also content warning: This post deals with mental health issues including anxiety and depression. It is unbelievably okay to ask for help so if you or someone you know needs assistance there are New Zealand-based contacts below. I am sure there are similar resources available for overseas readers.

When the crazy comes back

This sort of feels like an admission of defeat, but my gleeful post about switching meds for the first time in 20 years appears to have been a bit premature.

In short, the crazy came back.

Basically things went really well, right up until they didn’t. I was functioning fine during the working day, but by the time I got home I was completely out of gas from holding it all together. I was pretty much on an anxiety tight-rope. When it got to the point where Paddy sneezed and I screamed, we knew something was seriously wrong.

I didn’t give up easily. In fact, in trying to find another answer, I probably took longer than I should have to realise it was the meds. I did all the right things, I talked to an awesome head doctor, I started seeing a physio because the tension had munted my back and I was trying to eat healthier. (Getting more exercise was the next on the list, but I hadn’t quite got there yet!) When none of that worked that pretty much left one thing, it was chemical.

I didn’t want to admit this at first because I was so convinced the last happy pill switch was going to be the answer, so when things got steadily worse I felt a bit gutted. It’s silly, I know people who have been through at least six different medication changes before they found the right mix. I just figured that wouldn’t be me.

In typical Anna fashion, crunch time came at the least convenient moment, just before we were due to go on a planned holiday to Samoa. (Before you ask, we totally cheated and flew rather than sailed. We’d need a bit longer than 10 days if we were going to try something like that!)

No time was going to be a good time to switch, so my choice in terms of going on holiday was – wait until I got back, knowing there was 100% likelihood of feeling crappy while I was over there, or start beforehand with the small hope that I might actually feel a bit better. Not much of a choice I agree, but in the end I went with the latter.

This involved weaning myself the old happy pills, a couple of days of no happy pills and then gradually building up the new happy pills – which meant a fair bit of time with Anna’s brain not having enough happy juice. I was a bit scared, but I had done it before, and I knew it would be okay eventually.

Harry Potter and the Customs Official

One of the joys of having an anxiety disorder is that you fixate over every possible way anything could go wrong. If you are under-medicated and have an anxiety disorder it’s like that on acid (not that I ever tried acid, my brain was already fizzy enough!).

We were flying to Samoa from Auckland and circumstances meant that Paddy would be there before me (in Auckland, not Samoa), so I was going to catch a red-eye from Wellington and meet him at the Auckland International Terminal.

So of course my brain got busy with all the things that could go horrifically wrong before we even got out of the country. I stayed on the boat the night before to be closer to the airport and, after very little sleep (except for enough to have a nightmare that Wellington Airport was fogged out and no flights could leave), I got there ridiculously early and everything went super smoothly leaving me with an hour to kill. So far so good…

Turbulence on the flight to Auckland made me a little bit jittery, but it was nothing compared to bouncing around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (which is what I kept telling myself as I gripped the armrests.) I arrived safe and sound and made contact with Paddy to let him know I was about to head through customs. He told me there was plenty of time, but as far as I was concerned there wouldn’t be plenty of time until I was sitting at the gate waiting for them to call our seat numbers.

Customs went fine at first, I was waved through the people scanner, got most of my stuff, then noticed my handbag was heading away from me down the Naughty Conveyor Belt for Naughty People Carrying Naughty Things. I signaled to the customs officials that it was mine and they waved me over.

I stepped towards them and they were all “stay behind the yellow line please ma’am”. This was serious, I couldn’t even check to see if time was running out for my flight because my phone was in my handbag!

It was actually the second time this had happened recently, the first was when I was visiting my sister and new niece in Brisbane, but they found nothing then.

After confirming I had packed my own bags I joked (because that is what I do when I am stressed or nervous) that it might be my good luck troll. For those of you who don’t know me: My name is Anna and I never travel without a troll.

The customs official said “no, but I can see the troll, it looks quite funny!”

“Can I have a look?” I asked excitedly, forgetting I was still under suspicion.

I mustn’t have looked too dodgy because he let me lean over to see.

