Nelson, New Zealand 1 Jan 2011 41.2603S 173.2810E

One year later – sure doesn’t feel like a year, well in truth it wasn’t a year – only 364 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds to your 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. So we’ve decided to backtrack across the dateline next year to try and recapture that lost day – time is flying fast enough as it is! So first of March we’ll be window shopping (weather window shopping), looking for the perfect fit for what we expect to be a roughish passage back to Tahiti.

Touching land this time had the added distraction of Christmas preparations, so I’ve not posted a thing since we arrived (safely) in Nelson. It’s an easy town to be in, all the amenities of a large city, with a small town vibe, and the most amazing Saturday craft and farmers market I’ve ever seen. Frank is not a big shopper, but there’s another “kid boat” (Stray Kitty) who arrived here at the same time as we did, and despite the fact that we’re all trying to get caught up in school, it only took a little begging to get Christine to join me (and Chris to take her place at the front of the classroom). The lack of fresh veggies in the islands may have permanently changed my outlook . I feel a child’s christmas stocking joy at a bright green leafy head of lettuce, a pile of vermillion tomatoes, or an Alaska sized cabbage. And it’s summer here with long daylight hours, so the fruits are amazing – apricots that taste like apricots, gorgeous cherries, plump blueberries, and have you ever tried a palm-sized strawberry with the flavor of a sweet little forest strawberry? Not to be missed in this lifetime, I’d recommend a trip to Nelson just for the berries – although the flavor may well have been artificially perceptually enhanced by the 12 month sailing trip across the Pacific. Not that coconuts, mangos and taro don’t have their own special place, it’s probably just the contrasts that amaze.

So added to the regular landfall business, the holiday rush, the boat projects, and the school catchup, I’m struggling with lists that include, visits to the eye doctor , the dentist (for all of us), the doctor (my left index finger is still not 100%), while everyone here has gone on vacation. Imagine Christmas and summer vacation wrapped into one; forget trying to make an appointment! So we’ll forget for awhile longer, and go vacationing too. My mom comes on Sunday, so we have another good excuse to head out with all the Kiwis and enjoy this beautiful place with them for a couple weeks (maybe we’ll meet a doctor or dentist out there). Hopefully the Kiwi’s will all be back to work mid January so we can tackle our few remaining bigger projects (haulout and paint a clean bottom on her!)

I wish I had some more profound reflections this New Year’s Eve, but it’s been a couple weeks since my last dog watch. The profound thoughts remain in my dreams, unremembered when I wake up to my land lists. The main year’s lesson is that if you decide to sail off into the sunset, don’t be surprised if life comes along for the ride – all of life. I wasn’t really trying to escape my life so I don’t mind, although I wish it too would pick it’s wet towels off the floor once in awhile. Another lesson, 11,320 miles, 8,224 pictures, 72,463 ruminating words, and 282 algebra assignments later, the Pacific is unfathomably enormous and stunning (especially traveling 5 knots on average). I’ve tried to capture it, but it’s a task for the goddess Psyche. Still, I don’t mind sorting seeds for awhile longer, I’m not ready for the ant helpers.

Marc poetically pointed out that we left a year ago “on a blue moon on the first day of the second decade of the dawn of the third millennium.” Once on a blue moon, we pointed the bow south and sailed past Catalina’s West End. You’ve been with us in our hearts, thanks for coming along.

Love and joy to you all in the New Year. Margo

P.S. Scurvy has turned out to be a very popular guy, so we’ve given him his own official blog. We added some posts that he had hidden in the forepeak, they’re post-dated, so you may have to read back some, and I think we’re still missing a few. But at least now you can comment realtime on scurvyreport.blogspot.com We kicked him off the nav computer, so he shouldn’t be sending emails directly anymore, I hope you have RSS so you can keep following along. He’s a pretty social guy for a rat, so he’ll be watching eagerly for your comments.

P.P.S.

