10 kg Bag

On the flight from Hao to Tahiti I am allowed a 10 kg bag. There is a whole brochure explaining why; fuel is expensive, runways are short, Tahitians tend to weigh a lot...  Any luggage over 10 kg is charged, a lot, per kg. I don’t know what my hockey bag of stuff weighs but I think it is probably at least a gazillion kg.

I decide that I am willing to pay for 10 maybe 15 kg of overweight luggage but not more.

Noeline allows me to use the conference room in the town hall to sort my stuff out and I spend several hours doing so. I go through everything very thoroughly. I decide to keep things which are expensive, light weight, and precious and toss everything cheap, heavy, and of no sentimental value.

Unfortunately I have several big things I cannot bear to leave behind; the hockey bag itself is my husband’s, and my foul weather gear, large and bulky as a snowsuit, partly borrowed from my mother, then there is my 1-person tent, of course, and my hiking boots, I have my laptop, my phone, two cameras, and my kindle, which is, though small, hefty, and, of course, all the cables to go with each of them… After that, though it is not easy, I am ruthless; I keep my toothbrush but not my toothpaste, I keep my mask and snorkel but not my flippers or wetsuit, I keep my two pairs of purple undies but toss both my black ones and my white ones, I throw out most of my clothes, and toiletries, and my towel, all but one of the rocks I have collected along the way, my sketch book and pencils, many ziplock bags, even the good ones, my new sleeping bag and packsack…

Noeline comes to check on me and is horrified both with how heavy my hockey bag still is and with the amount of stuff in my to-be-left-behind pile. I ask her to keep anything she might find useful and give the rest away. We look over what I have tossed. ‘I guess I should throw out my used underwear,’ I say, reaching for it, ‘Nobody would want that.’ ‘You might be surprized,’ she replies, laying her hand on mine, ‘what people on this island would be happy to have.’ So I pack it along with my other rejected clothes into my packsack and leave it with stuff she will have to deal with.

When I finally get to the airport and they weigh my bag – I am, oddly, the only one who has chosen to pack their stuff in a hockey bag – it is only 10 kg! What? Really? Unbelievable! Wait, I want to say, let me just run back to the town to get my wetsuit… But it’s too late for that.

And, I realize, though this may be TMI, I will be wearing purple undies every day! 

HAO

HAO Part 1 - A necklace of pearls

A wee bit of the string of motus looking like black pearls in the early morning.

A close up of one of the 100's of motu that make up Hao.

Hao is the first atoll of the Tuamuto Archipelago that we are going to visit. An atoll, btw, is a ring of coral reef in the ocean marking the place where an island, most likely a volcano, was, many millions of years ago. The island itself has eroded away completely, there is no land left at all, but there is a reef which started growing when the island existed and continued on long after it was gone and along this reef there are motus, or lumps of dead coral that have clumped together and washed up onto the reef above the waterline so as to form islets, which might or might not have coconut trees on them. These motu may be one continuous ring, like a bracelet, or a series of individual jewels, like a necklace of pears. Hao is a necklace of pearls.

I envisage myself going all the way round one day, skipping across the motus and swimming between them, but this, I see, will not be possible here. Hao is huge. It is 50 km long! We sail beside it for hours - heading north to where the pass into the interior lagoon is – and countless motus, each like a pearl, appear before us, pass by, then disappear behind.

Once inside the lagoon the colour turquoise dominates. It is shallow here, the whole lagoon is shallow, and the beauty is, I know already, beyond my capability to capture with a camera. Even from the boat we can see the multitude of fish that populate the calm warm waters and can tell we have arrived in paradise. We dock, free, at the abandoned military marina, and so can live on the boat, swim in the lagoon, and, also, anytime we like, walk off onto shore, explore, visit the wee village, buy an ice cream at the tiny store, whatever. It’s heaven.

I clean the stainless steel our first morning at dock and do a laundry in the afternoon. These are jobs I can do by myself. Our alternator has broken, which is a big deal, and Sven is busy troubleshooting. The next couple days as he continues to work on finding a solution to this newest problem there is nothing I can do for him so I am free to swim among the amazing coral heads with the zillions of reef fish and wander the island at my leisure.