There she was, smiling benevolently up at me through the x ray. ‘Get me out of this Cal! (Short for Calorie, a story for another time),’ I thought frantically at her. ‘We’ve got a flight to catch!’

Cal the good luck troll (spoiler- as you can see we made it safely to the Pacific and she became TropiCAL)

After a bit of scruffling around and finding nothing, he finally said “What we are seeing is a pointed metal rod with sort of bumps all the way down it.”

I let out a massive sigh of relief. “I know exactly what it is. It’s the Harry Potter wand on my keyring!”

Instead of looking at me like I was a crazy person, he dug in deep, grabbed my keys and said ‘So it is! And it’s not just any wand. It’s the Elder Wand!”

(It’s totally a knock off of the Elder Wand, but I’ll take it).

It was a ‘graduation’ gift from a Wizarding Academy steam train trip I took recently with my Mum, two of my best friends and not a child among us – because #adulting. (Important note to anyone else who went on that trip. Take the wands off your keyrings if you want to fly internationally.)

Wizarding Academy graduates – adulting at its best!

It turned out Mr Customs Official was a massive Potter geek and had just returned from Harry Potter World (I didn’t catch whereabouts, I was still a little flustered).

He preceded to wave my tiny wand around *, showing his fellow customs officers the proper ‘swish and flick’ motion and trying to cast Alohamora.

I was massively relieved and glad to have provided some entertainment and found a kindred spirit, but I was also all ‘dude, flight to catch!’ I didn’t say that out loud though because I was still so relieved he hadn’t pulled out the rubber gloves.

In the end he gave me back my wand and my troll and I made it to the gate with time to spare and a story that I probably found much more entertaining that Paddy did.

* Yes I am aware of how that sounds. If your inner 14 year old boy is as vocal as mine, just google ‘Harry Potter wand replaced with wang’ and get it out of your system.

That’ll keep you going through the show
(with apologies to Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb)

Sometimes you don’t realise you haven’t been feeling anything until your emotions come back and you start Feeling All the Things.

It’s like when you stub your toe or otherwise bang yourself up. You feel nothing for a split second after you injure yourself (mostly because you are in a wee bit of shock) and then EVERYTHING IS FIRE AND PAIN.

As I mentioned in my book (which you should totally buy if you haven’t already because half of the proceeds go to the NZ Mental Health Foundation – see I can do product placement!) I have the cray-cray trifecta – obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression.

The anxiety is pretty easy to identify because you jump every time a spider farts, but the depression is a creeper and often you don’t realise you are going through it until it has its claws well hooked.

Paddy noticed I was sleeping a lot at home, but I just put that down to having a pretty full life. That was really the first sign. The second was that I had stopped feeling. I was making my way through life fine, but I didn’t really feel happy or sad, or anything really. I was numb.

It wasn’t until I was unwinding in a tropical paradise that I realised just how long I had been like that, and I realised it because I suddenly started to feel things again.

Something really silly made me cry. It might have been something in a book I was reading, or I might have lost something, or I might have stubbed my toe – I honestly don’t remember other than it was pretty minor – and I suddenly realised I hadn’t done that for a really long time.

That opened the floodgates. I’d get really involved in a discussion, I’d read something that resonated in a book, I’d see a cute cat on the internet and I would start bawling. It seems perverse that feeling sad can actually be a good thing but when you have felt nothing for so long it really, really can.

The first couple of days were a bit rough. Different people deal with depression in different ways and different approaches can work at different times for the same person. There is no right or wrong way to do this, so please don’t take my coping strategies as gospel, I might have different ones next week.

You often hear people talk about ‘battling depression’ and often that can be exactly the right thing to do. Fight the bastard. Throw everything you have at it. Don’t listen to a lying word it has to say.

Sometimes though you just don’t have the energy to do that, and that’s okay too. Sometimes you need to know when to stop and regroup, to recharge and get your energy back to kick it to the curb. That’s when I find myself sinking into it, just curling up and letting the feelings wash over me, acknowledging them but not fighting them. Sometimes that can take their power away.

