artist adrift

Artist Aground- last post

2009-07-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. ~Jane Austen

I can’t say I wish I’d stayed home these last ten months, but it is good to be back. Back among friends and back in my neighbourhood, the cozy, gossipy, crazy, infuriating, wonderful Protection Island. And great to find nothing much has changed: winter has come and gone, leaving a few casualties in my garden (my jasmine and my variegated fuchsia) and a new granddaughter to my good friend Frances. Oh, there have been the usual community feuds over various issues, which in the summer seem to mysteriously evaporate. And there have been the usual capers: the project to replace many island toilets with low flush models, which were barged over en masse and transported around the island with great ceremony in a poo-rade. Or the day one islander set a piano on Satellite Reef (while it was exposed briefly by one of the summer's lowest tides) in the middle of the harbour, for a performance and party.

I have been home for 10 days, enjoying day after day of classic Strait of Georgia summer, clean winds and clear skies. The wild grass in front of my house, which begins the summer brilliant green and lush, is golden and everything smells of dry fir needles and hot sap.

In my house, I wander from room to room, marvelling at all the space. I open and shut the refrigerator, amazed by the fresh food: three types of cheese, bags of arugula, bottles of chilling wine. I take long baths and help myself to clean towels. I sit in a chair on the porch watching the sunrise, or explore the corners of my garden, the overgrown forest at the back, the pond, the rhododendron dell. I putter in my studio, pulling out supplies and thumbing through art books. My home feels like a kingdom. And I feel rich.

Last night at 3am. Circadia completed her Pacific circle. Kim had promised to call me before he arrived at the dock here on the island, so I could be there to meet him. I slept through the phone ringing and didn’t wake until I heard someone having a long shower.

Circadia at the dock, Protection Island

He has captained the boat for over 10,000 nautical miles and will spend the next days having a well-deserved rest before he unpacks all his office boxes in the attic, brushes off his skull, and begins the process of re-opening his practice.

..the tired mariner.

I am already back in my studio most days, painting and preparing for the classes I will give in the next few months. And I am back at my desk, working on writing projects.

my studio

I will miss writing blog posts. Yes, this is my last one. As I have said before on this blog, your presence has meant a lot to me this year. You were my community and I often felt your interest and support on the slender thread of this journey over a wide ocean. I have learned a great deal from this year, some of which I already knew, but have been reminded of once again--that the fear which keeps us from doing the things we dream of is worth wrestling with (or at least ignoring). I wasn’t always as strong as I would have wished, as funny, or as brave, but I did it anyway, and it was a hell of a ride.

And thanks again for coming along with me!! Consider this an invitation to stop by my studio on Protection Island (23 Hispanola Place), check my website www.alisonwatt.ca, or email me alisonm.watt@gmail.com, if you have any questions or would like to be on my email list for shows and classes.

And so, Jane, I would say, perhaps there is nothing like staying home for comfort, but there is nothing like coming back after a long absence for appreciating it profoundly.

s/v Circadia

2009-07-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Currently at 48 degrees, 06 minutes north, 132 degrees, 37 minutes west.

In retrospect our travel in the last several days has been concerned with the North Pacific High. A high pressure area has been developing in the area of 45 degrees north and 135 degrees west. On July 19 (at 44.33 N 141 W), after a few days of picking up the leavings of a weak low pressure system we were able to hoist the spinnaker heading due north in a southeast wind (starboard tack). During the next three days until 0430 this morning the wind gradually veered*, becoming southerly, then increasingly southwesterly. As a consequence we turned more east and by early this morning were actually having to sail a bit southeast to keep the sails full. What was happening is that we were sailing around the developing high and the winds we experienced were spinning out of it.

The high is developing into a ridge that extends from here to northern Vancouver Island and it is fusing with the main high to the south. At 0430 we jibed and are now heading a bit east of north, magnetic 15 degrees is our course. We hope that the wind continues to veer and will fuse with the northwesterlies that come down the BC coast. If so, we should find our course gradually coming more easterly so that we line up with the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

At 0430 it was broad daylight and I realized we were a bit late with our time zone changing.

The GRIB files suggest that this developing high will snuff those nice westerlies you are having on Friday/Saturday, and perhaps the last part of our voyage will be diesel powered.

*Veer, a verb, according to the OED means to let off a sheet, turn downwind, or for the wind to blow from more behind. It comes from an old french root. However it is used by modern sailors to describe when wind changes in a clockwise direction (looking at the planet) as opposed to "backing" when the wind is changing anti-clockwise, and somehow the OED people haven't picked this up tsk, tsk.

From a natural history point of view we were visited by a large herd of dolphins in the night, giving a great phosphorescent show. It appears they were staging under the hull and then springing forward in synchronized groups of 8 to 12 swimming abreast. This went on for at least half and hour and then I think they triggered the shallow depth alarm by sitting under the depth sounder, alarming the sleepers. By the time the kerfluffle was settled they were gone.

Kim

s/v Circadia

2009-07-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

... we have been sailing due east along 47 degrees and 10 minutes north with 10 to 13 knot southwesterly winds and the red spinnaker. We can't make a more northerly course because of the wind angle. It was sunny this morning, now a kind of bright overcast. You get the idea--it just thick enough to obscure the sun, no thicker. It is a bit sleepy but we are steadily counting down meridians every 45 miles, currently the 136th one. We are interested to see what happens when we encounter this so called high pressure ridge at about 134 West - naively hoping very little, we'll just keep sailing.

We just saw the first freighter on the AIS that is heading for Vancouver. I was dozing in the forepeak a few hours ago and Michael saw an animal that probably was a fur seal based on his description. It had prominent flippers, a whiskery face and relatively light colour. The field guide says that this is breeding season but not all animals breed; so perhaps this animal was unlucky in love and just decided to stay at sea with the mackerel and anchovies and squid, nursing its woes.

Another sign that we are finally getting to the Pacific Northwest is that the closest Sailmail Station is Friday Harbour; I've said good bye to the incredibly efficient Honolulu station.

I don't know about the John Banville book - it could be characterized as that of a complaining Irishman or alternately as a book by a man whose wife has just died, neither really light reads, however I am trying to think of it as a coming of age type of story to keep my spirits up. And it is beautifully written. It occurs to my that the travel book by the dutch fellow must be somewhere aboard; I will be reviewing the bookshelves again.

Hinge fell off head door. A Joycean phrase. Fortunately that is the only boat related problem that developed today; everything seems fine otherwise.

Well, that is all the news from Circadia.

Au revoir, love Kim

s/v Circadia

2009-07-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

We have 644 miles to Cape Flattery, that is about 750 to Nanaimo. Things are going pretty well. There is a high centred at 45 N and 135 W. Though the GRIBs do not show this there has been southeast wind flowing from the high to our position west of it. My theory is that the high is emptying into a low pressure system that was supposed to have arrived today but never did. These things do not show up on the Gribs. Practically we have been moving well north and bit east with these southeasters, using the red spinnaker. Just now at noon the wind is easing some but we plan to continue northeast from our current position at 46.34 N / 140.30 W and turn towards Juan de Fuca at about 47.5. There is a chance that the wind will just carry us around the high and we won't have to do much. There is then a low pressure system which should arrive sometime Tuesday with southwesterlies that should push us along. Capiche?

It does feel like there are more birds now than there were. We passed a zone with several albatross sitting on the sea, a fishy smell and then caught a tuna whose stomach was full of squid. We passed another similar scene this morning but didn't have a hook down. The water temperature is 13.5, about what you get off Willows Beach. Lots of petrels, some shearwaters. I have to say that I have given up trying to speciate them.

Kim

s/v Circadia

2009-07-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

Things are pretty much how you would imagine out here. There is disappointing news about the wind. A high pressure ridge is developing between us and the coast. (we are at 44 north, 141 west). This is a zone of no wind and it also has the effect of filling and deflating the low pressure that was supposed to overwhelm us today with southwesterlies. So, we're droning along headed due north at 1300 rpm going between 2.5 and 4.5 knots depending on what zephyrs we can use for extra speed. We're down to about 15 gallons of fuel and there is a very real possibility that we will spend some days rocking back and forth with slatting sails waiting for the high pressure to disappear. Alternately we may be able to get around the top of the high which is at 48 or 50 degrees, if we ever run into actual wind so we can sail up there. One would say that I am being spanked by Aeolius for daring to calculate our arrival date when still 800 miles offshore.

It is Sunday morning. I have had my coffee and some cold pancakes spruced up with some honey from bees that frequented only madadamia nut flowers. It is overcast and I am sitting in the cockpit on green cushions wearing a toque, my reading glasses, a Loreto t shirt, my variegated blue merino shirt, my grey sturgeon sweater, my snazzy oregon research wind jacket, long underwear, shorts and my Musto Offshore pants, wool socks and deck shoes. I've moved to non-fiction in the form of the Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. Only bird today = Laysan Albatross.

St Matthews Passion last Sunday, I think it will Mozart's Grand Mass today.

My life in a nutshell

A bientot, Love Kim

Addendum: Now sailing with red spinnaker, feeling good. I have realized that when I smile my canine tooth jabs my lip right into the wound. The Mass was excellent. Only Mozart would have a sexy soprano singing the Credo. Saw another flock of jaegers, several Laysan sitting on the sea. Michael caught a little tuna, sprucing up dinner.

Kim

s/v Circadia

2009-07-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

41 degrees N, 142.5 degrees north and 142 degrees west.46 W

July 17

Last evening we had 13 jaegers milling about the vessel. They were likely Pomarine jaegers, though as I read about them I realized identification can be difficult. We seem to be visited by birds at sunrise and sunset. This morning when I awoke we were sailing, then we had pancakes. One of my favorite times on the boat is when the other two crew members are asleep and I am alone in the cockpit. Such was the case this morning and I was reading your book. Then the wind lessened and I had to hand steer to nurse her along; now the wind is 5 to 6 knots and the motor and autopilot aredoing the work. We are pointed at Juan de Fuca 894 miles away but there is a little high pressure between here and there that should be swept away by a little low pressure system on Sunday. So, I think we will have fluky winds till then, and hopefully will really crack on after that. There is a current of half a knot at least pushing us, so our daily runs seem good even on a wimpy day like today.

July 18:

We had another flock of birds around the boat last p.m. but they were ruddy turnstones (15) rather than jaegers. I think the jaegers were parastic not pomarine. We are seeing Blackfooted Albatross several times a day and today saw our first Laysan. Lots of vallela (is that how you spell the sailing jellies?)
It is getting cold here - the water is 16 degrees C.

We are at 800 miles to Flattery. Yesterday's run 88 miles. Ugh. There have been light north easterlies !%&!### for the last 24 hours and we have spent much of that time tacking towards home motorsailing at 3 to 4 knots. Ugh. Hopefully a southwester associated with a low tonite or tomorrow, but still no reliable sign of it in the sky and the barometer remains high. Solar panels both shorted out at the deck, haven't fixed them yet as we are motoring so much we have lots of power. Fridge is off.

Tonite the crew will get their first hash experience and there's been a lot of talk about it already.

Love Kim

from s/v Circadia

2009-07-15T00:09:00.000-07:00

Morning: We are at 37 degrees, 49 minutes north and 151 degrees 53 minutes west at 11 a.m. The wind has come around to westerly but is as yet only 7 knots so we continue to motor sail. Within the next 100 miles we should come into sailable wind. I got a reassuring email from Kevin (*our navigator friend, who is expert at Pacific weather) that they may not have to bury our desiccated bones after we expire floating gently around in the North Pacific High. The sea temperature is now 21 degrees and it is fairly cold at night so a person wears long underwear, trousers and rainpants just to stay warm on watch. Last fresh food is disappearing - it was Pork Chops, mashed potatoes and caramelized carrots last night.

Afternoon: Now broad reaching at 7 knots with engine off in 12 to 14 knots of wind. Wind will likely come ahead of the beam within the next 24 hours. The hydrovane doesn't keep up with this situation like it did upwind so we are using the electric pilot. Neither crew is interested in steering and there is no sun. I think the fridge is going to have to go. It is 1400 miles to Victoria.

Kim

from s/v Circadia

2009-07-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Today we're at 32 degrees 52 minutes north and 155 degrees 7 minutes west at 2 p.m. What a difference a day makes. We had a beautiful sail gradually becoming a broad reach until the wind expired at 2:30 a.m. and we began to motor sail. We still have 2 to 6 knots of wind aft of the beam. We have run into a lobe of the high that looks like it may be several hundred miles wide. The sky is blue - it is hot - the water is rippled with some swell- we have seen one sooty shearwater tody - I have seen some flotsam including what looked like a soggy loaf of bread. I have chosen to cross this patch mainly to the north at a heading of 005 magnetic rather than head to Flattery at magnetic 044 because it looks like there is no wind for most of the way in that direction which still is over 1600 miles away. The passage looked fast up until now.

I just now have finished Lolita a dynamite novel. Beautiful writing leaps out intertwined with plot, and other references, so that it is hard to make a simple quote to illustrate.

You would recognize the dietary things that are going on. We've got leftovers of the previously frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts but otherwise they are gone. We are looking forward to the lean rib eye steaks and the potential of tuna in the next few days. Various items do not seem to be present in the stores; I am sure I didn't purchase some of them but others may be lurking under something at the bottom of a locker that I haven't quite emptied.

Usual boat maintenance issues: had to replace the furling line again, solar panel electric connections are intermittent, a sail slide needs replacing. I'm really enjoying my weekend and hope you are too.

Really miss you

Love Kim

Further Travels of Circadia

2009-07-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

I am in Vancouver now and Kim is sailing the boat back from Hilo. He and his crew, Michael and Line left Hawaii five days ago. Here's what Kim wrote today:

Today we passed 31 degrees. We are going more than 150 miles a day, approaching the high--the pressure was up to 1023 this morning. The winds have lessened and the seas are quite pleasant now. We took out the last reef and are beam reaching slightly east of north in 12 to 14 knots, predicted to lessen in strength gradually over the next few days on the grib files. We'll see. It is still hot in the cabin during the day and we can't yet open any windows.

I have managed to snare the evening to 2 a.m. watch for myself so far. I usually make dinner and then Line washes the dishes in an attempt to allow my hands to heal up. She has this product called NuSkin which is kind of a liquid crazy glue that forms a membrane over the wound. Then I send the emails and get the gribs. As it gets dusky, (last night at 8 p.m.) I put on my cute red suit with rainboots and collapse into the supine position on the downhill side of the cockpit with a glass of whiskey. Last night I had chocolate too. I put the AIS and Sea Me on and frankly often drowse intermittently through the whole watch. Some nights I am alerted by squalls or horrors, the need to reduce sail, but last night the wind was steady all night, the moon was just past full and it was very enjoyable. Scorpio is the prominent constellation to the south; Sagittarius right behind. I haven't seen the Southern Cross since Hawaii but then last night was the first night I might have seen it. Cassiopeia is high in the sky at sunset. I haven't seen Orion's Girdle yet. We charge at about 6 when I wake up from my real sleep and then the whole cycle of coffee, granola, grazing, reading, little boat jobs begins again.

I did see one masked booby yesterday. Today the big sighting was a large whale, heading north, repeatedly surfacing to blow and then moving underwater as if it were travelling. It had a fairly blunt head and a small dorsal fin. I didn't see any of those granulations one sees on the head of a humpback and I like to think it was a solo male Sperm Whale heading back up to the Bering sea to feed after performing his mating duties in the tropics. However it was too windy to see the direction of the spume and I really couldn't call it for sure.

Back in the Flow

2009-07-03T15:54:00.001-07:00

Since we left San Diego in December we have been leading more or less a news free life. In Mexico the news just didn't seem to matter. And in French Polynesia, the void was widened by the language barrier. When we found an internet connection I would sometimes remember to check in on a Canadian or world news site--sometimes. I usually find that you think a lot is happening while you are away, and in fact nothing much changes.

