Cruising the South Pacific with Tackless II

2009-03-10T11:38:00.000+10:00

10 March 2009 -- What the 2Cs Have Been Doing with Themselves in Oz

2009-03-10T11:10:00.000+10:00

Nearly a month has gone by without an update here from the Two Captains. You probably figure that life in Mooloolaba as we’ve depicted it was so good that we’ve just settled down into an uneventful retirement routine. To some extent that is/was true. Our long 10K walks along the beach were the highlight of the day, the rest spent primping the boat so that she would be beautiful should someone come by to look at her. We made some local friends who entertained us at their homes or on their boats, we faithfully caught the Wednesday night cruiser dinner and the Sunday morning market in Maroochydore, and we were connected to the world via broadband Internet on the dock. Given the economy, it made for a quietly attractive lifestyle. It could have gone on indefinitely.

However, a couple of things happened that interrupted the flow. First, our visas came due, and although we applied for extensions on schedule, weeks went by without hearing from immigration. We were uncomfortable with taking off camping to parts unknown until the visa issue was resolved, and so we lingered. Next, the weather took a less friendly turn with hot days and regular rain showers, making our tenting plan less inviting. Finally, our three month deal with the Wharf Marina came to an end. Because the plan was/is to get out camping, it dawned on us that it really didn’t make sense to sign up for another three months at the most expensive marina around. And the month by month price was even worse. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t regret a penny we spent at the Wharf, what with its great situation and nice services.

But Mooloolaba is an hour and a half north of both our broker in Deception Bay and the Brisbane airport into which fly most Australian boat buyers. If we weren’t going to be on the boat, it made sense to move her closer to the action, especially as we could save a couple hundred bucks a month.

And so it turned out that our run down from Wide Bay Bar to Mooloolaba was not our last cruise in Tackless II after all! On Monday February 16th, we motored out the channel and turned right to putter down the coast to Scarborough. It was a lovely day with gentle seas but not enough wind to sail, although we put the sail up in hopeful anticipation. The Queensland coast of beautiful beach after beautiful beach unrolled as we aimed for Caloundra Head in order to slip into Moreton Bay the back way as it were.

Moreton Bay, like Hervey Bay was off of Bundaberg, is a wedge of water trapped between an offshore island and the mainland. In Moreton Bay, however, great long bars of sand have built up across the mouth making the ships heading for the port at Brisbane stick to confined channels. We had several big ships catch us up and pass us by, so we were happy to hug the coast. Caloundra was a neat looking town crammed in the lee of the head with the unexpected crags of the Glasshouse Mountains rising in the distance. From Caloundra we followed the deserted sandy shore of Bribie Island, another National Park, rounded the corner at Skirmish Point, and squeezed into Deception Bay, where moments after we gave up and dropped the mainsail, a sailing breeze came up.

Our first impressions of Scarborough Marina back in November when our friends Whisper and Procyon were here did not compare well with Mooloolaba. However, giving it a second chance has come good. Our slip near the end of the main dock is much quieter than the one at the Wharf, (except when the fisherman are launching or retrieving their runabouts at the launch ramp right behind us.) It is less lit at night, which makes for better sleeping, and there is a nice roster of cruising friends and acquaintances around. Scarborough biggest negative is that it is a bit remote, but, since we now own a car, that has proved less of an issue.

Getting the car down from Mooloolaba was a bit of a chore, requiring several train and bus connections and a few hours travel. But since then we have made four or five runs back and forth to change storage lockers for one closer, and to follow up on various appointments we’d made up there.

Our morning walk, which we had thought would be the biggest sacrifice of the move, has actually been a non issue. The Queenslanders sure like their waterfront parks and Scarborough is no exception. Pleasant measured walkways lead from the marina, past playgrounds and a work-out station just like the one in Mooloolaba, through local neighborhoods to just about as far as you could want to go, and because Scarborough is a quieter residential area to Mooloolaba’s resort pulse, those sidewalks are relatively deserted. No more dodging on-comers! We even found a little neighborhood café run by a spry old Greek gentleman Dimitri, with whom we can pursue our coffee research.

Even our social life got off to a great start by getting in on a jazz concert in nearby Redcliffe where fellow cruiser John of Gingi sat in with his horn with a combo at a local RSL club (Retired Service League) which led to drinks with a local group of sailors at the Moreton Bay Boat Club. The Aussies dearly love their social clubs, whether it’s a surf club, a bowls club, a boat club, a sports club or whatever, all of which seem to have cheap booze, affordable meals and pokie machines (gambling is big here).

So I guess a little to our surprise we have really enjoyed being here! However, the one thing that has been a disappointment is that there has been almost no activity on the boat. Our broker has dropped by a number of times and she insists that our boat is generating more interest than any other listing. We see lots of boat shoppers roving the docks looking at boats for sale with the Marina’s in-house broker. And boats have been selling! It’s a puzzlement.

Because we are ready to sell! Don, of course, has been ready for months, but I have been dragging my feet, hoping, I guess, that Don would have a change of heart or that there would be some kind of new revelation. And perhaps there has been, in the guise of our plans for our future. In this economy, the spring feeding our cruising kitty has contracted and these two old captains can’t come home and just rove the country in our RV like we planned. We need to create positive cash flow, so Don has been researching opportunities since we’ve been here. And we have pretty much decided to go with the mobile espresso cafe business. Guess it’s all that coffee we drank in Mooloolaba’s cafes. We have actually started the process back in the States! It’ll be a new adventure.

We’ll tell you more about all that later, but having made the decision, we’ve made reservations. Yes, the Two Captains are returning to the US…..on one-way tickets. We will depart Brisbane on April 15, leaving Tackless II in the hands of the brokers. It will probably work out much better than way, without me and my emotional second thoughts clouding the cosmic synergy.

So, now, having left it to the eleventh hour, we are indeed going to take off for a quick look-see around the countryside. It won’t be the full-fledged campervan tour we had imagined, but a briefer sampling that will fuel our fantasies until we can come back here and do it right. We are taking off tomorrow with our friends Mike and Kathleen of Content, to follow their experienced lead and to pitch our squeaky new tent in the lee their campervan. We’ll try to update from the road.

New Australia Blog

2009-01-11T08:01:00.001+10:00

If you have this Blog in your favorites, it's time to change it for http://www.thetwocaptains.com/blogs/australia. Yes, we finally started a new Blog for Australia, and all the posts about our first months in Australia have been moved there.

Remember, too, that our beautiful Tackless II is for SALE. She will be going market officially here in Australia in a few weeks. follow the link to see all her specs.

28 October – 6 November, 2008 – the Port2Port in Bundaberg

2008-11-08T17:39:00.000+10:00

Our first week in Australia was dedicated almost wholly to the arrival festivities of the Bundaberg Cruising Yacht Club's annual Port2Port Rally. The BCYC was formed in 2000 specifically for the purpose of sponsoring this rally to attract Pacific cruising boats to the Port of Bundaberg, which is situated up the Burnett River off Hervey Bay in Queensland at 24*45.58S 152*23.28E. This year the rally drew some forty boats, departing from two ports in Vanuatu and two in New Caledonia.

Port Bundaberg is an enticing arrival port because, unlike many Australian ports whose approaches can be complicated by shifting river bars, the approach up the Burnett River, leading in from the protected waters of Hervey Bay, is manageable in virtually all conditions, including, as we saw, at night. It is also far enough north that yachts coming from the tropics cross in the Coral Sea, north of the unpredictable weather generated by the Tasman Sea to the south. This had weighed on our minds because a boat we had met and socialized with in Vuda Point had been lost a few months ago in bad weather a mere 150 nm outside of Brisbane. Of course, the Coral Sea route was not without its hazards. One rally boat, Hot Ice, hit a reef and had to be abandoned. Fortunately for it's crew, they were on one of the radio nets at the time, and rescue was organized expeditiously.

Aboard Tackless II, we had very mixed feelings about doing another rally, since sailing to any kind of schedule can only mean trouble, as we were reminded in our trip from Port Vila to Noumea last month. However, the Port2Port Rally takes a slightly different approach. Participants are urged to TRY to arrive within a three-day window prior to the start of the rally parties, leaving departure time up to each individual boat. The organizers provide a tremendous amount of clear, useful information by email prior to departure, run an excellent radio sked twice a day from the 18th to the 29th, but don't collect entry fees until you actually arrive. Therefore, if you don't like the weather, you simply don't come! This year most Port2Port boats left over a span of eight or ten days!

Tackless II was called from the quarantine anchorage to the quarantine dock mid-morning. This gave us plenty of time to spiff up the boat…rather like cleaning for the housekeeper! Customs and immigration were mere formalities since we had applied for visas online in advance and also had printed out the customs papers from the Internet and pre-filled them out. It is quarantine that is the big deal in Australia. Modern day Australia is paying heavily for the past introduction of foreign species – both ignorantly and inadvertently – that have wreaked havoc with its fragile ecosystem (read Jared Diamond's book Collapse.) We are not allowed to bring in any fresh fruits or vegetables, meat, eggs, seeds, dried beans or related products and wood and fiber crafts from the islands are a concern as well. There was a lot of suspense about what we would be allowed to keep, but it proved wise just to wait and see (beyond the very obvious), because we were allowed to keep a lot of things I'd thought they would take. In our case the officers were more worked up by some bugs they found in a bag of slivered almonds, a fluttery character that they eventually identified as a harmless warehouse moth. All in all it was a very professional and courteous entry.

In the course of the following week there were: a spaghetti night, a BBQ night, a welcome breakfast sponsored by the Bundaberg Regional council, a curry night, and afternoon BBQ sponsored by the marina, a "Beer, Prawn and Oyster" night (the marina is associated with a seafood wholesaler), a pot luck evening, and finally a fancy End of Passage dinner with yummy hors d'oeuvres and free Dark and Stormy's (a rum cocktail famously made with the locally brewed Bundaberg rum…although, since the distillery failed to provide the rum, the evening's supply was actually made with Captain Morgan dark!...Yay! More on Bundabeg rum later.) Each of these events was more than affordable and took place around eleven huge round tables in a big tent set up on the marina lawn! The cruisers mixed and mingled (we all had name tags, bless 'em) and sorted out into subgroups of new and old friends.

We had around us quite the circle of friends from the past few seasons, including, Randy and Sheri of Procyon, Tom & Bette Lee of Quantum Leap, Robin and Duncan of Whisper (who actually crossed from Mexico when we did). Tricky and Jane of Lionheart, Jan and Lee of La Boheme, and this year's buddies, Jim and Paula of Avior, among many others.

The day after our arrival, Tom and Bette Lee, who had arrived early and rented a car, conducted us into Bundaberg for our first exposure to this very pleasant Queensland town. Lonely Planet describes Bundaberg as "a country town that feels oh-so two centuries ago." I don't know about that, but to us it felt just right. Down the center of town is a wide boulevard with lanes divided by a tree-shaded parking island and intersections had been attractively bricked. We learned later that there are plenty of modern shopping malls around, but despite them downtown still seemed plenty healthy.

Our primary stop was the Telstra Phone store where, like most of our pals, we got a local phone, a chip for my T-Mobile GSM phone, and a cellular broadband modem for the computer. We were quite grateful for the devalued Aussie $ when we got the total. But it sure has been money well spent, particularly the broadband modem which is so fast we can actually do video Skype!

The next day we met our yacht broker, Anita Farine, who was up from Scarborough to meet several clients. Yes, you read that correctly: Yacht Broker. It is something we have been considering almost from leaving Mexico, and in the end, with man, many mixed feelings, we have decided to put Tackless II on the market here in Australia. We have been repeatedly told there is a good market for our kind of boat here. The market was, of course, very strong up until a month ago, when the world economy went topsy-turvy and the Aussie dollar dropped from USD.95 to USD.60! This, of course, is good news for our living expenses here (especially as we all now only have half as much USDs!), but it is not good news for the boat market. If you'd like to see Tackless II's listing, you can find it at http://farine.net.au/sail/sb195/double.html . If you would like to BUY Tackless II, contact us directly ASAP at svtacklessii AT yahoo.com. (Address is written that way so spammers can scan it, but you know what to do!)

The other big highlight of the Rally week for us was the Monster Bilge Sale – the equivalent of a yard sale to landlubbers. Don and I wheeled up several cart loads of junk…er treasures…about half of which we actually sold. Can't say we made a whole lot of money, but bit by bit we are emptying out Tackless II's crammed lockers. I will say that we didn't BUY anything! Our other strategy for clearing the boat out involved several trips to the Post Office to send back some of the souvenirs we have collected.

Sunday morning, the rally organizers had arranged a bus to take us to the Shalom Vegetable market, held on the unusually named grounds of the Shalom Catholic High School! Don gave this trip a bye, which was a shame as there was a vendor specializing in macadamia and other nuts (which he would have enjoyed!), but I managed to load up two bags full of fresh produce on my own! On the way back, the bus driver took us on a side trip to Bagara, an up-and-coming seaside resort town just south of Bundy. Very pretty, but development is opting for "high rise" (6 or so stories) condos which will milk the real estate but fast defeat the charm.

On Monday we boarded another bus for a tour of Bundaberg's two great claims to fame, its Rum Distillery and its Ginger Beer Factory. We started at the Ginger Beer factory where is proudly brewed natural ginger beer, as well as sarsaparilla (root beer), a lemon-lime drink, an apple ale, a peach ale, and several others. Who knew this stuff was originally brewed like beer (and still is here!)? We got to taste all the products, including the diet versions, and all the ones we remember were very tasty, especially the ginger beer and sarsaparilla, of which we carted home a six-pack. Sadly, the diet versions did nothing for us.

We wish we could be as enthusiastic about the rum. Bundaberg rum, to a Caribbean-trained palate, is quite simply vile stuff! Our guide, the Port2Port volunteer Judy, must have encountered this before with cruisers arriving from the east, because she promoted more heavily their special liqueur – "only available from the factory." The factory tour itself was a little disappointing. In fact both factory tours were actually pseudo tours, cute little displays instead of the real thing. (The real thing can be had at the rum distillery, but it wasn't on our agenda. Perhaps because it calls for closed shoes and so few cruisers have any!) But it did also end up with free tastings. Each of us got a card entitling us to two tastes. I tried the new Bundaberg Red, in hopes it would be smoother. Better, but not a winner. We all tried the liqueur, which is a blend of rum, caramel, chocolate and licorice (I think, or cloves…something exotic), and it was good enough that almost every couple bought at least one bottle. Sadly, they don't offer tastes, free or otherwise, of their two more expensive products that MIGHT have been better tasting. But then, who needs an expensive rum!