Of course from the outside that looks a whole lot like curling up in a ball and feeling sorry for yourself, and when you are in a tropical paradise that some people might never get to see, that seems rather ungrateful and something you should feel ashamed about.

Now that I am out of that ball and feeling recharged and ready to face what’s ahead of me I can tell you that’s absolutely not the case, but it can be a tricky argument to win with yourself at the time.

When you suck at being a VIP

Before anyone tells me what I missed out on, this is not the first time I have been to Samoa. Around 10 years ago I visited Upolu, Savaii and even American Samoa and saw some stunning places, had awesome experiences and met some lovely people. I particularly recommend Savaii if you are thinking of going there yourself, it is absolutely stunning.

This wasn’t meant to be an adventure holiday, it was more of a stop, drop and flop affair. Somewhere warm to go and do absolutely nothing to stave off burnout in our real world.

So for the first time I stayed in a proper resort. To be honest, and I really hope this doesn’t come across as privileged and ungrateful, I’m not really a huge fan. Don’t get me wrong, it was absolutely lovely. We had lovely air conditioned rooms in a gorgeous setting with BATH TEMPERATURE ocean water just outside, the food and people were lovely, but I’m just not that crazy about people running around after me like I’m some sort of VIP.

I know it’s their job and if they didn’t do it they wouldn’t have one, but I just find people serving me and cleaning up after me a little hard.

I think I might have been a bit hyper-sensitive to it because I wasn’t 100% and I kind of just wanted to be left alone. But every day staff were desperate to get into our room to tidy up and, even if we left the ‘do not disturb’ sign up, they just circled until they had the opportunity to. I understood why after a couple of days, when it turned out hours later a manager would come in to check that the first lot of staff had done their job properly.

That didn’t sit super well with me, and is also a little hard when you are already feeling a bit guilty and ashamed about being busted taking a two-hour depression nap in the middle of a beautiful sunny day. I know it’s silly and that people who are on holiday rest a lot but, trust me, depression isn’t big on making a whole lot of sense.

Sometimes superpowers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

One of the side-effects of going through the medication switch at a resort is that I now know far too much about the people staying there.

I know that three Australian men were there on a racing trip (though I’m unsure what type of racing) and that they were rather fond of the local beer. I know that the kid two tables down from us hadn’t slept for three nights in a row (and I felt terribly sorry for his parents), I know that the woman at the table behind us was headed to Tonga but something her son was supposed to do back home hadn’t been done – and I learned all this in about 10 minutes, while trying to have a conversation with Paddy.

I first experienced this when I was 15 and diagnosed with All the Things. At the time I thought I was hearing voices or had suddenly developed the ability to read minds.

I would be in the supermarket and suddenly be assailed by inane conversations.

“This brand is cheaper but Frank likes that brand better.”

“Susan is a total skank!”

“I told you we were running low on petrol two days ago.”

I would hear all these things simultaneously until I wanted to scream “just put the house on the market Janet – it’s not going to matter if you buy new curtains or not!” at the top of my lungs.

When I told my head doctor about it I was convinced I had developed some sort of unwanted psychic superpowers. “You know, like when Superman got overwhelmed by being able to read everybody’s thoughts until he got control of his powers?”“

No,” she said, disappointingly. “You are not turning into a superhero.”

So much for silver linings!

She explained the fight or flight wiring in our brains, which kept us alive when we lived in the jungle and every cracking twig could be a bear creeping up on you. This was useful when humans were more regularly potential bear snacks, but not so much when you are in the supermarket buying yogurt.

As humans became less likely to be lunch, this hyper-vigilance faded. But those of us with anxiety and out of whack brain chemicals didn’t seem to get the memo. So here I was, in a tropical paradise, drinking pina coladas while utterly convinced there was A BEAR RIGHT BEHIND ME all day, every day. We don’t even have bears in New Zealand, and I’m pretty sure they’re not native to Samoa.