Everything is perfect.

I am totally happy here.

And this is just the first of many atolls we will visit along the way to Tahiti.

HAO – part 2 – Blindsided by Lisa

One day I return to the boat after a very interesting walk to the high school where I spent much of the afternoon talking to a couple of girls who, like the majority of the students, live on other, smaller, atolls, and board here for the school year.

When I get back Lisa shows me a small, no tiny, brown dot on her towel and accuses me of making it. I try to anticipate her endless complaints, perhaps even avoid them, but hadn’t seen this one coming. ‘Sorry, not me,’ I say, ‘I didn’t touch your towel.’ (Man, was that the wrong reaction. If I had been in super duck mode, or realized what the consequences of my mild, yes, mild, response, were to be I might, perhaps, have said something else like, ‘Sorry. I must have used it by mistake at night. Let me clean it for you right away.’ But, unfortunately, that is not what I said. I knew I hadn’t touched her towel and her accusatory tone of voice grated on my nerves and I hadn’t been prepared for this complaint and I just politely repeated that I wasn’t responsible.) Well, nah, nah, nah… totally livid, totally disbelieving, she goes on and on and on at me. 

Yick.

The next day, on a walk into town with Sven, I suggest to him that I leave when we get to Tahiti. I have known for a while that I will do this but have not said so before. He agrees that this would be for the best.  

HAO – part 3 – Blindsided by Sven

The next morning Sven tells me he has considered what I said yesterday and, that if I’m going to leave anyway, he’d prefer I go now instead.

‘Here?’ I question unbelievingly - we are in the middle of fucking nowhere - ‘in Hao?’

‘Yes,’ he confirms, ‘I think there are weekly flights out.’

I am flabbergasted. I am dumbstruck. I do not think fast, in general, on my feet, and had NOT seen this coming. I tell him I’d prefer to continue on to Tahiti with him. I promise to be on my best behaviour. I swear I didn’t touch Lisa’s towel. Eventually I plead with him. But his mind is made up. He is sick of the drama. He feels caught in the middle. He finds it stressful. He wants me to go.

‘But I don’t create the drama,’ I say. ‘I don’t put you in the middle.’

‘I know,’ he says, ‘You are not the one at fault here. I like you. I have enjoyed having you on board. But it is a three part equation, and if you are going to leave anyway, it’s best you go now.’

WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE?

My pleading descends into begging but all to no avail.

‘You chose to leave,’ he says, ‘I am just choosing the timing.’

I feel this is not a fair statement. ‘If I’d kept my mouth shut would you have kept me to New Zealand?’ I ask. He doesn’t answer. 

Eventually I agree to go into town and try to find out if flights from here exist. What else am I to do?

And, later that afternoon, despite the lack of a plan, I go back to the boat, pack up my stuff, and leave. (I wondered later if I ought have just stayed, declared that I had no other option, waited to see if he’d physically put me off, but, at the time, I was simply too shocked to behave rationally, and, having left, was just too stubborn, and embarrassed, to go back.)

Perhaps, had I realized what was coming, I might have been able to marshal some better arguments, or, at least, not have started the ball rolling by saying I would leave in Tahiti.

Ouch!

I can’t believe that I am getting kicked off the boat here, just as we have arrived at the beginning of the best part.

I can’t believe that the straw was Lisa’s towel about which I still proclaim total innocence. (‘Yes. You’re always innocent. It’s never your fault…’ I hear the echo of my ex-husband’s voice in my mind and it causes me to pause.)

I can’t believe I have, yet again, fucked up so royally.

I can’t believe this is how I am starting off my new decade.

I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming.

I can’t believe it at all.

HAO – part 4 - Noeline

Noeline and her family.

My first step is to ask each of the other three boats here on the island if there is any chance they will take me on. (Nope.) My second step is to look for a supply boat to go with. (Nope.) So I try to find out about flights. There is an Air Tahiti office in town (closed for the summer) and there is no internet (of course). I am stumped. Also, Sven has not returned my passport yet and I am stressed about the possibility of not getting it back at all. I am so out of sorts that I no longer know which way is up.

