Back in town

The shock of Noumea - the noises, the abruptness, the unpleasantness of town life.- is fading quickly. I’m a town girl, after all. Nothing noble about this savage. She’s just waiting to be rehabilitated. Give her a day or two more on the marina at Port Moselle and she’ll feel so self-conscious about her hairy legs and unpainted toenails and her grown-out haircut that she’ll have to do something about them. Or perhaps take her out of the town again, send her back to sea. Now there’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of it?

We left Vanuatu on the clearest, most limpid of mornings. The Port Vila harbour entrance is wide enough, but when you are sharing the space between port and starboard buoys with the Pacific Dawn, out of London, (below), it doesn’t seem that wide.

The galleon Atlantia, out of Scotland (pictured below), was a short distance ahead of us as we cleared the turbulence around Pango Point and turned towards New Caledonia. Will and Margaret Rudd have been living aboard Atlantia for six years (come to think of it, just about every cruising yacht we’ve met, except for Nada, has been “out” for multiples of three years). Wait for this – they have a hipbath on board! Perhaps I too would sail on and on if I could enjoy a bath before bed. Banish the thought. These sleek Swedish yachts we so love are built for speed. Will and Margaret say they think of Atlantia as their country cottage, and she is in fact almost spacious enough to install an Aga stove. They haven’t, but they did offer us their homebrew beer. Everything in a boat has a trade-off though, and Atlantia is not built for upwind sailing. They had their work cut out going south in southeast tradewinds, not that they didn’t try for as long as possible. We took photos of each other as we crossed paths. But eventually, Atlantia fell away to the west. Will and Margaret took the road less traveled to Noumea, we later discovered.

Oh my, the sailing was fine that first day out of Vila. The wind blew constantly and moderately, and Kukka sliced through the waves on top of the swell. I was surprised when I saw Atlantia’s pictures (she came into the marina at Port Moselle two days after us) at how low we seem sit in the water. Actually, we don’t sit low but we have much less freeboard than many other cruisers. It looks as though we must get awfully wet, but we don’t normally.

If the day was beautiful, the night was even more so. We had thought the wind might die as it had every night we were moored in Vila, but right through the night we kept up a cracking pace, with small reefs in both genoa and mainsail. But the moon was the thing. I’ve never sailed under a full moon before. It’s something to treasure, and to hope for again and again. A full moon takes the scariness out of night sailing. There’s no colour in the picture, but otherwise it’s like sailing during the day. You can see the horizon, you can see the land if you are near land, you can see the sails. When there’s no moon, even the sails disappear into the dark and you can see them only by pointing a torch upwards. When the occasional cloud floated over the moon, the difference was as sharp as if a light had been turned off in the room. The cockpit lost its moonshadows and the sails lost their moonglow. But there weren’t many clouds that night, and the full moon, which had risen as the sun went down, stayed with us through the night, not setting until dawn. I watched it sink below the western horizon, as big and orange as the sun itself. When I came back up into the cockpit after a short sleep, the sun was high in the east but Alex, like the moon, had Gone West. That country music has really got him by the short and curlies.

Twenty-three hours after hoisting our sails at Pango Point, we’d covered 135 miles, a new Kukka overnight record. The wind shifted a little further into the east on the second day, which gave us the lift we needed to pass to the east of Lifou, in the middle of the Loyalty Islands. If we’d known what we know now, we may well have stopped at Lifou and checked in. Once we reached the marina in Noumea we discovered that it was indeed possible to do this. The rider is that one of you has to fly from Lifou to Noumea so that immigration can stamp your passports. But the upside is huge. Having cleared in at Lifou, you can go where you want – say, north to Ouvea or south to the Isle of Pines - and take your time in getting into Noumea. But the French don’t advertise these deviations in process. We had tried in Vanuatu to find out about clearance at Lifou but nobody seemed to know for sure what the drum was. Only experience, I guess, gives you the confidence to push the bureaucratic boundaries.

On my midnight watch on our second night, the wind dropped to 8 knots and shifted into the north-east. We were rolling around with boom clanging and genoa flapping like a wounded wing. So we did what you do in such circumstances, if you are us. We turned on the engine. Havannah Passage was still 20 miles away. This south-east entrance to the lagoon has a notoriously fierce tidal current, and we needed to be through it before the tide turned. Fighting an ebbing tide isn’t funny in such places.

When daylight broke, it was grey. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a grey sea. Truly, the sea has some lovely colours, but grey is rarely one of them. The air was cool. Alex put on long pants, a shirt over his teeshirt and shoes and socks. I picked a baby flying fish off the deck. Have I said how much I love to see a flying fish – alive, of course? They are miraculous creatures. If they’re being chased, you’ll see a group of them shooting ahead like silver bullets, but sometimes you see a solo flier skimming the waves in lazy arc and covering maybe 100 metres or more before it drops into the sea.

After we’d motored through the Canal Woodin, we dropped anchor under a ridge of wind generators. Playing by the rules, we left our dinghy on board, and settled into a game of Scrabble. The weather was grim, and frankly, the austere landscape into which we’d wandered left us cold too. The south is good for nickel mining, but aside from a few coconut palms and colonial pines (they look like yews from a distance, tall and skinny with fuzzy little branches), there’s little vegetation to catch the eye. What you see first is erosion and red mud. Even when the cloud and rain lifted the next morning, we couldn’t warm to it.

And so on through the lagoon to Noumea, and the Port Moselle marina where we have found boats we’ve met throughout the cruising season, in various stages of departure. The water smells bad almost all the time but you put up with it because the visitors pontoon is sociable, and it’s convenient. We have good internet here, finally. That’s doubly important, because this is the beginning of the end and Alex is “looking at weather”. We won’t be going out into the lagoon again to explore coral atolls and reefs, as I’d hoped, because by Friday we’ll know whether the next high coming over Australia might be one we can ride down to Coffs Harbour. If it is, we’ll get going. Everyone has their own way of deciding when to leave. Some do it impulsively, others set themselves a deadline, and still others try to penetrate the obscure science of weather forecasting. Alex has always been drawn to the science, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. Alex is not faint-hearted.

We’ll see a bit more of Noumea before we leave. Perhaps we’ll find something to cheer our souls. They’ve built a nice aquarium here. Tropical fish, and even the nasty guys with poisonous bites and spines, are never disappointing.

The trouble is that the French have spent 150 years at worst crushing the Melanesian spirit and at best tolerating Melanesian presence in this country, and that infects the air. Eau Moselle may be putrid but the smell of colonization hangs over the whole city. Melanesians here don’t walk and talk like they do in Vanuatu where they own the joint. In the fashionable beachside suburb of Baie des Citrons, you could be in Mooloolaba – white bodies in bikinis lie side by side on the sand, white bodies in fashionable clothing sit side by side at expensive waterfront restaurants. It feels odd. Not right. Wrong, actually.

There’s a small bistro called Chez Toto which we want to go back to, maybe tonight. The French may not do colonization well, but they never let you down in the kitchen.