Input and output

Alex speaks in acronyms these days. This past weekend he’s been wrangling with the AIS, and the DSC on the VHF and, I believe, the MMSI. Today’s challenge is snipping and soldering the BNC and the PL-259, two different types of co-axial plugs for aerials and the GPS, he tells me. He mentioned something about NMEA 0183 or NMEA 2000 – which was it?

Each morning he sets off after breakfast, his old blue bag of tricks slung over his shoulder. I know not to expect him back before dark. Each morning I remind him he needs to eat during the day, and he grabs a banana and a Coke. Nothing else. I ask if he needs me to help and every day so far he’s said no. There’s not enough room, he says, which is true. It’s also true that I don’t know enough to be useful. It’s frustrating and, to use an old feminist term, disempowering to be so completely befuddled by the language of electronics and data transmission. I satisfied my need to be productive yesterday by finding ways to use our endless supply of kaffir limes and Thai eggplants, hard and round as golf balls, which are growing like natives in our small inner-city plot.


Until now, my expertise in radio communications has needed to extend only as far as operating the VHF (the marine network which operates up and down the coast and depends on line-of-sight communication between radio towers). But with the upgrades, which include Sail Mail and the satellite phone plan, talking at sea gets a whole lot more complex.
Sea Talk is something else. It’s the Raymarine “life tag” system we’ve bought. The idea is that we each have an electronic wrist band and if either of us strays further than a certain distance from the cockpit, or if our wrist band is submerged in water for more than 10 seconds, an ear-splitting siren goes off. At that instant, the position of the “man overboard” is automatically marked on the chart plotter. Both the siren and the GPS position give the person left on board a better chance of fishing their mate’s body out of the sea, hopefully alive.
When I first saw these gizmos on our friends Dave and Melinda, who sail a sleek John Sayer-designed yacht called Sassoon, my eyes lit up. Sailing two up, as we do mostly, has its risks, especially since I am so new to the game and have almost everything to learn. You can solve a lot by throwing money at a yacht. Hence Alex’s back-breaking labour below decks. But it’s not all about the money. We’ll be much safer when we know more about the sea, and the weather, which means doing the sea miles.

On wiring and other (narrative) strands

Here's why I haven't been on the boat for quite a while. I'm in awe of Alex's willingness to create such a mess, knowing he must find a way to put it all back together again! All the parts of the new AIS system have arrived in the past two days and must be fed into this jumble of wiring.


Meanwhile…

How much fun can a girl have in a  bookshop devoted to boating, and only boating? I found out yesterday when I went to Boat Books  in Crow's Nest, to buy the extra paper charts we need for our voyage. We, like most other cruising types, are GPS-dependent, but nevertheless we carry a fair old load of paper a) in case the GPS (and the back-up GPS) falls over, and b) because it's often easier to plot your course on paper, particularly over a large distance. I personally love the whole pencil and rubber thing. 
Charts are dispensed upstairs at Boat Books with all the seriousness due to such venerable and official documents, but downstairs it's a honeypot.  I spent over an hour browsing the shelves, and if I hadn't been meeting a friend for lunch nearby, I'd have willingly stayed longer. I passed once lightly over the cruising guides and the practical how-to books - how to anchor safely, how to survive in heavy weather, how to fix a marine diesel engine and so on. We're right for those. Maritime disaster and history books (often one and the same) leave me quite cold - though give me time and I may yet see the attraction. As for books on weather, well, for many years Alex wouldn’t travel without packing a hefty tome called The Mariner’s Weather Handbook. It came with us on holiday to France twice, and still has, pressed between its pages, a faded roadside Provencal poppy. I suspect we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to forecast the weather, and most of what we learn won't come from books.