Once I got this under control the first time (and I will again) it actually became a useful skill as a journalist. I had developed bat ears and often conversations inadvertently tuned into, grew into promising story leads.The moral of the story is, don’t whisper things around me, I will automatically tune in, whether I want to or not. Also, that colour really does look good on you, you should totally buy that dress!

Anna’s list of things that help when you are going bonkers in the tropics

There is most definitely a light at the end of this particular tunnel. I am not better yet, the drugs still need tweaking, but I am getting there.

The fact that I am writing again is a pretty good sign. In fact, I wrote most of this while we were away, which is an even better sign. I find writing down the things that have helped me through a wobbly patch is useful for the next time things go bumpy, so here’s my list this time round:

Sending silly messages to my family Whatsapp group chat, and seeing what they are up to (particularly looking at photos of my wee niece and grossing my sister out with photos of my Crocs)
Island cats (none of which were as beautiful and snuggly as my beloved at home of course!)

Swimming in bath temperature warm ocean water

Having breathing space to write again and actually feeling like doing it (it took four days before I was in the right headspace but I got there!)
Umbrella drinks
Putting umbrellas from said drinks in my good luck troll’s hair

Tropical flowers that look like fuzzy Muppet caterpillars

Reading three books in 10 days – a record, which is a shame because I love reading, I just never take the time to do it.
Wearing pretty summer clothes (that probably won’t come out again until the next holiday)

Paddy – for being right there with me while I slept, wrote, stalked island cats and put umbrellas on my troll. Love you babe!

Paddy in training for the 2019 International Competitive Hammocking Championships

Where to get help if you need it (in NZ):

Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor

Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)

Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)

Healthline – 0800 611 116

Samaritans – 0800 726 666

The Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand also has a great list of specialist helplines which you can find here:

Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand helplines (mentalhealth.org.nz)

Learning to forgive myself – and a big splash

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.

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!

You belong in a boat out at sea

You belong among the wildflowers
You belong in a boat out at sea
Sail away, kill off the hours
You belong somewhere you feel free

– Wildflowers, Tom Petty

Once I met a bloke who lived on a boat named after a Tom Petty song.

His name was Paddy and hers was Wildflower and they must have made an impression because nine years later they are still in my life.

Wildflower the boat

Wildflowers – the song

Nine years later and the Captain and I were privileged enough to see the man himself in concert. We had no idea it would be our last opportunity.

I’d always quite liked Tom Petty, but he certainly played a bigger part in my life after I met Paddy. The first time he came over to my house I tried to impress him with a best of Tom Petty CD casually playing in the background (smoooooooth…)

He still gives me shit about that.

Petty for Paddy is like Bowie for me – a massive part of his life for most of his life. He has a Petty lyric for just about every situation. He’s dealing with the loss of his idol in a typical Kiwi bloke fashion, but I can tell he is hurting. We both are. We have so many memories wrapped up in TP. In the end even my cat (the late, great Mr Pies) was a fan.

The best of those memories was earlier this year when we actually got to see a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert.

Paddy was turning 50 and our initial plan was to head to Hawaii – Hawaii Five-0 styles. Our plans changed pretty quickly though when I spotted on TP’s official Instagram that he was touring the United States at the same time we were going to be over there. My fuzzy American geography decided that our best bet was to detour via Texas, and so the adventure began.

When tickets went on sale I found myself at 4am mashing keys and refreshing my browser in a bid to secure our spot. I was mildly hungover after a few drinks to celebrate the end of the working year and all the usual things went wrong. The internet dropped out, my computer froze, the website got confused because I was in New Zealand trying to buy tickets for a concert in the United States.

But I got there in the end, waking Paddy up to crow about my success. (He muttered something unintelligible and went back to sleep.)

TP didn’t disappoint – the distance we traveled, the adventures to get there – the frisking Paddy got at the airport trying to leave Hawaii (a story for another day) were all worth it. The man still had it. It was an absolutely amazing concert and you could tell he was loving every minute of performing.

The crowd were loving it too – quite a bit judging by the funny smelling cloud of smoke that appeared over the stadium when he played Last Dance with Mary Jane.

It was amazing and we were both so freaking happy (and not because of the funny smelling smoke).

