Just for the fun of it

So this is what all the fuss is about… the sheer pleasure of sailing day after night after day, under a benign sky and on a friendly ocean. This time, it happened the way I’d been told it could happen. The nights weren’t terrifying, not even arduous.  They were exhilarating, both of them, as we whooshed north, leaving behind the weather forecast in French and heading for a place which, as we approached it, felt a little bit like the Magic Isles, so enthusiastically had other yachties spoken about Vanuatu to us, and yet in such strange, and difficult to comprehend ways. How could it be that there still existed a place where commerce hadn’t found its way into every nook and cranny? 

 Destiny loving the sail from Noumea to the Baie de Prony , where we anchored overnight before leaving New Caledonia via the Havannah Passage

The first eight or so hours out from the New Caledonian coast were a bit quiet, with the breeze too light to sail, but once the wind freshened from the south, there was no looking back. Sure,  we would have liked more east in it. Kukka doesn’t feel quite at ease with the wind and the swell up her backside. Destiny, on the other hand, grand lady of substance that she is, was in her element and during the first night, as we rounded Lifou, the middle island of the Loyalty group, she pulled away from us, and stayed about 10 miles ahead for the rest of the trip. But who was racing? 

 

During the second night, when I was on watch from midnight to 4 am, and the moon came up and the stars shone hazily, I had such fun with Kukka. I relaxed into her. Not so much that I forgot how little I knew, and can actually do, but enough to take the edge off the anxiety which I had accumulated around night sailing. Until now, every night sail Alex and I have done has involved some degree of drama, with weather and sea state difficult and unpredictable. But not this time. When the wind shifted, I adjusted the angle of Kukka’s course to the wind (our clever autopilot allows us to set a course by wind angle, if we so desire – it can mean you sail a few more miles if the wind is not steady, but on balance, we have found that we keep pretty much to the same line as Destiny, who sails to a compass course). When it shifted back, I shifted course again. I kept a check on the reefed sails, got the radar and AIS fired up when needed and  I was on a roll!

Part of the relaxed feeling was also, undoubtedly, because I wasn’t bundled up in five or six layers of clothing. The air was so balmy. I still wore wet weather pants and a harness, but instead of a big stiff jacket I put a light fleece over my teeshirt, and instead of marine gumboots and thick hiking socks, I wore shoes and cotton ankle socks. I hooked myself up to the iPod and when sleep was dangerously close, bopped along to The Black Seeds, an Kiwi reggae/dub group guaranteed to stimulate your body rhythms. 

When I was next awake, Kukka was still humming along and the skipper was blissed out on country music, his latest crush. There he was in the cockpit, likewise hooked up to the iPod, playing air guitar and air drums and singing his heart out to the soundtrack to the dJeff Bridges movie Crazy Heart. Priceless.
There was a moment when we looked at each other, and smiled, very big smiles. The speed dial read 7.6 knots ( a very satisfactory speed indeed). The wind had finally come round more into the east, and Kukka was like a frisky horse, shaking her head and kicking up her heels. It was a beautiful morning, and at this rate, we worked out as we ate our muesli, we would arrive in Port Vila in the late afternoon, before dark. We don’t like anchoring in the dark. 

When we’d finished breakfast, it was Alex's turn to go down below for a nap. I gave him the fruit scraps to throw overboard - banana peel, pear core and passionfruit shells - and as he remembers it, in his sleepy state, he absentmindedly began picking up small round objects from the deck and throwing them into the ocean, passionfruit seeds, probably, or seeds that birds had crapped out. Suddenly, he clicked out of his reverie, and leapt.out of the cockpit, with expletives. The proverbial penny dropped. There were no birds around, and passionfruit seeds didn’t look like that, did they? These things were nylon ball bearings. Where the **** had they come from?

They’d come from the traveler car which, for the layman, is plastic moulding around a steel frame, loaded with ball bearings, and designed to slide across the deck on a track, taking the whole load of the mainsail and the wind that is in it. The said mainsheet car was now two feet in the air, held only and fortuitously, by what remained of a disintegrated traveler car, minus its ball bearings, and one of its end pieces through which the ball bearings had escaped. The morning suddenly looked quite different, much less secure. On the sea, things can change very quickly if you don’t pay attention.

What to do? How do you fix it? Can you fix it? First, he had to control the boom before it wreaked further havoc. He lashed it to a strong point on the deck, then he had a Coke and a fag, and engaged the brain. 

Alex is a squirrel. It’s a trait of his that I frequently berate him for, but on this occasion, I have to say, Squirrels Rule. He went foraging in the forepeak and came out with a recycled hospital carry-bag full of hardware. Fossicking among the relics, he struck gold - a spinnaker block, circa 1986, once belonging to Slack Alice (his J24 boat). He untangled the broken bits and the mainsheet, and removed them from the disabled system, while keeping the boat sailing and stable in all that lovely boisterous wind we’d been enjoying up until then. Then, matching the ex-J24 block with an assortment of shackles and pins, over the course of the next hour he assembled a workable replacement for the busted car. Quite pleased with himself, he was too. “This could take us around the world,” he said, of his contraption. I didn’t doubt him. Bernard Moitessier sailed around the world twice in a boat with a mast made from a second-hand telegraph pole. 

We arrived in Port Vila at dusk, and made for the quarantine buoy, the nominated area for yachts awaiting clearance. In fast fading light, we failed to get the anchor to hold on the sand and coral bottom. Our second attempt, by torchlight, succeeded – whew! Watching new arrivals anchor and re-anchor is always great sport for other yachties swinging on their already well dug-in hooks. Smug of countenance, none of them at that instant would care to recall how often they’ve been the object of such prurient attention. The next morning though, all is forgotten. There’s a town over there coming alive, and a cruise ship gliding in through the harbour entrance. Port Vila already seems like a town I want to get to know.