After the tours, the bus dropped us all first at Bunnings, a Home Depot-type hardware outlet, and then at a grocery store, which we pretty well besieged. Cruisers who have been in the islands for a few months kind of lose all sense of proportion when exposed to first-world markets like this. So it is probably a good thing that they didn't take us to the Woolworths, which in Australia is a huge mega-market (we went there later with friends!), because they would never have got us all out again!

Between the soda six-packs, the booze cartons and the grocery bags, the return bus was pretty loaded, but this driver, like Sunday's driver, wanted to give us a little something extra so he drove us to the lookout atop the "Hummock." The Hummock is the closest thing Bundaberg has to a hill. Visually, it is a pimple on the very gently rolling flat cane fields, fields that look like a cross between Indiana and Fiji…in other words tidy mid-west farm fields with sugar cane and palm trees! Historically, the Hummock is actually a very ancient volcano, responsible for all the rich soil hereabouts, and as you might guess is densely built up with houses in search of the only "view" in town!

The Port2Port week finally wound down on Tuesday and boats began taking off. Avior, back in their home cruising grounds, took off early for a rendezvous with friends at Lady Musgrave, a coral atoll about 100kms north that is the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. Quantum Leap headed out for Mooloolaba, which is our eventual destination, where they will store the boa and head home. Procyon, who plans to explore as far south as Tasmania over the summer, got a jump on us by sailing south on Tuesday for the Sandy Straits where they have ended up exploring up the Mary River. It doesn't take long for the gang to disperse!

Saddled with two more paid-for days in the marina, we hung on a bit longer. Our reward was a ride up the Burnett River with Tricky and Jane aboard Lionheart. Rivers are quintessential Aussie experiences. This one wound about four miles inland through mangroves and cane fields to the Midtown Marina and mooring field right in the heart of Bundaberg proper before being blocked by a bride and railroad trestle. Tricky did a great job following the beacons up the river course. That it was a tricky route was attested to by our passing one of the rally boats stuck fast in a shoal area! (We sent the marina guys back for them!) With Lionheart moored bow and stern in the middle of the river, Tricky and Jane will do their own dispersing, taking off for a week visiting Tricky's brother in Rockhampton, about three hours north. Tricky and Jane (or "the kids" as we call them!) plan to go back to work for several years to beef up a world cruising kitty. It had looked like they might be based with us in Mooloolaba as Tricky may become a catamaran sale agent, but recently it's been sounding more like Brisbane will be where they tie up.

Tuesday, the day we rode on Lionheart was a very big day in Australia. Yes, yes, it was a very big day in the US as well, only the elections wouldn't even get going for several hours yet. But here in Australia, Tuesday the 4th was Melbourne Cup Day! Melbourne Cup Day is said to rank second in importance to Christmas on the Aussie calendar, and while it is not actually a holiday, "no one works." Instead they dress up, including fancy hats, and find themselves a Melbourne Cup Party. Presumably, in Melbourne they actually go to the Melbourne Cup! What is the Melbourne cup? It is a horse race on par with the Kentucky Derby.

We did not actually get to a party, but we did lunch at a pub in town that was making a deal of the race. We had to eat on the sidewalk as all the tables were reserved, but Don and I did nip in at race time to watch the race itself. It loses just a little when you have no clue which horse is which, but it was a huge field, maybe eighteen or twenty! And the track was grass! With such a huge field, the race was very exciting (seemed long, too!) and the finish came down to the leader being caught by a charging grey. It was a nose to nose photo finish, and I sure saw nothing to distinguish which was the winner! Wow. It almost makes up for not having seen a kangaroo yet. (We've been walking early; I guess we need to walk late!)

The American elections dominated hearts and minds and TV sets on Wednesday. Duncan and Robin of Whisper staked out a table for the day in Baltimore's, the very nice restaurant at the marina, and watched the returns come in over a long bottle of white wine. We checked in on Yahoo now and again, and stuck our noses into Baltimore's each time we passed. By early afternoon, it was a done deal, so we had Duncan and Robin to Tackless for a evening celebration to toast our new president -- CONGRATULATIONS, OBAMA! And congratulations America, on making a choice for change!

So, here we are. It is Thursday evening, the 6th of November. We have backed off the dock and are anchored not too far from where we were our first night. Tomorrow, we start our trip south through Hervey Bay and the Sandy Straits., a sinuous braid of sand banks and navigable channels squeezed between Frasier Island and the Queensland coast. Piled around me are charts, the Beacon to Beacon guidebook, Alan Lucas' Coral Coast Cruising Guide, lists of way points and bearings, and routes on two electronic charting programs. Leaving a marina is always traumatic!

27 October 2008 - Day 7 on the Road to Oz

2008-10-29T19:44:00.000+10:00

Our last night the wind went aft meaning that for the first time on a voyage on which we expected to sail downwind most of the way, we were sailing down wind for the FIRST TIME! It became rolly and obnoxious and made us really appreciate the several exceptionally nice days of sailing we did have...even with the spate of bad weather. In the morning, we encountered east Australia's southbound current, which, like America's Gulf Stream, can stir up quite a nasty sea in any southerly wind. Actually, it was for this reason we'd picked the weather window we did, since the winds were relatively light as we crossed. Still we were glad to push out the other side and get smoother sailing as we approached and rounded Break Sea Spit into Hervey Bay.

Actually, except for calmer seas, bottom soundings, and a few more seabirds, there was nothing to suggest we were approaching land of any size, let a lone a huge continent. Hervey Bay is a big wedge of water off the Queensland coast that is framed by Frasier Island, the worlds largest sand island. Again, no sight of it. The wind went light, and in our impatience to arrive, we fired up the engine. Night fell after another handsome sunset and still no hint of Australia. Finally about 8pm local time, we began to see some lights in the general direction of our waypoint.

The last leg of our trip, four miles up the approach channel of the Burnett River in the dark, was surreal. The channel is marked by pairs of powerful flashing green and red lights which leaves you feeling like you are landing a 747 on a runway, and because the channel extends well out into the bay, most of its length you still have water on either side! Once inside the lights were fewer and the dark darker. We actually passed the quarantine anchorage on the first go and then had to backtrack. Although the Port Bundaberg Marina just upriver was brightly lit, it actually made it harder to nose our way in to the small anchorage where three other boats already had the hook down. We shut down, toasted our arrival with a celebratory cocktail, and put our heads down, Don grousing that he would have to keep some kind of watch during the night in such close quarters. The next thing we knew, it was daylight!

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26 October 2008 - Day 6 on the Road to Oz

2008-10-27T04:33:00.000+10:00

Quite simply a grand day of sailing. Blue sky, sparkling waves, and a gentle rolling sea action. The wind stayed a steady 10-12 knots and we have consistently soared along on a beam reach at 6.5-7.5 knots. In a burst of enthusiasm, we actually got out the hose and washed the worst of the salt accumulations off the windows, stainless and solar panels, while below decks we cleaned cupboards, defrosted the fridge, and generally tidied up for our arrival. With the extra day the bad weather added to the passage, we have managed to do better eating down the larder. Today's lunch was a very French picnic of dry sausage and the remains of about five different bits of French cheeses.

Tomorrow mid-afternoon, if the wind holds, we should round the light at Break Sea Spit and enter Hervey Bay. It is another 40 miles from there to the channel entry to Bundaberg. It looks like we will arrive just after dark. Fortunately, Bundaberg is an easy, well-lighted approached and we will be able to motor right in to the quarantine anchorage when we arrive. And you know what that means? We will be able to get a good night's sleep in before facing customs and quarantine.

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25 October 2008 - Day 5 on the Road to Oz

2008-10-26T04:15:00.000+10:00

Today was a good day. The wind last night continued to back right when we needed it to, and we were able to clear the shallower peaks of the mid ocean ridge that runs south of Chesterfield Reef. You might wonder what the big deal is about crossing these submarine mountain ranges. Well, sometimes, all that ocean, suddenly encountering uw obstacles can mound up worsening surface conditions, which you may remember were bad enough on their own. Our experience, however, was that the time we were actually over the ridge (via one of the deeper "passes") was the calmest sea of the day! Once we were clear of that area, we shut the engine down, relieved to poke along at 3-4 knots and try to catch up on our sleep.

The next morning -- this morning -- the wind speeds were down and the seas were down quite a bit as well. Refreshed by some sleep yet faced with 400 miles still to travel without our big headsail, Don came up with a plan to replace the furling line with an old one and rehoist the sail. The first tricky part involved perching on the bow and winding the furling line back into the drum. The second tricky part was getting the many folds of the sail sorted out on a moving deck filled with dinghy and fuel jugs. In getting the sail down the day before in the big winds and seas, things had gotten a bit twisted up! The third tricky part was getting the sail rehoisted. The hero in this whole endeavor was the team of Otto and Perky who between them kept the boat steadily into the wind while the two of us were out wrestling things on the foredeck. Probably the biggest pain was trying to keep our harnesses clipped in while we needed to be first here and then there on the deck. We kept reminding ourselves that sailors used to change sails this way all the time in the days before roller furling! All went according to plan...well, the second time... and you never saw such pleased campers as these two Captains to have our sail back. We promptly shook out the reefs in the main and set the genoa and were off like a proper sailboat.

It's been grand sailing again today, the wind at a nice moderate 9-14 knots off the beam, while the large southern ocean swell runs by with a long period beneath us, lifting us smoothly from our port side and passing on away under us to starboard. This running swell is what I imagined we'd see all across the Pacific, but in fact it's the first one like this I remember.

By the way, we are not actually in the Pacific anymore. We are officially transiting the Coral Sea! So exotic!

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24 October- Day 4 on the BUMPY road to Oz

2008-10-25T04:08:00.000+10:00

Today will not be our favorite day of the trip. At about 0330 this morning our genoa furling line chafed through releasing the whole genoa. You are not supposed to sail with the tension on the furling line for this reason. You are supposed to walk forward and put a pin in a little hole in the drum to hold it. Then of course, you would have to walk forward again to take the pin out should conditions worsen and you want to furl the whole sail. This is not exactly what you want to be doing when conditions warrant furling the darn thing in the first place!

Of course, you also don't want to have to deal with getting a flogging sail down in 20 knots and rough seas. And dark. Our soloution was to harden up the genoa (sheet it in for saiing) and then heave to and wait for daylight. Even in daylight, it wasn't a fun job, but we got the sail down and tied off on the starboard deck and soldiered on with reefed main, staysail, and old Perky. we needed the engine's help to point up sufficiently to get across a mid-ocean ridge we wanted to take at a certain place.

We should cross the ridge later this evening. the winds are backing into the south and are forecast to go southeast and the seas are already easing off a bit. That should make the last of our trip a little easier, letting us shake a reef or two out of the main and reach off the wind into Bundaberg. Right now, it looks like we might arrive sometime monday, but if not, it will be Tuesday morning. At this point I need to shift to using my computer for navigation (don't have a chip for Australia for the plotter), so once I do that, I MAY not be able to switch between the sat phone and the computer GPS. So if you don't hear from us, don't worry!

Really looking forward to Bundaberg!

The 2 Cs
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23 October 2008 - Day 3 on the Road to Oz

2008-10-24T05:48:00.000+10:00

0731 UTC/1831AEST: S 23*05'; E161*12'. Last night was one of those absolute gifts Mother nature sends along now and then. We managed to sail along at 5-6 knots in 7-8 knots of wind! Definitely one of the miracles of sailing. With the breeze out of the N-NW, we were actually close hauled, but with no sea to speak of, we had T2s full main and genoa out all night. Bioluminescence sparked in our wake, and here and there were the occasional explosions of phosphoresence that I haven't seen since the Virgins. Overhead, the stars glittered clear and bright with only an occasional incursion of cloud, and a yellow planet in the western sky -- I am guessing Saturn-- set around one a.m stealing a tremendous amount of ambient light. But by three the waning moon was up lighting the cockpit for Don's watch. I write all this tonight in an effort to remember how grand it can be.

Because it isn't now. We drove through the frontal barrier about 8am this morning. It was a relatively non-event, just a long line of clouds and rain, that was surprisingly narrow. On the back side the wind began to build out of the west, right on the nose as predicted. We motorsailed awhile and then finally fell off in hopes of sailing. The good news is the engine has been off all afternoon. The bad news is that it has been a bumpy ride in thewrong direction. However, as the sun sets, the wind is inching toward the south, and we are eeking our way back around on course.

Tomorrow the wind should be out of the south, a better direction, but we are forecast to get the big swells. Oh, joy!

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22 October 2008 - Day 2 on the road to Oz

2008-10-23T07:32:00.000+10:00

0912 UTC/2012AEST: S 22*57'; E162*54'. Today was another fine day, if one of a different sort. The wind died out in the wee hours last night, and Perky was called in. We motored in gradually lessening seas which made it possible for each of us to get some good sleep. Midday we were able to set the sails again and achieve some decent motorsailing, and by 5pm, we had shut down and were managing to sail five knots in 6-9 knots apparent. I know no self-respecting sailor likes to motor, but it is very hard to begrudge a decent motorsail, especially in easy seas. Our friends Randy and Sheri on Procyon, with a deeper sail inventory, managed to keep sailing, crisscrossing back and forth across the rhumb line. Last night they ranged far enough away that we couldn't keep up our VHF radio rendezvous, so I was pretty surprised when I looked up from my bookthis morning to see their blue and white Code Zero headsail coming back at us from the south! A retired Coast Guard Captain, Randy has been talking me through me some functions on my radar I never knew existed! This evening we had a fabulous sunset with a great green flash followed by a nice supper of Indian lentil dal I managed to whip up under way. Australia will most likely relieve of us of alot of our food stores upon arrival, so we are eating all sorts of things that have been hidden away in the larder.

Our day tomorrow is not likely to be as nice. The wind we are sailing under as I type is very light fom the northwest when typical wind is the se trades. A low way to the south of us is going to bring us headwinds tomorrow from the West and eventually some big swells and brisk southerlies. But for now, we'll enjoy another night of gentle seas and stars.