• New New Zealand Pics are up on picasaweb.google.com/margoreveil
• My own ruminations are still available on www.hypercities.com/mo
• And when in doubt, links to all are at www.silverliningacademy.org

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Even Further South in the Tasman Sea, New Zealand 13 Dec 2010 39.6933S 173.0504E

Happy Monday Morning, it’s almost 5 a.m. here, the sky has been working on a subtle predawn glow for the past half hour. You all are waking up to a nice Sunday morning, reading yesterday’s news, and sipping on some hot Java. Maybe setting aside coupons for Christmas shopping later today? I admit, I miss Sunday mornings, there’s nothing quite like them in our new life. But since it’s Monday morning here, I’m not missing much.

I did miss sending a Thanksgiving greeting, and I wanted to share some holiday thoughts my dogwatch has been dogging me with. Marc sent me a book called “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. The author, Mark Ridley, has his bias on the how, but convincingly shares his ideas on the value of encouraging human exchange. He points out that we all live like kings thanks to a vast history of human innovation, which only exists through a long historic string of idea exchange, and that by all of us specializing, we each benefit from thousands of hours of other people’s time. Usually when I look at the boat, I think of my father’s genius – well, truthfully I usually think of all the maintenance tasks that we need to tackle – but when I’m in a more appreciative mode, Gary’s ideas surround us. But reading Ridley, I look around and see, all the great minds that provided this amazing experience for us: Thomas Edison and the long line of researchers before him, who discovered, harnessed, and marketed electricity; The factory full of miners, steelworkers, supervisors, company presidents, lawyers, insurance agents, and marketing dudes, who dug up, smelted, and produced and sold the raw material for our hull; the entire history of inventing sails to harness wind as propulsion, the production of sail material, the invention of the synthetic UV resistent materials (well somewhat resistent…ours are fraying around the edges after a year in the tropics), the girls in China that worked in factories that wove the fabric, down to the cleaning ladies in the sail designer’s offices, who’s efforts freed designers from the task of cleaning heads, to allow them to focus on design; and former colleagues, friends, and family that have supported us for years, helping me to advance my education, my career, and now this cruising life. Millions of minds, skills, and hands have all been applied to create this moment for us. That’s worth being thankful for.

In a similar vein, we’ve been reading aloud from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in our cockpit school periods. Early in the book he mentions what an amazing feat it is that every single one of my ancestors, managed to survive to reproductive age, and have a healthy baby – surviving plague, famine, war, puberty – further, think all the way back to the first single cell thing that split and reproduced, then evolved. That’s all worth being thankful for.

We just finished the chapter on atoms. Somehow I didn’t realize (or managed to forget), that the number of atoms on the planet is constant. They just get recycled into new forms. There’s a passage where he tries to give you a sense of scale of the number of atoms that exist just in air. He starts with the number of molecules (something easier to count than atoms) in a sugar cube sized space of air (45 billion billion), then he asks you to “look out your window” and imagine what it would take to fill that view. The kids and I all looked up, looked out at the 360 degree x 180 degree dome of air surrounding us…window?! Visibility out here is about 2 miles to the horizon if your head is 10 feet above sea level (according to my onboard walking Google), farther as objects are taller, and millions of lightyears to the stars overhead. A staggering, if oddly shaped, column of atoms. He also says, a vast number of the atoms in our body, came from Shakespeare, Buddha AND Genghis Khan (apparently you have to pick a historic figure for the atoms to have been sufficiently redistributed). To heck with historic figures, I’m remembering those phosphorescent jellyfish I saw last night, closer at hand, sufficiently redistributed through our watermaker, I’m part jelly! Is that something to be thankful for? Maybe not, but it is miraculous.

If you’re at all in doubt right now that life is a miracle, I can recommend both books, although Bryson is hands down the more engaging storyteller. And in the spirit of the season, you can go ahead and buy a glass of wine and a fish taco for that guy on the corner who thinks he’s Jesus. At the atomic level, he is Jesus – partly anyway.

Our wind was short-lived, we did motorsail a little yesterday, but mostly motored all night. Frank’s now up has optimistically shut down the engine, and is coaxing the spinnaker into the sky. We’re still a day or more away from Nelson, unless the wind picks up. We just need the atoms to align properly, the ones in the spinnaker are not looking half bad.

xoxomo

P.S. I tried the “I’m feeling lucky” button on my onboard walking Google the other day, and I can confirm that the results are far superior to Google’s. I think I’ll keep that pack of atoms. Something else to be thankful for.

