On the French marina

Ah, the thrill of the chase. In Port Napoleon, a vast and barren parking lot at the mouth of the Rhone, we are eyeing off a Hallberg Rassy cruising yacht named Enki. A relatively youthful beauty with a much-coveted hard-top, she's parked at the end of B pontoon, her clean stern turned towards the Mediterranean and her bow pointing up the river valley, into the howling Mistral wind. Alex is smitten, of course. He can't keep his hands off her. We're here for two days, and then we must leave to look at the rest of the field. I wonder what the point of that will be when I see him prowling around Enki with a look of possession in his eyes. But we are keeping an open mind, aren't we?

Last night for the first time in many months I fell asleep to the sound of a strong restless wind in the rigging and the tinny clang of steel against aluminium. We have taken a room at the marina, courtesy of the Capitainerie, looking out onto a small section of the hundreds upon hundreds of yachts parked high and dry here. If I could I would show you the view from our window, but we are minus essential cables for our camera. They're in a bag which didn't show up on the carousel at Barcelona. Alex's preference for wearing the same set of clothes for several days on the trot has finally been vindicated (I feel guilty relief that it was his bag not mine which went missing in transit).

The mood at Port Napoleon is the mood of marinas everywhere. It's hard to put your finger on it, but people in marinas move slowly, even when they're focused on getting a particular job done. They move deliberately, and thoughtfully. You don't get that crazy, stressed feeling in a marina that you get in towns.  I never thought I would say it, but I've missed marinas. Just for old times' sake, I popped my head into the laundromat. Just checking the denomination you need for the dryer, I told Alex.

She's gone

Kukka has new owners. Our marina berth is empty.  Much more could be said about the sale process, which has messed with our minds and sliced up our hearts over the past few months, but I'll leave it at that. It's a brutal market, as Alex has more than once said to me, and having waded into it of our own volition, we've had to accept its terms. The important thing has been to keep a sense of perspective. Selling an expensive yacht in order to buy a bigger and more expensive yacht is an agony most of the world would gladly suffer. Not worth writing about.

So I haven't, much.

Kukka was of course surveyed before she was sold, and here she is on the slips in Balmain where she was poked and prodded by a fourth-generation Sydney shipwright who then anti-fouled her in anticipation of the next chapter in her life.

He pronounced her close to faultless, which wasn't telling us anything we didn't know.

Now that she's gone, we are free to fall in love with another boat and that makes for an entirely different story, one I'll be much happier to tell.  We're leaving in less than a fortnight to look at the boats on our short list. First stop, Barcelona. We're chasing dreams with names like White Wings and Ghost Train, Lily and Enki. Each has a seductive online profile and carries a price tag we think we can work with, but it's only by seeing and smelling and touching and doing all those other tangible and intangible things that you do when you encounter a new boat that we'll know. At least I'm hoping we'll know. It has to be love, doesn't it?

Southernmost parts

It's hard to to keep a sea-faring blog on course when those who are meant to be wiping salt spray from their faces and scanning the horizon are in fact darting in and out of arty cinemas, galleries and second-hand bookshops, more tuned to the surge of city traffic flow than the rise and fall of tides. The Frenchman Moitessier's memoir, Tamata et L'Alliance, is on hold, my bookmark stuck at about half way. Lately I'm inclined towards Virginia Woolf's writing, and in particular her diaries. My engagement with the Bloomsbury high brows of 80 or so years ago matches Alex's trading desk activities for intensity. Since I can't in all conscience drag those of you who still occasionally check into this blog expecting tangy tales of adventure into my dilettante's net, I've been silent.