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21 October 2008 -2Cs Underway

2008-10-22T04:42:00.000+10:00

0640 UTC/1640AEST: S 22*32'; E 165*25'. We have had a rollicking first day out. Great weather, great wind, great progress. We left with a small flotilla at 8:30 this morning and have been accounting for ourselves quite smartly, maintaining 6-7.5 knots most of the day. Wind is up a bit coming on to sunset, so we will probably take a reef in the main. Looking forward to a starry night with plenty of mastlights around us!

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2C Update 081021

2008-10-21T19:03:00.000+10:00

Had a very nice birthday yesterday. Lots of B-day wishes by email and in person. The Rally we are in to Australia has a radio net, and the controller startled me by wishing me a happy B-day. Actually he said, "I hope Don is taking you out to a fancy dinner tonight." and I said, What? And he said, "Well, it's your birthday isn't it?" This Rally is REALLY organized! The result is, EVERYBODY knew it was my birthday...which is kind of fun. We spent the morning with friends checking out of New Caledonia, what one of them called "The Trifecta" of paperwork. The offices for immigration, customs and the port captain were spread all over the place, so we got a good walk in in good compnay. Then, hungry, we all treated ourselves to a lunch at a nice bistro on the park in town. Four of six had steak and frites, but Paula and I had a "swordfish brick", which proved to be a small piece of fish, leeks, cheese wrapped in filo accompanied by a carrot mousse and salad! And it was cheaper than the steak! Really felt finally like we were in "France."

I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't yet done an update on our time in Noumea. Well...it didn't get done. But we had a good time, and it will get written up. However, this morning we are weighing anchor and getting underway for Australia. it is not an ideal forecast, but mostly it errs on lighter winds than heavy, but for one day with headwinds and big swell from the southern ocean. That will be obnoxious, but in trade we get nice weather for our departure and our arrival, which seems the more important. So, off we go. I will try to make daily postings of our progress.

Love to all -- Don & Gwen , the Two Captains

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5-11 October 2008 –Baie de Prony

2008-10-12T02:56:00.000+10:00

By the time we passed the reef off Île Ugo, the chief obstacle on the northbound leg from Île du Pins to Baie de Prony, the wind had intensified to about 20 knots. With the full main and genoa up, old T2 was honking along at 8 knots as we bore off for the marker on the end of Prony Reef. We had ventured a radio hail for our friends Randy and Sheri of Procyon on the off chance they were in the vicinity and were pleasantly surprised to learn they had just turned into Prony themselves about an hour earlier and were dropping the hook in the first anchorage to the east.

Baie de Prony is named for the vessel that first explored it in 1854. Only ten years later a "forestry industry" began here using convict labor. (New Caledonia was, like Australia, initially a penal colony.) Throughout the bay are sprinkled ruins of convict "settlements," but there are no remains of the forest. I've been told that the original forest cover was the huge, slow-growing kauri pine that was popular in shipbuilding. Not sure if this is correct. It is hard to imagine. There is none of it remaining, and no evidence of replanting. The hills as far as you can see are red earth, thinly covered by green scrub with great orange gashes of landslides and erosion. It is sad but oddly beautiful.

We were surprised that Procyon would take the very first anchorage because Baie de Prony has no fewer than 16 identified anchorages within it, six of which alone are in the large eastern interior bay called Bonne Anse. Anchorage "A", as it is dubbed in the cruising guide, is right out behind the wooded point that merges with Prony Reef and is only protected from southeasterly winds, which, granted, are the predominant winds in the region. Well, it proved to be an outstanding choice, because the wide open view to the west – over Prony Reef to Île Ouen and the Woodin Channel -- then north to the multicolored hills backing the western side of the Baie de Prony -- was simply awesome, morning, midday, evening and even by moonlight!

PROCYON REUNION
Randy and Sheri had, unfortunately, been forced to spend nearly a month in Noumea after Randy had a mishap learning to kite-board and rammed a piece of coral well up into his foot. This became quite infected and ended up needing surgery, and his back compounded his misery by going into spasms. He was not a happy camper for a few weeks. However, he had as good an experience with the French medical system in Noumea as we had in Raiatea, and, in the end, Noumea is not a bad place to recuperate with its delightful market right at the head of the marina. The good news for us is that the Procyons would otherwise have already been on their way to Australia, and now they will be making that trip the same time as we.

We had a lovely afternoon and evening visiting aboard Procyon, which is a custom-built Gozzard 44, a truly beautiful boat with an owner's open layout placing a spacious dining/living area in the triangular space where usually there would be a forepeak cabin. We did steaks and baked potatoes on the grill, and relished a green salad with fresh ingredients and talked boat talk around their lovely dining table. It was a fleeting reunion, though as early the following the morning, they were underway south to the Isle of Pines. We, however, were left with the gorgeous view to ourselves.

BONNE ANSE
We lingered there a day working on various projects, then the next morning raised anchor to poke around the other five anchorages in Bonne Anse. One of the reasons Randy and Sheri has stopped so quickly is that they had seen a number of boats precede them in this direction. Over the course of the following day, we'd watched most of them leave again, so when we motored east ourselves, we were pleased to see that all but one boat had departed. We chose anchorage "E" on the north side of the bay in which to put the hook down as the forecast was calling for the wind to clock around to the north. Anchorage "E" was a cove of eroded orange hills laced with green, a red sand beach backed by a grove of green trees, and a wide semi-circle of shoals completely sedimented in red silt. Grandterre's red and green color scheme, so eyecatching at a distance, is rather intense up close, and in anchorage "E" we had totally sacrificed the long view. It was, however, quite a bit warmer, a function, I think, of both the wind shift to the north and the encircling land mass. Plus, again, we were totally alone…that is, except for the flies.

We had heard mention of the fly problem on the radio but had not imagined its degree. We paid the price for being late getting our screens up as the interior of the boat was beseiged. We are talking hundreds. The flyswatter was excavated and put to constant use. There is one redeeming feature of flies; they go to sleep at night, so you can. Okay, and they don't bite. But, Jiminy Christmas they are IRRITATING!

Our second morning in Anchorage "E", we dinghied across the bay to a trailhead leading to the lighthouse atop Cap Ndoua. This is the very important leading light for the Havanna Passage, the main ship entry from the east. We secured the dinghy off a nice little red sand beach and easily found the trail. Once upon a time, this trail was a road, but erosion has carved deep gullies in the bed, and recent rains or perhaps just the morning dew made the hard-packed clay very slick. We emerged from the tunnel of trees about half-way up and climbed the rest of the way to the light flanked by hip-high brush but with awesome views in every direction. What's really amazing about this panorama is that there is hardly any sign of man in it, discounting the light itself and its associated equipment, some ruins on a lower plateau, and a couple of red earth roads winding off to the east. That the hike is a popular one is attested to by a "flagpole" where hikers have hung items of clothing (including a pair of bikini panties) as well as a curious form of natural graffiti: the entire vale just east of the light is filled with "signatures" shaped from assembled rocks and then framed in a rectangle of rocks. I suggested we put together a "Tackless II was here" or "The Two Captains were here", but Don pointed out that either would take a lot of rocks.

But here's a peculiar thing. No flies on shore!

The illusion of "little sign of man" proved to be just that: An illusion. As we motored out of Bonne Anse that afternoon to check out some of the anchorages on Prony's western side, a huge industrial complex was revealed filling up the whole eastern part of the bay! Just over the ridge from where we'd been anchored! Now we know that the great lume of light we'd been seeing in the sky since Port Boisé is not Noumea at all, but this plant! The cruising guide describes a rock crushing facility here, which it claims closed in 1968. Whatever this is, it is neither defunct nor old!

Once revealed, it tuned out to be pretty hard to shake the specter of that monstrosity. We motored behind a little resort island called Ilot Casy up into the western arm of the bay, but still bits of the factory kept sticking up above the landmasses we tried to put between us and it. We were intending to go all the way up the bay to its fjord-like end, an area known as Carenage, with two hurricane-hole anchorages and some hot springs. But Don's interest was waning fast, so we turned instead towards a cove called Anse Sebert. Imagine our surprise when we rounded the point and found not just four other boats (one of them our buddies on Avior), but moorings!

ANSE SEBERT
We aren't sure who put these moorings here, but there are about ten of them. The chart shows a village nearby, but Jim and Paula of Avior did a walk ashore and found only ruins amongst which there appeared to be holiday "shacks." So perhaps they are the work of a Noumea-based cruising club. However, the landing was not in the possession of vacationers today, but a squadron of military types with a small fleet of inflatables. Over the course of the afternoon, a helicopter landed, took off, circled and landed over and over, and guys with rifles hid behind trees and tried to look inconspicuous, ignoring Jim and Paula as they took their walk! Later, while the four of us relaxed and pondered the situation over some cocktails, eight inflatables with eight men in each paddled off into the night. That it was a training maneuver and not a guerrilla takeover was suggested by lead and tail-gunner dinghies sporting engines and running lights!

RECIF DE L'AIGUILLE
The big attraction in Anse Sebert for non-military types is the nearby dive site Recif de L'Aiguille (Needle Reef), a rock spire that ascends nearly to the surface from about 80 feet right in the middle of the channel. Our dive gear, all nicely serviced in Fiji, has been sitting largely unused this season, and quite honestly, if it hadn't been for Paula's determination, it might still be packed away. The hesitation (besides pure laziness) has been the water temp. Readings have hovered at about 74-75 degrees on the surface which suggests colder temps below. This is about three degrees colder than the winter temp in the Virgin Islands, and up until the last few days, air temps have been pretty chilly, too. Have I mentioned that Don and I foolishly took our heavier wetsuits back to Florida? Well, we hadn't needed them since Mexico! But, at 0830 the next morning, after seeing Avior's gear start to emerge, we decided we wouldn't be wimps and started excavating and donning every bit of gear we still have. For us that meant Lycra suits topped by Polartec suits and hoods, booties and gloves. I was lucky to also have a neoprene chicken vest to add to my get-up.

It was, in short, a great dive! From about 60 feet up to about eight feet below the surface, the spire is encrusted with corals, sponges and a crazy variety of shellfish. Visibility was good and the sunlight just right to highlight some unusual formations. Huge groupers, that folks in these parts call cod, poked up from the depths to check us out, a pair of huge batfish kept shyly just ahead of us, while lovely pale spotted hinds (which folks in these parts call grouper or coral trout) tried to camouflage themselves against pale coral "stalagmites." According to the cruising guide, fresh water comes out the tops of these unusual formations, which must be how these reverse concretions have accumulated! In fact, it is probably how the how structure came to be, a fresh water leak in the seafloor depositing its minerals in a climbing tower eventually aided by reef building corals. Tiny little bi-color damsels darted hither and thither, while bigger "tropicals" wove around us. Presumably because this is a preserve, the fish were not particularly fearful. (That's, of course, because they didn't know what Don was thinking; he did a lot of "finger-shooting"!) We all surfaced delighted and wondering what we'd been waiting for!

APRES DIVE
By evening the weather had turned gray and rainy, but several of us were invited aboard the catamaran Lady Nada for an impromptu cocktail party. Lady Nada and Heat Wave were the hosts, and Avior and Tackless II the guests. Lady Nada is a big catamaran single-handed by its builder David, and Heat Wave is a fast monohull skippered by an attractive German woman, Bridgit and her partner in the boat Lee. All of us had been on the ICA Rally from Vanuatu, but we'd not gotten to know the others (other than Avior) very well. It was quite the international evening with a South African (David), Englishman (Lee), German (Bridgit), Scot (Paula), Aussie, Jim and we two Americans. Sadly, no one had invited the one French boat that came in..

HIKING ASHORE
On Friday, the weather stayed overcast and grew blustery, evaporating any enthusiasm to revisit the dive site. Instead, the group began to disperse leaving only Tackless and the French boat in the anchorage. In the afternoon, we grew antsy enough to dinghy to shore to check out, now that the military had vacated, the walks that Jim and Paula had found. After securing the dinghy to a nice floating dock, we found a detailed map of 14 kilometers of trails through the Prony preserve area! Wow! We could have walked up to the Carenage anchorage! One sure could spend some time here! Unfortunately, we only had a few hours until sunset, but we set out to the north along the shoreline following a well marked path around the headland to Prony Village.

At an intersection in the middle of the woods we stumbling upon a display answering some of the questions we'd had about the forest industry here. According to the display, Prony village was established in 1865 to house convict labor set to the task of felling the native big kauri pines and gum oaks. Right on a section of the trail was built an example of the wooden rail system that had been used in those days to move the huge logs. Smooth log rails were laid across wooden ties on which were mounted big wooden sleds, maybe thirty feet long. On these were secured an entire tree trunk. Even with this fairly slick system, there must have been a lot of back-breaking labor for the convicts, not the least of which was getting the log onto the sled. On the hill above this display was the convict cemetery lost in second growth woods, where, if a sign didn't tell you there were graves there, nothing else would suggest it. Further along the path were stone-wall ruins of the penitentiary, now incorporated into what do appear to be weekend cottages. Around them, several freestanding stone walls, even one entire building, had been totally encapsulated by the roots of banyan trees! The cottages were planted artfully with flowering shrubs, and everything looked like a landscaped park. Whatever one may say about the French colonial system, one has to be impressed with the infrastructure. Not just the roads and utility poles that impressed us in the Loyalties, but the details of these parks, the well-groomed trails and signposts, the first class docks and wharves. It is so noticeable, of course, because we are talking first world management in a third-world situation.

GONE ASTRAY
On our way back to the dock, Don noticed that there was another marker on the fringing reef just like the one we had all tied to when diving on Recife de l'Aiguille. On second look we realized, it WAS the marker we had tied to! Somehow, within the preceding few hours, it had broken free and drifted to shore! This is not good, considering the reef comes to within a few feet of the surface! It also would not have been cool to have been down on the dive when it came loose! (Of course, we were diving in calm conditions, and it was currently blowing about 20 knots.) On our way back to the boat, we stopped to introduce ourselves to and chat with the French couple of Fidelio (turns out they are physicians who have lived aboard 30 years and worked in Martinique, Nuku Hiva, and Noumea.) Just as we were suggesting that they – with their better French - call Noumea Radio to report the displaced "balise", up zooms a Marine Patrol boat, and within minutes it was on the notice to mariners!

