Pacific NW

Expeditions

Kelsey and I just found out through the modern marvel of the DeLorme InReach that a few of our friends just had babies! I thought I’d share an essay I wrote awhile back, after Taz was born but before we really started covering the ocean miles with him. –Peter Babies vs. Offshore Sailing

Offshore sailing and caring for the needs of a newborn baby are very close cousins. I’m a new father now, and the captain of our ship. My wife Kelsey is now the captain of our baby (and the Captain of the captain, I might add). Our blue-water sailing adventures have prepared us well for raising a baby. We both perform our respective duties knowing full well the critical role each of us plays toward our ultimate goal-a loving unit, safely sailing together, as a family. The changing of the diapers– to state an obvious similarity–is exactly like making sail changes: it can happen during any one of the 24 hours in the day (worse yet every hour of the day) and it’s usually after you’ve just tucked into your berth, exhausted, for the precious off-watch. You’re liable to get a little wet too. The boat’s now sailing on a more even keel with the new sail plan, which is her way of thanking you for your attention to her needs. Baby’s got a smile with a crisp new nappy, too. You can smile about it all, despite the one odd wave that just soaked your last fresh clean t-shirt while you were wrestling canvas up there on the foredeck. At sea it’s difficult to keep from soiling even yourself, to be honest (and I am talking about #2 here). The marine head is a specially engineered demon, designed to sling your waste right back at you, through any number of devilish ways that only a sailor -or parent with an unruly baby!– can truly understand. A sea captain can never fully relax. Even on a quiet night, every subtle creak of the ship and flutter of the sails keeps them awake and fretting. As your crew-mate snores their way through a deep refreshing slumber, you are left worrying about the tensioning of the rigging or the trim of your sails. A new mother can never fully relax either. She is attuned to her child’s every breath, and will snap to attention at the slightest irregularity. The baby is cold and needs another layer on, or he’s trying to poop. Mama casts a jealous eye at her partner who sleeps through all the crying, all the late-night breast-feeds. That bastard is getting the sleep that I need–how can they sleep through that?! The more carefree attitude of being 2nd in command is not lost on either of us, for we know we are in good hands. The periodic crushing responsibility of being captain of child, or a ship, is recognized by the other as well. Life hangs in the balance of good decision-making after all. The 2nd in command works heartily and seriously in times of stress, placing complete trust and confidence in the captain. We all rely on each other to keep one another safe and comfortable. Every mother’s child is the most perfect, beautiful child in the world. She sees all the love and magic within for what that baby truly is. A sailor will cast a similar eye toward their boat–the beauty of the anchorage. An age-old feeling among mariners is that a ship is so much more than an assembly of fiberglass and wood. The ship has a soul, a memory, she’s a living thing… “Privateer” is a very real member of our family, too. Babies of course have all of these qualities and so much more. Cooking in the galley at sea is often a messy business. Onions fly off counter-tops and silverware flings itself into the bilge because you took your finger off them for 1/8th of a second as you lurch crosswise in the swell. Even when we’re cooking on land (meaning: not weightless-one-second-and-5g-force-the-next-second) a baby can make a pretty good mess of his galley. The physics of an ocean wave and a baby’s exploratory gestures are two separate laws of nature that achieve the same end-they both chuck food across the boat, unpredictably.

Sailing safely on the high seas requires: Love, constant maintenance, 24-hr a day attention, large monetary investments, to have her bottom cleaned often, ability to handle stress, recognizing dangers before they develop, and not least the ability to laugh heartily when suddenly doused with [Circle all answers that apply] salt water, dinner, urine, feces, diesel fuel.

There’s a saying that sailing is 99% boredom punctuated by 1% terror. It doesn’t quite work for us, though, and the poor sap who coined the phrase had a dim imagination. We’re not the type that gets bored. Especially when there’s the endless magic of silently barreling along with the trade-winds week after week, stars above and swirling galaxies of phosphorescence below. I won’t deny the 1% terror part, though– it does happen. But at the end of each voyage, we gold-plate the terror (it always makes for a good story) and fixate instead on the joys of sailing! We happily drink up the bitter moments– it’s all part of the package-because sailing’s got a real smooth aftertaste=85 Substitute “caring for a baby” with “sailing” in the above two paragraphs. Ditto. Were we ready to be parents? Definitely not-even though we thought we were! But I’d say we had a pretty good inkling of what was to come, though. Offshore sailing unwittingly helped us adjust to this new tack, offering a unique portal into the joys and rigors of bringing a new Pirate into this world before it even happened. I like to entertain the idea that Mothering is something close to being in command of a ship. Kelsey certainly knows deep-down what it truly means to be a captain now. She gets to live both sides of the lucky coin. To all mothers: you are all sea captains. And to all prospective parents: go offshore!

