from s/v Circadia

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 80’s.
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. It’s 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 what’s 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 won—like this perfect night of moonlit sailing.

Na Na French Polynesia

B

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

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

Great Crested Tern

Diving, Manihi Atoll

Manihi

Apataki Atoll

Apataki

Pearl Farm dock, Apataki

 Apataki

From s/v Circadia

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

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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

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