As we climbed back aboard Tackless II we were of mixed emotions about whether to go or stay longer. It would have been nice to explore more of the trails. Indeed it would have been nice to spend several more weeks checking out all the rest of Prony's anchorages. But with Noumea still waiting and the month ticking down fast, we opted in the end to move on.

By the way, I forgot to mention that when we went to shore for the hike, I sprayed the beejezus out of the interior of the boat with bug spray meant for mosquitoes that we'd filched from our Fiji hotel room. By the time we got back, the fly problem was history! Now, keep those screens closed!

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29 September – 5 October 2008 – The Isle of Pines

2008-10-08T00:36:00.000+10:00

Some forty miles south of Grand Terre and anchoring the southern corner of New Caledonia's large southern lagoon is the famous Ile du Pins (Isle of Pines). Touted in travel literature as the jewel of New Caledonia, the Isle of Pines is not especially eye-catching when approaching from the sea. Its main mountain, Pic N'Ga, seemingly sort of poking up through a great flat circular drape of green, is only 262 meters high, and its shores are surrounded by a maze of reefs making it problematic to move between the southern anchorages near Kuto to the northern ones off Gadji.

It is up close that the island reveals its charms with picturesque anchorages fringed by powdery white sand beaches and whispering araucaria pines. These pines, related to Norfolk pines, grow tall and slim, usually in clumps Oddly, all the pines near where we anchored sport ten to fifteen feet of new growth at the top, making them look like Christmas trees have been grafted to their tips. Some environmental event in the recent past – drought or hurricane perhaps – must be responsible.

As we sailed south from Grand Terre, we hooked up with our friends Tricky and Jane of Lionheart, last seen over a month ago kite-surfing at Musket Cove. They had chosen to skip Vanuatu this season and hurry on to New Caledonia where there was said to be good locations for their new passion. Much of this past month, they have spent around Noumea where Maitre Island is a kiting mecca. It was our good fortune that they had decided to head south to the Isle of Pines at the same time as we, and that we had both chosen the southern anchorage group.

Upon arrival, the main anchorage of Kuto had a bunch of boats already at anchor, so we decided to try the smaller, but empty Kanumera anchorage, on the opposite side of the same "presque'ile", (a lovely French word for "almost island) for which we were lucky to have the right wind conditions for one night. Lionheart dropped anchor in the western lobe of the bay while we tucked into the eastern lobe. This was a lovely pool defined by massive limestone knobs at the entrance and a perfect curve of white sand. There was, of course, an upscale gite in the corner, with tourists taking the sun in lounge chairs and others paddling around in kayaks. So we did sort of feel like we'd anchored dead in the middle of the resort's swimming pool.

We, of course, could have sat there and enjoyed the scenery all afternoon, but Tricky and Jane saved us from such idleness by collecting us for a walk to the bakery. The walk to the bakery took us across the isthmus between Kanumera and Kuto, with a memorable grove of bugny trees (rather like live oaks with twisted trunks and an interwoven canopy), along the huge beach at Kuto, and then inland along a paved road. Our first stop was little store with basic groceries and, of all things, a Croc boutique! This in a region where Croc copies at half to a quarter the price of originals clad probably 50% of the feet! But they had every Croc style imaginable. After ice cream from the store, the boys lost interest in the walk, so Jane and I padded on another kilometer or so to eventually find the bakery, where…. there was only two baguettes left! Finding a bakery for fresh baguettes is a popular endeavor in French islands, although trying to figure out when you can actually get a loaf other than from 5-7am can be challenging.

The next morning we all went ashore early and met up with our Aussie friends Jim and Paula of Avior for a hike up Pic N'Ga. The trail up starts out shaded, but soon opens out into low scrub and red rubble so reminiscent of hiking in the Sea of Cortez it was eerie. About an hour each way, the top affords a nearly 360-degree panorama of the island and its reefs. Hot and footsore afterwards, we stopped back at the beachside "Snack" (French for affordable place to get anything to eat), for our first Number One beers and a "Sandwich Americain", which is the baguette version of a hamburger and fries rolled into one. How is it the French tend to be slim with all the bread they eat!?! Although a nap would have been my Number One choice for the afternoon, a forecast wind shift suggested we'd best move around to Kuto before nightfall, which we did. Our reward was to find that Kuto is an anchorage full of turtles, something we really haven't enjoyed since the Virgin Islands, plus it is a fine place for a green flash.

The next morning we were up early and on the road by 0630 hoofing it to the village of Vao where there was said to be a Wednesday morning market. We caught a ride in the back of a pick up truck the last few kilometers to find that most everybody at the market were fellow cruisers. The market was very small, but the ladies present did have some lettuce, cabbage, green beans, christophene, carrots and papaya as well as some "market eats". This kind of grazing is one of Don's favorite activities. Here he could choose from sweet crepes to chowmein filled roll-ups, from pineapple cake to some sort of fried banana fritter. Vao is a pretty village with a beautiful church, framed by two schools on either side. The little ones about Kai's age were all assembling for the day as we walked past. It was surprising how westernized they seemed, with their cute little outfits and knapsacks. There was even one youngster peddling to school on his little bicycle with training wheels (much like Kai's Elmo bike), with Dad bringing up the rear (and providing the bulk of the propulsion.) To counter the market snacks, we walked the whole the 6K back. Somewhat pumped by the walk and wired by several cups of caffeinated coffee (we usually drink decaf), we fell to boat projects in the afternoon and got a lot done. The day actually ended with some dancing in the cockpit to our wedding CDs.

That forecast wind shift came through with a vengeance bringing brisk winds from the south. In this part of the world, southerly wind means cold, and we had trouble keeping warm the next couple of days. The plan was to rent a car with Avior on Thursday, but the morning kind of expired without managing to get the car rented. In the end, we lined it up for Friday, which meant we could start by hitting the Vao market again. This time, little lettuce but avocados and fresh herbs!

After depositing our groceries back at the boat, the four of us set off with Don at the wheel (since Jim and Paula figured he'd be better at the left hand drive/driving on the right thing!) The morning was overcast, which was disappointing, and I wondered as we set out clockwise around the island, taking all the turns for each of the bays, if a car for a full day would be a waste of money. After all, it is not so large an island. Our first couple of stops, two of which over-looked the alternative anchorages of Ouameo and Gadji, were underwhelming without sunlight. In the latter at least were several masts poking up from behind an offshore islet.

Things got better when we turned down the access road for the Grotte de La Reine Hortense (Cave of Queen Hortense.) To begin with, it was the first time we had a sense of the Kanak tribes still living here (there are eight clans dividing the island who manage to live relatively traditionally among the tourists), as we passed a field where men and women were cooperatively hoeing a potato field. At the cave itself, was a booth for collecting a 200cpf admission per person…on the honor system, although a lady magically appeared when we needed to make change. (I must make note that this nice lady was the first New Caledonian, Kanak or French, to be overtly friendly!)

What a lovely spot! This is a "don't miss" for anyone visiting Ile du Pins. Set in a cool canyon of forest, the caretakers have planted what essentially is a mini botanical garden. (Of particular interest to me were the very tall trees, which Jim identified as iliocarpus (sp), a tree species I planted in Crystal River! Mine was pruned to look like a Christmas tree. Who knew!) The cave itself is huge! A cavernous maw with a stream meandering into it, the cave penetrates back far enough for it to get quite dark until you reach the far end lit by a gap in the roof. All sorts of stalactites hang from the roof, some growing at an angle as if drawn by the light! At the end is a platform of rock said to be the Queen's bed when she reputedly hid here during tribal wars in the 1850s.

When we were finished taking pictures of ourselves standing in front of various stalactites, we drove on to the Baie d'Oro. Here, on an islet of its own, is the five-star Meridien Hotel. We got no further than the front gate which is atmospherically on the far side of a bridge over a moat-like salt water inlet beset by pine trees. We could have gone on, if we'd been of a mind to pay $60pp for lunch! Instead we found our way to the charming little Gite Chez St. Regis, which perches on the other side of the saltwater moat. Here we had a local beer and tasty omelets with fines herbes and lardons (the French's less charming word for fatty bacon). What we didn't know we could have had, had we ordered ahead, was a chicken/fish/lobster bougna, a local delicacy cooked in coconut milk in a big round packet of banana leaves. That's what most of the tourists who filled in after us had.

The big draw in this part of the island (for those not staying at the Meridien) is the "piscine naturelle", a beautiful natural swimming pool of bright shallow sand occurring between three rocky islands. We walked from Chez Regis across the "moat" and along a trail leading to the piscine with every intent (at least by Paula) to go swimming. But although the clouds had cleared during lunch and the "piscine" was every bit as inviting as advertised, it was just too cold in that southern wind for cruisers to peel off and get wet. Only the dozen or so young Asian tourists (Paula talked to a couple who were Korean) were actually getting in the water!

On our walk back occurred a small mishap. Following the path with my eyes on my feet, I managed to walk full bore into a low tree limb. I cannot even claim the excuse of wearing a ball cap. The result is a charming scabby scrape dead center between my eyes as well as, at the time, a headache. Although this somewhat dimmed my pleasure in the rest of the afternoon, it did not stop us from a 40 minute hike through the woods to see the Baie de Upi, a huge, totally enclosed lagoon filling up the whole southwest corner of the island. Reaching it, however, was anticlimactic as it smelled rather distinctly sewer-like!

Our last stop of the day was the Baie de St. Joseph, just off Vao again, where they are famous for large traditional sailing canoes on which the locals take tourists for rides. The daysails were well over for the day, but as yachties we were interested to see the huge dugouts up close.

We relaxed in the Kuto anchorage one more day, visiting with Tricky and Jane some more, as well as meeting their friends Paul and Glor, who just bashed their way here from Australia on their brand new Fontaine Pajot catamaran. The weather stayed chilly, and clouds brought occasional showers. When we woke early Sunday morning after a night of rain, it did not look especially optimistic for our planned departure, but by golly we were underway by 0600 and by 0800 the skies had cleared and we were enjoying a fine fine reach north, bound for the Baie de Prony.

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25-29 September 2008 – Hunkered Down in Port Boisé

2008-10-04T20:11:00.000+10:00

The cruisers' world occasionally offers up little corners like Port Boisé where you can tuck away with little sight of civilization and stay indefinitely. In a bay already protected by reef, a dogleg to the northeast offers further protection. "Boisé means "wooded" in French, and the low hills embracing the bay are indeed thickly wooded. Above the ridge, however, poke stark mountains of red earth brushed with thin green groundcover that distinguishes at least this part of Grandterre's coastline. We cannot guess whether this is naturally so or the result of deforestation. The French reputedly have had a heavy hand in New Caledonia.

In Port Boisé there's a new-ish looking wharf of red stone and wood extending from a raw cut of red road emerging from the woods. There's also lighted nav aids and a power boat moored on the other side (which we finally figured out was a pilot boat positioned for ships transiting the Havana Passage), but otherwise there were no houses in sight. At the head of the dogleg a river empties fresh water into the cove turning the water murky, and visitors should beware of the abrupt shallows that fill the north part of the cove. For a spate of bad weather, Port Boisé was perfect.

By the time we woke from our post-passage nap, the first drizzle had started, so it was clearly perfect for a movie afternoon. After picking around through some unsatisfactory DVDs, we ended up watching "The Holiday," a limply-named but fun chick flick about two very different women - from LA and England -- who do a vacation house swap s a remedy for love lives gone sour. By the end of the movie the rain was steady and dark had fallen, but despite being twenty-six miles from Noumea the whole northwestern sky was lit with the lume of New Caledonia's big city.

It rained all night and pretty much all the next day. It has been a long time since we've had this kind of rain, and it was exactly what the boat needed since, after all the hard bashing to windward we've done this past month, Tackless II must have salt as high as the spreaders. We passed the day pretty much cocooned aboard, reading and writing, and going outside only to open up the deck fills to top off our water tanks once we were confident the decks had been well-rinsed. A third boat ducked into the anchorage to get out of the weather in the late afternoon, but our first awareness of it was when we heard the roar of its engine in reverse as it backed off that shoal behind us.

We woke the next morning to clouds, but neither rain nor wind. In a burst of energy we pumped up the kayaks and went for a paddle, exploring over the abruptly shallow shoals, along the shore to the little river. There'd been enough rain to feed several small cascades that made quite the babble as we paddled a short ways upriver as far the first rapids. This was a pretty spot, and it's a shame we couldn't get further. Instead we backtracked out and followed the shoreline around to the wharf, scaring up a pair of buff-colored herons of a sort we'd never seen before.

As we'd entered Port Boisé, we'd noticed a fancy-looking building poking up through the pines on the point that was either a very fancy private home or some sort of resort. So we beached the kayaks near the wharf and set out up the road into the woods to explore. As we reached the top of the rise, the woods thinned to low bush and the road intersected a paved lane. We took the turn to the right and walked about two kilometers following the sign to the Gite Kanua. This was a much fancier gite than Chief George's huts in Lifou, with a very fancy main restaurant building at the center. There were only four bungalows in view around the driveway, but we think there must be more down another lane. Evidently in the midst of some renovations, they were not quite open, even though a cluster of tables were set up, and in the French way, the people we spoke to were not very welcoming. Somewhat disappointed because we had thought we might splurge on a restaurant lunch, we got permission to walk down to their beach, but just as we reached it the rain returned, so we scampered back up the hill and persuaded them to sell us a beverage while we sat the shower out. Incredibly we made it all the way back to the boat dry and later enjoyed a lovely evening of wine and snacks with Jim and Paula aboard Avior. (We think we have a divided life! Jim and Paul have a house in Australia and a house they're building in Scotland!)

Although the next morning finally showed shreds of clear sky above us, the French forecast was calling for more "averses" (showers), so we stayed put doing various chores while Avior went exploring. This time it was their turn to get caught by the returning bands of rain that utterly whited out the visibility. We were very glad we hadn't second-guessed the forecast and set out for the Isle of Pines, some forty miles away through the southern lagoon.

The reward for our patience the next morning was a crystal clear sky and a glorious dawn. We and Avior were underway by 0530 to take advantage of the calm to motor southeast, a direction usually dead to windward. The coast of Grandterre was utterly gorgeous in this early light of sunrise, its bare red mountains, despite the greenery below, oddly suggestive of our favorite Sea of Cortez.