What I was looking for was nautical writing, not fiction (the world of Patrick O'Brian still waits for me) but non-fiction. I've only recently discovered its pleasures. Jonathan Raban set the standard for me, and as it turns out, it’s a hard one to match. After Passage to Juneau, I read his earlier book Coasting, which Alex considers a kind of sacred text.  I could have kissed the man – Raban, that is. His prose is glorious, variously taut, wry, lyrical, erudite (he wears his learning lightly in the best of British traditions). I love the way he moves his eyes across landscapes, both natural and urban, and draws their features like a portrait artist. He writes about the sea the way others write about the heart, mapping its movements and its moods in intimate detail. Since then, I've read a  couple of Chichester's books, Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way, and a few forgettable accounts of the living the dream, as cruisers call it. It's not a travelogue I'm after, you see, not a list of islands and continents visited and oceans crossed. Of course I want the broad outline of how it was getting from A to B,  but what interests me more is what goes on in people's heads and hearts, what they think and how they feel when they are “out there”.  People used to travel by sea much more, before planes got so good at staying up in the air. In a world which values speed, productivity, progress and wealth creation, floating about in a small boat for months on end is a strange choice to make. Sure, it's the ultimate escape fantasy, but how does going to sea alter a person’s view of the world, and of what it means to be human (one guy told me, “once you leave land, you are at the bottom of the food chain”)? That's what a good writer can tell me. 

So I left the cruising yarns on the shelves  (I'm sure I'll find some satisfying ones if I look harder - and there are stories yet to be written, of course). Instead I bought a biography of the mesmerizing Frenchman Moitessier, written by his friend Jean-Michel Barrault, a new-ish biography of Joseph Conrad, by English academic John Stape, and a hybrid volume of memoir and distilled practical wisdom by Jimmy Cornell, the man who got yachties offshore in packs (Alex participated in one of his earliest Atlantic Rally for Cruisers in 1989). Not a thing about 12-volt boat electrical systems though. 

Getting into the detail of the thing

This afternoon I thought I should read something about our destination. Perhaps a little late in the piece, I admit. I've been distracted by bread, but a solid working knowledge of flour, salt, yeast and water can take a person only so far at sea. As for brushing up my French, well, I need to concentrate more on the task at hand. As I ran my eyes down the French/English "mini-dictionary" in the back of the cruising guide to New Caledonia my foolish pride in having read and enjoyed Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog in French collapsed. The deep philosophical musings of a hyper-intelligent Parisian concierge don't throw up vocabulary like tide tables,  mooring, breakwater, crew, harbour master's office, quick flashing light etc., the sort that could help us out of a tight spot in Noumea.

Alex and I had spent the morning, a sublimely warm one, drinking coffee in the garden with new friends John and Shauna. “Are all your friends from now on going to be sailors?” I was asked yesterday by one of the Tribe. Perhaps. It's an interesting thought. John and Shauna are planning to leave Sydney in mid-May, like us. Unlike us, they’re still working their day jobs, he as a doctor and she as a nurse. This will be their third consecutive season cruising around New Caledonia and Vanuatu.  They walked in our front door, carrying boxes of extravagant pastries, but pulled up short at the sight of the solar panels. For several minutes, they lingered with Alex in the hallway, discussing and admiring the panels' fine and fulsome capacity. Shauna even got down on her haunches to inspect the connecting leads. It was that which pushed me towards the cruising guide when they'd gone. Seeing Shauna's involvement. I felt a twinge of shame that I hadn’t yet got past seeing the solar panels as a hallway traffic obstacle. Where was my cruising spirit?

Amidst all the serious stuff, Shauna and John offered this little gem of advice. A rubber plunger, the sort used to unblock drains, pushed up and down in a bucket of warm suds works well as a laundry agitator. Clever, huh?  They also gave us great tips about what we might have on board to trade for fresh food in Vanuatu, outside Port Vila.  I’ve traveled plenty, but until now I hadn't registered that money doesn't always talk. (Alex has told me how he and Jan smoothed the path of their Combi with gifts of cheap cosmetics, cigarettes and so on when they drove across Asia in the early 70s . But if the past is a foreign country, it's all the more so when it pertains to your partner's previous relationship.) I got out pen and paper and noted down Shauna and John's suggestions: short-grain rice, raw sugar, small fishing hooks, torch batteries, deflated soccer balls, tee-shirts, school supplies (“don’t buy those cheap coloured pencils because they don’t work”), thongs (“size 8 - they’re small people”), even cutlery. I’m onto it.

  Kukka's new stainless frame, fitted by the wizards from the west, sits sweetly under the boom. The solar panels will be mounted on top of it.