And to make the night even more perfect, out of all of his massive back catalogue, what did he play? Wildflowers.

Paddy probably won’t admit it, but it was quite an emotional moment.

Here’s my wonky recording – ignore the wobbles, the sound is good!

Margarita slushie – essential Texan concert fuel

Pre concert excite! (Yes Paddy is wearing a laser kiwi T shirt. NZ represent!)

Waving celphones is the new waving cigarette lighters

Paddy says losing Tom would have been so much worse if he had never got to see him play. It’s like the best thing and the worst thing happened in the same year. I’m so sad, but happy at the same time that I could help make this happen for him.

I’ll leave you with another favourite of Paddy’s from the 2010 Mojo album

I know that look that’s on your face
But there’s somethin’ lucky about this place
And there’s somethin’ good comin’
For you and me
Somethin’ good comin’
There has to be

– Something Good Coming – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Getting back to nature – whatever it throws at you

This year’s mental health awareness week’s theme is Nature is key – which would be great if nature wasn’t being so bastard cold at the moment *

(*When I started writing this blog Wellington was behaving awfully weather-wise. It has since bucked its ideas up but I can’t be naffed changing my intro or cover pic. Nice one Wellington – keep up the good work!)

In all seriousness though, they’ve put together some pretty cool material to remind people not to get buried in things and to look to nature to support mental health and wellbeing.

One of the things they have produced is a little green N sticker to put over the N on your keyboard to remind you to take a break and go hang out with the grass and woodland critters. It’s a great idea in theory, but I’m a bit of a keyboard masher and N seems to be right in the firing line – so mine kind of looks like this now.

Hopefully it stops raining for long enough to go outside before I wipe it off the face of my keyboard. (See asterisk above).

It might seem a bit tree huggy, but there’s actually something in it all. When I’m having a hard time with anxiety, one of the best things I can do is just drop everything and go for a walk. Blowing out the cobwebs by moving is a great distraction when your brain is trying to eat itself. Going to the gym is great but sometimes you just can’t deal with other people – going for a walk around the harbour (even if it is head first into a gale force wind) can be much more healing.

I discovered the benefits of getting out and walking when my OCD was bad all those years ago. I would get to the point where I couldn’t stay still. I couldn’t stand still, I couldn’t sit down I just had to get out of where I was. Walking through botanical gardens, parks and along beaches saved me in a lot of ways and the friends and family who walked with me (when I was up to dealing with people) even more so.

Gardening is now one of my go-to’s (a genetic predisposition from my Mum). I can spend hours playing in the dirt, freeing plants from weeds and vines, talking with worms and helping things grow. It can be very zen in some ways but great when you are frustrated too. Sometimes the more violent the gardening the better. Hacking up blackberry and ripping out weeds by the roots can be exceptionally satisfying.

Getting away from the dirt – I guess, if you think about it, heading out to sea is about as close as you can get to nature. While it wasn’t always super relaxing – and at times rather traumatic -our trip around the South Pacific in Wildflower also provided me with some of the most peaceful moments oof my life. A night watch on a still night can be stunning. When there is nothing but sea, stars and fluorescent algae to keep you company, nothing but waves and the Milky Way, there is nothing more beautiful. It is one of my go-to images when I feel stressed out.

Speaking of images, the Mental Health Foundation also has a photo challenge going, which I am having a go at this year. You can check it out here:

Mental Health Awareness Week photo challenge

If you’d like to have a look at my pics you can find me on Instagram as Seamunchkin, @Seamunchkin on Twitter or check out the Which Way is Starboard Again? Facebook page. Let me know if you are taking part, I would love to see your photos too.

The best thing is you don’t have to be officially cray cray for this sort of thing to help. We all lead highly stressful lives in one way or another and sometimes we just need to be reminded that there is a world out there. That outside of that meeting you were in, that difficult class you took or that politician that annoyed you on the internet, there’s an ocean and stars and trees and flowers and dirt.

I’m not saying going outside will fix everything. If it did I would spend much more time out there than I do. Treating mental health is much more complex than that. It may involve talking with people or in some cases, like mine, medication.