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24-25 september 2008 -- A record for T2

2008-09-28T19:59:00.000+10:00

We set a record yesterday. Not one, but two passages in 24 hours, and BOTH were good.

With weather forecasts hinting at winds backing into the east and north east -- a direction from which Baie Doking is exposed -- it seemed the prudent thing to move on. The plan was to sail west around the the big beak of a point of Lifou's north end, and then beat southward down the anchorage at the southern end of Baie of Sandal, where most of the boats went last week. about a thirty mile trip altogether. It was a rousing sail, downwind under genny alone to the point, and then a fast beat across baie Sandal.

But upon arrival, the wind was east enough to make the anchorage bouncy, and beauty wise it coudn't hold a candle to Baie Doking. Several of the boats there were planning a night passage down to Havana Pass (the entrance to New Caledonia proper's southern lagoon, so we download the latest weather and decided it was the right window. We'd had lunch, I'd gotten the last update posted and Don had had a snooze. What more did we need out of a stop?

So we upped anchor at 5pm, had a fabulous sail in 10-15 knots at 45 degrees off the bow, making 6-7+ knots well reefed. Biggest complaint is that with the cloud cover and no moon, it was really dark!, We entered Havana pass at 8am right at dead low water (our goal, as outgoing tide kicks up quite a sea against the wind), but even then it was lively enough with the wind and current opposed and waves crashing on the reefs. although this pass is super well lit and marked, I'm not sure I'd want to do it in the dark.

And now we are anchored with Jim and Paul of Avior (of the bicycle trip) in a lovely bay -- Port Boise, a few miles into New Caledonia's southern lagoon, to sit out the forecast rain and northeasterlies. Didn't want to mess about with reefs we couldn't see around lIe du Pins. This is a lovely spot. we may never leave!

Now it's lunch time and nap time! We deserve it!

19-24 September 2008 – Baie Doking, Lifou Island, Loyalties

2008-09-25T02:06:00.000+10:00

We left Ouvea early Friday morning in very light winds, perfect conditions for traveling southeast to Lifou. Evidently, everybody else thought so too, as we had to join a long parade out through the pass even though it was before sun-up. Fortunately, the crowd broke up into three main groups, those heading west to the mainland of Grandterre, those heading to Baie Doueoulou on the south shore of Lifou's Baie Sandal, and few tacking off to the north to Baie Doking on the north coast of Lifou.

We ended up in the latter group after some early indecision. What a good call. We enjoyed an absolutely lovely day of easy (motor) sailing, and the anchorage once we reached it was positively stunning. I won't say there wasn't a moment or two of uncertainty as we approached. Places often look forbidding or unattractive from a distance, and Doking's high cliffs, as the afternoon clouds rolled in, made it not a gentle looking place. Nor was it so easy to find a good spot to get the hook down, as the bay is laced with coral. But after five days, we'd have to say it will remain one of our more memorable spots.

The anchorage was tucked more or less into a corner of high cliffs (les falaises in French, a lovely word.) The cliffs were sculpted into great caves and stalagmites and topped by a village grove of the tall skinny pines we now see are going to be a signature sight in New Caledonia. The landing for the village, in a cove that was no more than a dimple in the cliff face, was really something. Perhaps there was once a dock, or a ladder, or something to make it easy to get ashore. Such is suggested by two last lingering, rusting bits of iron sticking out from the rock face. Whatever it was is no more, and the cement "path" just ends with a three foot drop to the water. This cement "path" is so steep that, having scrambled up from the dinghy, it is all you can do to ascend it the thirty or so feet to the bottom of the steps upright. About where the steps begin there is a big hoisting arm with cable that is positioned to hoist the villagers' tin boats out of the water. There were, in fact, two tinnies tucked to the side, but there was also a third crumpled into a crevasse. The afternoon we arrived, there were quite a few kids playing on the rocks, evidently drawn by the arrival of six yachts. However, during the rest of our stay, it was more likely to be day tourists and visitors to the Doking gite (guest house/campground) on the rocks than locals, and we even saw people swimming and snorkeling from there, although how they got out of the water again is anybody's guess.

We ascended the steps (I forgot to count how many) in several lengths (clearly built at different times by different hands) huffing and puffing to the top the afternoon after our arrival. Officially, appropriate behavior is to present yourself to the chief with a token gift and ask permission to stay and play. We found the chief's "case" ( pronounced 'cas") a massive traditional hut, quite different from the cases we'd seen in Ouvea, but failed to find the chief himself. But we did find a small store (totally unmarked) where we were able to buy fresh French bread, eggs, and other sundries. The proprietress, a older lady named Yvette, offered to bring in some salad, tomatoes and bananas for us the next day.

Which meant, of course, we had to climb back up there again the next day. This time, armed with some intelligence from the other cruisers, we did find the chief back in the compound of his gite/campground. This little 'resort" is perched right at the top of the cliffs and has the most awesome views. Chief George is a fairly young man, or at least one in better shape, than other chiefs we've met. He and his young wife and children live in a relatively westernized house, complete with satellite dish and a raft of toys and tricycles out back. The guest accommodations, however, are fairly traditional, with round huts of thick-walled thatch. To our surprise, the chief spoke fairly good English. Probably because he is such an entrepreneur. In addition to the guest houses, he has a small restaurant, rental cars and rental bicycles.

When our morning visit to Yvette produce tomatoes and bananas but no "salad," and since the weather was utterly cool and gorgeous, we decided on a whim to follow the example of some other cruisers and rent bicycles to pedal over to the larger town of Xepenehe (pronounced Chepenehe), said to be only six kilometers away. Note that "said to be." As you might guess, the chief's bikes, although evidently 27-speed models, were not in the best of repair. I never found more than three speeds on mine, and, as the ride wore on, one of Don's pedals popped off and his seat came loose, while my back wheel became progressively wobbly. It also was most assuredly NOT six kilometers.

But the ride itself, in the company of Jim (Aussie) and Paula (Scottish) of Avior was quite pleasant. The first stretch wove through a lovely forest, before breaking out into open grassland, passing two vanilla farms, before leading….eventually to an intersection giving us the choice of Easo to the right or Xepenehe to the left. By now we were all four of us sore and skeptical, and by the time we creaked into the village proper, things were shutting down for the midday siesta. We pulled into the market driveway with but five minutes to spare and tore through the shelves grabbing foodstuffs willy nilly. Our purchases in our hands and the door looked firmly behind us for TWO HOURS, we made our way down to the seaside park to eat the baguettes and cheese we'd bought. There we found two other cruisers, the Dutch couple Gert and Mies of Kiwi Blue, who were either in better shape or had better bicycles, because after they finished their baguette, they set cheerfully off to tour around for pleasure! The big disappointment, especially for Paula, was that the park was in the shadow of a huge boulangerie (bakery) that not only closed at 1130 like the store did, but wasn't going to open again until three! It was about this time that Paula found the mileage chart on her tourist map which declared the distance between Dokin and Xepenehe to be 17 kilometers, not 6!

We four decided to wait for the market to reopen to replenish all the items we'd scarfed down for lunch. In the meantime, Don managed to have a mash up on his bike when the seat gave an untimely wobble and caught his…er…well, you know…in a pinch. The result was a lovely scrape on his knee and a doozey bruise on his hip. We washed it out as best we could with drinking water (better than Coke Zero) and a major part of our second round of shopping was a package of band-aids. By the time we were done piecing the little band-aids over his scrapes (important to keep the flies off in this part of the world) his knee looked like a patchwork quilt. (Give those band-aids credit, they stayed on all the way home.)

All the way home…by the way, was seriously painful. Parts of my anatomy may never be the same.

The next couple of days passed in a lazy haze of recuperation. Air temps were quite chilly – in the mid 60s in the morning barely climbing to the 70s mid day, accentuated by plenty enough wind for a wind chill factor to come into play, and the water temp was a brisk 75. We did snorkel the gorgeous corals once, but we never pumped up the kayaks, even though we got them out. Instead we got a lot of reading, writing and recuperating done, and visited with our neighbors in the afternoons. Climbing the stairs once a day for bread was exercise enough.

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13-18 September 2008 – Ouvea

2008-09-18T19:48:00.000+10:00

Ouvea, the northernmost atoll in New Caledonia's Loyalty Islands is a gorgeous spot. Uplifted limestone creates a long thin frame of land on the atoll's east side, while two strands of small islets and reefs known as the Pleiades trail away to the west from the northern and southern tips to loosely enclose the lagoon. The ICA fleet is anchored off the southernmost island of the eastern strip, an island called Ile Mouli, along a curving white sand beach with bright turquoise water in the foreground and in the background a pretty red-roofed church poking up through a grove tall conical pines. It is surely one of the most beautiful, most inviting beaches we have seen in years, but, damn!... it's chilly! Brisk winds and temperatures in the low seventies make it sweatshirt and double-blanket weather for these two captains!

On Monday morning the sky dawned a clear blue, and the wind a more moderate 15 knots. Around us was a total of maybe fifty boats, including our fleet plus a group from the CNC Yacht Club in Noumea (who are officially hosting us). The officials of customs, immigration and quarantine flew in mid-morning, and the skippers assembled ashore to do paperwork under thatched palapas. It was the quarantine officials that had everyone shaking in their boots. New Caledonia has regulations against foreign fruit and vegetables, and even to a degree on meat and dairy. Evidently it is always suspenseful waiting to see what they will take away and what they will allow us to keep. Most of us had purchased Vanuatu beef (excellent and cheap) and paid for a special certificate of export that should pass muster with quarantine. But would it? Most of us also had a stash of vacuum-sealed New Zealand cheeses that we weren't entirely sure were legal. Plus, we were supposed to throw out all our fresh food –including garlic and onions -- twenty miles out, but inevitably there were things we forgot. Were we smugglers if we held on to that last head of garlic, a few onions, and that bit of broccoli?

All in all, things went pretty well. The quarantine officer who visited the boats by dinghy took a few things but left us stuff that would reasonably be eaten within the next few meals. Only fruit and vegetables were discussed. There was no mention of meat or cheese. Generally speaking I would say the whole anchorage heaved a hearty sigh of relief when all was said and done. We celebrated that evening with a potluck cocktail party on the beach where the closest things to vegetables were jars of salsa and olives.

The next day, the local village hosted all the cruisers to a midday feast. A huge buffet table was set with dozens of dishes under one of the beachside palapas (don't actually know what they are called here, but it's just a thatch canopy.) There were speeches and gifts by Gilbert, the leader of the CNC group, speeches and gifts by John, the ICA leader, and speeches of acceptance and welcome by the local chief. The gifts, for those curious, were several T-shirts, a bolt of fabric, and a wad of money from each group.

Many of the dishes had been baked in the earth ovens we have seen from the Marquesas, to Easter Island to Samoa, to Tonga, to Fiji, to Vanuatu. However, all those boring starches seemed to perk up here through the addition of some spice! Trust the French to bring flavor to the South Pacific's generally bland cuisine. In addition to the starches there was grilled fish, poisson cru, roast pig and roast goat, plus French bread and about five different slaws and salads. There was even dessert, canned fruit served in coconut crème with a stalk of sugar cane. Generally it was a pretty satisfying repast.

On Wednesday, most of the fleet mustered ashore at 9am for an island tour. Although the Loyalties are part of New Caledonia and therefore of France, the people here are the original indigenous people known as Kanaks. In the Loyalties, the Kanaks live a relatively "custom" lifestyle. Houses are the traditional round huts with tall conical roofs, and the chief's "grand case" is surrounded by a fence made of huge tree trunks. But the French presence is very obvious to outsiders in the paved roads and utility poles carrying electricity into the traditional homes.

Our tour got off to a late start when one of the busses due to transport our large group didn't show. The organizer, a young business woman named Melinda hustled up a few private vehicles to carry the balance (in one cast in plastic chairs in the back of a pickup), but we were running so late, -- especially after the drivers made the mistake of stopping at the local "supermarket" where the cruisers snarfed up snacks like we hadn't seen food in days -- that one of the major stops on the tour – the coconut oil and soap factory – was already closed, much to the disappointment of several of the cruisers. The next stop was the Blue Holes of Hanawa. The first hole was a light blue pool some 100-150' in diameter in the middle of the limestone several hundred feet in from the ocean. The hole was evidently connected to the sea as bread thrown onto its surface attracted some good sized fish. The next stop, another hole, was said to be a turtle sanctuary, but I'm not sure anyone actually saw any turtles. From there we drove to the north end of the island to a visit the handsome Catholic Church in St. Joseph. With its cool blue vaults, stations of the cross and stained glass windows, it made us nostalgic for Mexico (where my sister Jo is currently touring the lovely churches in the Puebla area.)

After the church we tried the soap factory again, but although the workers had promised Melinda to reopen after their lunch, there was no sign of them. So it was on to the vanilla plantation. This was an interesting endeavor by a family where a substantial number of vanilla vines are being trained up racks girdling the trunks of shade trees in a patch of forest. Of course, it is early spring as far as the vanilla plants are concerned so all we saw were the first flowers starting to open. Evidently the flowers here must be hand pollinated, painstaking work, because attempts to interest local bees in doing the job have so far failed. It takes eight months for the pollinated flower to produce a bean, and then the beans must be dried for three months. We were incredulous that so far at least the plantation does not ship any of their vanilla off island, but that tourists buy up most of their product. Keep in mind that most of Ouvea's tourists stay in homestay "gites" (clusters of homestay guest huts) and there is only one "resort"! (We later learned that Ouvea is visited several times a month by a cruise ship, which must help!.) The two ladies in charge of the plantation did have packets of vanilla beans to sell, small jars of ground vanilla, and a larger jar of "vanilla and coconut jam".

The most impressive site on our tour was "Les Falaises de Lekiny" or the Lekiny Cliffs. Where Mouli meets the main island via a small bridge, the lagoon pushes though into a shallow interior lagoon backed by a tall limestone cliffs pocked with caves, undercuts and stalagmites. It was a striking stretch of landscape for an otherwise flat, scrubby island.