All too fast the day flies by and soon I will need somewhere to sleep. I have a tent, of course, so I go to the town hall and ask the mayor’s secretary where I can set it up for a few days. (The answer is nowhere.) Is there a hotel? (Also no.) I explain my situation - which is complicated by the fact that I have no cash with me and no way of procuring any, short of having it wired to me which takes 3 business days, and, of course, assumes I have some way of contacting someone to do so, and what does wired even mean - and she, the secretary, says that I will just have to spend the night with her. I repeat that I am without cash to reimburse her. ‘Come back at 5 pm when I get off work,’ she says. ‘We will figure something out.’

My situation wrt the boat decided and a place to spend the night found I go and sit in the shade beneath the internet tower and finally manage to figure out how to buy time. Letting a couple of friends and family in on my disastrous situation calms me a bit but still I worry about the short term (given the poverty all around me what will my lodgings be like tonight?) and the middle term (what on earth does one do when stranded on Hao?) and the long term (since I am obviously far more dysfunctional than even I had realized is there any hope for me at all?).

My life has been a mess forever it seems and I wonder if perhaps now I have finally reached rock bottom, in, ironically, a country that doesn’t have even a single rock.

I meet Noeline after work and we walk together to her house. I had not realized when she said that I would have to spend the night with her she meant in her bed with her. I had assumed she meant on a couch or something. But her house has nothing resembling a couch. And the only chairs are plastic garden ones that are brought inside for meals. And the floor is not an option. There is a large screen TV but no running water. Two rooms. Everyone, Noeline, her sister, her 84 year old mother, and her adopted 9 year old son, all sleep in the same room. Rainwater runs from the roof into barrels and each evening everyone showers all together, naked, outside, in view of the road, by scooping jugfuls of water from the barrels onto each other. Supper is watery rice soup. I get the impression that that is supper every night. Noeline has a job. She has worked for the town for 35 years. I have no idea what her salary is but I know that unemployment on the island is high and I cannot imagine how families without jobs live. Snuggled beside her in bed that evening we chat for quite a while after everyone else has fallen asleep and I marvel at how welcome I really do feel here, with this total stranger, who has so little, and contrast this with how I felt on Sven’s 3 million dollar boat.

I remain shocked that he asked me to leave.

And that I left.

And I just do not know, at all, what I will do next.

Birthday Blues

My first act, in my sixth decade, is to get up at 3 am and pee off the back of a 65’ sail boat into the turquoise waters of the South Pacific. A gentle breeze has the rigging tapping out a light percussion rhythm and the palm trees, on land, sway to the music. My muscles are sore from a long hike yesterday up to the top of the mountain from which there was a 360 view over this island, the many black pearl farms dotting the green/beige/azure/blue shallows, the other rocky islets, and the outer barrier reef surrounding it all. The warm darkness with its familiar salt-water tang enfolds me comfortably and I am totally certain that I am exactly where I want to be.

Unfortunately I have only half of the equation right as I am not necessarily with whom I want to be with. I will be spending this momentous day far from friends and family, with a couple of random people, my captain and co-crew, and the disconnectedness of this social situation haunts me.

Later, when Lisa gets up, she greets me with a huge hug and wishes me a happy birthday, which, I have to admit, puts a smile on my face and cheers me far more that I would have believed, making me feel once again like a beloved sister-wife. And, over breakfast, Sven talks intelligently about why ‘corner birthdays’ feel more important than they actually are which leads to a good discussion about how one’s priorities change over time.

As it is Sunday and we are anchored next to the town of Rikitea, on the Island of Mangareva, in the Gambier Islands, where the largest cathedral in all of French Polynesia is - designed and built centuries ago by an over-zealous French priest at the cost of many human lives - Lisa and I decide to go to church. It seems the whole town is there, the women decked out in their Sunday best with high heeled shoes and garlands of fresh flowers in their hair, and we are embarrassingly underdressed in our usual slightly grubby t-shirts and shorts and bearing backpacks, but we are welcomed with open arms, well kisses on both cheeks actually, by all and sundry.