That’s why I get so mad when I see those stupid memes about how hugging a tree is better than medication. You know the ones – I’m not giving them the airtime of reposting. There is a great response by the wonderful mental health advocacy website The Mighty that I will share though:

To the Person Who Made a Meme Calling Depression Medication ‘Sh*t’

Like everything, it is all about balance.

So kudos to the NZ Mental Health Foundation for encouraging people to think about their brains as well as their bodies.

I know I bang on about it a lot but mental health support in this country needs so much more support than it gets. I am so glad it has finally become a political issue. It affects so many of us and we need to stand up for ourselves and each other and push it where we can.

In the meantime, if you have anything to spare, I highly suggest sending it the Mental Health Foundation’s way. They need all the support they can get.

As always, 50% of the profits from Starboard physical book sales are going to them so if you want something to read and a warm fuzzy feeling feel free to push the button below ($10 sale is still on)

Note: The super funky image at the top of this blog is called Rain and wind. It’s by jaci XIII, and was created for the Kreative People Challenge 59 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

1000 subscribers! Let’s have a sale! (proceeds to NZ Mental Health Foundation)

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

Mental Health Foundation fundraiser

You can also purchase it, and other cool stuff, through the Mental Health Foundation website (where they have also done a really cool review!)

NZ Mental Health Foundation – buy useful stuff

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!

Goodbye Mr Pies

Nearly 16 years ago I got into an argument with my flatmate (housemate or roommate for non-Kiwi readers) about whether or not we should get a cat.

“Don’t be ridiculous!,” I said (in a rare moment of sensibleness). “We are going to go our separate ways in a year. Who is going to take the cat? Who is going to pay for the food and the vet bills? We are not getting a cat. End of story.”

It was not the end of the story.

Around midnight said flatmate woke me up to say she thought she had heard an injured cat in the back yard. I muttered something about her probably being high and turned to go back to sleep when I heard it too. A woeful yowling noise that could have woken the dead.

We woke another flatmate up and the three of us headed out to the back yard, armed with a cigarette lighter, because students didn’t have useful things like torches. We followed the noise into the bushes down the back of the property and when I thought we were close I grabbed the lighter. After burning my fingers several times (I didn’t smoke) I found the source of the caterwauling and tried to grab it before it could run away. Still thinking we were hunting for a wounded adult cat, I was shocked when my hands closed on a ball of fluff the size of a regular cat’s head. Where was the rest of the cat? How could it still be meowing? Once my eyes got used to the light I realised I had captured a tiny black kitten. I was amazed that something so small could have made so much noise.

The first thing we noticed when we got the poor thing inside was that it absolutely stank, like something had peed all over it. We gave it a bath in the sink, dried it off and popped it in a shoebox with a towel and a hot water bottle. A fourth flatmate woke up. “Is that thing staying?” he asked. We shrugged, if we couldn’t find an owner, then probably yes. We popped the shoebox in the bathroom, where we surmised there would be less damage if its occupant peed everywhere, and went back to bed. As soon as the lights went out the howling commenced in earnest. “Is that thing staying?” flatmate became “if someone doesn’t shut that thing up it’s going out the window” flatmate and Anna the sucker stepped in. I picked the kitten up and popped it on my pillow, where it promptly fell asleep. The choice was taken out of my hands, I was Mum from that night forth.

The next day we tried to deduce gender, but the kitten was so tiny it was almost impossible to tell. We couldn’t spot any boy bits so we declared our new friend a little girl and named ‘her’ Holly because we found her just before Christmas. A check up at the vet some time later told us a different story, our little fleabag was actually a little boy, and we might want to consider a name change. To keep things simple we just decided to drop the H and Holly became Ollie.