However, we are not irretrievably lost to the lure of the wild . The picture above was taken at Martin's Bay, where the Hollyford river flows out in the Tasman sea, just above Milford Sound in the South Island of New Zealand. Close friends from Auckland had invited us to walk the Hollyford track with them, which we did at the beginning of the month - the pensioners' version of hiking, as Alex calls it, with a warm, welcoming lodge at the end of each segment, and minimal weight on your shoulders. Wonderful stuff. At the end of the first, long day's walk most of us were sodden through our Gortex  (the rain we encountered was a trifle, a mere shower, according to our guides who said that real Fiordland rain "bounces up off the ground" and prevents you from seeing). But the pay-off for penetrating this remote valley far outweighs the inconvenience of wet boots. The pix below do some, but not complete, justice to the beauty of the Hollyford..

Lake Alabaster (above and below)

Martin's Bay dunes

After the 3 day walk, our friends flew back to Auckland (something about work?) and we continued south by road. I had this irrational desire to touch the very bottom of the South Island, which I've never done before. Specifically, I wanted to go to Bluff, which meant staying in Invercargill, the butt of many unkind jokes and possibly the glummest and churchiest town I've ever visited. Sorry, Mr Mayor (Tim Shadbolt, ex-Auckland hippie turned local Southland hero). The baby tuataras in the Southland museum were as alert and lively as any youngsters in their glass cage, but I'd hate to find myself stuck in this neck of the woods for hundreds of millions of years as their lot has been

We walked to the wild edge of the southern ocean on a day when we estimated the wind Out There was blowing about 70 to 80 knots. It was crazy. Here I am hanging onto my hat and fooling around at Slope Point, technically the furthest south you can go on the NZ mainland at 46.40 degrees South.

I couldn't imagine how sailing ships in the old days navigated this coastline - many of them didn't, as it turns out. We learned that 100 ships were wrecked on the route between Melbourne and Dunedin before 1845 (NZ as a British settlement really didn't get going till about 1810 or so).

At the tip of the Otago Peninsula, near Dunedin, there's a colony of royal albatrosses. These are the birds of sailors' bad dreams, the ones which glide for hundreds of miles on air currents with their giant wings locked into their shoulders. Mostly albatrosses don't come this close to humanity to breed. They prefer desolate rocks in the sub-Antarctic. But about 30 km by road from Dunedin, we trained binoculars and cameras on this season's albatross chicks which squatted on an exposed grassy hillside waiting for their roaming parents to return to feed them.



The big birds came in from the sea following a fishing boat. Watching them trying to touch down in gale force winds beside their offspring (a pair of birds mates for life and has one chick every two years) was mesmerizing.  They lowered their legs like wheels on a jumbo, and if they were blown off course they aborted landing. The chicks could only watch. They're too heavy and ungainly to go anywhere at this age  (3 to 4 months), so much so that apparently they have difficulty supporting their own weight on their wobbly legs. They sit tight on their hillside in all weathers until one day, on nature's cue, they go on a diet which enables them to totter over to the edge of the cliff where they stand with their wings outstretched, and when a current lifts them up, off they go....for miles and miles, year after year, until they are prompted by who knows what to return again to this same place to choose a mate. It's quite a story.

I could come back to the South Island year after year too. In autumn especially, its lush green pastures and river valleys, its grand alpine passes, lakes and glaciers are more lovely than ever. We saw cruising yachts anchored near the commercial fishing and oyster boats in Bluff harbour. What about coming back by sea, I wondered. On a blue day, with Stewart Island faintly visible ((through and under cloud) and a gentle wind barely raising a swell, we walked from the famous Bluff signpost around to Lookout Point,  below which whaling boats used to huddle, keeping a watch for their great prey. I suggested to Alex that maybe one day we might sail through Foveaux Strait.  He looked sceptically at the calm sea. The next day, a big low moved up from Antarctica bringing freezing squalls and ridiculously strong winds.  The sea off the Catlins coast was churned up and surly. Big fat sets of rollers crashed against Slope Point's raggedy cliffs and threw drifts of fine salt spray up across the sheeplands. At Waipapa, where 151 people drowned in a shipwreck in 1881, the top layer of the beach was whipped along at waist height, and for days afterwards grains of sand leaked out of my jacket's seams. Only a day after I'd imagined I could feel the pull of Antarctica, I found myself asking why anyone would choose to sail the southern ocean in a small boat. That stuff was for the birds.