How to mix a reading group

If Alex and I get away on schedule, then I've been to my last reading group until we're back in six months or so. I'm missing it already! Of course we'll take books away with us. Alex is a great reader, so there's no having to justify the extra space or weight of my on-board library. His first present to me all those years ago was a hardback copy of Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. In fact, the man is a menace in a bookshop, as uncontrollable as my sister in a shoe shop. Still, he and I can't replicate the alchemy of the reading group. We girls have something special.

Over the years, I've often been asked by curious friends how our reading group works. The mechanics are simple. We meet every five or six weeks, at someone's house. A day or so before the meeting we start talking on email about food. Only once have we ended up with four desserts. There's always decent wine. We chat. Of course we chat. It's part of the pleasure, but the rump of the evening, the meaty part, is after dinner when we pull out our books.

Everyone's pile has two kinds of books - those they've borrowed previously, and are returning or wanting more time to read, and new books they're bringing to the group. When someone returns a book they've read, they talk about it,  and since often someone else, or perhaps everyone else, has already read that book and/or others by the same author, discussion is on-going and magnified. However, our greatest joy  - and call us bluestockings (if you are that old) or nerds - is in sharing a great find, an author new to the rest of us,  and persuading someone else to give his/her book a go. I would never have read the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's 1958  novel Things Fall Apart if not for reading group, for example. As it is, the first time I borrowed it, I was too agitated to let myself relax into Achebe's speech rhythms. I returned it unread. A year later, I was persuaded to try again, and this time I was ripe for its famous spell.

The more usual model for a reading group or book club wouldn't work for me. It sounds too much like a homework circle. I tense up when I come across a suggested list of questions for book clubs in the end pages of a book. Plus, I hate the thought of having to read a certain book. I like to follow my nose with my reading. What I pick up depends on my mood, on what's happening in my head, in my life. Our model takes that kind of fluidity as a starting point. It works because a) we're all serious readers (as in, we really can't imagine life without books) and b) because we're committed. It's just like playing in a soccer or a netball team. You've got to be committed to turning up, and training, otherwise it's no fun for anyone. The people are the key. We didn't start out as friends. At the beginning we were introduced by a mutual friend, Caroline, who has a genius for putting people together. Some people who've joined our group since its inception, when others have left, haven't worked out, and that's been awkward. I'd say only that you've got to trust your instincts, and when someone doesn't work out, get tough.

I'm going to break out at sea, and read some of Alex's beloved crime fiction. Lee Child and Peter Temple are coming aboard, along with John Banville and Ian McEwan, Siri Hustvedt and Orhan Pamuk, more Moitessier and Francis Chichester, the third Steig Larsson book, Judith Wright's poetry and Montaigne's essays ETC. Of course, I'm fooling myself. There's never enough time to read at sea. My mind will be kidnapped by the world out there. That's what I loved about it last time, but I'll bring the books anyway. I'd frightened to leave home without them.

Contemplating the size of the world from the kitchen

Another week closer to departure, another Monday night dinner about to unfold. I have Stephanie Alexander's excellent olive bread rising in a snug corner of the laundry, and a pot of Jamie Oliver's basic tomato sauce, the one with the perfectly sized-up kick of chili, simmering on the stove. It's dark, and we're shutting windows to keep the warmth inside,  but Alex has not yet appeared from his workshop, aka the boat. Nor have the solar panels in the hallway moved far in a week. Claudia's getting grumpy about kicking her toes on the corner of the box each time she comes in the front door. But hey, the new toilet on the boat flushes at the touch of a button, and that's a triumph. Plus, Alex has at last ordered an AIS set-up from a man in Seattle who works out of home so he can do the school drop-offs. The magical shrinking properties of the internet are demonstrated, yet again. But then this planet of ours does seem ridiculously small when a16-year-old schoolgirl can sail around it while the rest of us are distracted by an unusually long hot summer.

             Tiptoe around the solar panels (a fun game for young adults coming home after a night at the pub)

It's time

The sun will set an hour earlier tonight. Summer  time has ended and we'll be leaving Sydney soon, sailing north before winter arrives. Alex has given me the middle of May as a deadline. We're approaching it at different speeds, and in different states of mind. He's going full tilt, as he does, while I'm digging in domestically. Today I cleaned the house. Cleaning isn't so bad when you're mentally taking leave. Even the bathrooms provided a quotient of pleasure; I opened all the louver windows in the new one downstairs and let bright watery sunshine spill in from the garden. I also baked bread - again. I'm working towards a crusty, chewy loaf which can be reliably reproduced in our galley oven. It's happening. I baked an almond cake too for Monday Night Dinner, our family's equivalent of the old-fashioned Sunday lunch. Since it's Easter, I slathered the cake in melted chocolate icing and eggs. This is a recipe which won't travel so well to the tropics.