But the first thing we heard on arriving in Hawaii was that Michael Jackson had died. And so we were ushered back not only into the news but the celebrity obsession of our culture.
Hawaii does it's best though, to put things in geological perspective. Unlike the islands we have been sailing through, heavily eroded (the Marquesas and Society Islands) and completely ground down (Tuamotus) volcanic islands, the Hawaiian chain is still being created and the big Island is the newest. In the last two years Kilauea peak has been especially active, a new crater appearing in the larger crater. As you approach it there are signs warning of unusually high sulphur dioxide emissions and stating that part of the circle road and all of the trails inside the caldera are closed. At night the visitor centre is crowded with people, shivering in the misty rain that always seems to be falling on this wet side of the island. They strain to see the red glow of the lava which rises and falls on its own mysterious tides within this new caldera. (In the day all you can see is an industrial plume of sulphuric steam). Meanwhile fresh lava pours into the sea to the east, enough every day to pave a double lane highway all the way around the island.

the new caldera

Yesterday we walked along one of the trails which goes through the high wet forest, under giant ferns and strange flowering trees, trying to find some of the surviving endemic birds. They tend to be brightly coloured, red or yellow, with curved beaks, adapted to feed on the tubular flowers of some of the plants which evolved here. Many birds once here are extinct and many are hard to find. But we did see some beautiful red male Apapanes.

Apapane (from www.stanford.edu)

When people here get tired of the rain they drive to the other side, the dry, Kona coast. Which is what we did last week, for a few days to get off the boat and check into a hotel (clean linen, stacks of towels, a king-sized bed, those white bathrobes...!). And a few last days of tropical sun and water.

Koi pond, Kona hotel

young Black-crowned Night Heron, fishing in the koi pond

The resorts of Kona are startling, almost unbelievable feats of overly-green grass and fluorescent gardens, surrounded by miles and miles of barren black lava fields, the heat rising off them in oppressive waves. And yet, even here there is a kind of cultivation. People throw chunks of white coral collected from the beach into the trunks of their cars and drive them to the lava fields, carefully line up the wave smoothed coral on the ancient re-forged stone in brief devotions of the human heart: "I love you Matt" or "Happy Birthday Grandpa Dave".

Other than these excursions our time in Hawaii has been busy with catching up on emails and taking care of the details of the lives at home, which we'll be resuming soon. My computer crashed. Apparently it didn't enjoy it's year of sailing. So I have been pre-occupied with restoring files. And of course, there are the boat jobs. In general Circadia has proved to be a tough little boat. We had a sail tear, but no other major repairs, just the usual maintenance. And at the moment she is almost ready to set sail again, for the last leg of this journey. And now it's time to fess up. I will not be onboard for the sail home. I am flying to Vancouver tomorrow, to attend a writing course at UBC. Two new crew members are flying in to help Kim on the passage, one of whom is Michael, who kindly posted my offshore blog entries. I plan to continue postings on the progress of Circadia across the North Pacific, via sailmails from Kim.

On the Same Ocean

2009-06-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

I want to share a comment Maureen Gordon left after one of my recent posts. Maureen and her husband Kevin own Maple Leaf Adventures, an ecotour company which runs trips in BC and Alaska, under sail, on the historic schooner Maple Leaf. I have worked as a resource person onboard each summer for many years and as a result have had the chance to see some of the most beautiful spots on the Pacific Northwest Coast.

My recent travels have been spectacular but I can say (with authority now) that our own coast and islands are equally dazzling.

Alison,

  Around about the time you were writing this, heading north on Circadia, Kevin, Paul, Lila and I were heading north on Maple Leaf.  And at some point, I thought of you two briefly, about where you were and whether you would come home at all!  

It was 5 a.m. Alaska time when you wrote this post, and I was trying to ignore our alarm clock. Unlike you and Kim in your ocean-going boat, free of land in the blue, blue sea, we were creatures of the coast, dropping anchor at night, travelling by daylight.  We were on a crew-only transit from Sandspit to Sitka.

While you were bucking those tremendous squalls in the south Pacific and thinking of the Queen Charlotte Islands, we were in the North Pacific, moving away from the Charlottes, bucking waves and a building wind in Hecate Strait. Sunshine, though, no clouds.   At one point, the day we headed northeast toward the mainland, you could have shot a straight line from your boat to ours and not hit a single island in between.

   Since you know the area, I'll tell you what we were doing.  We'd dropped anchor 7 hours before you wrote. We'd tucked into a bay filled with rocks, just out of the huge copper mirror that Clarence Strait had become in the Alaskan sunset. That sunset seemed to fade not to black but ever pinker, while we stood and watched a humpback whale, no doubt incoming from Hawaii, slowly breathe and sound, swimming the path up the channel we'd abandoned for the night. The whale was more like you than us, travelling on without the need to put out a chain and rest.   The sunset stayed through hanging the anchor light, opening a bottle of shiraz and sharing 2/3 of it. It was hard to stop looking at the sea. I realized that since we'd rounded Cape St. James on June 2, we'd been heading northwest into a brilliant sunset every night. I noted this because we were always out on deck taking pictures of the bow in the sunset.  We slept and had to wake early.

  Within three-quarters of an hour of you writing, the anchor light was away, the coffee, tea and GreensPlus Energy drink were brewed (three people, three different stimulants!). We were following that humpback north for another long, long June day, crawling ever farther up the chart of southeast Alaska, still two days away from our own turning point (Sitka).

  It's frightening and comforting to think about us both on the same ocean, so very far from one another but doing a similar thing ... so far away that if this technology didn't exist we'd never have an inkling of the others' existence right now.

  That day was epic, a calm run and chores in the morning. Then a brief opening to the Pacific, that allowed some sea otters and us to share a brief inspection of each other. Then into Rocky Pass between Kupreanof and Kuiu Islands, where Kevin and Paul turned Maple Leaf about 120 times in 90 minutes. We traversed The Devil's Elbow at exactly high slack. The pass was so shallow it felt like we should be kayaking.   (A moose and her calf on shore, another sea otter in the water and a great big black bear ... and no ability to stop and watch.)   Then onward, out past Kake into Frederick Sound. I was at the helm and looking for humpback whales as the wind increased to 15 or 20 knots over an ebbing tide.   After five minutes of constantly having to re-find a whale's splash in the growing whitecaps, punctuated by closing hatches and staring into the sun for logs and debris, I decided I was trying way too hard to whale watch.

We spent 90 minutes in the exciting sea hanging out in the wheelhouse as waves hit the hull from the port side and sprayed over a deck ... foredeck, well deck, aft deck, wherever the wave happened to hit.   Great mats of rockweed, the size of a livingroom floor, were sloshing around Frederick Sound and once when a wave sprayed against the bow it broke not only into water drops but also flying bits of rockweed.  Then we were across and surfing downwind, up Chatham Strait, into Warm Springs Bay for the night.

Love, Maureen

The Emerald City

2009-06-23T16:10:00.001-07:00

Dorado

We arrived in Hilo a couple of nights ago, after 18 days of sailing, from Papeete, Tahiti. The wind and rough seas we had so much of on this crossing continued for those last 500 miles. We were very excited to glimpse the Big Island and scanned the sea all our last day. We figured we couldn't miss it, since it is topped by a 4200 m. peak. It is an amazing feeling to sight an oceanic island, after days and days of seeing nothing but sea and sky. It seems like a miracle that it's there at all and equally unlikely that we could find it. I can't imagine how the Marquesans, who are believed to have first colonized Hawaii (only about 13oo years ago) did it. It seemed sufficiently epic in a strong sailboat, with high tech sails, electronic navigation, a tank of fuel, holds full of water and food.

Anyway, we never did see the island, there was so much cloud, but as night fell we could see the bright white light off the east cape and eventually the orange glitter of the lights of Hilo. As we turned into the harbour a land wind blew into our faces. Suddenly I had a dog's sense of smell. There were cloves and compost and gardenias and the inside of cigar boxes. We finally dropped our anchor after midnight. Since then we have been in that enhanced state of enjoyment you only get after tough expeditions, when simple things are exquisite: a hot shower, clean clothes and bedding, a meal that is cooked, delivered, and cleaned up by pleasant strangers. It has rained mostly since our arrival (not surprising, since Hilo is on the rainy side of the island) but we don't care. The city is lush and feels more real than many Hawaiian towns; there are lots of bookstores and indie film theatres, and dim shops full of second hand Hawaiian shirts and retro knick knacks. Now, off to find a Kona latte, no maybe a chocolate macadamia nut ice cream cone, or a pair of new flip flops...

Our most excellent crew:

Max

Farlyn

from s/v Circadia

2009-06-19T06:37:00.001-07:00

Thursday June 18, 2009
12 degrees, 51 minutes N, 148 degrees, 16 minutes W

Three days of sailing to windward in 17-20 knots. Waves come up over the bow, rush back over the side decks, or appear like invisible critics on the sidelines tossing buckets of water at you, drenching you while you are innocently standing at the wheel. It's as if the utopia of our little boat has been taken over gradually by a tyrant. At first you object strongly but gradually you come to accept the situation and try to eke what joy you can out of life, a little reading, a little star gazing, the odd piece of chocolate.
But meanwhile it takes a lot of energy to do simple things, having to hold on to avoid being thrown across the boat. Fortunately the galley is downwind so things don't come flying off the counters and out of the cupboards when you're cooking, but the head is upwind, which requires agility.
It is not easy to accept that nature is above all indifferent to the beauty and the obstacles it throws at us. It just doesn't care that there are earnest environmentalists here, trying hard not to lose any plastic overboard, or burn too much fuel, simply wanting to make their way, without bothering anyone, to safe port.
The good thing is that we have been sailing steadily at an average of about 150 miles a day and at the moment are just over 500 miles from Hawaii, a few more days of sailing away. We are already noticing the change in ocean regime; the water temperature is 2 degrees colder than Tahiti. Last night we wore sweaters for the first time since leaving Mexico. Soon we will see the first signs of land: contrails, fishing floats, maybe a big 'ol American warship.
Meanwhile, today the winds are lighter and coming from behind the beam. The boat flattens out and we can finally clean up and cook a good meal. Our thoughts turn to the end of the journey, the restaurants, the laundromats, the hot shower and internet again. There are always a lot of unanswered questions on these trips. This time I will be curious to see what I can find out when I get in about the dorado, who always seem to travel in pairs, each taking a lure, port and starboard, as if in some mutual suicide pact; also, the meteor shower which seems to be falling from the northern sky the last few nights.
I hope you are all able to find a find a dark field to walk through in your bare feet, to watch a few falling stars on the solstice.

from s/v Circadia

2009-06-16T05:12:00.001-07:00

Monday, June 15, 2009
5 degrees 50 minutes N., 144 degrees, 59 minutes W.

For the first time since I began this blog I find myself at a loss for words. There is a monotony to this environment that is difficult to describe. I can’t even imagine a comparable experience, except maybe travelling slowly through a great desert. It tranquilizes the mind, until you find yourself spending more and more time thinking about less and less. Which doesn’t make for great copy. I could say we’ve successfully crossed the equator and are gradually sailing up through the northern latitudes one by one. I guess I could tell you what we ate for dinner last night (a fresh Dorado, or mahi mahi, which Farlyn caught on one of her new lures) and that dorado are beautiful—golden yellow, with a bright blue fin like a sail; that we poached it in coconut milk, lime and ginger, and it was delicious. I could report that yesterday was Kim and my 23rd anniversary, but that brings me to that how-did-the-time-pass-so-quickly thing, which is clichÈ, but maybe, after all useful to contemplate in the light of what feels like an endless crossing—in retrospect it will feel so very short. Which reminds me to savour the experience, which is, most of all, one of time and placeless-ness.

from s/v Circadia

2009-06-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

There’s an Oz like quality to this experience. You set off on a journey with your odd companions (and what you hope is enough brains, heart, and courage). There’s no telling what exactly the dream will throw at you next: flying monkeys, poppy fields, headwinds, squalls, doldrums...All you know is you have to get to the Emerald City—Hilo.
We are slowly approaching the equator, counting down the degrees of latitude from the south. I am used to the phenomenon of being a tiny speck in an empty ocean. But once in awhile I have a vertiginous feeling—as you might if you hike all day, looking at the trail, then stop and look up and realize you have climbed to the edge of a 3000 foot drop off.

Many things about this crossing are similar to our crossing from Mexico to the Marquesas:
-The watches which deconstruct day and night, and the forced idleness in-between which gives simple things like flossing executive importance.
-The big screen sky. The other night we saw a lunar rainbow, silvery grey, like suspended graphite powder. In the morning, just before the full moon sets, its shadows are pale blue and it looks transparent, a very thin cross section of the moon pinned against the sky.
-The visitations from other living things: flying fish (this morning we found one which had flown in the galley window) seabirds, and last night, a pod of dolphins. I like to crouch at the bow and try to hear them come up for their greedy gulps of air; it is comforting to hear something else breathing way out here.

But this crossing is different in many ways. We are sailing into the wind and towards the sun, pointing at the Big Dipper rather than the Southern Cross. Any day now we will see the pole star and slowly the familiar northern constellations will appear. Our mind set is different, because we are sailing home.
And you know what Dorothy said.

from s/v Circadia

2009-06-08T06:32:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:15 am
12degrees 4 minutes S; 147 degrees, 45 minutes W

The Gimbaled Life
We left Moorea three days ago, sailing into light winds. We are expecting to sail to windward on this leg, especially towards the equator, which we must cross to the east so that we can have the right sail angle in the NE trades to Hawaii.
The winds and seas built quickly and for the last two days we have been sailing upwind in 15-20 knots, a tough start to this long crossing: sea sickness, heeling boat, the effort required to do ordinary things like prepare food, brush your teeth, change into dry clothes.
Living on the boat becomes like living in the intertidal: water comes in any open hatches, or down into the cabin with us, dripping from our rain gear. Everything is slippery. Skin becomes clammy with salt and hair feels like the wall-to-wall carpet in an apartment I had once in the 80s.
Last night and all morning we passed through a vast area of vicious squalls, one lined up after another, some with winds of 30 knots, all with driving rain. At one point the sea and sky was so grey and stormy in every direction it felt like sailing off the coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The last squall was a huge dark mass, like a black hole, that seemed to suck everything in towards itself: light, water, wind. We shot out the other side, as if out the last gate of hell, into the blue.
Now we are sailing gently on easy waters, under a full moon. And, as if the gods noticed we deserved a break, the wind is westerly, so that we can make some precious easting.
Once again I think of our gimbaled stove, that simple but essential concept of swinging level no matter how thrown off balance, and how difficult it is to achieve. Its important to remember the third law of sailingdynamics (see post, April 11): THINGS CHANGE.
On these night watches I think of what people I love are doing. My computer is still set on west coast time, where it is early morning. Maybe my friends on Protection Island are already up, having a cup of coffee, wandering through their gardens to see whats in bloom and what the deer have eaten.
In Victoria, my son will be waking, planning his Sunday. My daughter will have just arrived on Baffin Island for her summer job. It will be, I think, around 9 in the morning. She will not have seen darkness at all tonight.

It has been strange to spend a year in perpetual summer. ClichÈ perhaps but the northern summers are so much sweeter, being hard wonlike this perfect night of moonlit sailing.

Na Na French Polynesia

2009-06-01T17:52:00.001-07:00

Common Myna

Our time here is coming to an end. We are watching the weather now, waiting for the right winds to set sail north to Hawaii, another three week crossing.

On the island of Moorea, beyond the dark smudges of coral heads, the deeper water is the kind of blue that travels down the optic nerve and goes straight to some centre of longing; the kind of blue you dream of in the middle of winter.

Sitting on the beach the other day I leaned against a palm, trying to memorize that blue, enjoying a medley of bird song above me, until I realized that, in fact I was hearing only one bird—the Common Myna.

The Common Myna belongs to a group of birds that are among the most accomplished mimics in the world. The Indian hill mynas are virtuosos at imitating the human voice. Human and myna sonograms of a phrase like hi there Charlie, look almost exactly the same, though the bird’s vocal tract is nothing like ours.