One of our goals of the day is to get some fresh provisions to see us through the next few weeks as we travel through the stunningly beautiful but barely inhabited atolls of Tuamotu Archipelago so after church we walk the main road to the public gardens. We collect nine pumpkins which we lug back to the dock and stow in our dingy and then return to gather grapefruits and lemons. (Lemon trees have many sharp thorns by the way. Who knew?)

I had brought my laptop into town with me hoping to have received, and to be able to reply to, a few birthday e-mails, but the owner of the pub with public internet access died and the pub is closed until further notice. I cannot be crushed; this is the way of the islands. But, nonetheless, without hope of internet today, and, possibly even for whole month if we sail soon, I feel more alone than ever. We return to the boat where I spend the afternoon working on repairing old lines. It is a somewhat menial yet satisfying task and one that I am good at. If the pub, also the only place in town to eat out, were open, we may well have had a meal there it being my birthday and all, but instead we follow our regular schedule. Today Lisa is on lunch and I on supper. I choose to make new-pumpkin soup and we eat it in relative silence and I am reminded of Christmas, a year and a half ago, on another boat, again far from friends and family, and now, as then, I find myself more melancholy than I care to admit. I will be happy when the day has passed and we are on to tomorrow.

Hicup

June 12 – Rebuked AKA Queen of Shebia AKA I am an idiot

Mangareva

Wow. I am an idiot and, consequently, had a strip torn off of me today, a huge strip, and, consequently, Sven has lost, in my opinion, some of his shine. What a shame. As usual the incident was petty but nonetheless I can’t see myself completely forgetting it. I don’t know why I am so stupid. Miguel, another yatchie, stopped by in his dingy to ask what we’d thought of the movie he had leant us and Sven said we hadn’t finished it. I chirped in that someone had posted a small segment of it on facebook earlier in the year and I’d found it so compelling that I’d taken it into school to show my students. Miguel wanted to know which clip and then asked how far though the movie we’d gotten and I, idiot me, said I thought we’d watched the whole thing. What was I thinking? After Miguel left Sven just totally flipped. He yelled at me for 15 minutes. He told me not to talk during HIS conversations, not to contradict him in public, called me the Queen of Shebia who thought only of myself, told me that HE was boss on the boat, that HE got to do all the talking, that I took orders from HIM, blah, blah, blah… (I watched this whole performance somewhat detached wondering if he realized the irony of his calling me out for being self-centered while simultaneously thumping himself on the chest and declaring that he was lord of the universe.) I am sure that mostly he was embarrassed by my having implied that he had lied to Miguel, which, after all, he had (his explanation being that he wanted to keep the movie another day to make a copy of it. Why not just say that then? I asked) but his reaction was nonetheless WAY out of line. Why, oh why, can I not just get along with people better?

Later I sit outside under an almost full moon, the cool breeze delightful, the sound of (loud) drumming coming across the water from town giving the evening a lovely Polynesian flavour and yet the ambiance tarnished by events of the day. I am torn, almost ready to jump ship, miss seeing the Tuamotu Islands, yet realize that this might also be an over-reaction.

Was it only yesterday that I wrote in my journal that for the first time on this trip I was totally at peace? Man! Easy come, easy go, I guess.

PS The next day Sven acts as if nothing has happened, Lipsticktoo and I wander the town together happy as can be, and I decide to try and let it all blow over, partially because our guidebook claims that all, except one, of the islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago are ‘true atolls that range from unbroken circles of coral surrounding a lagoon to glistening chains of coral islets with one or two navigable passages into the lagoon.’ and this all seems to good to miss. Our first stop will be Hao which has the interesting history of having been a military base back in the day when they were doing nuclear testing nearby…

"marble kids" - after they see me!

Kid playing marbles on the steps of the cathedral before he sees me.

PPS I assume internet opportunities will be few and far between as we hop from almost inhabited atoll to uninhabited atoll but also assume that I would have to say anyway will be, ‘Wonderful sail! Amazing snorkelling!’

Just Living

June 11 Mangareva, Gambier Islands AKA Just Living

After a fun day exploring Pitcairn Island and a very fast 36 hour sail west we have arrived in French Polynesia and are just living. It is relaxed, stress-free and totally wonderful.