To close out the day we stopped for some pictures from the Mouli Bridge and then ran down to the southern end of the island where we stood on the shore of the pass we had entered just days before by boat. I don't know. There was something ultimately ridiculous about sixty pale-skinned yachties disgorging from busses onto a tiny stretch of limestone beach. In fact, I suppose generally, it was an underwhelming tour. A long day in vans and busses running up and down paved roads bordered largely by bush. Melinda says the population of the atoll is around 3,000 (with another three thousand of her people living in Noumea), but there is not much sense of the inhabitants .

Actually, there was one other stop that told us rather more than anything else about Ouvea's Kanak residents. It was an elaborate memorial remembering 19 rebels who were killed by French paratroopers in 1988 after the rebels took some gendarmes hostage as part of a "muscular mobilization campaign" in the Kanak movement for independence. We are told there are several different versions of what happened that day, but clearly the French government was determined to nip in the bud any uprising. For us, it is a reminder that you can't take things on their superficial value. It is easy to think the Kanaks in the Loyalties have a good deal, with a certain degree of autonomy, social support from the French government for education, medical, and infrastructure services, and some kind of stipend that affords them cars and cell phones and imported foods. But I guess a good deal cannot entirely gloss over the fact that the Kanaks have for many decades been treated by the French as second class citizens in their own country.

Not sure exactly what our next plans in New Cal are. A few boats sailed out from Ouvea the evening after the tour. Some are leaving first thing Thursday. Others are talking about Friday. Some plan to sail to Noumea "over the top" of Grand Terre while others plan to head south via the other Loyalties and the famously beautiful Ile de Pins. I guess we'll know what we're doing when we've done it, but I suspect Don plans to spend tomorrow tinkering more on the engine!

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10-14 September 2008 – Taking the Rally to New Cal

2008-09-18T19:36:00.000+10:00

This leg of the ICA Rally has exemplified for us the plusses and minuses of traveling with a rally group. Although many of the participating boats have been with the rally on its complete circuit from New Zealand to Tonga to Fiji to Vanuatu, many more signed up for this leg only to take advantage of the special check-in the organizers had arranged to take place in Ouvea, the northernmost of New Caledonia's eastern string of islands known as the Loyalties. . Normally, full check-ins for New Caledonia are available only in Noumea, on the West side of Grand Terre, the main island. Although partial check-in can be done on Lifou Island in the Loyalties, boats then are expected to proceed on to Noumea within one week. This makes spending any time in the Loyalty Islands all but impossible. Because the ICA had arranged to bring the Noumea officials to us, participating boats would be able to take all the time they want to get to Noumea. The result was that the rally group swelled from the twenty coming from Fiji to thirty-five! Thirty five crews make for quite a crowd.

Pre-departure activities in Vanuatu were fairly well organized, particularly the duty-free fueling of so many boats, the customs and immigration formalities, and of course the parties. Right after the first "muster", we had a big group dinner at The Flaming Bull steakhouse. This teetered on the brink of disaster since it took all of three hours for everyone to get served. BUT, the evening was redeemed because every one of the dinners came exactly as ordered and were downright delicious. Two nights later, Tusker Beer, one of the rally's main sponsors, hosted a potluck barbecue at the Vanuatu Yacht Club, providing free beer, which with cruisers always sets the mood. It was a particularly nice evening, because people wore name tags and mingled, so we got to actually meet a lot people who previously had only been names on a list. And then, for the final checkout Friday morning, Tusker also arranged for the best patisserie in Port Vila to cater a variety of fresh French pastries along with divine expresso coffee. Not a bad way of doing things.

All these conveniences of a rally, however, are offset by the fact that a rally must keep a schedule, and THAT violates the cardinal rule of cruising. Our trip from Fiji to Tanna was a happy fluke in that the schedule matched a perfect weather window. The schedule for the short trip from Vila to Ouvea, however, did not.

A Not so Nice Passage

We left at four thirty Friday afternoon, setting sail into light winds and a nice sunset. The first twenty hours were idyllic enough: ten to fourteen knots just forward of the beam, almost no sea, and a moon near full. That's when the word "trough" that I'd heard on the weather report finally penetrated, as a recollection burbled up through my murky mind of a previous lovely full moon night passage in Venezuela that went wrong as a trough rolled over us. Well, sure enough, mid-afternoon on Saturday, things went to hell in a hand basket.

First the wind died away completely. So on comes Perky and we were motoring away in company with another boat in the rally, when -- burp -- the engine died and we were left making no way in no wind while the other boat walked away We were stunned by the engine quitting again, as we were quite sure we had found the root problem when we discovered that the fuel tank vent was blocked. Not only was it clear we hadn't found the whole problem, but it was the first time the engine had quit with any load on! The good news is, Don got it reprimed and restarted in record time, but the suspense of it quitting again weighed heavily on us.

Then, as we passed through the frontal boundary, the wind came in on us in a fury. From zero to 25+ in moments it seemed like, and the seas went from flat to short and steep. Yuck-OH! Fortunately, we'd had a heads-up on the wind, and had put in our second reef early and raised our trusty staysail. We went from a languid six knots boat speed down to barely three, thanks to the wind being hard on the nose and the seas knocking back any momentum The old girl was heeled way over and the seas regularly sluiced the whole boat. Thank goodness for our enclosure. How people in open boats do this is beyond us.

We got a third reef in the main before dark and braced ourselves for a long miserable night. There was a lot of talk -- aboard T2 and on the radio -- of heaving to. Apparently, the anemometers on the Kiwi boats are calibrated differently than ours as there also was a lot of talk about 30, 35, even 40 knot gusts. Ours never claimed more than 25-27, but perhaps it is ours that is out of calibration, because let me say simply...it was nasty.

Fortunately a few hours into it things eased just enough that the boat at least started making some way. It was not remotely fun or comfortable, but it was, as we say, doable. For one of the few times ever, my stomach was queasy, probably thanks to the salami sandwiches we'd had for lunch when things were calm. What was I thinking!? There was no interest in dinner, and we took turns sleeping on the leeward side of the cockpit. Along about four am, we sailed out of the rain and cloud into clear skies with stars and a fat old orange moon setting between a lingering cloud strip and the horizon. The wind still was honking a brisk 18-22, but we were between Ouvea and Lifou islands, so the seas were more reasonable and we were moving right a long. At sunrise we set a scrap of headsail and the boat speed jumped from 4.5 to 7+ knots. We turned in through Ouvea's Pass de Coetlogon at about 10am on the 14th , and had the anchor down off the Mouli beach by 10:45. It was time for a hot meal and a long nap.

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6-10 September 2008 – Port Vila

2008-09-18T19:15:00.000+10:00

We had a nice week or so in Port Vila before the hoopla for the ICA Rally to Ouvea got underway. With so many friends in the mooring field, life was rather social. We'd do lunches at Jill's American Café, were you can get a mighty fine cheeseburger, ice cream from Le Peche Mignon (also a fine bakery), happy hour at the Waterfront or at the Iriki Resort's fancy lounge, and gourmet dinners at a range of restaurants from Chinese to French. One lovely evening we spent with Tom and Bette Lee of Quantum Leap at the Waterfront Restaurant enjoying truly fine jazz by a local trio while rain drizzled off the thatch roof! It's no wonder cruisers spend so much time in Port Vila.

And that's not even talking about the shopping. Port Vila has four large supermarkets, the best of which is the Au Bonne Marche up the hill from the waterfront. Embedded in the store is a truly fine butcher selling Vanuatu's famous beef, descended from stock imported by finicky French colonizers. Not only is the selection of cuts quite varied, but the price is past reasonable to downright cheap. The market also has aisles of gourmet foodstuffs as well as products more appealing to Western tastes than we saw in Fiji: like a whole section of Old El Paso Mexican items, two or three sections of various sauce and flavoring packets, plus pasta, rice and couscous products, not to mention the canned and pickled choices. Plus, in the frozen section there are all sorts of goodies, including frozen vegetables that are not the ubiquitous peas and carrot mix that is ALL that is sold from Tonga to Fiji.

There is also quite a selection of duty free shopping. Not quite in the league of St. Thomas, but a few women found jewelry, men found cameras, and pretty much everyone stocked up on liquor.

We did have some boat work to attend to: the fuel issues mentioned in the previous update, theplugged galley water faucet, a new furling line for the genoa, some sewing repairs. Plus Don had a watermaker project on another boat, while, with decent internet, I was able to upload some photos to the website.

But mostly Port Vila was a consumptive interlude, which after the remoteness of the out islands and the narrow range of options in Fiji (Indian) was welcome to all.

19-23 August 2008 - Rom Festival on Ambrym

2008-09-09T12:39:00.001+10:00

I was dismayed when getting ashore to an Internet cafe in Port Vila to see that, for some reason, the post of our visit to Ambrym for the Rom Dance Festival did not appear. I will try to get it placed where it belongs, but I don't think Blogs work that way. At least it is getting posted within the Vanuatu sequence!.........

Thanks to the ruggedness of Ambrym’s terrain and the actions of its volcano, the villages here are said to have clung tighter to the “kastom” lifestyle as well as their mystical beliefs. In particular Ambrym is famous for its ROM dances, mysterious cult dances performed to appease spirits by male dancers wearing elaborate headdresses…(and little else!) In August, the village of Olal at Ambrym’s northeastern-most corner hosts a “Back to Your Roots” ROM dance festival for outsiders as a means of raising money for secondary education and as a way of keeping “kastom’ traditions alive.

Also thanks to the ruggedness of Ambrym, winds gust down the mountainous slope in “wind bullets” that thrust the boats in the anchorage this way and that, while rain showers keep them perpetually misted and lit by rainbows. By the start of the festival on August 20, thirty plus boats had assembled in the anchorage off Nebul village (S16*06’.5; E168*.07’.7), an area protected from the trades by the tip of the island and a curve of reef. Olal, however is several miles further north on the unprotected tip, so at 0830 Wednesday morning the cruisers gathered on the beach, dragging their dinghies above the tide line with the help of muscular villagers, and set out to walk the track in the drizzle. Fortunately for us, we were approached by one of the chiefs who shook our hands and suggested we take a guide, who happened to be one of the men who helped beach the dinghy. Micah, who stuck with us the entire three days of the festival, showed us the sights as we walked, carried one of our collapsible chairs when its sling broke, and steered us to short cuts saving us ten minutes on an otherwise hour-long walk.

The festival took place in a cleared glade in the woods fairly far from Olal village. The dance area was much smaller and more intimate than what we’d seen in Lapo, as well as wilder and more mystical as sun and mist alternately filtered through the trees. Around the edge was bamboo pole seating, and behind the “stage” blending into the trees was an array of slit drums and “tiki-like heads” known here on Ambrym as “atingting.” Through the trees one could just make out a staging area where the dancers prepared themselves while to the right was the nassara, a sacred and decorated building where the ROM members gather and women are tabu. There were also three “concession stands” – booths of palm fronds – in the woods behind the seating where Don was able to indulge in drinking coconuts and fried dough in three or four different forms over the course of the next three days – and some “outhouses” I never did check out.

If there was one thing that made this festival stand out from the others it was the tall and solid person of Chief Norbert (pronounced Nor-bear in the French way), principal of the Olal Secondary School and master of ceremonies for the performances. At the start of things that first day, and before every major presentation, Norbert calmly walked out before the audience, utterly at ease in his Kastom attire of penis wrap and little else, and clearly explained what we were going to see and why it was important in both English and French that we could hear and understand without a megaphone. More than an emcee, Norbert participated in every dance presented, and he did so with more gusto than any of the others. In fact that would be the second thing that really distinguished this festival, the fact that most of the dancers seemed to be having a helluva good time.

The main dance of the first day was a grade-taking ceremony for a chief. What made it unusual was that the area’s high chief, Chief Sekor was repeating the first level grade – that of the sacred fire. Although Chief Sekor is actually a grade seven chief, he had lost respect by violating the tabu of grade one – sharing food. Apparently all these chiefs after grade one must prepare their own food on a separate fire and eat separately from anyone else, including their own families! So, Chief Sekor was repeating the ceremony to get his full status back.

How to describe for you the dances we saw, let alone any one dance?! Well this first dance was distinguished by only being danced by chiefs. There were probably a dozen of them of a wide range in age, all in kastom dress of namba (the penis wrap of woven leaves in perpetual erection) attached to a woven belt, with the rooster tail of leaves firmly attached to the backside above their buttocks. Some wore the coveted boar teeth necklaces and some carried impressive staffs and some had smears of red paint on their faces. The two main elements of all the dances were harmonic chanting by the men, usually in response to a solo lead, and vigorous stamping of bare feet, in various cadences, that vibrated through the ground. Some of the dances danced to the beat of the large slit drums, some to a smaller portable slit drum, and some to no drum at all. Most of the dances are danced with the men in a tight circle, almost a huddle, so that the audience is presented with an array of backsides. Odd at first, it is a powerful statement of communal strength (and bare butts are pretty fascinating given the time and opportunity to study them!). At one point in the doings,
Chief Sekor climbed to a platform some twenty feet up and the dancers took turns throwing coconuts to dislodge him, mostly symbolic, choreographed lobs, but one did catch him on the thigh. And in the end, he did have to kill a pig for the ritual sacrifice to seal the deal. This time it was a little porker…I guess because he was repeating first grade!

The second dance of the day was a woman’s dance. Here the ladies were in full grass skirts and naught else but perhaps a thin garland of leaves around their upper body. Sadly for the men in the audience, these were still not the young and shapely maidens of South Pacific fantasies, but at least they all seemed more at ease with their shift from western dress than the women in Lembinwen did. The women also dance to their own chants, but instead of stamping, their step is a skating slide of bare feet on the dirt that makes a sort of swishing sound, and most leaned on a slim staff, for an effect rather like dancing with a swaying broomstick.

The second day’s main dance was a dance from the yam harvest. A young man, who doesn’t sleep for two days and who gets a special hairdo, wears an awkward pyramid of a headdress symbolizing the yam. (Incidentally, the yam is a pretty major food crop in these parts, and according to Micah the name Ambrym comes from Capt. James Cook’s arrival when he was presented with the traditional welcoming gift of a yam, and the word “ambrym,” which in the local language means “for you.” Nice, don’t you think?) This dance was performed with the dancers facing the audience, and several dancers did solo turns impersonating various creatures like prawns or birds.