I read once in a book on human speech that bird song has more in common with human language than any sounds made by our ape relatives.* Birds are born with the ability to make calls, which keep the flock in touch or signal danger. Human babies are also born with innate calls, two in fact, distinguishable world-wide, one a cry of pain, the other of hunger. Later, like birds, humans learn other sounds: meaningless as single units, but eloquent in sequence. Rich in variation and dialects we layer them, like bird song, over our innate sounds. We share this “double articulation’ with birds, as well as the fact that the entire unlikely enterprise is controlled by the left side of the brain.

I brought one bird book from home: A Field Guide to the Birds of Hawaii and the Tropical Pacific—an especially good reference on the seabirds, like petrels, shearwaters, and terns…But like all oceanic islands, the islands we have been sailing through have a small but specialized collection of land birds.

The only guide I could find for the land birds was Oiseaux du Fenua – Tahiti et Ses Iles. I can usually figure it out, Aire de Repartition, might sound like a new perfume by Givenchy, but it actually means distribution. Regime Alimentaire is not a program at a health spa, but diet, and nidification, not a painful aesthetic procedure, but nesting. Unfortunately it is too easy to translate most of the Statut entries, species after species disappearing—because of introduced birds, rats, dogs, cats, development—holding out on uninhabited islands.

I would rather have seen the Tahiti reed-warbler in the coconut I was leaning on at the beach, but why not admire the myna? It is what birder friends of mine might call a trash bird, an introduced species, which (like most introduced species) out competes the native birds, tossing them out of house and home and just generally ruining the neighbourhood. But the myna can’t help it that he’s here. Or that he is so much better at everything, including singing, than the natives. And after all I’d like to be a better mimic. I’ve been working on Spanish for twenty years and still talk pretty much like I’m in fourth grade. When I try to speak French I usually come up with a Spanish word or some incomprehensible hybrid.

And then there’s Tahitian. Tahitian belongs to a group of Polynesian languages that includes Maori and Hawaiian. Spoken, it is a soft stream of short syllables, rich with vowels. In fact the vowels are pronounced just like Spanish, but the similarity ends there. Hello is or ana. Goodbye is na na.

*The Seeds 0f Speech, Jean Achison

It's Farlyn and Tavish's 20th birthday today! A happy and sad day, as we say na na to Tavish, who's hitching a ride further west (on a South African boat)--he should arrive in Australia in early August. We'll miss him!

Sunday Market Papeete

2009-05-26T16:21:00.003-07:00

We are in Papeete, Tahiti's main city, actually the biggest city in French Polynesia, and the first one we've been in since leaving Cabo over two months ago. We had a beautiful sail from Apataki in the Tuamotus, leaving at night, as we had been invited to local's home for dinner, and arriving about 36 hours later. This is more or less the farthest point south we will travel --we are 4230 nautical miles from Nanaimo.

Papeete is a very busy port and we are tied up at the quay in the middle of the action, rocking with every ferry and freighter wake. But there are advantages, for instance we are ten minutes away from the market, which is especially busy on Sundays.

I'm always eager to find the fish stands--it's a great chance to see what the local species are; the Sunday market gets fish in from all the islands. Not surprisingly many of them we'd seen snorkelling and diving. This display reminded me of a poem by the American poet Mark Doty

A Display of Mackeral

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales'

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

--nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they're all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfillment

of heaven's template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler's

made uncountable examples

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before;

a cosmos of champleve.

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer--would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They'd prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even on ice

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don't care they're dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn't care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Images from the Tuamotu Islands

2009-05-23T19:55:00.003-07:00

Great Crested Tern

Diving, Manihi Atoll

Manihi

Apataki Atoll

Apataki

Pearl Farm dock, Apataki

Apataki

From s/v Circadia

2009-05-20T06:06:00.000-07:00

If God was a slacker, or believed in working smart not hard, the world would be like the Tuamotu Archipelago.
A coral atoll is an ecology starter set: slide a tectonic plate over a tropical oceanic hot spot, throw rain at the resulting island for a few hundred million years until there's nothing left but the surrounding coral reef. Let the coral build on itself, creating a protected inland sea, where life flourishes and washes up on the shore, making land on which a few species of plants can get a toehold; watch the plants drop pieces of themselves, grow and die, making more soil. Throw in a couple of species of land crabs that scuttle around in the undergrowth, digging burrows. Wing over some birds, which evolve into few species of fruit dove, a blue lorikeet, and a Darwin's finch-like collection of drab but eloquent reed-warblers and you have the perfect world:
gentle beaches, shallows filled with brilliant fish, and a forest where you can harvest heart of palm and coconuts. If you grow tired of fish you can eat the crabs, which taste like coconut fed lobster. (We haven't had crab yet, but Tavish and Farlyn collected heart of palm and hand extracted coconut cream from fresh coconuts the other day).

We are on the island of Apataki. We shot through the northern pass three days ago and have been sailing its inland shore-kind of unnerving, as great heads of coral turn up randomly, in twenty feet of water, in fifty feet of water, a mile out
They are like reefs back home except with knife edged serrations which, sailing along slowly at 5 or 6 knots, can open a hull. Tavish climbs up onto the first set of spreaders on these passages, scanning the water ahead of us constantly.
Apataki is eight miles wide and fifteen miles long. At times the ring of land dwindles to open reef and white sand bars which barely hold back the outer ocean, a line of white surf suspended above the radiant blue of the inner shallows. At other times the far shore disappears and it seems we are sailing to the edge of an infinity pool.

Most of the island is uninhabited. But last night we went out to dinner. We anchored in a bay where boaters can go to shore and have dinner (not coconut crabs or heart of palm, but steak frites) prepared by a local family. The main livelihood of the family is cultivating pearls, an industry which sustains much of the Tuomotus though it is has its ups and downs. A handful of black pearls is irresistible-they are cool and dense and have the dark iridescence of gasoline: purple, green, blue, copper. Most get shipped to Tahiti then on to the international pearl market in China. Two tiny ones will be coming home with me.
Tomorrow we will stop to provision in the local village before leaving the atoll for the open passage to Tahiti. Should be a couple of days sail to Papeete. Talk to you then

Inner LIfe

2009-05-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

&quo
Town on Nuku Hiva

Patuatu, Anaho Bay, Nuku Hiva

Once, years ago at a dinner party I asked a friend of ours, an international racing sail navigator, what he thought about during all those hours at sea. I don’t know what I expected, maybe not ;the meaning of life” exactly, but at least something slightly lyrical.
“How to make the boat go faster,” he answered without hesitation or elaboration.

If you read this blog, you already know some of the things I think about. I spend very little time thinking about how to make the boat go faster; I spend some time thinking shockingly shallow thoughts. For instance—after almost a year of no shopping—what I’ll buy when I get home. If you only have a few clothes you wear day in and day out, they wear out fast. I know for sure that I’ll throw away all my underwear and buy a whole new set. And I’ll treat myself to a new pair of running shoes to coax me to begin running again.

I thought it would be interesting to canvas the crew to find out what they find themselves thinking about on watch.
Kim:
How to make the boat go faster; boat systems (this week, the electrical system preoccupies), our byzantine financial affairs, our next boat (this week it’s a large fast trimaran—NB. this last theme is more like a lottery fantasy, because of the sobering previous topic).
Farlyn: thinks often of summer back home, the weather here lulls you into the sense that it is summer everywhere. She thinks about the vegetable garden in full production, what’s been planted, what’s being harvested. The bonus is that it will all just be starting when she gets home in June.
Tavish: often thinks of the boat, as if in a movie shot, an aerial—kind of the visual expression of the Sailing Ideal—the sails filled, the hull racing along through an exotic sea, life reduced to the simplicity of wind and ingenuity. Oh, and he thinks of food—what there is to eat or how he can use our odd and spare supplies to prepare something novel (ie. fried bananas with lime, on fish).

We all spend a lot of time reading. Here’s our recent book lists:

Alison: Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Turning, Tim Winton
The Bounty, Caroline Alexander
At Night in Chile, Roberto Balaño
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Still Life With a Bridle, Essays and Apocryphas, Zbigniew Herbert
Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay
All Our Wonder Unavenged—poems, Don Domanski

Kim: Mind in the Cave, David Lewis Williams
Ulysses (or so he claims…), James Joyce
The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paul Theroux
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
King, Queen, Knave, Vladimir Nabakov,
Mariner’s Weather
The Adapted Mind – Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J. Barkow

Tavish: The Alchemist, Paul Coelho
A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
The Turning
Oryx and Crake
Probably More Than Everything you Wanted to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast, Milton Love.

Farlyn: While I Was Gone, Sue Miller
Walden, H D Thoreau
The First and Last Freedom, J. Krishnamurti
Late Nights on Air
Persuasion, Jane Austen

We have just finished a four day passage from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus, the islands that lie between the Marquesas and Tahiti (the Society Islands). Had a nice couple of days of down wind sailing with the spinnaker up, then the winds shifted dramatically and we ended up sailing upwind for two days.
I confess, I hate sailing upwind in high winds—the boat is constantly heeled so that you fight gravity every minute of the day, plus the seas were rough, so going below is as if you’ve just stepped into a boxing ring, constantly being flung against some hard thing. Eating, taking a pee, bathing, even sleeping is exhausting.

After about 36 hours of this we arrived near Manihi Island just after midnight. We shortened sail to slow our approach as we couldn’t get in until the pass was at slack, and finally motored through at around 8:30 in the morning.

The Tuamotus are dramatically different from the steep lush mountain landscape of the Marquesas. Thin membranes of land seem to float on the ocean—you don’t see a Tuomotu until you are a few miles away. These islands are coral atolls, the endpoint of a volcanic tropical island, what’s left after it erodes away—a necklace of coral reef, sand and coconut forest, enclosing a lagoon. Water percolates in through the porous walls of the atoll and rushes in and out the odd pass.

Manihi

As soon as we dropped an anchor, a local, Fernando, came by in a speedboat with a bag of fresh baguettes. (I’m so glad the French got this place). Fernando owns the bakery and is the head of the Mormon church here. Turns out he can show you how to cook a fish in a pit, open a coconut, harvest heart of palm, take you to see a pearl farm (sell you pearls), guide you into the anchorage, and dive on your anchor to free it from coral heads. He will also drop you outside the pass and escort you by boat, as you drift on the current, watching the great show “go by” as you zip along at 2-3 knots: thousands of brilliant reef fish: angel and butterflyfish, unicorn fish, surgeonfish, damselfish, trumpetfish, scorpionfish…. My favourite things today were the giant clams, each with bright mantles, like lips, in different shades of brilliant blue and green.

from s/v Circadia

2009-05-07T07:39:00.000-07:00

We have been "idylling" on the island of Nuku Hiva, waiting to leave for the Tuamotus,the winds at sea having dropped off to almost nothing for days. We remember the doldrums, the sails flapping and the boom banging, and content ourselves with the Marquesas. Which isn't so bad. At the moment we are in Anaho Bay, a sweet anchorage, protected from the swell and rimmed with a few homes, communal gardens, and a path which takes you to a long sand beach in one direction, and in the other, over a steep trail to the village in the next bay, Hatiheu, a town of exuberant gardens, nestled in a perfect semi-circle of blue bay at the foot of long fingered mountains.

But lest you think life is perfect in paradise I have prepared a list, a REALITY CHECKLIST I guess you could say:

1. bug bites
For the last five days or so Farlyn and I have become covered with dozens of bites. You see, every beach is home to legions of tiny black flies, called no-no's. You can't feel them bite. In the next few days the little red spots become unbearably itchy. This lasts for about three days or until you are unwise enough to be seduced by another perfect white sand beach. We smear calamine lotion, we sit on our hands, we give in and scratch fiercely

2. miscellaneous injuries

foot and hand mostly, from the various ways you can injure yourself here: scrapes with the rigging, shoe blisters, stubbing toes on the deck hardware; and mystery lesions like the little red spots all over Kim's chest, or the jellyfish sting on Tavish's leg, which he didn't notice for a couple of days, or the sore on one of my ears which turned into a hive of angry blisters.

3. sharks
So far, snorkeling, we have only encountered harmless reef sharks. The other day, hanging out at one of the towns here, Tavish spotted a very big shark gliding past the pier. Turns out it was a bull shark, about 10 feet long. Our book says "considered dangerous." At the next anchorage we chatted with a local boy who told us that a bull shark had killed his cousin in January on nearby Ua Pou island. (We're sure he was killed, despite the fact that our French is so bad, by the way the boy drew his finger across his neck and rolled his eyes back in his head).

4. heat
see previous posts.

5. lack of privacy
Not to complain about my shipmates, but how much time can you expect the average person to enjoy living with three other people in 200 square feet, twenty-four hours a day?

Understand, this is not whining. I just thought, before you sold everything, quit your job, and bought a sailboat, you should know

Ua Pou

2009-04-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

We are now in the northern Marquesas. Our best laid plans for a visit to Fatu Hiva (to the south) were re-arranged by 23 knot headwinds. We turned around and rode the winds north, to rugged Ua Pou Island.

While I was drawing on the beach in the little town there, some bored children wandered by.

Soon they had raided my art supplies and were drawing and painting. Though we could barely communicate with their fragments of English and my slender French, we had a good time together and they presented me with their paintings “pour le souvenir.”

The boat in the painting is the Aranui, a cargo boat which visits the island every two weeks or so. It has been supplying the Tuamotus and Marquesas from Tahiti for over twenty years. The new ship is 104 meters long. The front is a cargo ship with cranes and open decks. The back is a passenger ship with cruise ship accommodation: several decks, a mini-swim pool, sundeck, dining room, bar, library, and the odd expert on French Polynesian culture. Check out my friend Elain’s illustrated blog for a fascinating description of her travels on the Aranui3 last year.

The people here seemed at first to be a little aloof, but I've come to understand that they are not unfriendly, they are simply dignified. Once you stop and talk to them, you will soon find yourself being driven up a valley to find fresh pamplemousse, or to meet a carver who is the brother of a friend…

And, of course, they are more connected to the world than they seem at first glance. My young friends laughed hysterically over a recounted episode of the TV show Hannah Montana. And the guy who drove us to the carvers wore dreads and popped what sounded like Polynesian reggae into the CD player.

Later that day we walked past a quiet garden scented with plumeria and shaded with breadfruit. On the house wall, a hand-painted sign Carpe Diem.

We are now in Nuku Hiva to re-supply, then off to the more remote Tuomotus to the south.

Bread Fruit

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

Saturday, April 25
We managed to get our visas extended and have finally left Atuona, and what civilization has a foothold here, including the internet, and so are communicating once again via single side band (and the helpful Michael!)
A three-hour sail took us to Tahuata Island and an almost comically perfect tropical beach-azure water, a white sand beach trimmed with coconut palms and lime trees. A memorable place to spend my birthday, which was an indolent day, finished off with an elaborate dinner and mango upside down cake prepared by the wonderful Tavish and Farlyn.
One of the first things we did when we arrived here was to get out the snorkeling gear. (We had all been longing to swim, as the harbour at Atuona was murky and rumoured to be full of sharks.)
Under the seamless blue surface of this bay-a brilliant confusion of fish that look like they have been doodled into existence, coloured in by children: striped, cross-hatched, polka dotted, iridescent, transparent, metallic, rainbow
Schools of tiny neon damselfish flicker like electricity. In the shallows over the sand, sleek little silvery fish dart back and forth in the surf. Once in awhile an octopus materializes then melts back into stone; a couple of black-tipped reef shark cruise slowly by. And all of it shimmers with the constant play of light through the clear water.
You can just hang there and watch it go by like movie, or dive down and let everything flow obliviously around you. I stare and stare, trying to memorize the shapes and colours until I can get back to the boat to look them up in the Reef Fish Guide, a surprisingly difficult thing to do.
Meanwhile life out of water is like being in an endless hot yoga class. But I am getting used to it. This morning, before the sun was too high, we climbed a steep slope to a summit above the anchorage, where we could look up the coast at a series of deep cut anchorages, some studded with boats. The land is volcanic, heavily eroded, densely vegetated, riddled with wild goat and horse trails. Coconut palm forests flow up the valley bottoms. Fairy terns whirl like scraps of white linen in the wind, up the ridges to their nests.
Tomorrow we weigh anchor and sail to Fatu Hiva, the southernmost of the Marquesas, considered one of the most beautiful and unspoiled islands (the only island without an airstrip).