If Harry Potter was the boy who lived, then Ollie was the cat who lived. Right from the start we were told not to get attached to him because he probably wasn’t going to make it. He was only about three weeks old and we were told by various well-meaning cat people that if his mother had abandoned him, if he had been peed on, if we didn’t have a heatpad or fancy food then he was probably going to die. Nevertheless we purrsisted, feeding him kitten milk with an eyedropper and keeping him warm. Before long he was drinking milk from a dish by himself (give or take a bit of faceplanting) and using a litter box. Score one for the cat who wasn’t supposed to make it! Since then Ollie made it through a lot, getting hit by a car, a dicky thyroid, getting lost at new homes. He was the poster child for a cat’s nine lives.

I’m a big kid now! (blurry pre digital camera shot of Ollie graduating from bottle feeding. Note milk beard.)

Because he was so young when we found him, Ollie didn’t really know how to cat. This meant he was a terrible hunter. He knew he should chase things but he had no idea what to do with them if he accidentally caught them. Other than the 3am live mouse chases after having them proudly delivered to the foot of my bed, this was something I didn’t actually mind that much.

Because he wasn’t weaned properly Ollie also sucked his tail. It was kind of adorable when he was a kitten, curled up like a tiny doughnut, but not so cute when he was still doing it three years later. We tried to stop him, but if you pulled his tail out of his mouth he would just slurp it back in like a piece of spaghetti. It was really quite gross. His tail was crusted and pointy like a paint brush (in fact somewhere I have a tail painting where I gave in to temptation and dipped it in some water colours). At one point the tip of his tail became ginger. I kid you not. I have no idea what is in cat saliva but he actually managed to suck the colour out of his tail.

Students. I don’t actually have an explanation for this photo.

Then there were the wet patches. If you tuned out the weird slurping noises and let him stay in your lap for too long he would leave large drool spots in rather embarrassing places. He did it in the bed too, necessitating a few awkward conversations with new boyfriends.

Our first real challenge came at Christmastime when we were all going to go our separate ways. Who would take the kitten? As predicted, it turned out to be me. I put him in what from memory was a bird cage and took him to my Mum and Dad’s, where we separated him from our adult cats Pirate and Topsey. He took it all in his stride, getting cuddles from my little sister and posing for a family photo. By then it had been unofficially decided that the fuzzball was mine.

Mum only just told me recently that when I turned up with Ollie she thought it would be a disaster. “Oh god, she’s got a cat. How is she going to cope with that while she’s flatting?” she said to Dad. After a few years of watching me with Ollie, she quickly changed her tune. Yes I saved him initially, but he saved me in so many ways. Those were her words, and they are so true. Through struggles with mental illness, messy breakups, living arrangements falling to bits, work and study stress, Ollie stuck to me like glue. I was never really on my own. He never judged and he was always there.

Renting with a cat isn’t easy (that’s a subject for a blog all of its own) but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Ollie and I have lived all round the country – several flats (and a brief stint in a friend’s Kombi van) throughout Christchurch, another few rentals down south in Timaru when he went with me to journalism school, a number of homes further south in Oamaru where I worked for the local newspaper and we lived on our own like grownups, and finally across the Strait to Wellington where we moved about a bit before buying our first house together (with the help of some bloke called Paddy).

It felt like Ollie and I against the world for such a long time but when we allowed Paddy into the mix, we became a funny little family.

Meeting Ollie was a pressure moment for Paddy. He knew that if the cat didn’t like him it would be a deal breaker. In fact I’m pretty sure I wore a black cat T shirt on our first proper date, just to hammer the point home. Luckily for Paddy Ollie was a bit of a hussy when it came to men and he let him cuddle him straight away. A couple of years later and they were best buddies. Ollie even came to stay on the boat a few times.

When Paddy first met Ollie he was a little rotund (Ollie not Paddy!). At one point the vet told me if he got to 7kgs we were going to have to talk. Unbeknownst to me Paddy had a history of renaming people’s cats and this time took to calling mine Mr Pies (as in who ate all the…).

Annoyingly, the name stuck. Mr Pies, Pies, Pie-eater, Piesy, Pie pies, His Royal Pie-ness. Ollie started coming when called Pies, he knew that ‘pies’ equated to food and that ‘pie time’ was dinner time. In the end I was calling him Pies too, despite my concerted efforts to call him by his real name.