Salty flavours

Since Alex and I took up this cruising lark in 2009, I’ve regularly eaten humble pie. Not such a great taste, but I choke it down.

I’ve mentioned before how apprehensive I was about giving up my usual stimulants i.e regular doses of new books and the New Yorker, movies, Radio National programs and so on. “What do you do on a boat?” I asked Alex (he enjoys reminding me of that). I feel as confounded now as he must have back then when shore friends say to me “Doesn’t it get monotonous? Don’t you get bored sometimes?” Well, no. The ocean is magnificently various and interesting. Boredom doesn’t come into it. Plus, there's lots to do on a boat.
Choke, splutter on that bloody humble crust.

I’ve also had to revise my narrow-minded preconceptions about the kinds of people whom I might meet at sea and how much I’d have in common with them. It’s embarrassing to admit to now, but I didn’t expect to meet the sharpest minds lolling about in paradise. Weren’t all the smart people hard at work – making films, decoding gene sequences, saving forests, toppling governments, inventing new apps, defending the innocent, that kind of thing? I had my patter –cruising seemed to me like a watery take on caravanning, the kind of thing you did when you’d run of puff, lost your appetite for invention, problem-solving, fortune-hunting and so on?  

Well, no again, as it turns out. All wrong.

We’ve made some fast friends since we’ve been cruising - People Like Us (that phrase courtesy of Mike and Alisa). Before you leap to the obvious conclusion that PLU must be dull as ditchwater, I’m going to suggest that, even in these high tech times, setting out in your own boat to cross oceans and to hang out in remote, foreign parts for months at a time presupposes some strength of character.

My guess is that three out of five skippers we’ve met (yes, only men so far) have engineering backgrounds. That’s useful. I could do with some more engineering in my background! But also floating around out there are people who’ve had big jobs in all sorts of other fields – medicine, computing, television, academia, business, teaching etc. You meet them in an anchorage, or on a marina, and start by talking boats and weather, but then conversation wanders onto what you’re reading, or places you’ve been, or want to go, music you’re into or common experiences with kids. Something clicks, you find you like their energy. Chomp chomp chomp. More humble pie goes down the hatch.

I half suspected that our “cruising community” would dissolve once we came back from Vanuatu, especially since we’d signaled we were taking a year out to sell Kukka and buy another yacht. Instead, it’s been a bit the case of “guess who’s coming to dinner?” at Darling St this summer (autumn arrived a few days ago, so ‘tis the season to reflect on the vanishing summer). We’ve gone barely a week without seeing or hearing from some cruising friend.

In November, it was the Swedes, Bertil and Agnes (Panacea) who were wandering in and out of our house, keeping the air salty. Then we were in Hobart before Christmas, visiting John and Ange (Nada) and Mike and Alisa and their boys. On a whim, we thought to ask John and Ange if they fancied spending some of January in Sydney. They house-sat in Rozelle while we were on holiday in New Zealand.

We still pinch ourselves at how much we enjoy chewing the fat with Dave and Melinda (Sassoon) who we met in Mooloolaba in 2009. When Sam walked in on one of our long lunches, he found Melinda trying on my spiffy Spinlock harness for comfort (his look was one of “whatever is happening to Mum?’).We never run out of conversation with these guys, and we still hope to cruise with them one day though they'll be up in Asia again this coming cruising season.

A couple of weeks ago, big Mike Brown (Wombat of Sydney) swung by on his scooter, minus Sweetcakes who had returned to South Carolina to see her ailing dad. We headed out together to watch Inside Job, which a day or so later picked up the best doco in the Academy awards. In a previous life, Mike ran the Bank of America’s corporate lending desk in Sydney, so afterwards, over dinner at a Darlinghurst bistro, we got his  view of those Wall St emperors with no clothes. Dull, huh?