A very pleasant day of sailing today. It was almost too perfect! We had to continually glance at the GPS to believe that we were really making 7 knots of speed over ground…it felt almost like we were standing still. With a gentle 14 knots of wind from behind we only had 7 knots of apparent wind in the cockpit. The sails stayed filled and we enjoyed about 12 hours of broad reaching and 12 hours of wing-on-wing.

Just one more day of sailing now until we clear the continental shelf and get back into deep water again. The Arafura and Timor Sea are so shallow–just a few hundred feet on average. The waters are therefore a disturbing muddy shade, and we long for our electric purple sea. Our watermaker filters will be happier too–we’ve been putting off making water here due to all the biological bits floating around in the water. It looks like our timing on Ashmore Reef might not work out so well, with an ETA at the reef entrance for just after sunset. We don’t necessarily want to heave-to for 12 hours, especially if these sailing conditions continue. The long-range GRIBs look really great and we may just continue on with this relaxing run, under the full moon.

We’ve really gotten into a good sea routine now. This year is all about making the sea miles. On this leg to Christmas Island we’ll pass the 1/3 the way around the world longitudinally from our easternmost point of Oakland, California. However since leaving Alaska we have already covered well over halfway around the world if we were to sail along the equator. And a short month or two from now, we’ll be closer to Alaska if we keep sailing west! It feels really good making the miles out here, with Privateer doing what she does best. Life is good on the long blue highway.

We are away from the land and all the troubles brewing about. We hear that it’s dim times in many corners of the world, and we fell fortunate to be removed from it all and visiting the lands with the friendliest people (Vanuatu, Fiji, Marquesas, etc) where happiness and wealth are measured by the size of the family and not the bank account, and the monetary economy and poverty are just abstract concepts. The ghost of Trump haunts us all and Privateer will be sailing en-route to Africa when America decides whether or not to take the plunge into darkness. Privateer is not only our magic carpet ride but also our escape pod! Perhaps not escaping from America, but bringing some of the “escapism” we’ve learned in the South Pacific back to our own families. The USA desperately needs an escape from the maddening, narrow rut that so much of the world seems stuck in. As one keen observer in Vanuatu asked me–“Why the rush? What happens after you rush?” Our generation is looking for its JFK and Martin Luther King but we are overexposed by the media. We can’t see the diamonds in the rough when each rock and murderer is amplified and sensationalized. We seem to be in such a rush that even bullets aren’t fast enough.

We’re loping along at 3.5 knots in very light winds now and enjoying this pace. Our “rush” today happened when we sailed through a massive school of leaping tuna. We frantically looked for the fishing line but alas it was buried in the locker that we cannot get into when the Monitor wind vane is engaged. Thoughts of fresh sushi tantalized us until we gave up in disgust. We had another visit from the surveillance in the sky again today. This time the plane buzzed us head-on with a radio call afterward. It’s quite odd to be out here in the watery wilderness and suddenly have a very brief and unexpected encounter with another human.

We had a good day of sailing in light breezes–sometimes wing-on-wing, sometimes on a beam reach. We’ve had the downwind pole set out to Port ever since leaving Vanuatu and it makes switching the sail plan very easy. We just keep the pole out when we tack the Yankee. It the winds go Easterly, we pull the Yankee out to the pole, and if the winds go southerly, we slip the Yankee back over to the Starboard side of the boat (port tack) leaving the lazy sheet running all the way out to the end of the pole. It looks a bit funny but its very convenient. Right now the winds have gone pretty light and we are ghosting along at about 3 knots. The moon is dazzling, almost like a second daylight, and we can do all of our deck work at night without having to use headlamps or turn on the LED spreader lights.