Sadly every story does have an end and Mr Pies’ was just over a week ago. It wasn’t a shock, he wasn’t in pain and he let us know when it was time for him to move on. We knew our time with him was coming to an end, it just happened a little quicker than anticipated. Ollie’s 16 years made him quite an old man in cat terms and unfortunately his kidneys had just worn out. Right up until his last week with us he was just as playful as when he was a kitten. A miracle kitty arthritis drug had given him a new lease on life. He would hurtle up two flights of stairs and be squawking at me from the top to get up there and feed him in the time my creaky knees had got me a third of the way. When he started struggling with his favourite thing (eating) and started pooing in strange places though, we knew something was up. He was so thin too. From his fighting weight of nearly 7kgs he had dropped down to 3kgs.

The vet told us we might have a couple of weeks, but unfortunately we had just days. The morning I woke up and he was still in bed with me not demanding breakfast I knew things weren’t good. When I popped him down and he was wobbly on his feet I knew they were even worse. We’d read that with kidney issues they aren’t in pain, their bodies just aren’t processing toxins and it is a little bit like being very drunk. Sometimes they just naturally go to sleep. Paddy told me to stay at home with him that day and if things still weren’t good we would take him in to the vet. Ollie and I snuggled all day; He rested his paws on me and purred. When his breathing started to get shallower I told him it was okay, he didn’t have to stay, he could rest now – but if my boy was anything it was stubborn. He started hassling me like he wanted food (he was on a special diet for his thyroid but by that point we decided he could have whatever he liked. Raw eggs and bacon flavoured baby food were his favourites – thank you internet!) I carried him upstairs and we sat in the sun (it was a rare sunny Wellington winter day) and he had a good chow down. The little bugger kept wanting to wander off though and he kept falling over. His body wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do. He let out a yowl of frustration and I knew. It wasn’t fair, he was in distress. I called Paddy and he came home early. Ollie cuddled up to him and started purring, which he hadn’t done for a while. When I said to Paddy we should try to get an earlier vet appointment he started purring louder. I am so sure he was telling us yes.

I sat in the back of the car with him and we cranked up the tunes. Ollie was a bogan, he liked car rides but only if accompanied by loud music. Like his Dad he was a bit of a fan of Tom Petty, so that is what he got. He didn’t want to be in his carry cage and I figured this time he didn’t have to be, so he sat on my lap, peering out the window and watching the traffic go by. When we got to the vet it was amazing. Pretty much as soon as we put him on the table, he fell asleep. It was like he had waited until we were all together and decided ‘okay, it’s time for me to go now’. When the vet put him to sleep we didn’t even see him take his last breath, it was so quick and so peaceful, it was obvious he was ready to go.

I’m crying as I write this, but I am also grateful. I am grateful that we got to say goodbye as a family. I am grateful for all those wonderful years, for all the times he drove me insane, for all the times he made me smile. I’m grateful for the friends we made together and the adventures that we had. I’m grateful for all the times he was there for me when times were dark, when the responsibility for a little animal that loved and trusted me helped keep me going.

As my little sister said, I was literally with him from the beginning to the end – and all the highs and lows in between. As a kitten he used to eat my books. As a cat he is immortalised on the cover of my first published book – pride of place, exactly where he belongs.

I am a witch without a familiar. He was my best friend. I am bereft but also so glad he was a part of my life for so long.

We buried him in a grove in the forest out the back of our property where he liked to lurk. Eventually we will clear a path down there and put in a bench so we can hang out. He’s got his blankie and his mousies and a tonne of catnip to keep him company in kitty cat heaven.

When I broke the news on Facebook it was really lovely. People from so many different parts of my life who remembered him from different times got in touch. It made me sad, but it made me smile.

So goodbye Ollie, Mr Pies, Piesy, Wolliver, Woozle, Mow mow, Boop Kirtlan. I will miss your chattiness, your attitude, your cuddles, and your incredible ability to find the most noisy thing in the room at 3am. I will miss seeing you at the door when I come home from work, having you steal water from any unattended glass an typing my blogs from underneath your furry butt.