Transitions

The little boat, its small spaces, beds, communal areas and decks becomes so very familiar.  Throughout Vanuatu we had a fairly predictable routine.  Arrive, anchor, meet the chief, swap t-shirts for fruit, explore, swim and sleep on the boat.  Sleep on the boat.  

Pandion ready for nightfall - Chesterfield Reefs

Anthropologist Yasmine Musharbash wrote an article about sleeping in yunta, the Warlpiri desert peoples' practice of sleeping in a line outside, side by side, with a windbreak at their heads.  Some interesting highlights were that the most spiritually competent women sleep on the outside, ever alert to repel spiritual threats, or the more mundane approaches of dogs.  However her point which is valid here, is that a certain bond exists about where you sleep, whether it be outside or in the "domestic fortification" of our homes; a bond of trust, a bond of connection.   Sleeping on Pandion is somewhere between yunta and a house.  It is probably more safe than sleeping in the open, less safe than a house, but still relies on the ever present attention of your co-sleepers to wake up when danger is imminent.  

So when we land back in our ‘homes’ in Brisbane, Stanthorpe and Iluka, there is the strangest feeling of not sleeping on the boat.  Everyone feels a bit discombobulated.  I wish we could ease the transition, perhaps a few nanna naps on the couch before returning to Pandion at night then gradually work up to a full overnighter.  Like some youngster practising for their first sleep over.  However it rarely happens like that and always feels abrupt. These strange transitions are what have occupied us for the past few weeks. 

There are also the “sea legs" - that first 24 hours on land where everything has a wobble from side to side.  But on the up side, land has many attractions.  Friendly faces and family.  Fresh water – as in the kind that cascades over your body and the kind that washes your clothes – holds an almost magical mystery for our first two weeks back on land.  Land life is so …. easy.   But land life is also so ... busy. So many more options, obligations, and the every present need to “engage” with the world.  For example a week was spent re-registering our car.  I am often lost in a sea of internet passwords attempting to reactivate those aspects of our digital life that seem to be necessary.    

It was all getting quite stressful.  On top of everything else, we are touring high schools and primary schools in the region, and I dashed out to the desert to work for a while.

shipwrecked

On passage in the desert

Nyirripi Road - plenty beach

We have discovered that although our life has always been full of uncertainty, unconventional work and last minute decisions, we are really craving some certainty right now.  Two days ago we moved back onto the boat.  A 30 knot southerly front was predicted for that night, so we sailed over to the Yamba side of the river out of the wind. SV Stowaway was there and some friendly chatter preceded an average anchoring attempt from team Pandion that left us only a boat length from shore.  Good enough, we knew the southerly buster would swing us offshore later anyway.  

Almost immediately we noticed how much of the tension had gone, like we had left it all in Iluka as we sailed 5 minutes across the river.  We are living on the boat again now.  It feels cosy, we have 360 degree ocean views and as much nature connection as you could want.  

Here are some pics from Chesterfield Reef, our last offshore stop and the birdiest place on earth (well, the bits we have been to.)  Next stop Lord Howe Island, weather permitting.

At anchor - Chesterfield Reef, West side.

Point your camera anywhere in the sky at Chesterfield Reef and this is the likely result

or this

Milpirri Cloud , Tanami Desert.

* Night, sight, and feeling safe: An exploration of aspects of Warlpiri and Western sleep

Yasmine Musharbash. The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2013) 24, 48–63

Last chopper out of Nam

Our northernmost anchorage, at Port Olry, 15 degrees south

First Gonyonda left, racing back to Australia to take up a job offer.  Then Dogstar left, heading south to wend their way back through the islands of Vanuatu and then onto Noumea, where they would stay and wait for a weather window to NZ.  Then Bella Luna left for Oz, along with two thirds of the Aussie fleet in a perfect weather window a week later.  Fifty-four boats all left from Noumea on the same day, someone told us. Paws and Libby left, heading north to the Banks Islands and onto the Sols.  Most peoples’ boat insurers demand that they are out of the cyclone belt by 1 November, which is anything less than 8 degrees south, and anything more than 26 degrees south (essentially the equivalent of the whole QLD coast).  The anchorage at Luganville, once chockers with boats, felt eerily empty.  Of the handful of boats left, another seemed to disappear each night.  Curried Oats and Aquabar left together, and we toyed with the idea of joining them, our old passage pals, but Miles had a conference call he wanted to make a few days later, so we watched them pull up their anchors and sail away.

The weather in Santo had grown hotter and more humid, and most afternoons clouds piled up in the sky and thunder rumbled sometime in the night.  It was impossible to get anything dry because it could rain – a deluge or a light shower – at any time.  When it rained we had to run around the boat shutting hatches and the fans ran around the clock.  With so much cloud cover the solar panels weren’t charging the batteries and we had to run the engine for a couple of hours a day. We were literally the last boat heading west still in north Vanuatu.

It was time to leave.

One of the hardest truths we’ve had to face about the cruising life is that you can’t go everywhere and you can’t do everything.  My own list of Must-dos in Vanuatu only had four things on it: climb the volcano on Tanna, go to the blue pools on Santo, dive the SS Coolidge and go to Waterfall Bay on Vanua Lava, up in the Banks Islands.  Three out of four ain’t bad, but if you’ve been to the Banks Islands, please don’t tell me about it, because it still hurts that we didn’t make it up there.