Over the past few days we’ve had a few very annoying breakages of our gear. One of our dinghy floorboard connectors snapped (thankfully our friend Tom brought 2 spares to NZ for us!) and then one of the Monitor thumb pegs sheared off. I dug around in the spares bag and found an extra one of these too. Both of these pieces of gear are made out of plastic, which is a very poor material to use on anything marine-related as the UV rays quickly make it brittle. But today’s breakage was a bit more serious. As we un-reefed the main and took halyard tension back up, the mainsheet winch made an unpleasant breaking-metal “ka-CHUNK” and ceased working. We quickly improvised by taking a turn around the broken winch and leading the halyard forward to the anchor windlass drum. While Kelsey worked the lever for the windlass I was able to tail the halyard, and we got the Main sail hoisted full again. We will have to do this 2-person process until we anchor on flat water next and I can have a good look at the inside of the winch. Fingers crossed. They say that bad luck comes in sets of three so hopefully that is it for a little while. It dawned on me today just how far we’ve sailed these past few years, and with the intense usage our gear receives, it’s amazing that everything has held up as well as it has (I’m knocking on wood right now).

Today we had our first encounter with the Australian Border Force aircraft. First, a VHF radio call came out of nowhere, and we were asked for our voyage plan details. Then about 5 minutes later, a rather large aircraft flying only 100 feet off the surface of the water buzzed the boat. It was all a bit surreal and a very strange way for me to get woken up from my afternoon nap. I’m sure they snapped some photos of the boat as they whooshed by. If the Border Force wanted to recoup some of the astronomical costs of their surveillance state (aside from the initial sky-high Quarantine entry fees), they could offer to sell the pics to the yachties! I’d buy one for sure. We looked good out there today sailing along wing-on-wing. I made sure to give the pilot the “full view” as I clambered out into the cockpit buck naked 🙂

We are headed out into the fabled Indian Ocean at last!! We are slicing along at 6.5 knots under full sail and flat seas. A friendly almost-full moon will keep us company on this passage. We are standing out into the Indian Ocean and sailing for Christmas Island, 1,500 NM away. In about 450 NM we’ll pass near Ashmore Reef, and may break passage there for a few days if the winds are light. We’ve heard there are sea snakes and dugongs at Ashmore, so hopefully it works out that we can check it out.

We had really wanted to sail the Kimberley coast, but decided against it due to Taz. Aside from feeling like crocodile bait every time we step down into the rubber dinghy, it’s just too difficult and exhausting to day-sail with a baby. Shore-side excursions are complicated when naps, diaper changes, etc come into play. Sometimes it takes us an entire day to spend just an hour or two on shore, once all the Taz prep work and logistics are taken care of. It’s much easier to make big offshore passages, and then spend a few relaxing weeks in one place once we get there, rather than going through the motions of navigating, anchoring, and launching the dinghy every day (all while Taz screams at us from down below because he’s missing out on the action). And so, as a sacrifice in the name of good parenting, we will sail by this incredible coast at our fingertips.

We left Darwin in our wake, and when the low land quickly slipped under the horizon all the that remained was the white condominium skyline of the city, rising out of the Timor Sea like a set of teeth. Also visible were the massive columns of smoke from the many bushfires. Charred grasses fell from the sky and onto Privateer when we sailed away from the coast.

Forecast is for light breezes for the next week, which is hopefully a welcome change from our past few heavy-air passages. If the wind goes too light it wreaks havoc on the sails and rigging as they slat around, and counter-intuitively a light wind passage can almost be more tiring than a heavy weather passage due to all the finicky tweaks and sail changes needed in light air. In heavy weather you can just hoist a scrap of sail and peg the monitor on course and just hold on. But fickle winds demand constant attention, if you want to go anywhere besides in circles.

For now, we’ve just put a reef in the main as the trades are freshening up after dark. During the day the heat of the land sucks in all the air, but at night the ocean pattern re-establishes itself. The trick about reefing is to always do it right away when you first start thinking about it. I don’t mind shaking it back out if I feel I’ve jumped the gun, but that is way better than the feeling you get when the winds build and you wish you’d done it an hour ago, with scary prospects ahead. We’re still making 7 knots now with our reef, and it always makes me feel better to have a reef in after dark. All we need to do is roll in the Yankee and we have our instant small sail plan.