After the Yam Dance, one of the chiefs, a man who truly personifies dignity, performed for us on the bamboo flute. WE subsequently bought one of these, and I can barely get out one tone!

The other main event of day two was a meal prepared by all the dancers. The women repaired to one side and lit a fire to cook cassava and make something with greens and coconut milk, while the men lit their own fire on the other side of the grounds and roasted breadfruits in the flames, which they then peeled and then, on great wooden boards, kneaded with a coconut rolling pin until the cooked breadfruit flesh transformed into a soft puffy dough the size of a double giant pizza.
Then they scored the dough into bite-sized diamonds and drizzled it with hot coconut cream, also, of course, produced by hand. The result was surprisingly light and tasty, and most of us went back for seconds and thirds. The women were still peeling the cassavas when Micah spirited us out for an early look at some carvings being offered for sale, so we didn’t get to sample whatever it was they were making.

The carvings were being set up for purview down in the Olal Yacht Club (yes, they have one too.!) The Olal Yacht Club is on a bluff overlooking Selwyn Straight, the channel between the north tip of Ambrym and Pentecost Island. There is tiny “anchorage” down below, but it’s not one you would ever want to put the hook of a cruising sailboat down in. The reinforced tradewinds had rolled in since our arrival two days before, and the straight and anchorage were a mass of whitecaps and spindrift. No wonder we were walking three miles each way!

The carvings on display were fascinating. Each day of the festival there were more and more as locals caught on there were buyers afoot. Note, it wasn’t just cruisers attending the festival. Some intrepid tourists (including a camera team from French television) had flown into the airport at Craig’s Cove, transferred here by fast boat, and were staying in the village. Unfortunately, other than knowing that Ambrym carvers are renowned in Vanuatu and that most every figure on display was a reproduction of some traditional artifact, we didn’t have a clue what we were looking at. Also, unfortunately, we didn’t have enough cash to buy much of anything. Too late, after the end of the festival, Chief Norbert passed out a museum quality booklet prepared for an exhibit of North Ambrym ritual art just finishing at a gallery in Sydney that pretty well explained everything (including what a ROM dance is!—Chiefs Norbert, Sekor and the whole dance troupe actually were brought to Sydney to perform for the opening last month! That must have been an eye-opener!). (The booklet shows that the gallery has a web address that might have an online version for those of you who are curious…it is www.annandalegalleries.com.au )

So what is a Rom dance? Although we were all there to see it, I suspect very few of us had a clue. According to the museum booklet, Rom is one of three “secret societies” that controls and manages Ambrym’s mystical kastom culture. Of the three – Mange, Temar and Rom – Rom is the most open, with some of its dances occasionally presented for outsiders like us. I quote from the Annandale Gallery booklet:

Adult Rom masks are always danced by men who are invisible beneath floor-length banana leaf costumes as they represent powerful spirits rather than living men. There are many different types of Rom mask and each man who wishes to dance one must pay for the privilege of making it and wearing it. … The typical Rom mask has a sharp, angular face with a prominent lower jaw that juts out of a cone-shaped fiber-covered head dress at an angle of 45 degrees. The complexities of different grade rankings are communicated by variations in the patterns and colors with which the faces are painted and by the design of the ridge running up the center of the mask.

Our Rom dance began “off stage” 100 meters down a path leading to the nasara. Chiefs Sekor and Norbert and the troupe of uncostumed dancers began the chant in a very tight pack surrounded by eight spirit figures.
It took them quite a while to reach the dance ground proper, and unfortunately this led to the audience filing from their seats with their cameras and blocking the view for everybody else, which, also unfortunately, let to temper flare-ups and a lot of pissed off people. Of course, the dancers did finally arrive, and we all saw plenty of them as the spirits swished back and forth in various patterns each carrying an unusual woven staff/rattle that leant them a two toned mystical sound, while the singers chanted and stamped indefatigably.

This obviously is not the dance of a professional ballet, Broadway or even folk-dancing troupe, but the chants and the stamps get in you head, hypnotically melding you into a scene you couldn’t even have imagined before you came. The bludgeoning of the pigs – yes, another one, sending several youngsters into tears – is no westerner’s favorite part, but we are here to see their traditions; it’s not that they are not putting a show on for us.

After the Rom dance came a short magic session. They only did three “tricks” because they have their own magic festival at a separate time. I was imagining something a little more witchcraft-y, but the three tricks were actually rather agricultural. For me, the best was the first, where two men planted the top of a taro root with its attached cluster of leaves, poured some spirit water on it from a coconut shell and unearthed a full grown tuber! Hmmm. The second trick was a similar one with a yam, starting with a vine, and the last one was a water trick where they poured water into one length of bamboo and poured it out of another!

Chief Norbert – aka headmaster Norbert – closed the festival by explaining that the monies earned from the (fairly stiff) festival entry fee goes into a fund for education of the area’s kids, mostly funding students to secondary school.

The show ended with a public dance, where everyone was invited to get up and join the dancers – stamping or swishing as our gender dictated. Don was exempt with a sore foot, but I did my best to swish with the ladies, although Don says I was seriously overdressed.

Afterwards, Chiefs Norbert and Sekor hosted the cruisers to a feast at the yacht club. We had roast pig (most likely the porker from the first day) and two table loads of chicken, yam, cassava, salad, green beans, rice, fruit salad and the like. We all lolled on the lawn overlooking Selwyn straight and gobbled to get out platefuls down between showers.

The furiously strong winds stirring up the waters out in the open finally began to subside yesterday in time for boats to raise anchor and sail away. We said “Fair Winds” to Procyon, who took off for a night passage back to Port Vila and onward to New Caledonia. On Tackless II, we took Saturday to unwind, to snorkel the surrounding reefs, and, of course, to catch up on this log. Tomorrow, we head further north.

6 September 2008 – Laboring our Way to Efate

2008-09-07T01:41:00.000+10:00

We left Banam Bay at 0630 in the benign glow of a gorgeous sunrise and empty blue sky. This bears mention because Malakula Island, downwind from volcanic Ambrym and all the particulate matter it dumps into the air, is inclined toward cloudiness. It seemed like an auspicious sign, and our first winds were decent, bringing a smooth ride, if close hauled.

But there was no getting away from the fact that our desired course line to Epi – southeast through the strait between Ambrym and Malakula – was dead into the wind, and all the wonders of the boatyard refit has not changed the fact that our beloved condo Tackless II is not a windward performer. So we were doomed to motorsail, but even motorsailing, thanks to tidal current, was problematic. During the hours the wind was with the tide, the ride was smooth, but headway was minimal. When the tide was with us, it was against the wind, so the short steep seas repeatedly knocked the snot out of momentum gained. We only had 25 miles to make to our planned staging anchorage on Epi Island, but for a while it was not looking good for getting there by dark. However, we eventually clawed our way far enough out of the straight that the boat began to sail more freely, and not only did we eventually tack our way over to Epi Island, but we did so with enough time to carry on past Lamen Bay (which was packed with boats) to a further anchorage.

Revolieu Bay is a pocket of water tucked behind a bracket of reef and fed by a dark river disgorging through black sand, and as we tacked in it was being misted by late afternoon showers and rainbows. Only two boats were there, and we knew both of them. No sooner was our hook down than Russ of Wandering Star, the boat we'd seen in Banam Bay, picked us up for a nice reunion cup of tea aboard La Boheme. With only an hour to sunset, it was a short reunion as all three boats planned to depart at or before first light for Efate.

Havana Harbor on the north side of Efate lay just sixty miles away on a bearing of 189 degrees, just west of due south. With easterlies, it would have been a grand sail, but full blown easterlies weren't in the forecast for four more days, by which time we'd be overdue for Vanuatu's 30-day immigration check-in. So we motorsailed again, but this time the wind, blowing 15-20, was thirty degrees off the bow instead of on the nose, so we had a lively ride albeit with plenty of water over the bows. As we neared our waypoint, the wind backed enough for us to shut down and sail the last hours in.

Havana Harbor is a huge bay framed by two small islands off Efate's north coast. It is reminiscent of Gorda Sound in the BVI, and during WWII it was a base for the US Navy. We anchored on its southern shore along with a clump of day charter boats and had a quiet night. In the morning, we raised sail and enjoyed an hour of idyllic sailing in twenty knots on Havana Harbor's protected waters, before popping out to bash around Efate's notorious Devil's Point.

On a better day, the huge bay that takes a bite out of Efate's southwest corner is probably a place for pleasant days sails, but for us it was a long hard motorsail to weather to get up to the smaller bay within the bay where perches Port Vila. We had heard so much about Port Vila as an oasis of civilization both before coming to Vanuatu and from all the boats that have already passed through that we pictured some sort of Shangri-la. As we passed through the outer buoys we passed a freighter at anchor on our left while off to the right was P&O cruise ship on the commercial wharf. Ahead to the left was the outer anchorage backed by the downtown area of Vila, while on the right, the small island of upscale Iriki Resort hid the inner mooring field. We followed the approach range almost to shore before turning right into the mooring basin. Along the shore was the sea wall with boats moored stern to, but, beyond, a field of some fifty or sixty densely-packed moorings wrapped around the backside of Iriki.

We had called for a mooring from Yachting World only to discover we'd arrived on election day and most everything was closed. Wandering Star, who'd been here several times before, opted to drop a hook in the outer anchorage, but our friends on Procyon hailed us and directed us to a mooring just vacated. There is nothing like entering a packed harbor area to make you realize how many boats you know. What was most peculiar is that it felt not just like Fiji transplanted, but Vuda Boatyard transplanted! There was Flight on the seawall and the big schooner Mundaca. The steel Kiwi boat Heartbeat, which had still been on the hard when we launched and left, was right there swinging at anchor, and Freedom Hunter, who shared bottom paint with us, was on mooring number one. Further on were several of our Musket Cove buds, including Procyon, Wind Pony, and Quantum Leap. And just to cap off the sense of déjà vu, a boat called Esprit, hearing us on the radio, called to ask if we were the same Tackless II that left Puerto Vallarta in 2004. The cruising world is a small one!

Port Vila has proved to be the sweet little oasis of civilization everyone says it is. It is a nice mix of islanders, ex-pats, tourists and cruisers. The downtown market is full of lovely vegetables with a French influence, and the supermarkets…well, La Bonne Marche is a cruising cook's wet dream. The main street is quite the mix of restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops, duty free stores, real estate agents and tour agents, and there's a steady stream of traffic, including mini-vans running as short stop busses…all driving on the right! France obviously won that battle!

And yet most of the people we have met are speaking English. Bislama, the official patois of the island chain, is more evident in posters and billboards, but it is close enough to English that you can slide by. The only French I've been called upon to speak was at the French consulate, and that was more because I wanted to practice.

Our main objective in getting back to Vila – besides cold beer and restaurant food – was to get our visas for Australia lined up. In the end, we did not go for the full bore one year visa because we might have been required us to get a lung x-ray for tuberculosis which was said to take weeks. Instead we went for the one year, multiple entry ETA (electronic travel authority) visa available on line. Since we anticipate flying out within three months (of a mid-November arrival), either to the States or to New Zealand, it answered all our needs. It also left us enough time us to apply for visas from the French consulate for New Caledonia. As US citizens we won't get the unlimited access to New Cal our EU and Kiwi buddies will get. Going into the Loyalties with the ICA rally will get us a full check-in, but we still would have been expected to get to the capital Noumea within one month. Having the visas will let us take up to three months to dawdle our way there, much as having the visas before arriving in the Marquesas gave us a full three months to dawdle our way to Papeete.

With the bureaucratic stuff out of the way, we now have to concentrate on the boat. We need to replace our main halyard and our furling line, for both of which we have spares, and Don is currently on the floor in the engine room replacing the fuel line from the tank to the engine, the culprit, we believe in the Perkins quitting a second time on us this morning. He is also being kept busy with watermaker calls, and we have sold off a lot of the Spectra parts we have been carrying. I also fear there are a few jobs for me with the sewing kit….

Events for the ICA Rally are scheduled to get going next Tuesday. There will be muster, and a briefing, a golf scramble and an excursion to a local watrfall. We'll have checkout and post check-out duty free topping up of liquids – diesel and alcohol! Departure for New Caledonia is targeted for Saturday the 13th.

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30 August 2008 – Banan Bay, Malekula

2008-09-06T19:46:00.000+10:00

As predicted, by turning back south, we have started paying the piper for all that grand beam-reach sailing we've been enjoying. That said, Tackless II continues to impress us with her performance even in these less than ideal conditions -- too much wind, choppy seas and close hauled...never our favorite point of sail.

However, our reward was pulling into Banan Bay anchorage on the east coast of Malekula (S16*20'.404; E167*45'.293). These places never look like what you picture from the sketch maps in the guide books, and I guess I never looked at the pictures in the Tusker electronic guide for this one, but it is a big round anchorage with wooded shoreline, great protection, and little sign of any villages except plumes of smoke. There was one boat in the anchorage when we pulled in, who turned out to be old friends from several years ago of whom we'd totally lost track. But bless their hearts, they pushed out of here at 5am this morning to bash further south leaving us to wake ALL BY OURSELVES! This is a first for us this year. And depending on the weather forecast I download, we may not mar it by launching the dinghy. The villages in Vanuatu have been wonderful experiences, but it's great to indulge in the feeling that we are all alone!

There is a record high pressure system (1049mb) crossing New Zealand to the south which is generating steady 20knots winds here, doggedly out of the southeast, when what we need are light winds or none from the northeast to enable us to get back easily to Port Vila. Not likely to happen, but, the wind is supposed to ease up a smidge tomorrow, so we will probably take what little we can get and bash onward.

In the meantime we are passing the day contentedly on Tackless II without launching the dinghy or exploring ashore. Every time we make this decision I feel guilty, because every place we stop has interesting stuff to see and people to meet, and we will not likely ever get back to any of them in this lifetime.