Hiva Oa

2009-04-21T22:54:00.001-07:00

They say that temperate people lose most of their sweat glands as children from lack of use. I don’t see it myself. As soon as the sun is up, the tiniest exertion and sweat is dripping off the tip of my nose and running down my back. In the heat of the day I find that if I lie very still under the faint breeze of the forepeak hatch I can stop sweating.
We have been in Atuona, the main town on the island of Hiva Oa, for over a week. It is a tiny tidy town most famous as Gaugin’s Polynesian paradise. There is a museum full of reproductions of his paintings set in his garden. Best of all are three studios, where artists from anywhere in the world can come for a three month residency. I didn’t see any sign of artists at work but my inquiries took me to the office of the mayor, a friendly guy in a cotton shirt and shorts, to whom (along with an office in France) one must apply. I think I’ve got it in the bag.

Rooster in Gaugin's Garden, by Farlyn

I love the strange hybrid culture here. There is an almost total lack of fresh vegetables and meat. Fruit seems to be the main staple: enormous grapefruits with sweet yellow flesh, bananas bunches which you can hang off the rigging. Farlyn and Tavish have foraged coconuts and dozens of mangos from wild trees along the roadsides. Yet every morning huge plastic bins of fresh baguettes arrive at the stores. Unlike all other foods, baguettes, cheese, and red wine are cheap—the essentials of French life are guaranteed on its colony. Pourquoi pas? Sounds like a balanced diet to me. And if you need to you can buy a can of minced duck breast or foie gras.

Through the church window, Puamau

And the French of course brought Catholicism. A local family offered to bring us to church on Sunday for an opportunity to hear Marquesan singing, which was indeed very different from the plodding hymns I remember from church as a girl. Children were passed from lap to lap or stood in the aisles swaying to the music. The women wore bright dresses and flowers in their hair. A woman seems rarely to go out, even if she’s in a T-shirt and shorts, without a flower tucked in behind her ear. For that matter men often wear flowers as well, even some of the manly paddlers that train in the outriggers every night in the harbour.

images from the crossing

2009-04-18T23:06:00.001-07:00

leaving Cabo

Tavish and the yellowfin tuna

swimming to the Marquesas

Farlyn at the wheel

squall

Bottle-nosed dolpins

flying fish

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-15T05:56:00.001-07:00

We have arrived! Got in yesterday (April 13 at around 3:30 pm, almost exactly 21 days after leaving Cabo). We had very good winds for the last two days, which pushed us through the last leg (a good thing as we had only emergency fuel left). It is a strange feeling after so many days of being at sea to see land emerge on the horizon. Farlyn saw it first--a blue shadow which could almost have been a dark cloud. I had been expecting to smell the land before seeing it, but the winds were blowing from the sea. Only once we were in port did the full aroma hit us: soil, fresh water, decaying fruit, and flowers. The harbour is tiny and is crammed with boats. It is interesting to talk to the others here--you can only get here via a long passage--not your usual cross section of boaters. Mostly people, like us, sail in, drop an anchor and look pretty dazed for the first couple of days. We all felt weak as kittens on our first walk into town yesterday. Atuona is a pretty little town of plantation style houses on streets lined with hisbiscus, mango, frangipani. It still seems strange to hear Polynesians speaking French--though they speak their own language, which sounds similiar to Hawaiian (though I'm sure is very different). Other observations, the streets are very clean and the offices are very bureaucratic. We waited an hour in the bank, in something that did not in any way resemble a line. Then I went to the post office to use the internet, and there were all the people who had been in the bank (waiting to pay bills, or whatever they do in the post office). We will likely be here a few days, doing boat repairs, re-provisioning and just generally relaxing.
bonne nuit,
Alison

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

Saturday, April 11, 2009, Day 20
Noon position: 6 degrees, 11 minutes S, 134 degrees, 47 minutes W
Distance travelled: 2416 nm

We have lost the wind again, just under 300 miles from the Marquesas. This is a phenomenon I notice often when sailing, a kind of reverse relativity—the closer you get to your final destination, the more slowly you approach it—distance increases or time lengthens, I’m not quite sure which, until it feels like the smallest span will take an infinite amount of time to cross. At any rate, soon we will have to turn off our engine and simply bob around out here until the predicted wind comes in. Meanwhile we have the sky to entertain us: the horizon trimmed with a continuous cloud frieze of towers and arches, and closer clouds like hot air balloons just loosed from their tethers floating up and over the boat; squalls which drag transparent curtains of rain shot with rainbows.
Yet despite our slow progress there is a feeling of anticipation building. Everyday we see signs that we are approaching land: plastic bottles and fishing floats, a far-off boat, birds which breed here (Tahiti Shearwaters, Sooty Terns, Frigate birds). Conversations drift to what we will do when we get to there: check emails, find a Laundromat, eat out, have a good bottle of wine, take a long freshwater shower…I expect we will all quickly scatter to spend some time to ourselves. (Though it is amazing how one can find privacy on a 40-foot boat—bow, cockpit, side decks, aft cabin, forepeak, the main salon—four people can each find a little space for themselves.)
Most of our fresh food is gone; we have a few eggs, some cheese, 2 oranges, 2 apples, 2 grapefruits, a bag of onions, a few potatoes, three beets, one yam, and a half dozen of the invincible jicamas. We’re hoping for another fish but meanwhile we are surviving on dried and canned beans, pasta, rice, canned vegetables and fruit; every couple of days Kim and Farlyn make bread.
After I finished the last paragraph I went up to watch the glassy water and to try to conjure wind, but another phenomenon, a law of sailing physics you might say, is that a watched wind never blows. Fortunately another law states that things change. Somehow it’s easy out here to think that when the wind is blowing it will blow forever, never giving you respite from a heeling boat and that when it is windless, you will always be wallowing in swells, losing hope. Anyway, while I was sitting on the bow I saw a sleek dark form leap out of the waves. It was so big at first I thought it was a dolphin. I had a brief movie play through my head that went like this: this big tuna is going to swim to the back of the boat and take the lure we have been dragging for days, then Tavish, who is watching “So I Married an Axe Murderer” on my computer, is going to miss the last scene as he jumps up to pull in the fish. Moments later Kim shouted “fish!” At the end of the line the very fish I saw, a 25 pound yellowfin tuna. Like the skipjack we caught last week it was hydrodynamic, with “recess-able” fins, including the spiny dorsal fin, which slid into a slot on its back. It’s skin was opalescent, its fins and scutes brilliant yellow. It was such a beautiful and astonishing creature, like pulling a small god out of the water. We might have thrown it back, but it was already bleeding and we will keep what we don’t eat to give away when we get to the islands.
Post Script: while we were all busy with the tuna a little whiff of wind came in…

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, April 7, 2009, Day 16
Noon position: 0 degrees, 37 minutes N, 131 degrees, 14 minutes W.
Total distance travelled: 1933 nm

We have been plagued with light winds for the last few days, as we approach the equator, burning precious fuel, but hoping to find the SE trades soon to carry us the remaining 800 or so miles to the Marquesas.
The other day it was so calm that we simply jumped off the boat and swam along with it slowly, in 14,000 feet of water. I have been trying to find the colour of the water in my paint palette; the closest I can come is a mixture of phthalo turquoise and indigo. The sea is bottomless, scentless and clear as mineral water-you can see someone swimming 20 feet away in perfect detail; beams of sunlight split into fans, which flicker far below.
Life onboard is routine now that we have been sailing for over two weeks. Some days it seems we are characters on an unchanging set, trying to make sense of the world with limited information. We seem to generate many more questions than we have answers for (given our finite library and lack of internet connection) and drift into long speculations, like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. It would be easy to forget what's real, to begin to doubt the existence of land altogether. But it's there on our charts. And that "imaginary line" (which seems like the most real thing out here at the moment) is less than sixty miles away (we have the champagne chilling).
Meanwhile it's great to have this tenuous connection to you all. I can't access the blog, but Michael has been kind enough to send me comments: Chris, good to hear from you. I have a great photo of you and the gang, which I will forward to you when I get to an internet connection. Colene, thanks for taking the time to keep me company out here and Julie-I ran out of time in Cabo to answer your last email-promise one soon. I will also post some pictures of the tuna, as well as some other photos from the crossing. Meanwhile I hope spring is bringing you warm days; your farm must be beautiful as it emerges from winter.

Post Script: crossed the equator an hour ago (around 7pm, under sail). Cheers.

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-06T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sunday, April 5, 2009, Day 15
Noon position: 3 degrees, 54 minutes N, 129 degrees, 52 minutes W
Total distance travelled: 1721 nm

It is odd to be moving for so long through a mono-geography. What makes place here? There are the animals. But most of the birds we see are ocean wanderers: shearwaters, petrels. The closest thing they have to a home would be the remote breeding islands where they were born and touch down on once a year to breed.
As for what lives underneath us-that is mostly a mystery, except for what emerges from time to time: squid, flying fish, a tuna. Yesterday we sailed through a huge group of Pantropical spotted dolphins. Scores of mothers and calves, groups of males, came rushing over to the bow. Apparently these animals have specific ranges of several hundred square miles-somehow they know what is home in this borderless expanse.
Mostly, it seems that geography on the ocean is not what is here, but what happens here-the effects of wind, current, and latitude. For instance, a few days ago we passed into an area where squalls lined up on the horizon. It is wonderful to sail into one of these-first the wind freshens, then, suddenly you are in a rainstorm. It reminds me of that scene in The Truman Show, when the weather program glitches and rain falls in a narrow cone out of a perfect sunny sky. We all ran above decks to stand in the downpour. Tavish and Farlyn collected 6 gallons from the foot of the mainsail in a few minutes.
This province of squalls is expected-a result of the mixing of the two systems of trade winds on either side of the equator. The doldrums are another geography expected here. In the last few days the winds have been steady and we have been flying the smaller, heavier spinnaker. It is a beautiful red sail, staining the chrome and the water at the bow raspberry with its reflection. We left it up a couple of nights ago and sailed on smooth seas. But last night the winds dropped and we are under motor.
Heat is the main event at our current position. Daytimes, we only stand at the wheel for about an hour at a time, occasionally dousing ourselves with seawater, which helps, despite the fact that it is 34 C. The rest of the time we stay below out of the sun, trying not to exert ourselves. Yesterday Tavish observed that he was breaking out in a sweat threading a needle. (He's sewing a stuff bag out of scraps of blue spinnakerů)
I look forward to the night watches, as they are so much cooler than the day. Plus there is the welcome geography of the skyů The moon is now bowl shaped, half full, and already so bright the stars are faint until it sets at around 3 am. The Southern Cross rises in the south and slowly tips over as it travels across the sky. For thousands of years it lay buried in the constellation Centaurus. Then, a few hundred years ago European navigators discovered that the upright of the cross points to the south celestial pole, and so they pulled it's little diamond (it is the smallest constellation in the southern sky) out of obscurity.
For now, our country is the small protectorate of Circadia, slowly approaching that invisible "landmark" (or as my dictionary says, imaginary line) the equator, a little over 200 nm away.

From s/v Circadia

2009-04-02T19:18:00.001-07:00

Thursday, April 2, 2009, Day 11
Noon PDST : 9 degrees 45 minutes N, 125 degrees, 43 minutes W
Distance traveled: 1286 nm

It's getting hotter and hotter. I live in my bikini, covered up with a white shirt when I have to stand at the wheel, in the searing sun. Sometimes I stand with my feet in a bucket of seawater, to keep them from feeling like they are baking in a convection oven.
When I get bored I time the flights of flying fish, which scatter at our bow wave. They shoot out of the water and veer and skip above the waves before re-entering, sometimes clumsily, doing a little flip before righting themselves and swimming off. The record so far is 9 seconds.
It's been days since we've seen any other ship. It's hard to describe how empty it is. Any sign of life seems lush. From time to time Masked Boobies or White-tailed Tropicbirds circle the boat. The other night around midnight a group of about ten dolphins swam with us for a while. I like to imagine that they are as entertained to find us as we are to see them-something fun to play with, after miles and miles of nothing. From the bow we could follow the braided paths of their movement, each animal cloaked in bioluminescence.
The days and nights flow into one another, each much like the one before. We spend about 6 hours a day at the wheel, though we sometimes let the autopilot take over for a while. (In order to run the autopilot we have to run the engine about an hour every second day, to top up the batteries, though the solar panels also contribute).
I find it helpful to think of the many hours at the wheel as a job. (At any rate, best not to think of it as a holiday). It also helps that I am reading Caroline Anderson's Bounty, a detailed account of Captain Bligh and his crew's ordeal, including a 3600 mile voyage in open launch through the Great Barrier Reef and Endeavor Strait to Timor. The good news is that the Circadia crew doesn't look like they're going to mutiny. Tavish and Farlyn, experienced seafarers despite their young age, are ever cheerful, helpful, and calm in tough situations. The other day we shredded our big blue spinnaker-lines flying, fabric splitting, pieces blowing off downwind. Tavish was quickly up the mast in a harness to untangle fouled lines, Farlyn up and down between deck and below to handle lines and to stuff the tattered fragments back into its bag. We're sorry to see it in such a sad state. It's carried us a lot of miles.
Yesterday one of Tavish and Farlyn's prize lures, bought in Cabo, finally hooked a fish-a skipjack tuna. If you see a tuna fresh out of the water you will never think of tuna sandwiches in the same way. First, it's back is streaked with midnight blue, the sides are abalone, but shimmering as they suffuse blue, violet, pink. The belly has racing stripes and the body itself looks like it was designed by Italians: sleek, efficient, and stylish. The pectoral fins when not in use lie pressed completely flush against the sides, in grooves which bear their exact imprint, including delicate veining; just in front of the tail a series of little fins or scutes create turbulence which increases swimming speed. But best of all is that it is delicious, which is a good thing as we will be eating it for several days.

From s/v Circadia

2009-03-31T06:43:00.000-07:00

Monday, March 30, 2009, Day 8
12 noon, Pacific Daylight Savings Time
14 degrees, 57 minutes N, 121 degrees, 33 minutes W
Nautical Miles traveled: 845

"…And we went on living day by day in accordance with the abnormal conventions of the dream-world: anything can happen and whatever happens the dreamer accepts it." Roberto Balaño, By Night in Chile.

At night sometimes we turn off the running lights and sail through the dark, by the light of stars and bioluminescence. The moon was a waning sliver when we left and has just reappeared. It's nice to know it will be waxing as we travel closer and closer to our destination. On my watch I stand at the wheel and stare at the green discs of the instrument panel. At first I had to concentrate hard, now I can unconsciously nudge the wheel to keep the boat on course, and let my thoughts wander. This oversupply of thinking time takes some getting used to. It must have been the way people lived for thousands of years-long periods of repetitive activity in which the mind was unengaged.
I think about my past. I spend time in my thoughts with people I have missed recently. I think about my father's father, who grew up in Shetland and went to sea at fifteen. In 1921 he spent almost three weeks in a lifeboat with ten other men, on this sea. They eventually rowed and sailed 950 miles back to the continent, to be picked up off San Francisco. I try to imagine what it was like to be in a small open boat in the middle of this expanse, what he thought and felt. He died before I was born; I wish I could have met him.
I make plans for the future (though I try to be in the present) but this is not a journey which can be hurried even if we wanted to. We have had generally light winds, with intervals of 8-13 knots, when we can put up the blue spinnaker and make about 6-7 knots. It's not a fast way to travel, but it adds up…

From s/v Circadia

2009-03-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

Friday, March 27
12:00 noon Mountain time, 11:00am PST
Position: 17 degrees, 48 minutes N, 116 degrees, 31minutes W
Nautical Miles travelled: 510
Many thanks to my friend Michael (www.fisheggs.blogspot.com) for posting these blog entries, which we are sending via single side-band radio.