After Mike came the Cornish connection, Jason and Fiona (Trenelly) and their two sea pups, Dylan and Molly. Fiona’s brother lives in Bondi, and they’ve been hanging off a mooring at Rose Bay for the summer (In the picture below, taken at Lamen Bay, in Vanuatu, Fiona drops the anchor “helped” by Dylan while Molly gives advice from the car seat.) .They remind us in many ways of Mike and Alisa who crossed the Pacific with Elias and are now about to repeat that performance with Elias and Eric on their new boat Galactic, just launched in California. I’d love to introduce them, but Trenelly is going north, bound for Darwin, and from there, to Indonesia and beyond i.e. in the opposite direction from Galactic. That’s the only snag with cruising friendships. Everyone charts their own course, no matter what, and inevitably there are many more goodbyes than hellos.

Back business

Our friend Peter rang this morning, looking for a coffee and a chat, both of which we can usually manage. Sydney swelters, but we press on with life’s essentials. However today was different, a bit special. Alex left early to see a neurosurgeon about his back. Peter registered the size of the shock correctly. “Is nothing in this world stable? Next you’ll be telling me he’s giving up the fags!” Then he congratulated me. Wrong. Alex doesn’t do anything until he’s ready, and that includes dealing with the lower back pain which frames everything he does, every day.

In the decade we’ve been together he’s managed (as they say) his unreliable spine with a mixture of stoicism and contempt and, when the pain is acute, with hard core painkillers and withdrawal into an inaccessible emotional space just big enough for him. That last bit drives me nuts. So his appointment with a neurosurgeon was a big deal, for both of us.  

For years now he has swatted off my helpful suggestions about how he could “fix” his back. Exercise, I’ve demanded. It works for other people – why not you? I’ve raged, I’ve pleaded. Do something. But Alex is a fatalist by inclination, and Eastern European by birth (the two are somewhat related). He doesn’t want pity. Nor does he want to be told what to do. In his situation, I couldn’t not do something, couldn’t not act to alter the odds. I don’t want to believe that things can’t get better. When he and Peter started walking and swimming together a year or so ago, and he began to feel fitter, it had nothing to do with me, which was the beauty of their arrangement. But of course I secretly took some credit for his physical improvement. That made it all the harder when, just before we were due to leave for the Pacific last May, his back went out. Something silly, something small. That’s all it takes. He took to his bed, did what he needed to do. I was the one who was devastated.

Alex had a back operation 20 years ago when the technology was much more primitive and the risk of coming out of the theatre unable to walk was very real, and very scary. Seeing a neurosurgeon today was a big move. It was about being ready to contemplate something radical, again. He’s 63, with oceans to cross and the time to do it. That’s why he went to see the doctor this morning. Where it goes from here is his business. My business is to keep him company, and when that’s not required, deal with it.

Time out

Believe it or not, there are still places in the developed world where you might as well not bother bringing your laptop or whatever gizmo you connect with. That's where we've been, one of those places. I’m not complaining. The day when we get good enough internet reception at our beach house in New Zealand will be a day to regret.

The house sits on the edge of a grey sandy beach, looking out towards Kawau Island. People don’t come to this benign sweep of coastline for the beach action per se. Occasionally (and this summer, when the weather systems seem to have lost all self-control, saw two such occasions) we get stung by the tail of a tropical cyclone which stirs up the sea and shifts about loose chunks of sandstone and mud. But mostly, when the barometer is steady, you can’t find a better place for boating or letting young children loose to play in the water or around the rocks.

My parents starting coming here with me, my sister and two brothers in 1965. Since then the trees they planted have grown huge and there’s a “new” bunkhouse, built 20 years ago when more babies demanded more beds. But not much else has changed. Photos from one decade are interchangeable with those taken in any other, if you discount the growing/aging cycle of the human players. See there the tanned bodies sprawled across the veranda, books in hand; the sailing dinghies and kayaks ready to roll down the ramp into the high tide; the fringing pohutakawas and agapanthus, and hydrangeas in bluest of bloom; the kids squashed together on divans, playing cards, or batting a shuttlecock and wearing out the grass in the same old places; the boys (usually) feeding wood into the barbecue and downing cold beers; the girls (usually) slicing and chopping, stripping husks off sweetcorn…memories which bind three generations now.