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Further South in the Tasman Sea, New Zealand 11 Dec 2010 37.7195S 172.1219E

Lessons learned today: 1. US Mason jar screw top rings do not quite fit New Zealand canning jars.

2. Pickled beat juice does a spectacular job at livening up the otherwise dull white interior of a fridge.

3. After just a few days at sea, the 20 second rule does not apply to pickled beets on the galley floor.

The good news is the kids think pickled beets taste like sweetened dirt, the bad news is I love sweetened dirt (but not when it has been mixed with other detritus on the cabin sole).

20 knots of NW wind today, 2-3 meter seas still confused, but mostly following, 7 knots of boat speed. All is well on board, even with a few galley events.

xoxomo

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The Tasman Sea, New Zealand 11 Dec 2010 36.4116S 171.5354E

Yesterday the boys decided to go whale watching without me. They followed a pod of 10-12 sperm whales along for awhile, and decided that it was a sin to wake an off-watch crew member, even when it started to get exciting. Apparently whales were everywhere off in the distance, so Frank figured they’d be everywhere when I woke up too. But then they came closer and closer to see if this SL gray whale presented any competition (or do we look like a massive sailfish?). Apparently one bull felt a need to exert his authority, he refused our starboard under sail priority, and cut us off at the bow, then flipped us the tail, yards from the boat. Frank said the stomps and cries on deck should have been my wake-up call, but it all merged into an odd dream I was having about driving down a rough road with my brother. When I did wake up, Frank came proudly to show me his pictures. “There’s no magic to photography, you just have to get close enough,” he says.

Meanwhile Logan is pestering Kennan to rig up his RC Helicopter with a q-tip, and ready it for the next pod of whales. He’d heard on a podcast that an Ignobel Prize was awarded to a team of researchers who came up with the idea to use RC Helicopters outfitted with swabs to gather whale snot specimens from live whales at sea (apparently you don’t want to get too close, due to the overwhelming smell). Unfortunately, it was one of the few science podcasts that did not come with the preamble, “Do not try this at home.” They also did not tell us where we’re supposed to send the specimens once we get some.

Our wind came last night, if it holds we should be into Nelson in 2 days or so. It’s a fast but rolly ride with the seas confused by the change in wind direction. But all is well on board (right now at 8 am, all are sleeping on board, except me).

Oh I forgot, at some time in the past week we left the Pacific Ocean behind and entered the Tasman Sea. We are officially no longer cruising in the South Pacific. I don’t know exactly where that line lies, but we’re fully in the Tasman Sea now. According to my onboard, walking Google, Able Tasman sailed this sea in the opposite direction from us. He was looking for the south side of Australia, but found only Tasmania then NZ instead. Apparently no one was able to make it south around Australia’s east or west coast to explore without wrecking their ships on reefs. So he headed way west, then way south then back up this way, missing Australia altogether, but determining for the world that it was not as big as they thought. We’ll wave at his historic wake as we pass.

xoxomo

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Three Kings, New Zealand 9 Dec 2010 34.1742S 172.0742E

A memorable day with an early start, we’d anchored off the northern Tip of New Zealand last night, It was a desolate windy spot with long beaches and a swell rolling through which rolled us right along with it – all night long. Tom Bowling Bay it was called, I guess that was the hint we missed. Still the W/NW winds predicted, aren’t expected to arrive for another 24-48 hours, so we were not ready to turn south yet. Frank woke way before his wake up time, to haul in the anchor and sail to the Three Kings Islands. A beautiful day of sailing brought us to a dramatic anchorage with steep cliffs all around. Despite the light 10 knot winds outside, gusts were sweeping straight down from the cliffs, creating wild air currents and counter currents. The hordes of seabirds were loving it, but erratic winds, combined with a deep boldery bottom, and an even rollier anchorage, convinced us that we’d be better off bobbing around in the ocean all night, so we left, barely one beer later, maybe this year’s shortest anchorage stop.