We did our last provision at LCM in Luganville, jerry canned water from the beachside resort tap out to the boat, baked up a storm, went to the markets one last time, bought one last armful of plantain chips, drank our last Tusker….

Passage food

On Tuesday the 23^rd of October at 3.30pm we lifted the pick and motored out of Luganville Harbour and through the straights of Segund.  We knew we’d have to motor for a few hours before we got out to the wind.  Just as we left Santo and headed into open ocean, with the setting sun right in our eyes, we saw a NiVan banana boat, bobbing around in front of us.  A couple of men were out fishing and as we passed by them they gave us our last Vanuatu wave, standing up, grinning and waving with both arms.

We’d be at sea for the next ten days.

6 weeks out and counting...

Our reward for staying out so long

At six weeks, this is the longest we’ve ever been ‘out.’  We refuelled in Vila on the 13^th of September, and sailed out of there, full of food and water a couple of days later.  In Australia a scarcity of food outside supermarkets meant that we had to duck back into port to re-provision fairly often and the longest we’ve made it before is about three weeks between marinas.

Everyone has gardens in Vanuatu and we can trade or buy food wherever we go, and we’ve been able to collect and filter water in several places, so we’re not dying of thirst.  We left Vila with 400 litres of diesel and we’ve had pretty good sailing conditions, so we could keep going for much longer.  However…

We’re all out of UHT milk, thus also yoghurt; we’re out of honey, peanut butter, vegemite, chips, crackers, alcohol, cheese, meat, eggs, tahini and we’re dangerously low on chocolate (1 block).  The Cannery and the Shop are almost bare, and the fridge is spookily clean.  Yesterday we turned off the freezer.

Looking on the bright side, we still have toilet paper, plenty of rice, lots of GF pasta, three sticks of butter, a few heads of garlic and various dried pulses.  Depending on where we land and what’s in season, we can augment our diet with paw paw, eating bananas, cooking bananas, choko sprouts, island cabbage, bok choy, spring onions, star fruits, mangoes, rose apples, coconuts at various stages of ripeness, chokos, tiny capsicums, yams, sweet potatoes, manioc and just lately, mangoes.  Also ‘snake beans’, if I could figure out a way to cook them that didn’t make everyone retch and threaten to mutiny.

Miles pumping his tenth jerry can

The biggest loss to our diet has been eggs, which are almost impossible to come by on the islands.  There are soooo many chickens but they all free range and people have told us that they eat the eggs only when they find them.  On Ambrym we heard a rumour about a kind of jungle chook called malau that digs holes in leaf litter, lays its eggs in it and covers them back up, sometimes two foot deep.  These chickens, from all reports, look exactly like normal chickens but their eggs are twice as big!  Malachy is as keen as I am to sight the stretchy-cloaca-emu-egg-tarzan-hen and we keep our eyes and ears peeled whenever we wander through the jungle.  It’s possible the locals are having us on.

Island tucker - notice the cacao pods top right

Pretty sure this is not an egg-laying malau, but it doesn't hurt to be vigilant

Another consequence of being away from ‘civilisation’ for so long is that we’ve had to get over a few mood humps.  We’ve found ourselves saying things like, ‘god I would kill for a timtam,’ or ‘get me off this godamned boat and fly me to the nearest 5 star resort or I’ll scratch your eyeballs out.’

The island of Ambrym was the site of my most severe mood hump.  Ambrym is renowned for its sorcerers and black magic and I can only assume that I was hexed on arrival.  How else to explain the dread sense of foreboding, the debilitating heat, the swarms of flies, the rolly anchorages, the snappish paranoid shrew I turned into?  Ambrym is weird and spooky.  Hot water bubbles out of the ground, two volcanoes shroud the peaks in smoke and steam, the sand is black, the sky is grey and even though there are millions and millions and millions of chickens, there are no fecking eggs!  Our efforts to climb the volcano came to naught as the sky closed in and promised zero views for the ten hour return slog, we got kicked out of the Rom dance (for, er, trying to sneak in with some rich tourists)^* and as we went to pull up the anchor and get the flock out of there, we discovered we had no steering.  One of us spent three hours cooking himself in the engine room fixing a leak to the hydraulic line and the other of us spent three hours saying, can we go yet can we go yet can we go yet, like a seven year old.^**

Cooled lava

Rock cliffs that we obtained permission to jump off

This river is so hot it would boil your feet if you stood in it for too long - which didn't stop Budi from running through it

The twin volcanoes of Ambrym

(* Although we would never have pulled such a stunt under normal circumstances, one of the tourist ship’s crew invited us to join the grey melee, his boss agreed and we were only stymied by the local bouncer who demanded cruise ship prices for admission, i.e. $300 for the family.  Are you kidding me? Don’t these people realise there are gradations of wealth in the whitefella hierarchy and that retirees paying $1500 per person per day for their three week cruise are at the top of the heap and that scumbag cruising families who trade the shirts off their backs for a bag of mangoes are at the bottom???

** Not the actual seven year old on board, as it happens.)