Our fifth day. And now the sea resembles nothing so much as a wilderness, a vast blue desert. Life is sparse and when it appears, usually solitary: a single Laysan Albatross, a White-tailed Tropicbird (which circled the boat, longingly inspecting the rigging for possible resting spot). Watching a tiny storm petrel zig-zagging over the waves, it seems unlikely that such a thing survives here; yet it would be warm, its heart beating, and it would smell of the musty oil it secretes to waterproof its plumage.
Our routines are now settling, the day and night dissolving into pieces of wakefulness and sleep. When not on watches we read and write, cook, and eat. Our appetites are coming back, which is a good thing as we have A LOT of food on board. Hammocks lashed to the ceiling rails above me swing heavily, stuffed with grapefruits, oranges, jicama, avocadoes, pineapple…
The night watches are cool, we had to dig out sweaters and fleeces for first time in months. The southern sky is thick with constellations, which I must spend some time untangling soon.
The days are punctuated by small things. For example the haircut I gave Tavish-leaving (at his request) a jaunty mullet (which has fortunately been recorded in photos, as he is threatening to cut it off).
When the winds are steady and we can sail downwind we hoist the big blue spinnaker and make 7 or 8 knots. Mostly the wind has been light, pushing us along at 5-6 knots. A couple of nights ago we lost it for a few hours and drifted slowly, the rigging banging, reverberating in the drum of the boat, until we gave up and ran the engine. We have to be careful with fuel. The trip is 2600 miles long and we have enough fuel for about 300 miles. (And after a few hours of no wind, we definitely want to be able to outrun the dreaded doldrums, which still lie many days away).

From s/v Circadia

2009-03-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

12:28 MST Position 21 degrees, 9 minutes N, 111 degrees, 23 minutes W. Total distance traveled: 134 nautical miles

If you have any reservations about getting started on a long ocean voyage, start from Cabo San Lucas. After two days in the anchorage, awash with the wakes of pangas, glass bottom boats, party cats, jet skis and cruise ships; after two nights of pounding 80's club music from the beach, we were happy to leave.

One other boat, (from New Zealand) took off a half an hour before us. Apparently there are other boats as well on the crossing, but it looks pretty empty out here.

Within twenty minutes of leaving the pinnacles of the Cape behind us, we had 20 knots of beam wind, and big, confused seas. Everyone skipped dinner. Out here, with less shipping, night watches are a little more relaxed than coming down the west coast. One of the two people on watch can usually doze, though sleeping on deck is like sleeping on minimalist furniture, or in an airport.

The sky was clear. Once in a while a falling star would shoot through the Milky Way. The water, mostlty rinsed of plankton, has turned swimming pool blue. But last night we passed through a school of squid so dense we could smell it.

Surviving Cabo

2009-03-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Alison, by Jude

Just coming to the end of a week in Cabo with friends. Darcy, Jude, and I have painted and shown together numerous times. It’s great for me to have “the company of women” and for them to have a break from the relentless winter back home. Still getting reports of snow…

Jude and Darcy

Turned out it’s been spring break for American college kids this week. It’s been mostly entertaining watching the show: acres of flesh, swimming pools of alcohol. But we have been happy to escape Cabo most days for beaches and towns up the coast.

At the beach

Kim arrives today with crew, Tavish and Farlyn. They have had to motor down most of the way from La Paz. Hopefully we'll find better breezes on the Pacific. Tomorrow we’ll provision and, weather permitting, set out on Monday.
And so, my friends, thanks for coming along for the ride thus far. Your presence, visible and invisible, has meant a lot to me. I’m hoping to be able to make the odd post through the miracle of modern technology and the ionosphere. But if all fails, don’t worry, we’ll blow into some South Pacific Isle eventually (somewhere after the middle of April) and you will the first to hear about it!

Blog From the Sea of Cortez 2

2009-03-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

I was sorry to miss the chance to travel recently with our friends, Angus (you may remember him as one of our first crew members) and his brother Graeme. Graeme is a whale biologist (a whale magnet actually) and over the twelve days I was gone, the boys on Circadia managed to spot tons (literally) of whales: pygmy sperm, humpback, pilot, fin and blue (including a baby the size of a city bus).

Blue Whale (photo, Graeme Ellis)

Each day, my thoughts turn more to the next phase of our journey, the Pacific crossing to French Polynesia. I trust the boat and I trust our crew (Tavish, also an early crew member, and his twin sister Farlyn will be sailing with us). Yet, I am anxious. Recently I read an interview with a woman climber. When asked how she overcame her fear, she answered that she didn’t, she just went anyways. I guess I can accept that; I can drag my fear along with me, like a bad knee, like a lost chance, something I’ll never get over.

Brown Boobies

But I am also curious. Flying home from Honduras, the earth seemed animate from above—veins of rivers, spines of mountains. But impossible to know, except in its small and particular wrinkles: a garden, a street, a beach. I’ve always wondered how it would feel to move slowly over a whole sea, to be intimate with immensity.

But I have no idea whether these poetic sentiments will sustain me. I’m pretty sure I won’t find the lack of fresh food or bathing difficult. I can go feral with the best of them. What I’m not sure of is what will happen to time. Will the days drag by or will they melt into one another? Will I be bored? And space—will I feel trapped, or could I be “…bound in a nutshell and consider myself a king of infinite space”.

In the meantime we have had one last interlude in the Sea of Cortez, with Kim’s brother, Doug, and his two small sons.
It is a simple landscape, this hot red stone and cool turquoise water. One where a person could go to remember themselves. Or forget—burn things off, wash them away. But mainly, where you are reminded of patience—how slowly everything here grows, decomposes, erodes.

Palo Blanco

I will spend the next week in Cabo San Lucas. A week of terra firma and time with my best girls, Jude and Darcy, who are flying down from Canada, before I take off on the next leg of this journey. A week to compose myself, maybe finally do some reading on the South Pacific, around the pool.
Frankly, I’m still a little hazy on the geography of our next destination. Not the best strategy, to wade into life’s unknowns perversely unarmed with knowledge. But the truth is I think there is only so much we can do to prepare for the biggest crossings, real and metaphorical, in life. You have to wait and see what happens and when the time comes, as we say in Canada, “just give er.”

Honduras sketches

2009-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Pico Bonito, Honduras

2009-03-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

the Lodge at Pico Bonito

I first fell under the spell of tropical forest when I was in my twenties and set off to spend three months in the Amazon. In those days, among biologists, it was known as a good gig—room and board at one of the first jungle lodges, the Explorers Inn in Southeast Peru, in exchange for a little guiding and a modest research project.
So I got myself a South American bird book (which weighed about three times as much as my North American guide) read a little about tropical ecology, and decided that my research project was going to solve the mystery of the relationship between certain canopy fruit eaters and seed dispersal. I had been working at a botanical garden and had years of experience as a park naturalist in BC. Piece of cake.
It took about two weeks for it to dawn on me that I had been seriously deluded. First, to put it simply: in a 4 square mile piece of a coastal BC forest, 2 or 3 species (of conifers) dominate the landscape; in a tropical forest you could easily find 200 species of trees and that doesn’t even count the tangles of lianas, the ferns and orchids encrusting trunks, the great aerial pools of bromeliads, the under story of heliconias, herbs, and grasses. This is something like opening a mixed chocolate box—it’s better to have a key.
I had neither plant keys, nor botanists to consult. I would walk the dark forest floor, gazing up at the sunlit canopy, picking up strange fruits and flowers, with no idea what I was looking at. Sometimes a mixed foraging flock would wash around me and shake down the forest and I would flip through my bird book trying to get all the field marks before they rushed off again. Then I would simply lie on the trail on my back with my binoculars plastered against my face. I had a biologist’s existential crisis—if I couldn’t name things where did that leave me? Was taxonomy dead? Eventually I became lethargic, undisciplined, entranced. I would set off, telling the other naturalists that I was going to do research and simply wander the trails, watching.
Every time I’ve set foot in a tropical forest since, I start resolved and am seduced again. I lose my edges, start to melt into the whole thing.
This week though, it was different. I was on task—I was with BIRDERS—at the Pico Bonito Lodge, one of my favourite places in the world. The lodge nestles at the edge of a huge protected area, which cloaks the high steep flanks of the Pico Bonito Range. Looking at the wall of this forest from below is like looking at a beautifully stitched tapestry, rich with the many textures of the trees, occasionally embroidered with flowering canopies. Waterfalls feed rivers, which pause from time to time, in clear cool pools.
My companions were a mixture of writers, local guides, biologists, and eco-tour company owners. Neither a fleeting feather, nor a faint call was lost on them. I followed them happily, though often I felt like one of those foreign correspondents, slowed by their feed—mine being the time it took me to actually find the birds in the dense layers of forest. The final list was long and included some uncommon species. All in all a respectable piece of field work. Yet, it still feels more like love than science.

All Birds All the Time-The Mesoamerican Birding Festival

2009-02-25T18:09:00.000-08:00

No, I didn’t sail here. In fact at the moment I’m landlocked, watching a fine rain fall on the hibiscus and citrus gardens of the Finca Las Glorias Hotel, on Lake Yojoa. This week, while Kim sailed off into the Sea of Cortez, with friends Angus and Graeme, I flew into Honduras (where I used to guide an eco-tour every February). I haven’t been back for a couple of years and so I jumped at the chance to re-visit some of my favourite places.
I’m here, as a writer, for the first Mesoamerican Birding Festival, so I thought I’d “fly” (sorry) some of my first impressions past you, dear readers.
First, let’s be clear. I am not in the same league with the birders here. I am far too sloppy with my birding details to be a real birder. For example, this morning, in a reserve up in the mountains, I watched Violet Sabrewing hummingbirds. Someone asked me if I had ever seen this species. If a Violet Sabrewing flew into your kitchen right now you’d remember it forever (and not only because that would be a very unusual event) but because it is a wondrous thing. It is the size of a swallow, wrapped from head to tail in iridescent purple lamé. (If birds are the earth’s jewels then tropical birds are its bling). You might even have what one of my co-birders here called a “birdgasm”.

female Violet Sabrewing

But I couldn’t remember if I’d seen a Violet Sabrewing. I can’t account for this lapse in my bird memory. I could put a good spin on it by saying that I get gob-smacked, side-swiped by beauty and slip into an altered state, in the way you forget the details of a conversation when you are falling in love.

Great Kiskadee

But even though I am not the most diligent lister, I am passionate about birds.

Once I went to a teapot show at a museum. There were rooms and rooms of teapots of every shape and material used in the past, and more rooms of artists’ conceptions of teapots; teapots shaped like human hearts, where tea poured from the aorta, nautilus teapots, where tea spiralled from inner channels; bejeweled, enameled, scaled, tiled, hammered, hand-painted and hand-blown teapots. It seemed that an explosion of possibilities was contained in the vessel of the teapot.
I think this is part of the delight of birds. But making the delight more perverse, more interesting for the mind and heart to reconcile is that this sheer extravagance, this endless ingenuity has been fashioned by the slow, indifferent hand of evolution.
I looked up the meaning of beauty in the Oxford Dictionary: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. But also, a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.
It’s difficult, this meaningless beauty. And it always leads me to something I can only describe as the inherent morality of nature. A morality which is not utilitarian, but complete in itself. Beautiful.
By the way, I checked my notes. Turns out I have seen the Violet Sabrewing, not here in Honduras, but ten years ago in Costa Rica.
Cecropia leaf on umbrella

recent images

2009-02-18T16:08:00.001-08:00

Post Script-Flaneur Dog

2009-02-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

I returned to La Paz yesterday to find that my little black friend has been adopted, by a gentle older man. He has named her Lady's (he's a she) and her eyes already look brighter, her coat brushed and gleaming. I was almost sorry, as a friend of mine had already written to say she'd love her. But a happy ending nevertheless...

Bones

2009-02-11T03:27:00.000-08:00

Dried Triggerfish on the beach

One of the pleasures of walking on the beaches in the Sea of Cortez is picking through the tide line. Mounds of coral tinkle like china, bleached porcupine and triggerfish with calcareous grins lie among shells as big as dinner plates, the femurs and skulls of pelicans—like leftovers from a great feast.

Frigatebird Skull

Perhaps because the salt and sun desiccate everything as soon as it dies, these leavings aren't gross. Even in the city, people here don’t seem to mind dead things hanging around longer than they should. A road-killed cat between the marina and town grew drier with each passing day, until it became flat and papery, a blueprint of a cat.
On first glance you might think the Mexicans have a laissez-faire attitude towards death. As I mentioned in my last post, they don’t seem to find it as serious a topic as we do. On the two days around the Christian All Souls day, they celebrate the Day of the Dead. They have parties to remember friends and relatives, visit their graves, sometimes sleeping there, and leaving special food and drink for them to enjoy.
I like the playful “Catrinas”, skeleton dolls sold for these days and as reminders all year that underneath our finery, even in our prime, we are bone; the only part that will last—for a while.

There’s something impersonal about bone; its mineral indifference makes you feel that you are built on some bureaucratic biological specs rather than lovingly designed; that you are a form letter rather than a handwritten note.
Still, maybe it’s us with the laissez-faire attitude towards death, ignoring it, or poking at it with science. For instance, here’s “Kim’s skull” (you may remember it from my first blog post). Kim acquired it many years ago, from a hospital shelf where it had been languishing un-loved. In Canada it is almost impossible to examine a human skull (as it is illegal to sell them). Whenever I see this skull I wonder who he was, where he grew up, why he died so young (as his perfect teeth suggest). What would he have thought of the idea that one day he would be passed from hand to hand, opened up with neat hinges?
One thing is for sure, his skull will never become part of the joyful decay we see on the Baja beaches, or depicted in this Day of the Dead Skull I found in a shop in La Paz.

Of Dogs and Men—the Flaneur’s Life

2009-01-31T20:25:00.001-08:00

As we drift around the Sea of Cortez, La Paz seems to be our base. It is the place where family and friends come and go, where flights and buses leave; we sail in the long narrrow channel (which closes when winds are high) into the windy, current-swept harbour often, and tie up at Marina La Paz, where there are so many gringo boats there is a club house on the dock where people meet for coffee and to exchange books, DVD’s, and information every morning. This week we are waiting for friends to arrive from Canada.

This afternoon I set off for a leisurely amble through town, with my camera. I guess you could call it a flaneur’s expedition (flaneur: An aimless idler; a loafer. French, from flâner, to idle about, stroll) settting off with no clear purpose, but to observe the goings on around me. I did mean to stop at a couple of places to photograph “death art” but other things happened on this walk, as they should to a flaneur.

First, I met a flaneuring dog—a black lab/border collie thing, I’d seen around town. He was a little scruffy and lean, but otherwise healthy, with a big white smile. He sneezed a few times to let me know he was there, took one sniff of me, decided I was a gringa and likely to be fruitful, then fell into easy step with me. At first I told him to go away “vaya, vaya”, but I think he knew it was half-hearted. If I was Mexican I would have been sensible and shouted or tossed a small rock at him. Instead, I studiously ignored him. He trotted along happily, nosing every garbage bag, investigating every food source, even the house sparrows taking dust baths around the street trees. When we passed other dogs, he looked up at me for support as if to say “I’m with her”, but ultimately, he carved a wide berth around them and eventually caught up with me again.

I said “look, we are not together. Don’t even imagine you are in my company.” I was tempted to stop at a food stand and buy him a treat but I figured that would turn him into a more aggressive mooch in the long run…But he seemed happy with our arrangement, trotting along in a gentlemanly fashion. In the same spirit as the Mexican men who occasionally take an interest in me—polite, watchful. If there’s an outside chance, que bueno, but otherwise, respectful.

I eventually lost him when I slipped into a store, where I finally did photograph what I’d set out to: the many little figures one can buy in honour of the dead. It seems that the Mexicans have a healthy relationship with death, taking pleasure in imagining all of us (from the young woman in her prime, to the dentist and gynecologist) as joyful skeletons.
But what really caught my interest today were the walls I passed on my walk. I like old peeling walls, which show their layers—they are so much more interesting than perfect newly painted walls. Not to push the metaphor, but what do you think? A wall with a past, showing its history…just makes it more beautiful?