But there is only so much you can do right, especially when you have a schedule. If I haven't said it outright, you have surely deduced by reading between the lines, that we are not much liking having the ICA rally schedule over our heads. This is not really the rally's fault, but our own for being so late in the season. We owe the rally a lot for getting us out of Fiji relatively painlessly when our own motivation was about gone. And I believe we will be grateful for the same facilitating the rally will enable in the jump from Vanuatu to New Caledonia's out-of-the-way Loyalty Islands as the year fast counts down to cyclone season. We wouldn't want to miss New Cal in a late season rush to Australia, so it's either a little of each or all and none. The majority of the rally participants are New Zealanders doing their annual seasonal cycle – NZ to Tonga to Fiji to Vanuatu to New Cal and then back to NZ again– so they conceivably can do it over and over again. It's a cycle we could jump on if we had the gumption.

Since we probably don't have that gumption, I am sitting here in Banan Bay reflecting on the things I am not going to get to see in Vanuatu. We are not going to get to Espirito Santo, the island where the US Military was based during World War II. James Michener (along with John F. Kennedy) was based there during the war, and it served as the foundation of his famous Tales of the South Pacific, which, of course, led to the musical and film South Pacific. South Pacific was one of the first movies I ever remember seeing, even before Disney…although, in fact I may not actually have seen it, and just imprinted on the songs that my sister Cecily would have brought home. I remember her singing with me for hours, "Ditez-moi, pourquoi, la vie est belle; ditez-moi, pourquoi, la vie est gaie, ditez-moi, pourquoi, chere mademoiselle? Est-ce-que, parce-que, vous m'aimez?!" (With that kind of start, no wonder I've had a knack for French!)

Actually, the song that has been playing on instant replay in my mind since arriving in Tanna is the one about "coconut palms and banyan trees and coral sands and TONKinese." Between the two of them, I really did expect to see sweeping French plantations on the hillsides and Bali Hai on the horizon. There are certainly still sweeping stands of copra plantations, but I don't know if there are still some that are French-owned or how many of those owners continue to live here in colonial elegance. Maybe I'll find out in Port Vila. But we didn't get to Espirito Santo, and I probably would have been disappointed anyway as Dave and Chrissie report there is little left of the military base left at Luganville. And as for Bali Hai, Lonely Planet says Ambae, the island that was on our Asanvari horizon, is the one that inspired Michener. We didn't get to Ambae either.

And speaking of reflections, I have been reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel, very interesting material for a cruise through this land of dugout outriggers, subsistence gardening, chiefdoms and secretive custom religions all in a balancing act with cellular towers and DVDs, western religion, a bi-partisan colonial heritage (Vanuatu was ruled under a condominium government from 1906-1980 shared by the historically prickly governments of England and France!), and now thirty years of independence during which at least they have not been taken over by resort chains.

By this point in the Pacific, cruisers are frequently pondering about what it is we have learned from our travels, debating over whether places like Vanuatu should get outside help to get up to speed with the rest of the world or whether they should be entirely left alone. No easy answer as they are struggling with the question themselves. It's not so hard to foresee a time when the world will be without this diversity, where we will be largely homogenized into one global state. I'm glad that time is not quite yet here.

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26 August 2008 – Asanvari

2008-08-30T23:53:00.000+10:00

Not all the villages in Vanuatu may be as friendly as the ones we have been lucky to visit, but for sure Ansanvari, which may have been in the "Friendly to Yachties" business longer than most, has it down pat. The yacht club is by far the nicest we have seen (Port Resolution's on Tanna comes a close second.) Built with foreign aid from Australia and (I think) New Zealand, it is a spacious building, (maybe 30'x50', Don guesses) with cement floors, open air above a hip-high balustrade, and the beautiful local "thatch' roof. There is an attached office and a western-style kitchen space, plus tables and a stack of green plastic chairs. (What did the world do before plastic chairs!) The rafters are hung with cruiser banners and flags memorializing those who have passed through before, and we added our names to this year's ICA banner.

Among those flags was an SSCA burgee documenting the multiple visits by sv Cormorant. We met Harry and Jane of Cormorant way back in Trinidad, where we discovered Jane and I had Dana Hall School in common – me as a student and she (subsequently) as an administrator. After their first visit to Asanvari, Harry and Jane had returned from New Zealand with the equipment to build a miniature hydroelectric plant to provide the village with electricity. It sounds like such a simple thing on paper, a generator to provide electricity where there is none, but Asanvari is a long, long, long way from the "grid." It is a long way even from any easy source of fuel to run a standard generator. To devise a way to provide electricity from natural sources is quite simply, way cool! (For more information on the story of building this generator, SSCA members can search through back issues of the SSCA Bulletin online at www.ssca.org.) It was because of Harry and Jane's efforts here that Asanvari was high on our list of places not to miss.

The yacht club is presided over by Chief Nelson and his son Nixon. Nixon, particularly, speaks great English, having worked as a dive guide out of Luganville. They go out of their way to make yachties feel welcome at Asanavari, and obviously this has worked well for the village.

First thing in the morning, Nixon is liable to come paddling up to your boat with freshly-baked bread. Later in the morning, they may pass the word over the radio about activities that could happen, and in the afternoon they may organize the local ladies to bring in popular items of fruit and veg from village gardens, which we may then purchase by leaving the requested sale price in a pile of coins wherever the item had been sitting!

Although kastom dance is usually a popular thing, Nelson and Nixon picked up quickly on the fact that most of us had been to one or the other kastom dance festival recently if not both. However there was a local wedding planned for our first day that many of the cruisers decided to go to. Local, of course, is a relative term. Asanvari is on the beach, and the wedding turned out to be in a village up on the ridge about a half hour's walk away. In the company of Dave and Chrissie of Runaway Bay, who'd come sailing in from the north the night before, we went along for the "walk", which took a bit longer than advertised and included at stiff climb up a narrow path, something the ladies who'd dressed nicely for the wedding surely hadn't anticipated.
Many of the Vanutau footpaths are the width of bare feet making for challenging footing for gringo walker shod in Tevas or Crocs (the most popular cruiser footwear).

It is amazing these villages that exist sprinkled away in the forests of the mountainside. It makes you realize how little of the country we see, sticking, as we do, to communities right on the coast. On Malekula, and probably on most islands, there are still really, really traditional clans living largely out of touch with the modern world back in the deep folds of the mountains. But an amusing sidelight of our walk was crossing paths with one of Maewo's candidates for parliament hoofing it by footpath the length of his district trying to drum up votes for the upcoming September elections. Later, we asked Nelson and Nixon about the political side of Ni-Vanuatu (Ni-Vanuatu is what the people call themselves) life. It appears to be a completely separate power structure than the chief systems that rule the villages themselves (they say even the prime minister is subject to his chief when in his home village!). Pentecost, we were told has four representatives while Maewo, with a smaller population currently only has one, although due soon to be entitled to a second as their population crests 5,000. (Maewo Island, by the way, is a slightly smaller twin sister to string-bean, mountainous Pentecost to the south.) There are at least four parties fielding candidates, and the fellow we met was not the incumbent, whom Chief Nelson anticipated regaining his seat. A parliament in Port Vila sure seems a long, long way from village life, so I asked how they keep track of what is going on, and he said, "By radio."

At our turnaround point – the village hosting the wedding – we also met the bride-to-be, a nice-looking young woman with a pudgy one-year-old on her hip. Her story is also an interesting vignette of Ni-Vanuatu life. While at school to become a nurse in Port Vila, she hooked up with a fellow student and went home with him to live in Tanna. According to Chief Nelson, her parents back in Maewo had no idea what had become of her! Marriage is a big step here. A groom may have to pay a bride price of up to $100,000 vatu (about $1,000…or the equivalent value in pigs!) He may also have to compensate his future mother-in-law for the loss of a worker as usually the groom takes his bride back to his village. In the old days, and perhaps still, there were elaborate understandings of obligation between the joining families, including that a groom's younger sister might be pledged to the bride's brother and so forth, and sometime this connection might span several generations. On the other hand, most people I asked about this did say that most relationships nowadays start with a mutual attraction at school or church. Evidently, this couple was making things official by coming home to Maewo for the wedding. Another curious tidbit Chrissie picked up is that the couple recently moved to a village in the hills to get away from the dangerous ocean "where children are frequently lost." Perhaps that is just her view, having grown up on the mountain herself!

We did not stay for the wedding itself, which turned out to be the first of a couple of good non-decisions we made while in Asanvari. The second was not going on a trip to "The Bat Cave." I know it's hard to imagine that an American would want to miss out on this, but Don had a sore on his foot that he was nursing, and another hike – advertised at two hours – did not sound like a smart move for it. Right decision. The Bat Cave turned out to take about six hours round trip with much bushwacking by machete and plenty of mosquitoes, and Nick and Bonnie of Rise 'N Shine reported back that there were times, scaling cliffs by means of vines and roots, when they "feared for their lives"! Bonnie did confess that at one point where she was in mortal dread, she looked over the precipice to find an aged grandmother "commuting" to her regular garden. So I guess it is a matter of perspective!

Better, more active decisions we made were the swim in the waterfall (after checking out the generator set-up), the snorkel on Asanvari's recommended reef, and the big group dinner at the yacht club.
The waterfall comes right down to the shore, so it was an easy scramble to get a fresh water plunge after our hot "walk." David and Chrissie were even smart enough to bring soap. Good thing I was last, because ---ooops ----who remembers that soap doesn't float!?! Hey, I'm a child of the Ivory generation, and besides, when is the last time I had a bath!

For the salt water plunge, Don and I dinghied over to the "huge coral head" – really more of a butte that rises from the deep at the south corner of the anchorage. The visibility was impressive, and although the only corals were small ones on the butte's flat top, there were lots of fish in a variety of sizes. Even though Don no longer has his speargun (and I don't think it would have been permitted anyway), he still prefers to snorkel with fish worth shooting if he did have one. Here, we saw at least five huge groupers, as well as the even bigger Napoleon wrasse as well as sizeable parrotfish and a whole slew of various schooling fish. We circled the butte twice and then swam across to the fringing reef and made our way in toward the village where to our surprise there was actually quite a bit of coral and still plenty of fish. Don went back for the dinghy and I continued on in a snorkel swim all the way back to the boat. As you might guess, the side of the anchorage where the waterfall comes down is pretty much devoid of coral or fish. But I could still see our anchor perfectly set in the sand 60 feet down!

We had read (and heard) that Asanvari was a good place for a group dinner ashore. By our third day there the anchorage had collected over a dozen boats, but thanks to the intestinal bug that had troubled at least half the fleet, momentum for a dinner was slow to grow. It took a NZ boat coming up from Vila with guests to get the ball rolling, but when it turned into a 75th birthday party for Rod of Sah-le-ah, everybody joined in. Nixon and his family put on a fabulous feast of roast pig, fresh-water prawns in noodles, green papaya curry, kumala (a white sweet potato), rice, stir-fried green vegetable (green peppers, I think). Don was very worried that when the number jumped by about ten at the last minute, that we were going to get short-changed (although for the equivalent of $9.50, how much could you complain?), but in fact Nixon had planned ahead and there was plenty for all 35 cruisers. After dinner there was kava and birthday desserts brought in by cruisers, plus there were not one but two string bands that alternated through dinner, and after dinner pretty much everybody – local ladies included – took to the dance floor. We may have scandalized the place by touch dancing (a little swing stuff), but soon most of the cruisers were doing the whirl and twirl thing and in the end there was the inevitable conga line. The band kept announcing a last song, as they had to walk home to their village in the dark, but they just couldn't help themselves and kept playing and singing until well after cruisers' bedtime. It's truly amazing what energy electric light can bring out.

Perhaps it was one of our less wise decisions to plan an early morning departure after a late party night, but groggy and heavy-bellied as we were, by first light we none-the-less tucked a few reefs in the sail, put our heads down and started the required bash back south.

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080825- Moving North

2008-08-26T18:46:00.000+10:00

(Please note that the update on the Rom Dance Festival on Ambrym Island which should appear here for some reason did not get posted. Please look for it out of sequence above in early September.)

Had a grand sail nineteen miles north to Waterfall Bay, Pentecost, (S15*47'.57; E168*09'.14) although we arrived too late to launch the dinghy and go into the waterfall like the other yachties. That's because the old Perkins shut down as we were lifting the dinghy aboard at Abmrym. Just stopped! Don and and two other guys from boats still there kibbitzed over it for about four hours. Evidently, the problem was air getting in through some connection or other as Don tightened a few from the tank onward, but it takes so long to bleed and restart a Perkins so it was hard to know wht actually fixed things. Finally got it, and the wx was so fine, that after letting the engine prove itself for 40 minutes, we upped anchor and and sailed off anyway.

Penetecost is a long string bean of an island with steep mountains thrusting up into clouds. The lower flanks of the island are heavily clad in coconut plantations, and there are a whole bunch of anchorages along the western coast, most with villages but some without. Waterfall Bay is really not a bay, just a dimple in the coastline situated between two villages. We could see the cascade from the waterfall as we turned in, but by the time we got to anchoring depth it was lost behind some trees. Although the cruising guides recommend this as a day anchorage only, we had a very settled night with just a little bounce. The oddest thing about it was the bright electric flood lights with which the village of Melsisi to the north was lit up and the trucks headlights (at least two) that traveled back and forth along a coastal road. We haven't see electricity in a long time!

The boat may have have a fairly settled night, but I didn't. Around about midnight I woke abruptly with a miserable intestinal bug. I mention this only because I am relieved, after stressing over what of my own cooking might have caused it, to find that David on Runaway Bay had it on the otherside of the island chain. So there is something going around. So I didn't enjoy the 25-mile sail north to Asanvari as much as I would have otherwise, being sleep deprived and having to....commute below... shall we say.

Asanvari (S15*22'.874; E168*07'.42) is a much touted anchorage as one of the most beautiful and friendly in Vanuatu. It was the destination of the other, larger group of ICA Rally boats that left with us from Fiji. Friends of ours from Trinidad had stopped here several years ago and constructed a hydroelectic generator in the waterfall that tumbles into the bay, so it was high on our list of places to visit. Turning in, it didn't look all that enticing, but once in, it is actually a rather well protected bay with steep forested hills wrapping around. The fat semi-volcanic island of Ambae, that straddles the V of sea between Vanuatu's two strands of islands, fills up a good bit of the horizon westward, and we can hear, although not see, Asanvari's waterfall. (Turns out we could have seen it if we'd anchored closer to the village.) Since I was lying low yesterday, we haven't been ashore yet, but rumors are that Chief Nelson is already planning something to celebrate the new big group of boats arriving. Good thing I am feeling better today!

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