 

We’ve never had a television at the beach and there’s still no dishwasher because we’re on tank water (which is why until very recently there wasn’t a decent shower in the place). The dish-washing roster and narrowness of the kitchen manufacture family closeness - the kitchen is so ridiculously small that to be in it with one other person is an intimate act. My mother won't tolerate any loose talk of alterations (“over my dead body”, she says, and my architect brother-in-law bites his tongue, biding his time). Hence, by default, the house has become fashionably retro. A couple of years ago some slick creative boys came through, salivating, and said it was exactly the location they were looking for to shoot a television ad. They went ahead with the ad (for a car – eh?) and apparently it’s a big hit, but living in Australia as we do, I’ve never seen it.  

A friend whose family holidayed with us over several summers when our parents were young and shiny popped by at the end of January. He hadn’t been inside our beach house since his father died when he was a boy. After that happened, everything to do with his parents and mine seemed frozen in time, like Camelot. I walked Mike through the rooms (it didn’t take a minute) and watched his mouth drop. “It’s so small,” he said, quietly. Could it be that all we both remembered about those golden years had really happened in such a tiny place? I’ve often wondered about that myself. Yet the evidence suggests that legend-making is still strong at the beach house – in inverse proportion, perhaps, to the availability of mod cons.

It's a hard rain

The heavy rains are moving south. Now Brisbane is expecting a deluge, getting out the sandbags. Here in Sydney we’ve had a wet summer, as was predicted, but nothing remotely like Queensland’s catastrophe. Queensland always feels like another country, but through Kukka we learned something of the lie of the land around Bundaberg. When Bundaberg was the first Queensland city to be flooded just before New Year we thought immediately of our sailing friends George and Kathleen who had left their beautiful wooden boat Kalalau moored at the mid-town marina. Photos on the internet showed that when the Burnett river rose to its highest level in 50 years nothing was left of the marina,  so when George and Kathleen arrived back in Australia on 2 January they had good reason to fear that they had lost their boat.

Over the past week they’ve kept us in touch with their story. It has a happy ending. Kalalau is not among the 25 or 30 boats which have disappeared without a trace from Bundaberg, some taken out to sea, others no doubt on the bottom of the river. Nor was she half sunk, sitting on a rock, or marooned in a sugar cane-field. She washed up among the mangroves on an island in the river and in the last couple of days has been salvaged by an expert local crew. Here she is being dragged through the mud and back into her element. She not only floated, but her marvelous teak hull was tight. Hallelujah, wrote George.  No water in the bilges! She looks like a battle-scarred veteran, they say, but nothing, fingers crossed, which can’t be repaired further down the track. I hope we meet Kalalau one day again on the water. That will be a precious moment. 

This morning’s news has Toowoomba, just west of Brisbane, knocked out by a violent flash flood.  People have drowned, swept from their cars and their houses. I watched a You Tube video of a solid young man in a singlet and shorts hanging on for dear life to a wire netting fence. A couple of rescue workers got to him, pinned him against the fence and stopped him from being pulled under the ugly, angry, dirty water. He looked stunned when they finally escorted him to safe ground. He was in town somewhere, somewhere normally hard and dry (until very recently Toowoomba was in drought). Was he driving his car when he saw the water coming for him? Was it a rainstorm that fell out of the sky, or did the river – what’s the name of the river near Toowoomba? – take him from behind like a surprise cavalcade? There’s another image of a white van upended and being pulled along like a bath toy on a body of water moving so fast it is throwing up a wake as it rushes around power poles and other obstacles. Such weird things are happening in Australia this summer, things you just don’t expect.