As the sun was setting, I stopped for a marguerita at Hotel Perla, on the waterfront. I was the only customer and the waiter was elaborate with me, to the great enjoyment of his idle colleagues. Will that be a marguerita on the rocks he asked me in Spanish. No, on the veranda I answered. Time to sign up for those Spanish lessons...

Blog From the Sea of Cortez

2009-01-27T08:00:00.001-08:00

In 1939, the writer John Steinbeck set off from Monterey for the Sea of Cortez on a marine collecting expedition. Seems like an unlikely activity for a fiction writer, but he had fallen under the spell of an unlikely companion, a biologist named Ed Ricketts. For two months the two of them, along with a small crew, scoured the shores and reefs of the Sea of Cortez on a sardine boat.
If you have read Cannery Row, you will know that Ed Ricketts ran a biological supply company in Monterey (the character “Doc” was modeled on him). He was a man who loved beer, women, music, and (especially) the inter-tidal world. (He wrote one of the first field guides to marine life of the North Pacific, Between Pacific Tides).
He had the sort of fascination with hidden and inconsequential creatures that most of us lose as children, when we realize that they are not important to most adults. Studying biology can give you permission to continue to love these things and I’ve noticed that many biologists, especially the ones who still deal with animals and plants in the wild, have a child-like love of their subject.
It was this passion that seduced Steinbeck. The book he wrote about that trip, The Log From the Sea of Cortez, came out in 1941. Any edition after 1948 (when Ricketts was killed in his car at a rail crossing) includes a forward on him by Steinbeck: a funny, affectionate, and complex character sketch, which resonates with sadness.
The book is a contemplation on many things, including diesel engines, navigation, social engineering, and philosophy. Occasionally Steinbeck pauses to paint portraits of his quirky shipmates. But mostly he writes about the journey, the smells and tastes of the sea and land, and the collecting expeditions to fill jars and buckets with crabs, shrimps, nudibranchs, snails, worms...
I can’t help but compare that journey, almost exactly 70 years ago, with our own. As they set off from Monterey, Steinbeck writes about not only the material provisions (cans of peaches, crates of oranges, bottles of whiskey) for their trip but the spirit with which they set off: "We suppose this was the mental provisioning of our expedition. We said 'Let’s go wide open'.”
I think about that term mental provisioning often. Wondering what our own is. Certainly to “go wide open.” Maybe also, as Steinbeck writes “to re-align ourselves with light and tides.” Perhaps, like he and Ricketts, to “re-acquaint ourselves with laziness” as “only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself.”
But also, with a different spirit—a little sadly—to try to see things before they disappear. Part of our mental provisioning is a feeling that something is coming to an end. Not the world of course, it will go on with our without us. But rather, diversity, effortless flourishing. An end of abundance.
We haven’t seen the air bright with leaping swordfish, the great pods of dolphins and schools of tuna thrashing the water to life that Steinbeck described. Today, day after day, many of the beautiful creatures which Ed Ricketts lovingly collected on specially chosen sites and tides are dredged up by the shrimp trawlers we have seen moving like slow combines up and down the coast.
Still, taking Rickett’s cue, perhaps the secret to happiness is finding great pleasure in the small cogs of the living world, a burrowing owl fixing you with a yellow gaze, a tarantula ambling across a sandy wash, a tiny ruby-coloured hawkfish darting among the coral.
In the end Steinbeck found more than specimens on his expedition. He collected holiness in the tide pools of the Sea of Cortez:
…If one observes in the relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And that not only the meaning, but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical out-crying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

The Great Escape

2009-01-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

Olympic Mountains from Victoria

Many of our friends have remarked that we are so lucky to have escaped the recent frigid weather back home.

An Aside About Escape
I suspect escape through travel (or maybe any other way) is an illusion. First, it seems that my tiresome self stowed away on this voyage and brazenly struts around (knowing how impossible it would be to ship her home):
-Should I keep on colouring my hair? I mean, is there a time a woman should just go grey gracefully? Or am I too young to go grey? You know, I’m tired of all this upkeep. For that matter why not just cut it very very short. What a release that would be, so quick to dry after swimming. But then I’d have short grey hair. Oh dear, I don’t think I’m ready for that. Etc. Etc.

-Oh, maybe I should just stop trying to be a creative artist. What kind of career is that anyway? When I get back I’m going to get a real job. Etc. Etc.

Second, the expenses of life go on. Only the wind is free. Though once in awhile we can trade a T-shirt for a fish.

Meanwhile, back home snow falls and rainstorms have flooded communities, leaving city and home drains unable to keep up with the run-off.

An Aside About Plumbing:
It is hard to be happy if plumbing isn’t right. On the boat it’s pretty simple. We have two choices: we can pump into the holding tank and then try not to think about the fact that we are carrying our sewage around with us. Or we can pump overboard and try not to think about the fact we are pumping it into the sea.
In Mexican cities the smell of sewers often wafts up from the streets. I suspect very few cities have any treatment at all. Progressive plumbing is a long pipe. (For that matter sounds like Victoria).
But people seem to accept the smell as an inescapable part of life. Once, on a plane, I sat next to a man from Lima who ran a chain of hotels. He had a terrible time convincing local staff from small towns, that it was important to clean the washrooms so that they don't smell. “Why do you want to do that?” they would ask. “A kitchen should smell like a kitchen. A bathroom should smell like a bathroom.”

A few days into the New Year, we had plumbing problems of our own. First, with a septic system pump in our house on Protection Island, the other with a flooded basement in a Victorian house in James Bay, we were charmed by when our guard dropped a few years ago. A flood in November resulted in the replacement of its 100 year-old sewer line, but in January the house flooded for the second time.

And so it was that I found myself flying back over the miles we covered so slowly months ago. Which brings me to another facet of the escape illusion. That we are very far away. From the plane I could look down on the coastline of Baja, its long sweeping beaches, offshore islands, and deserted bays, and ponder that we had sailed every inch of it.
My flight times were: 1 1/2 hours from La Paz to LA, 2 hours LA to Vancouver. 2 hours from flipflops and T-shirts to coats, mitts, hats, boots…

A few days later I stood freezing as Mike from the construction company explained to me that they would have to replace the entire perimeter drainage of our quaint house (for the price it would be to rent a small villa in Italy for a year). Still I reminded myself, these are the problems of the privileged.

And there were bonuses. I got to check in with our house on Protection Island, being lovingly cared for (along with the cat) by Louise. And I got to touch base with friends who I have missed very much: Jane, Carol, Denise and Mike, Hazell, Maria, Trudy, Darcy, Jude, and Mary Jo. (Though missed Liz and Frances). Even fit in a run on my beloved Newcastle Island.

Just wish I could have left that little whinger home, but she’s leaning over me now, wheedling away about how I’m never going to finish that novel.

Back in Baja, together with the boys. We have just visited Isla Carmen, where we walked up an arroyos thick with resin-y, thorny desert plants, and flowering shrubs that were swarming with Costa’s hummingbirds (the males sporting Shriner-purple throats).
This morning we woke at Isla Danzante, to the sound of Pelicans plunging all around the boat. The bay was full of little silver fish and schools of rays, soaring like birds, the tips of their “wings” rippling the surface.

Lindsay and a Tarantula

Monday in La Paz

2009-01-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

Today we finally found the English bookstore (Allende Books). I bought a copy of an Isabel Allende book I have in Spanish (it took me half an hour to translate one page, so I am looking forward to having an English version on hand).
We had heard about the hairless dog of the Aztecs, so were fascinated to meet the bookseller's four month old Xoloitzcuintle (they call them squintlees sp?). They look like flying foxes and are so hot to the touch that they are recommended for people with arthritic hands .

Perla

Then I wandered over to the central plaza, across from the church to draw.

It was a quiet day, the park full of mothers and children, and idle young men. The shoe shine stands were empty....

I drew quick portraits of these two children and they decided they wanted to paint too.

Espiritu Santo

2009-01-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

An island called holy spirit is probably an auspicious place to spend Christmas. (Though, if you're more secular, Kim offers his own translation: spirit of Santa island). It lies just over ten miles from La Paz, but it feels a world away. The water is so clear you can see all the way down to the anchor. Pufferfish flutter lazily along the hull; brilliant blue King Angelfish poke around coral heads and where the water shallows over bone white sand, pelicans and terns hover over tinsel rivers of schooling mullet.

The land is vivid: red, ochre, chocolate brown; dry and crumbling, studded with thorny shrubs and cardon cacti.
Circadia, filled to the brim with people, food, and drink, wallowed gently from anchorage to anchorage. Along with Kim and I, Lindsay and Sophie, we had our good friend Trudy on board as well as old friends from Portland Oregon. An especially wonderful part of the holiday was having the children (Heather, Claire, and Hannah) of these friends along (who we have known since they were babies). It is one of the under-rated delights of this stage of life--we get to discover the adults all the kids have turned into. Along with Stuart, Sophie's friend, they were superb companions: curious, intelligent, thoughtful and a lot of fun.

Trudy

On Christmas Day, Trudy, a friend Derek, Heather and our family hiked to a ridge top to watch the sunset. We celebrated New Years (with the Portland gang) with a bioluminescent swim under a brilliant starry sky.

The days melted away as we drifted between swims and snorkels, beach walks, kayaking, and swinging in the hammock.
Hannah and Claire

Sophie

And now the journeys home begin. The flight back to Portland left yesterday. We just put Sophie in a taxi for the airport, (a tough one, as we won't see her now until summer). Lindsay just finished his degree, so we get to keep him for awhile. He heads back to Victoria in late January.

It was a Christmas season we will remember for a long time, though we never forget, in the midst of these exotic waters, that our hearts' home is on our (snowbound!) island, and among the friends we won't see for many months. We wish all good things to you in the year to come...Alison

Kim, Stuart, Sophie, Alison, Lindsay, Charlie, Claire, Hannah, Terri

La Paz

2008-12-22T08:49:00.000-08:00

In The Log From the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck wrote in 1941: "La Paz grew in fascination as we approached. The square, iron-shuttered colonial houses stood up right in back of the beach with rows of beautiful trees in front of them. It is a lovely place."

It is so lovely that I think many boaters just wash up here and never leave. There seem to be a lot of extremely relaxed people in flip flops, strolling back and forth on the docks; their boats look like they haven't been sailed for years.

I have already fallen under its sway and find I can sit on the deck watching Pelicans for hours, doing face plants, fishing just a stone's throw from our boat. I never get tired of watching them come up, their fleshy lower beaks full of squirming fish. In the morning they sun and preen on these nearby pilings.

A curious bird is the pelican

its beak can hold more than its belican (Ogden Nash)

There are wonderful bronze sculptures along the waterfront. I love this one. It's called El Viejo y el Mar? The Old Man and the Sea?
There is a poem with it. I've translated it (crudely)

I have a paper boat.
It's made of a page
on which I wrote my dreams.
It has no anchors or moorings.
I want to sail the seven seas and the eighth
where I will run aground in the longed for port.
Has anyone seen the bright beam of its lighthouse?

Guillermo Gomez Mac 2004

Images from Magdalena Bay

2008-12-16T09:23:00.001-08:00

We rounded Cape San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula yesterday around noon. It was a little strange. Houses, condominiums and hotels cling to the cliffs and beaches of the cape as thickly as intertidal life on the deserted beaches to the north. We are happy though to be able to tie up to a dock, and to catch up on sleep and correspondence! Tomorrow we head north for the first time since we left home. Onwards to La Paz, where we'll pick up Lindsay, Sophie, and friends for holiday-making.

Snowy Egret, mangrove estuary

About a Boat

2008-12-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, I can see why a blog about a sailing trip might eventually talk about the boat. Circadia is a J120. It is 40 feet long, 12 feet, three inches wide, with a 7 foot draft. It is a little unusual to cruise a J120--they are mainly known as race boats. She is fast and light and has an extendable bow sprit from which a spinnaker can be launched easily. In high winds, like we had one night coming down the west coast of Baja, she just keeps on sailing, but tends to surf over chaotic seas rather than dig in as a heavier boat would. I have to admit, I'm still not used to these kind of conditions and still feel like I've survived a near death experience...But back to the boat: unlike most race boats, the interior is pretty, (white, with wood trim) and comfortable. There's a double berth in the fore peak and also aft. The salon has cupboards and lots of book shelves.

the fore peak; note sprit (spinnaker pole)

The main salon

The Galley is small, but everything is in arms reach! There's a two burner propane stove with oven. We don't use the oven much, although lately, sailing in remote areas, Kim bakes bread. Our eating habits are a little different from home. Less red meat, more fish (which has been easy to get from local fisherman on the west coast of the peninsula). Hardly any butter, lots of olive oil; very little sweet stuff, plenty of wine (which we loaded under the fore peak boards in San Diego). We bought an ingenious little 12 volt fridge before we left the US, which to our delight is just tall enough for a bottle of white wine.

Kim in the galley

Living in the Light

2008-12-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

San Juan Capistrano, Edgar Payne, early 1900's

It has rained twice since we left Vancouver Island in mid-September. At first the blue skies were like drinking champagne every day. Eventually I longed for rain. Some mornings I would wake up and imagine the sound of the snapping shrimp under the dock was the light patter of drops on the skylight, but then I’d stick my head out the hatch and there was the San Diego sun, sometimes veiled with sea fog, but climbing resolutely out of it by mid-morning.
I used to love fall. You know that old “My sorrow when she’s here with me thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be…” But in recent years my sorrow moved in around mid-November and by January even she was getting kind of pissed. So I was pleased to check out of a whole winter of rain, which where I live would put everything under three feet of water if it didn’t run off or evaporate.
And it’s not exactly like I miss it now. It just feels weird. I start thinking about how much of what we are is where we come from. For instance, what would Neil Young have been like if he didn’t come from that town in North Ontario, where he had nothing to do but stare at the blue windows behind the stars? Would he have felt so helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless, if he grew up in San Diego?
Maybe Jesse Winchester, shivering in his Montreal flat, put his finger on it when he wrote that song to a lover, fled to California: “if you are never cold girl, who’s gonna keep you warm, you’ll take the sun for granted, you’ll run from every storm.”
Still I can see the appeal. I recently went to a show of California paintings from the early 1900’s. I don’t know what California painters are painting now, most contemporary painting seems kind of tortured, but back then they were called the California Impressionists, painting landscapes (which would be considered sentimental now) bathed in that gorgeous light. I think they were happy.

Monterey Cypress, Edgar Payne, early 1900's

Even the California poets seem less morose than most. Kay Ryan, the Californian who was recently named American poet Laureate writes:

“The Best of It”

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

I’m sure people suffer anxiety in California. Judging from the cosmetic surgery advertisements in local magazines, at least some of it seems to go along with trying to look as good as possible in skimpy clothes and the unforgiving light. But let me just say (except for perhaps the homeless men who seemed to inhabit every public bench, which is another, sadder story) I didn’t see much evidence of it.
Which brings me to my final question. Do we each get a standard amount of happiness? Do we either take it measured doses, as we might living in sunny latitudes. Or do we use it up in spurts, running on empty in our northern winters, and guzzling it down in the summer?
Me, I guess I’m too old to give up my existential angst very easily. It may have been doped by all this sunshine, but I can feel it, like some desert plant, biding its time, waiting for the rain.

PS

Circadia at anchor, Turtle Bay, Baja

We left San Diego a week ago and are now sailing down the west coast of Baja (which is long and mostly deserted). Many wonders along the way though: pods of bottle-nosed dolphins, estuaries full of northern breeding ducks, grebes, geese on their wintering grounds; my first ever sighting of a Burrowing Owl in the wild.
Plan to be in Cabo in a week or so…

An Idiot's Guide to Evolution

2008-11-27T10:05:00.000-08:00

“You said you needed more space, more time. Whole dimensions!”

