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| Pandion heading out the Southport Seaway |
I knew I’d get seasick. I’d been living on land for four months and
had spent one measly night on the boat before we set sail, and that was in a
very still marina. The ocean when we
exited the Southport Seaway wasn’t so much confused as psychotic. Twenty knot winds and a three metre swell coming
from at least four different directions made for a very squirrely start.
Here’s us; me and Sylve sharing the same
vomit bucket, sometime on the second day deeply entrenched in the Animal State,
as our hardened sailor friends from Galactic call the first few days of a
passage. I never really got what the Animal
State was all about until I experienced it for myself. For three days Miles essentially
single-handed the boat accompanied by four lumps of fleshy ballast. (We started calling him Jessica Watson.) I’ve been badly seasick once or twice before,
and I’ve been queasy plenty of times, but I’ve never been so incapacitated by
nausea as I was on this passage. My
world shrank to the proximity of the white bucket, how long it was likely to be
before I needed to use it again and whether or not the short humanoid person
sharing the cockpit floor with me would be using it when I needed it. Occasionally Sylvie would whimper and want
comforting and if I was nearby I might stretch out a foot, which she would
feebly grasp and cling to for a moment. I
sympathised with poor old Sylve, but I had no capacity for mothering. Miles navigated, adjusted sails, kept watch,
parented, kept the boat tidy, rinsed out the vomit bucket, phoned my brother
and sister-in law (doctors) via sat phone when we started to get worried about
Sylvie’s hydration levels, slept in fifteen minute grabs, boosted boat morale
and basically got us through that first horrible part of the passage.
At one point I said to him, “As soon as I
can sit up without vomiting, I’m going to carve an effigy of you out of soap
and mount it on the prow.”
He was characteristically low key. “I’m in charge of crises and cocktails.” Just
doing his job.
Some time on day three I decided to treat
seasickness like morning sickness and tried to just eat constantly. “I need pad
thai!” I would call out. “I’ve figured
out the easiest way to make it, with the least number of ingredients, but I
really need you to drop everything else and make it now.” Or, “If I don’t have a rice cracker in the
next ten seconds, bad things are going to happen.”
“I liked it better when you were too sick
to talk,” Miles said.
Vomiting so enthusiastically for so long
had messed with my electrolytes and I was constantly craving salt. At one point I was sitting in the cockpit and
I traced my hand over the panelling of the aft companionway and my finger came
away white with encrusted salt. I put my
finger in my mouth. “Sylve,” I said to
my daughter, who was lying on the cockpit floor. “You have to try this.”
She ran her finger over a piece of the boat
and put it in her mouth. She nodded
slowly. “That’s really good.”
“Dad!” called Reminy in alarm. “Mum and
Sylvie are licking the boat!”
My salt craving lasted for days and reached
a heavenly pinnacle one night when I had just come on watch and Miles foolishly
asked me if there was anything he could get me before he went to sleep. “Corn thins with sliced tomato and lots of
salt and pepper. Don’t be stingy with
the salt.”
“Butter? Avocado?”
“Hell no.
Just the good shit.”
If I’d been able to locate the jumbo-sized
jar of vegemite hidden somewhere in The Shop, I would have polished off the
whole damn lot.
Vertigo
Before we left Australia I’d wondered how I
would feel about being so far from land, and it’s true that in the first few
days, especially when we were so ill, I did occasionally experience a swoop of
vertigo. The Pacific Ocean is seriously
deep, and the bit we saw was very empty.
We were travelling in the vicinity as two other boats and it was
extraordinarily comforting to see their tiny white triangles against the
horizon during the day and see their mast lights winking at night. On the odd occasion that they outpaced us, I
felt mild anguish. We passed within ten
miles or so of two freighters, but both of those were on Miles’ watches, so I didn’t
see them. And the scores of dolphins and
whales we’d shared coastal Australia with were also absent. We saw the odd bird and glimpsed a few flying
fish.
When I fly I have to try not to think about
the fact that I’m essentially rattling through the air in a thin metal tube,
and I had that same lurching feeling once or twice on passage, looking around
the salon at the contents of our little floating house and being aware that
just outside was an ocean perfectly designed to eat through boats. The water
was a blue unlike anything I’d seen before.
On our second last day of passage, when the wind had dropped to nothing
and the ocean heaved with a slow swell, we stopped the boat and Miles and the
kids jumped in, holding tightly to the swim ladder. “Look down,” Miles told the kids, and one by
one they put their heads in, and one by one they squealed. “It’s so blue!” they said. It was over three kilometres deep.
But I’d do another passage in a
heartbeat. I really would. There’s a feeling of intense satisfaction
that comes with moving yourself across a vast distance, leaving one country and
some days later arriving at another one.
At night the stars were incredible, and with every wave that licked the
side of the hull, a wash of phosphorescence twinkled beside the boat.
A highlight of our trip was when Noddy showed
up. At dusk one day a noddy tern made a
great effort to land somewhere on the highly polished stainless steel of our
davits, was undeterred by a nasty knock to the head by the wind generator, and eventually
skated to a stop on the anti-slip paint on the aft deck. But it was too windy out there, so Noddy kept
edging herself closer and closer to us in the cockpit, eventually hopping down
onto the seat, strolling up Budi’s arm and hopping onto his head. You have never seen a less afraid wild
animal. “So,” she said. “Where am I sleeping?”
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| Budi with Noddy the Noddy Tern |
And here's where we are now.
In the Land of Gluten.