                   Let them eat cake (but please may they say nice things about the bread too!)

While I savour the remaining weeks of our home life, Alex has two feet on the boat much of the time and is always at sea in his mind. He spends all day and much of the night working on his list of boat jobs. It still fills one page of a spiral-bound A5 notebook but most of the problems we identified on our first cruise have found solutions. Correction - with the verb in the active form: Alex has found solutions to those problems . Today he's finished installing a more environmentally-friendly (or so I maintain) toilet system. There have been endless flow diagrams (and bad jokes), but when push came to shove (yes, that bad) he said it was a one man job to fit the new set-up. I didn't argue. He's where he wants to be, doing what he wants to do. Next up is fitting the two new solar panels which will give us more power on the boat. They're lying in a carton in our hallway now, waiting for a stainless steel frame which is being made up in a workshop out west to Alex's design. He hasn't decided yet which AIS system we're buying. AIS is the newest and grooviest thing in navigation aids, used to identify and track the direction and speed of big ships, by far the most terrifying occupants of the ocean. I thought we'd nailed the AIS thing one evening during the French Film Festival as we waited for the ads to spool through before the main feature. Where better to run through relevant radar, chart plotter, VHF and antennae configurations than in a cinema's  companionable darkness? But a few days later another variation on the AIS theme presented itself. The boating world is awash with new product.

After I've gone to bed, Alex roams the world's on-line marine suppliers. Doing boat porn, I used to call it (I'm kinder these days). In the morning he lays out his successes for me to admire. The other night he tracked down a particular kind of plastic rail clamp integral to the solar panel project. A guy in Florida was sitting on a stash of 10 of these widgets (there 's apparently a global shortage) but undertook to post him eight on the strength of  fond memories he and his wife had of sailing in Australian waters a while back.  Every day is Christmas at our place as couriers deliver the spoils of Alex's late night foraging, and another piece of the puzzle titled 'boat preparation' drops into place.

Where am I in this? Well, aside from my bread-making campaign, my toughest marine challenge has been what to do about the curtains on Kukka which offended my eye from the first moment I stepped down into her otherwise impeccable Swedish interior. What were those ugly flaps of left-over furnishing fabric scrunched on either side of the windows? Alex claimed never to have noticed them in all the weeks he'd been working on the boat in Bundaberg.  Huh. I was sorely tempted by printed hemp fabric from Cloth. clothfabric  Hemp is supposedly mould-resistant, but the designs which were small enough to work on these mean little curtains got lost in the bunching. Instead, in a flash of decorating brilliance, I've taken the easier option of distracting attention (mine, primarily) from the window-dressing with lush, richly-coloured cushions from Marimekko.  You can take the girl out of Vogue etc etc. 

Frivolity aside, I'm sucking up all the pleasure there is to be had from the company of our young adult children, from the graciousness (and spaciousness) of our house, and from the cultural offering of this big, noisy, showy city which, going back a year, I couldn't have imagined feeling such indifference towards. "What do you do on a boat anyway?" I asked Alex at one point as the reality of spending months, rather than days, in the confines of a small cruising yacht began to un-nerve me. He wasn't impressed. There were some fraught moments before we sailed out of Bundaberg on our 2009 shakedown cruise. He was over-worked, and I was fearful. Fearful of leaving what I knew, and what I had mastered. 

But it was fine. More than fine. It was a triumph. Once we were at sea, Alex remembered what it was he liked about me, and I remembered what I'd known as a child, and had forgotten - that I'm happy when I'm sailing. Sailing works like a tonic. It clears my head, it invigorates my body and calms my soul. Most astonishingly, it lifts me out of myself. If that sounds too wacky, try reading the mesmerizing prose of round-the-world sailor Bernard Moitessier (The Long Way). He levitates.