Protagonist to her boyfriend, who has broken up with her. (From a novel in progress, by a writer whose name I have lost, Banff, 1999)

I think there are some things that the human mind is just not capable of grasping: how almost 50% of Americans voted for McCain/Palin, how a remote control really works, and deep time.
I guess it’s not our fault, at least the time part. We’ve buried it under human clutter, roads, houses, malls, sports arenas. Inside them our clocks are set to tick away in bite-sized pieces. We think in fragments of the day, maybe weeks, months, sometimes, though we resist it (look how we ignore history and are in denial about the future) years.
There’s a clock in Strasbourg with a gear that turns once every 1200 years. That’s more like it! You could sit and watch that gear making its infinitesimal progress and contemplate time. Or maybe we should all wear a geological watch, along with our Timex. Then, while we were obsessing about how quickly our kids grow up, how much we’ve aged, or how there’s never enough time to do everything we have to, we could look down at our wrist and notice the millennial hand hasn’t moved.
O.K., speaking of time, you have things to do today, so, where’s this going? This, of course, is about the Galapagos. Because since getting back I am not in culture, but rather in time shock. There are some landscapes that pull us back into the flow of deep time. Perhaps even before we understood how vast time is, we have been drawn to them. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (which I picked up in the Houston airport) the party of young people (including the sensitive, intelligent heroine and the man of excellent wealth and character she agonizes over) take the air in Lyme. They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted.
It is as if certain places quiet our minds, give us a little escape from the relentless micro-timing of life. Places where the land is opened, where we can see its bones: seashores, mountains, volcanic islands.
In the Galapagos the landscape is still being made by an oceanic hot spot. Moving through the islands, from newest to oldest lava is like moving through time, on stages where everything is laid out clearly for us, so that there is no way for us to misunderstand: here is the land, the sea, the tides and currents, here is the life that has arrived and been fashioned through time to thrive here: an idiot’s guide to evolution.
Still it takes mental effort to comprehend how a perfectly ordinary cormorant becomes flightless, sporting tiny stubs of wings, how an iguana, unlike other self-respecting lizards in the world, takes to the sea, its face becoming pug for grazing marine algae, its nostrils spritzing brine from glands which extract the extra salt from their blood.
For some people the effort seems to be too much. Here in the US nearly half the citizens (I would guess the same half that voted for McCain) do not believe in evolution, but rather that the world was created by God, in something like its present form, within the past 10,000 years.
This strikes me as odd. The world didn’t come to an end when we found we weren’t at the centre of the universe. The faithful simply re-arranged God’s cosmos and carried on.
I guess it’s harder for us to give up on ourselves as God’s special favourites than earth being his special planet.
Darwin knew what his theory meant. And he was a reluctant messenger. He waited years to publish. He lost his own faith. But he found consolation in the elegance of what lay spread before him and wrote “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
As for his fellow man, he wrote in a letter to the zoologist Asa Gray, “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
I'm thinking a pair of boots this colour some day. Maybe the next time I'm in Montreal--that wonderful Greek boot maker (Imperial Boots) on rue de Bleury....

Obamaland

2008-11-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

We arrived back in San Diego from Catalina just in time for Obama's election speech. And what a wonderful piece of work it was! There is a palpable sense of relief here. Most of the people we know are Democrats. Interesting aside, along the vein of "differences between Americans and Canadians"--Americans say "I am a Democrat" where as Canadians would say "I vote Liberal, or I belong to the Liberal Party". (Another aside, our friend Tracy was shocked that one of our major parties called itself the Liberal Party--liberal is a charged word here, somewhat like socialist.)

I think people here of all (two) stripes are happy the election is over. We are only sorry that Sarah Palin has faded back into Alaska and the spoofs have come to an end.

I'm off to the Galapagos Islands, leading a trip for Hidden Places and Maple Leaf Adventures. See you in a couple of weeks.

Images of Catalina Island

2008-11-06T11:28:00.001-08:00

Catalina Tiles

together but apart, waiting for the tour bus.

detail, Bronze door, Wrigley Memorial

The "Casino". Actually a movie theatre and ballroom, built in 1928.

The Company of Women

2008-11-02T07:14:00.001-08:00

Tile Mural "The Casino" 1928, Catalina Island

I read the other day that a UK magazine recently canvassed its readers for words and phrases which women use (and which men would be unlikely to use). They included: pilates, body image, book club, empowerment, emotional intelligence, kitten heels, and pomegranate.
I went through the list carefully. I have to say I believe that I have used each of these words myself lately with the exception of kitten heels. Though I did note the reference in something I was reading.
I love my husband. I also like him; I find him quirky, funny, and interesting. We share many passions (beyond our endlessly absorbing children) including sailing, hiking, birding, reading (maybe minus poetry on his side), and music (minus Wagner on mine).
Before we left for this year away, the most common question women asked me was “are you nervous about spending so much time together?” At first I was surprised. It seemed like our lives were so busy, especially before we left, that we didn’t get enough time together.
We have been gone for 6 weeks now. And here’s the thing. I’m not tired of his company. Sometimes I need to be alone and so I just take a day off, go wandering, or painting, stop in a café and scrawl in my journal for awhile.
But last week I spent an entire morning lost in blogs, reading about the joys of Clairol Cream hair dye, a great thrift shop coup (which included a pair of plaid mules with kitten heels) and the anguish of failing to conceive after the last of many IVF attempts. As I sat at the computer, tears streaming down my face, I realized what I was missing—the company of women.
While in San Diego I have the temporary but perfect yoga class. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m short on women, but I feel like I could be the best friend of anyone in the class. We could go out for coffee, talk about jobs and children; then we would discuss books and the last great movie we saw, and maybe, eventually share some secrets. But of course the women in yoga have their own lives and mostly they rush off after class to their busy days.
Which leaves me to blogs. I always seem to come late to technology, being preoccupied with pre-industrial crafts. So if you know this already, read ahead. But blogs are amazing. I first started reading one regularly, the wonderful materfamilias writes. What entranced me was how the medium conveys the rich texture of ordinary life. Not that Materfamilias is ordinary—I can unequivocally state that as she is the only blogger I follow whom I actually know. Through her blog I have found a community of stylish, clever, worldly, anxious, ardent women. And, conversely, I feel the presence of my own community of women (because, let’s face it, it looks like “blog” is one of those words women are more likely to use than men) when I think of them reading my own posts.

Blogs I follow:
Materfamilias Writes
La Belette Rouge

2008-10-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

Entrance to "The Prado" Balboa Park

Ohh. Canada?

2008-10-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel that we are from some small protectorate. Americans see us as quaint, a kind and compliant folk, but a little like the perpetual adolescents living in the upstairs bedroom, who haven’t had to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood: grappling with racial strife and inner city crime, policing the globe with a massive military, shouldering the mantle of world pop culture.
Granted the population of California is similar to that of our whole country. But still, we’re big—I mean square miles (oops, kilometers) wise. Still most Americans don’t seem to notice us. Take our election. I didn’t talk to a single person here who realized that, just like them, we were having an election. Kim and I spent the big night huddled around our computer, listening to a bad CBC stream that kept looping back on itself. (Though it hardly mattered, as apparently the election looped back on itself.) Mainly we were on pins and needles hoping our friend Briony would take the Gulf Islands, Saanich seat (she lost after a close race). I also had great hopes that the vote for the environment strategic voting approach might have made a difference. But, though we were deeply disappointed at the outcome, it still felt that the election unfolded through measured debates.

At a friend’s here the other day I noticed that she had an enormous map of British Columbia on her office wall. That would not be unusual I guess if she’d actually ever been to BC. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“That’s so I can think about where we’ll move to…” I looked puzzled.
“In case the Republicans get in and introduce the draft.” (Her twins, Sam and Helen are 10). “Next time it’s going to include girls as well as boys!”
Perhaps, I thought, Americans are thinking of us more than we suspect. Like these two vowing to move to Canada if Sarah Palin becomes VP.

It is hard for most Canadians to believe, but there are actually people here who haven’t noticed that McCain’s choice of running mate is from the lunatic fringe. And though I gnashed my teeth at the division of the left in our election, there is something about this deep polarization between two parties that seems to force people into extremes, leaving little room for subtle discourse. No, I am glad I am a Canadian, even though, in the end, the only person here who commented on the outcome of our election was Jon Stewart. Oh, and Gordon Lightfoot.

I was so excited when I realized that Gordon Lightfoot was performing just ten minutes walk away from our marina. “Kim, do you know what this means?”
He looked at me blankly. “I may finally get to see Gordon Lightfoot sing "The Canadian Railroad Trilogy". Another blank look, which meant he was forced to hear me sing it from beginning to end (O.K. I forgot a few lines.)
I phoned my good friend Nancy (who has lived in California for several years).
“Nancy, I’m going to see Gordon Lightfoot!”
“No way!...there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run...” She launched right into it…
I’m not a member of Gordon’s fan club, but his music was the soundtrack for some heady years of my life. And though he kind of slid a little into country there was still something about him—rough around the edges, a little coarse even, but then those poetic lyrics. And, of course, the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Now I know the Canadian railroads where built by oligarchs on stolen land, but somehow that song always gives me goose bumps.
Gordon never did sing it last night. The man who walked onto the stage would not have been able to get through half of it. He spent 6 weeks in a coma after an aortic aneurism a few years ago. It was a year before he picked up his guitar and this is his first tour since. He was bone thin, and his voice, frankly, was shot. After the first song, I was worried for my fellow countryman. But the audience, a packed house of determined fans, with that American warmth and generosity, cheered right through to the end of the two hour concert. As we turned to go, three young men looked at him with adulation.
“Too bad he didn’t play the Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” one said.

Painting Palms

2008-10-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Palm Tree, Nassau, Winslow Homer

The only book I brought along from my studio is “Winslow Homer Watercolors”. If I could paint like anyone it would be Winslow Homer, his strong compositions, economy of brush strokes, and clear color. I find myself constantly admiring the palms here. They are so graceful and limber in the wind and carve such strong shapes against the sky.

moonrise over palms, San Diego

I have been trying to identify some palms growing along one of the streets we ride every day. They caught my eye because of the strange flowers, palm pom poms I guess you could say. They are most interesting just as the flowers are emerging, like presents being slowly opened. The wrappings unfold and drop onto the streets like sheets of building materials.

Also strange are the cones of the cycads buried in domes of decorative leaves, heavy and soft as felt. I find the diversity of plants here wonderful and bewildering—basically the streets, gardens, and parks are stuffed with plants from all over the world, especially Australia, South Africa and the Mediterranean. To see some of these check out sandiegoplants.

a windy day

2008-10-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

street art San Diego

It's been windy the last couple of days--a relief from intense heat during the week. They tell us that September and October are the hottest months of the year here (sea fog rolls in in the summer). Fall here is also the time of the year when the famous Santa Ana winds, which blow from the hot interior can sweep fires through the dry hills. Anyone with homes up away from the city lives in fear of this combination of heat and wind. Down here, at sea level, the wind was welcome. Yesterday we actually got out for a sail for the first time since we tied up here. We joined the other day San Diego boats, sailing back and forth, back and forth in the harbour.

It was fun to see it by day though, as we arrived in the city in the dead of night. Apart from day sailors in the harbour, there are tourists lining the rails of a few sleek x-America's cup boats. At first they look very impressive, but then you notice that the sails are moldy, and they rarely have them all up. Once these boats are finished one race season, they are obsolete and too expensive to keep up. We got a look from afar at the new America's cup trimaran "BMW Oracle" leaping off the waves at breakneck speed, reefed down, in 15 knots of wind.

By the way, we managed to sight the other "most famous American boat" on this trip too--on our offshore passage just south of San Francisco--monstrous sails emerging from the mists, visible for miles. It was the superyacht Maltese Falcon, just arriving home in the US, 2 years after it was built in Europe. Apparently it's already for sale, for a mere 150 million euros.

Today we set off in the wind on our bikes for a little expedition to town (about half an hour away). That's where we saw the bicycle wind piece--the wind was ripping through the sculpture, sending the bike wheels spinning like mad. This installation is one of about 12 along the waterfront--they all have the same base--each artist was given the task of making a vertical sculpture. Somehow, like butterflies and teapots, the constraints of the design make the differences seem more delightful and ingenious.

tile bench

In Little Italy

2008-10-09T17:39:00.002-07:00

Sharkey's Pier

2008-10-08T15:24:00.001-07:00

fishing buddies

Sharkey's Pier

2008-10-08T15:16:00.000-07:00

Brown Pelican, waiting for scraps

2008-10-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

Rooster, Tapestry

Joseph Domjan

A Temporary Life

2008-10-07T13:06:00.001-07:00

"Don't Look at Me"

Tony Oursier

Installation

Museum of Contemporary Art,

La Jolla

We have been in San Diego for more than a week now. Angus and Tavish have returned home.

I had heard that port life is mostly about fixing the things that were broken while sailing and so far that seems to be true. We are also getting some things installed for the next leg of our journey. A bimini for shade from sun, a watermaker, an extra autopilot. Kim spends a lot of his time on short visits to various businesses to talk to experts and sales people.
A few days ago we moved from the transient dock and now have a slip in a regular marina—fewer dogs and derelict boats, but not nearly so entertaining. It’s like living in a leafless fiberglass forest. Though nature tries its best to intervene. Every day a flock of itinerant starlings rushes in from the palms along the beachfront and settles on the masts, chattering and happily shitting all over the blinding white boat decks. Every so often a boat owner arrives, curses and hoses down the mess. Along the edge of the breakwater where the tide moves sluggishly in and out its 5 or 6 feet, little flocks of sandpipers and Marbled Godwits with amber-coloured bills probe the mud. An osprey flies over often and once in awhile a pelican drops among the masts, fishing between the dock fingers.
As for the human community on Shelter Island, there are the people who work at the marinas, hotels, and beaches, and the people who use the marinas, hotels, and beaches. At the end of the day many of them leave. At night, other than the snapping shrimp, we feel like the only living things.
Beyond Shelter Island and all its boat businesses though, of course, is a real neighbourhood. The streets wind up a hill planted with palms, hibiscus, jasmine and eucalyptus. The air smells resinous. So far we have found: an excellent wine store, an internet café, a couple of good restaurants, an artisan bread shop, a video store, and a drug store. For our first week here, that was our world. Then we got second hand bikes! Now we ride 15 minutes to shop for groceries. And three days a week I ride straight up the hill to a yoga studio. I was very happy to find La Playa Yoga. It is in a private home, and looks out into a sunny garden and beyond to a sliver of ocean. The teacher is blond and willowy, and the women are very nice and smile and ask me questions about myself and I’m sure none of them are Republicans. Even though I know I will not have time to make good friends here, it was a relief to find a place which feels personal. Usually when Kim and I travel we do not stop for long, which solves most of the question about what to do next. But staying in a place for two months is very different. For the first time in a very long time I find that I have to actively make a life, give it direction and content. I am used to doing this. But I have realized that the infrastructure of my home life: time, materials, my studio, but most importantly, my community, allows me to spend so much time working alone.
Now I have wireless on the boat and can talk to friends and family via email and the blog every day. Also we have a few friends and family of friends here who have invited us out. Yesterday, Tracy, the sister of our Portland friend Terri, drove us around the area, pointing out spectacular walks, the local library, where to get a good martini, great Mexican food, a pair of running shoes...