Sailing past the Prince’s Islands a couple miles to the west, was where the memorable part comes in. These were really more a collection of tall pointy ridgy rocks than islands. Very dramatic, and as we approached we saw a giant arch in the rocks. It looked like one could almost sail through (if one had an unlimited rigging budget and a steel hull…we were only halfway qualified). Instead, the steep deep water right to the cliff face allowed us to get close, without attempting to thread the needle. I was on the bow ready for the perfect shot, the one where the arch frames the pinnacles in the background, when a pod of very large dolphins, I think bottlenose, swam up to ride our bow. I’m afraid my shutter was clicking way to fast for any of the pictures to be any good, so I finally stopped and just watched, it was an amazing sight. They had some of the cutest tiniest babies with them that I’ve ever seen in a dolphin pod. Logan called out gleefully “Did you see the little wrinkley spot by the fin of that tiny one? Just like the wrinkles human babies get around their knees.” I think it must have just been born, his hops out of the water reminded me of a toddler hopping along to keep up with dad, barely able to break the bonds of gravity for a second, before falling back down. They followed along for awhile, perfecting what I thought was an already perfect view. A little farther along, a big Albatross came close enough for Frank to photograph (they always hide behind shrouds or swells for my shutter clicks – and I was at the bread again). We’ve been seeing Albatross all day, but none have graced us with such a spectacular fly by and that in light wind. It was a day for the log books.

Since the wind has not turned yet, we’re heading for Australia. Hopefully the wind will turn by tomorrow so we can head back to New Zealand, ideally towards the south island. Otherwise, we’ll be like Cook, who spent a a couple weeks sailing out from the NZ west coast in the morning, then back towards the coast by nightfall to take a position, then back out then back in. Not too frustrating if you’re trying to map the island, but cartographers we are not, and we’d like to make it to Nelson before Christmas. I wouldn’t mind if we took just this one zig towards Oz, then a straight beeline down, with no more zags or Aussie zigs after. Not that it isn’t beautiful now, not that today’s sidetrip wasn’t appreciated, but it never stays this beautiful for long, even in the summer; a port would be nice before the next chilly southern blow.

xoxomo

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Maitai Bay, New Zealand 8 Dec 2010 34.8253S 173.4114E

and yesterday Whangaroa Harbor: 35.0093S 1737296E

We’re working our way up and over the northern tip of New Zealand. Our ultimate destination this round is Nelson on the northern tip of the South Island. We’ve been doing little, one night, one day stops, hopping along cove to cove. We’re trying to time our arrival at the north tip of the North Island, with the arrival of some north winds up there to send us on a 3 day non-stop trip south (the west coast here is not a boat friendly coast, so no little one day stops on that side). It’s an odd thing to be driven forward from these beautiful, sometimes dramatic, spots by a wish for nice winds – never a promise of nice winds. Each spot we’ve stopped at so far, is worthy of at least a week’s vacation. But since we’re not on vacation really – just cruising – school, sailing, boat repairs, cooking, cleaning, all must happen in a given day. Some days we get a couple hours worth of vacation squeezed in too, with kayaking and stomps in these coves and hills. The view from our backyard is always excellent.

Stomps is a term we learned from English friends on Zephyrus. It means – a vigorous hike – one where you really step out and get the heart rate up, where the path is “difficult,” according to the guidebook scales. Before algebra the other day, we had an amazing morning stomp up the Duke’s Nose (in Whangaroa Harbor). The last bit was more climb than stomp with a convenient chain anchored to the face of the rock cliff to help the less qualified climbers up (me, and still I was challenged). From the top of the Duke’s Nose, Silver Lining looked like a toy boat. I did get some fun pictures, which I’ll post when we get back to WiFi land.

Right now the coastline is desolate, very few houses, no boats in sight (although we did share an anchorage with the police boat last night – safest anchorage we’ve been in yet). We’re sailing north now with flat seas 10 knots of wind, making an easy 5 knots. It feels like lake sailing. I guess a day this beautiful counts as a vacation day, but with no stores, I do need to go work on a loaf of bread to fill the stomaches I hear growling in the background. Too bad I can’t just pour the flour and water down their gullets; that would be a lot quicker, and I’d be free to go watch the coast slide by.

Hmmm, should have packed some Space Food Sticks, do they still make those? I guess today they’re called energy bars.

xoxomo

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