A couple of visits to galleries have been wonderful. Saw “Don’t Look at Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla (a beautiful, once private home, perched on cliffs looking over the sea). The face on the figure was a video projection (which gazes at the viewer and says things like “don’t look at me, go away, I’m not here…”). It was mesmerizing, a strange combination of the highly realistic and the obviously formless.
One of my favourite museums here is the Mingei, a craft museum in Balboa Park. I will go back again to see the jewel-like prints (some of which have been made into huge tapestries) of the Hungarian artist Joseph Domjan.
Off to see the San Diego Watercolour Society’s International Show…

2008-10-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

Dock Life

We arrived in San Diego (a week ago) at 4 am, straining to find the red and green corridor of navigation lights superimposed on all the lights of the city.
There was a surprising amount of harbour activity in the wee hours of the morning: fishermen, police run-abouts, military patrols roaming the edges of the Point Loma Naval Base, panning great spotlights over its brushy slopes. Just inside the harbour mouth is the “Transient Dock”, the public dock.
We tied up and had a celebratory dram of scotch and sleepily congratulated each other on making it to our destination. The docks were quiet but gradually we realized the water around us was crackling. It sounded as if someone had lit cedar kindling under the boat. We poked our heads above decks, we leaned out over the water, we took Kim’s stethoscope out and held it to the hull. Finally, baffled, we fell into our bunks and slept until 9 (well trained by now to sleep in 4 hour watch stretches!).
The public dock in San Diego is at the end of a long thin peninsula of land called Shelter Island. Looking down into its quiet waters, one sees a forest, a watershed of masts. There are said to be 15 marinas and 7000 boats in San Diego. There are sloops and ketches, schooners, and motor yachts, micro and mega yachts, stripped down racing boats and gin palaces. And here’s the thing, there’s nowhere to go. Past the harbour is open ocean; the nearest islands are over a day’s sail away. But that doesn’t seem to bother anyone. On the weekend, the bay is a traffic jam of boats sailing back and forth, back and forth.
When you get tired of that you can shop for boat things. Shelter Island is one of the world’s major yacht centres. There are brokers and maintenance yards; there are chandleries and stores where you can contemplate upholstery, water makers, navigational instruments, refrigeration, canvas, carpentry, charts, books, tackle, sat phones and radios; there are painters, carpenters, fiberglassers, sailmakers, riggers, and people to maintain engines, plumbing, and electronics. In other words it is guy heaven.
There are women on the boats at the dock of course, but they don’t wander with a glass of beer or a cup of coffee, lean on each others’ boats shooting the breeze, they don’t spend hours talking about hull shape, this self-steering or that navigation system, the best configuration of sails and solar panels.
The transient dock turned out to be the place where almost everyone who arrives in San Diego first ties up. This time of year most boats are on their way to Mexico. You can spot the veterans by the amount of gear hanging off their rails: barbeques, extra gas tanks, solar panels, kayaks, generous awnings. Circadia, with her simple light lines and spindly radar pole looks naked.
The transient dock is also the place where permanent denizens of the harbour mooring buoys come to pump their tanks, get fresh water, charge their batteries, and have a shower (you can stay there 10 days out of every 40). They are recognizable by their leathery skin and their derelict boats.
Almost every boat on the transient dock seems to come with a dog, Chihuahua, border collie, pit bull… When a new boat comes in they all start barking at the newcomer on the bow.
But there are other life forms on the dock. By day great blue herons pace thoughtfully. Green herons hunch over bowsprits. And at night the black crowned night herons stand under the lights, gazing steadily into the water with their ruby eyes.
And, oh yeah, we did finally figure out what the strange static in the water was: beds of snapping or pistol shrimp, tiny critters only a couple of inches long. One claw is super-sized and comes with a thumb-like thing. The military first took an interest in them. A commander of a US submarine in 1942, suggested that “the Japs may have some newfangled gadget that they drop” to make so much underwater chatter. Since then someone figured out that the claw creates a bubble of water, which snaps when it breaks. Under the boat, and on the pilings, as I write, hundreds of snapping shrimp are at work—or whatever it is—speculations are it is both defensive and stuns prey. Check out Wikipedia for some amazing underwater footage.

2008-10-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

San Diego Rooftops, sunset

San Diego

2008-10-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

Japanese Friendship Bell--entrance San Diego Harbour

weather report

2008-09-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

Tavish and the spinnaker

Marine forecasts aren’t like other weather reports. We listen to the weather at home to decide, should we plan a picnic, take a raincoat, pack our sunglasses? Marine weather is not concerned with such trivial things. No, there is only one thing marine forecasts care about. Wind. How much of it and from what direction, whether it is building or dropping off. And its effects: wave swell and height. Whether it is going to be rainy or sunny is not even mentioned.
As we are still close to shore (20—70 miles) we can get weather reports on the VHF radio—a monotonous drone updated four times a day, by a faceless employee, I imagine sitting in a regulation grey room with fluorescent lights at a coast guard station. What does he think about between the endless repetitions of wind speeds and wave heights at scores of coastal stations and offshore ocean buoys? Is he tempted to read it in a seductive voice or with a Russian accent?
The ultimate weather report is something called GRIB (still trying to find out what the letters stand for). Almost everyone, except the determined luddite, makes sure they can get these files (usually through a single side band radio)—pictures of the ocean scored with little feathered arrows (the feathers corresponding to wind strength). You can scroll through the short and long term forecast to see a virtual picture of the wind moving over the surface of the sea in time. GRIB files help you to find the winds you want, and avoid the ones you don’t want.
Our single side band isn’t up yet but we get a verbal summary of them from a sailing friend Tavish calls each day to report our position. And we always download GRIB in port.
You may recall our last stop was just north of Cape Mendocino, where very high winds were promised. We ducked into Eureka to watch and wait. The GRIB files showed the winds downgraded to moderate—a little energetic in places, but dropping off.
Tired of days of motoring we set off looking forward to a free ride down the coast on northwesterlies, which would push us along from behind. One of the amazing things about sailing downwind is that, though the wind may be blowing 20 knots, the boat is also going forward and the winds magically cancel each other out. So, if you’re sailing at 10 knots, you’ll only feel a gentle 10 knots on your back. If you turned around and tried to sail upwind, you might go 8 knots, and would face an unnerving 28 knots on your face.
By dinner the wind was blowing 25, gusting to 30; by dark, 30 gusting to 35. Circadia was flying only a handkerchief of mainsail, moving at 10 knots. The only good thing about night falling was that I could no longer see the sea, which seemed to be moving in all directions at once. All I could watch was the water lit up by our stern light—waves the size of box cars racing towards us, lifting us up then tearing on past as we surfed down their faces (clocked one at 17.1 knots before we fully reefed). It was a long night, with all the crew taking short turns steering, which required constant concentration to keep the boat on course while it was being spun on the wave tops: readjusting the wheel moment to moment, sometimes having to throw your whole weight into it, with legs braced wide.
Down below the sound of the water rushing past the hull was deafening. “It’s like sleeping in a waterfall” shouted Angus as he tried to catch a quick nap.
By early morning the wind was down to 25 again and dropping. The crew spent most of the day taking turns sleeping. I can’t imagine better sailing companions than Tavish and Angus—dependable, unshakeable, and cheerful even in the tough moments.
In the end it was good to have experienced the storm (actually, technically a “near gale”). We found out what the boat could do and what we could do (or didn’t do, ie., in my case, curl up in the fetal position below, something I wasn’t absolutely sure of before).
The next few days brought the dreamed of perfect winds, 15-20 knots. We hoisted the big blue spinnaker and didn’t take it down for almost two days. The nights were full of stars and dolphins shooting by in sleeves of light. My favourite sight: a flying fish, shooting out of the face of wave, lit up, silver in the morning sun. It flew and flew and flew, just like a bird, then slipped back into the water and was gone.
Arrived in San Diego at 4 am Saturday morning.

Eureka, California

2008-09-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

detail from the wall of a fish and chips store

"The Pink Lady" 1889

Rusty Hull

2008-09-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

The crew: Angus Ellis, Alison Watt, Kim Waterman, Tavish Campbell

Working the Night Shift

2008-09-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

According to the publishers of the Concise English Oxford Dictionary, time is the most commonly used noun in the English language. I imagine them trolling the popular media for entries like “…most people don’t have the time to walk to work” or “…it’s time to think about your Christmas shopping list.”
On Circadia (whose name refers to a day’s measure of time) the day is split into two 6 hour day watches and three 4 hour night watches.
On night shifts, two of us “work” 8 pm-midnight, sleep, then 4 am-8 am, while the other pair does midnight to 4 am. (I haven’t lived by this schedule since I had babies. At the time, I felt like ordinary life was over, my days fractured into small units revolving around eating and sleeping).
We wake from a dead sleep and roll out of our lee berths. These are usually settees, but for a long passage, lee cloths are fastened on the open side, forming a little cradle that you can roll around in if the seas are rough or the boat is heeled.
We pull on our layers: fleece underwear, a wool sweater, a pile coat, heavy sailing overalls and coat, a fleece hat, a life jacket and a tether. The tether is our umbilical cord. It clips into lines of webbing which run the length of the boat. The seas have been calm for us so far, but the tether, like a car seat belt, is never optional.
The nights are chilly and four hours can seem very long, but there are rewards. Last night Kim and I watched our wake turn glow-stick-green with bioluminescence. Caught in the foam, silver flickers, clumps of plankton or small jellies; deeper, globes the size of crystal balls, turned on and off slowly, in response to the boat hull pushing them aside. They were probably more of the big jellies we passed earlier in the day—great fields of red bells with frilled tentacles trailing back in the current, like laundry blowing in a breeze.
Around 10 pm the waning moon rose and climbed up the notches of Orion’s belt. There were a couple of big planets and up there somewhere the satellites our new phone talks to. I decided to buy the Iridium Sat phone just before leaving. Too tempting—the possibility of carrying something that you could call home from anywhere on the planet. Turns out it’s not cheap to talk to satellites, but why should it be? We’ve hoisted new pieces of sky. I thought of the Kwakiutl’s notion of the heavens, the stars, holes in the roof of the world, through which they could see the light of the “overworld.” They were, I understand, in constant communication with the ancestors who lived there.
Of course it’s the things you can’t see that you think about most at night. Worry about. Watch for. But there are instruments for those as well. One of the clever things we have along (at least theoretically, as it has been malfunctioning) is something called AIS. This constantly scans the sea around us, looking for boats which have AIS transmissions, mostly commercial shipping.
There is something about freighters, their speed, their rootless-ness, that is malevolent. Or maybe it’s the stories of their autopilots set without watches, small boats mowed down while everyone on the freighter slept, or worse, carried on, knowing they had hit someone. It is reassuring to be able to see the shipping around you on the electronic chart. If you click on the AIS ship icon, you find it has a name, a length, a speed, and a bearing.
And then there is radar. The trick is to cast a fine-meshed electronic net, then pull it in, opening the mesh, to find the big fish that are lurking among the clutter, like the freighter I caught last night, heading north hugging the coast.
The rest of the boats we sighted were lit up and moving slowly, tuna fishing boats out of Coos Bay.
So far, our passage has been mostly windless and we have had to motor much of the time. That means we are travelling at an average speed of about 6 knots. It’s sort of like jogging down the coast. The boat never sleeps, however it too needs to be fed, and we must stop again to fuel up.
The weather report promises wind soon—lots of wind—in fact, too much. We are just about to round the notorious Cape Mendocino. Here the coast of North America takes one of its major turns and intersects with a great air outflow corridor from the continent. The winds for which it’s famous are forecast to come in in a couple of days—fierce northwesterlies which can blow 30-35 knots for days.
Tonight our night passage will take us to Eureka, where we’ll contemplate our next move.
Most common noun in this posting: night

2008-09-17T17:42:00.001-07:00

Sailing this week, bracing myself in the galley, over the soup pot, which was tilting wildly as the stove swung level on its hinges, I found myself thinking about how we take unchanging horizons for granted.
We left our house on Protection Island last Thursday morning first thing, dragging our gear down to the beach to load into a borrowed skiff (thanks Graeme and Jane). It was a perfect morning and no one else was on the beach except my friend Denise, who came to see us off. (We had said multiple good-byes to other friends, including Protection Islanders who threw us a great party). As we pushed off the beach I took one look back over my shoulder at the house, gazing stolidly to the east, ready to shoulder the winter storms. Though I complain about the dark rainy winters I know there will be days this year when I long to be sitting in front of the fire, listening to the wind lashing the windows with rain. Days when I wish I was snuggled in bed watching the sun rise over Gabriola Island.
So far we have had a gentle introduction to our sailing life. We left Victoria Inner Harbour (last Sunday afternoon) and found ourselves motoring out the Strait of Juan de Fuca on smooth windless seas. By dusk a full moon came up. We motored all night and the next day until afternoon when a northwest wind finally filled our big blue spinnaker and we sped off at 9-10 knots, taking a route of about 20-40 miles offshore.
One of the advantages of sailing on the continental shelf is the incredible life which feeds here. We've seen pelicans, albatross, fulmars, and shearwaters. One morning a big gang of Pacific White-sided dolphins noticed us sailing by and charged over to play on our bow. I never get tired of watching them, they always seem eager to rush away from the dull tasks of life to play. Mixed in with this group were some dolphins I'd never seen before--which turned out, on checking a field guide here, to be Northern Right Whale Dolphins. It was fascinating as well to watch schools of Albacore Tuna, leaping like tiny dolphins.
We decided to stop in Newport Oregon for a couple of nights, as the winds have been so light we have had to motor quite a bit and need to top up fuel. There is a thin, cold grey fog blowing in from the sea which makes the town seem drearier than it probably is. Today we explored the waterfront, a mix of tourist shops hawking fishing trips and T-shirts, and docks crowded with crab pots, tuna boats and fish plants. On our way to the chandlery the sidewalk was embedded with dozens and dozens of plaques: the names of fishermen lost off this coast.
The weather forecast is for light winds for the next couple of days. Tomorrow we'll head out into tilting horizons again. I think about the boat stove. One could do worse than emulate it, lead a gimballed life, finding the level no matter how off balance life gets.
Thanks so much again to those who have provisioned us with poems, songs, good wishes and special treats we carry along with us. Talk to you soon...

more thoughts about leaving

2008-09-07T16:15:00.001-07:00

Just home from a run on Newcastle Island with Trudy, Denise and Liz. A big high pressure system has settled over the coast, lulling us back into summer. The grasses on Newcastle are golden and the trails smell of dry, crushed arbutus leaves. Soon the maple leaves will join them, big yellow handkerchiefs which turn to something like soggy cornflakes as the fall rains set in. I will miss the Newcastle year, all the seasonal markers we always notice on these runs. And I will miss very much my running buddies and other island friends like Frances and Carol. As well as town friends like Darcy, Judith and Mary Jo and Victoria friends Jane and Hazell. Looking back, a year has passed so quickly; looking forward it seems to stretch slowly into something longer than it's measure. Is that part of the theory of relativity?
I'll also miss my students, some of whom I have been painting with almost every year for more than ten years. For my part, I'm going to try to work on the art of the quick watercolour sketch and will try to post some of these on this blog. Meanwhile I wish all you painters an artful year. And remember PAINT AS IF NEITHER YOUR TIME NOR YOUR MATERIALS ARE VALUABLE.

first post

2008-09-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

hello everyone
welcome to my new blog. Though I am not adrift yet, except metaphorically. Kim and I are busy battoning down the hatches on several fronts. Our house must be prepared for the house-sitter, which has meant hours of sorting through STUFF, setting aside what we'll take with us, what we'll store in our attic, what will go to the recycling, the Sally Ann, the dump. I always try to keep the flood of goods equal to the ebb--here on Protection island, it is deadly to ignore that philosophy, or soon you will find yourself buried under cargo, and you will have to organize an almost military campaign to ship it off. But, slowly, insidiously, the STUFF has been accumulating. And it turns out that what we are taking off the island is almost precisely balanced by the boxes which have arrived from Kim's office. They include: an EMG machine, office supplies, printer, swivel stool, foot stool, and several unbelievably heavy boxes of medical texts (hopefully he has all that information stuffed in his comparably easily transportable cranium). Speaking of which, the last item is a plexiglass box which holds a handsome skull, the top of which opens like a boiled egg with silver hinges. Kim found this fellow abandoned on a dusty hospital shelf long ago and he has grinned (with a spectacular set of perfect teeth) from his perch in Kim's office since.
Finally, of course, there is the boat to prepare. At the moment Circadia is in the boat yard in Sidney, having the self-steering mechanism installed. We had almost given up on it arriving (it was ordered from England in May). It's arrival last week (in five separate boxes) seemed like a minor miracle.
We are hoping that the installation will go well and we will be in Victoria Inner Harbour by next week, to begin provisioning. Sadly Kim's father passed away last week, so we will be attending his funeral in White Rock on Friday.
Hoping that we will be able to begin the first leg of our journey (the sail to San Diego) on the weekend.
stay tuned!
Alison