The Gambier Islands are a group of small rocky islets - the last remnants of an old long-extinct volcano - in a large shallow lagoon surrounded on all sides by coral reef. It is the first set of over 10, 000 islands that stretch all the way from here to Asia. From now on we will have short hops from one island to another, countless choices about where to sail next, palm trees and white sand beaches and little drinks with umbrellas in them in all directions.

We are anchored near the village of Rikitea along with a dozen other boats. It is totally calm inside the lagoon and so we sit flat, without rocking or rolling, as if at dock. An easy swim to the shallows allows one to snorkel with countless exotic fish. The weather is ideal. And the (only) street in the village is lined with lush trees, mango and orange and coconut, laden with ripe fruit for the taking. There is a small restaurant/pub that wants to attract the ‘yatchies’ and so offers free internet. (Yes, I am there at the moment with my laptop, drinking a cold beer and considering the snack menu.)

One of the other boats here has a Canadian couple on it whom we met at Easter Island and two of the other boats are previously known to Sven. All three of them have been here for a while and are getting ready to head on to the next spot as soon as the weather looks good so we quickly invited them all over for an after dinner drink yesterday and had a wonderful evening.

One of our forestays broke on the leg here which means Sven has a problem to tackle and we will likely end up staying two weeks instead of the one originally planned which gives me lots of time to be a good crew and do chores on the boat but also to be a tourist, go for swims, walk the town, climb the hills, visit the black pearl farms… 

So I am just living. I am, for the first time on this whole adventure, utterly stress free, relaxed, happy, and at peace with myself.

I want to be here. Or somewhere else. I want to just live. Sort of like we are now. Forever. We got up with the sun this morning, had our usual healthy breakfast, and discussed the day’s chores. I made Sven laugh, which is always good, every day needs some laughter in it, then I wiped the salt off the lifelines, made fresh bread, helped him take down the stay sail, did a laundry, prepared lunch, had a break, took a long swim, attacked some rust spots on the stainless steel, and was, basically, just happy. I don’t want to stay on this boat, where I am paying crew (yes, I admit, I am not being paid to be here, nor am I here for free, I am paying for the right to live and work here, but, to be honest, it is not much, $15US/day, which covers everything, room, board, limitless drinks, the use of all the boats toys, the odd sarcastic comment…) I want to find a partner to sail with. The three couples who were on board last night have each been sailing for years, literally, and all of them are so relaxed, so happy, so content to just be. The boat I am on is magnificent, I am unlikely to ever live again on such a fantastic vessel, but here I am crew, merely crew, and as I looked at the couples sitting round the cockpit with us I wanted to be one of them. Don’t get me wrong. I am thrilled to be here at all. And the situation I am in at the moment is almost absolutely perfect. This is almost exactly paradise. I want to live like this, where the days in harbour are filled with cooking and repairs and long swims and fresh fruit, exploring new places, meeting new people and happening across old friends, and where the days at sea are filled with watching the weather, navigating the boat, changing the sails and learning the names of the stars. But, also, I want to have at least a tiny bit of say into our itinerary and at least a little bit more responsibility with respect to sail handling. But that is all. Everything else I can compromise on. (Except safety of course.) I doubtless will never end up again on a boat as magnificent as this one, but, really, that’s ok.

And, of course, I am going to have to spend next year living in Arnprior and being the Art teacher first. (What? Art? Really? Weird!) 

But it’s all good. It’s all very very good. Roll on 50!

Hopeless

Lisa is hopeless. And so, by the way, am I.

Lisa, by the way, is hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, she has some great qualities, she is an excellent cook and likes to clean and would never ever question Sven’s judgement or statements. (I do. If he does/says something that I am sure is wrong I correct him and always he is pleased to have had his error pointed out, like this morning when I pointed out that the waypoint he had set was for a different island than the one we are intending to get to!) But Lisa has been on Dana for TWO years now and still knows NOTHING. Sven asked her to teach me how to put the preventers away. She got it wrong and he had to re-teach me. He asked her to show me how to raise the anchor. Same thing. When she is “on watch” she sits in the captain’s chair – which she loves to do, reminds me very much of a lovely co-op student Catherine had once – but Sven looks after the course and the sails, or gets me to do it, something I was quite embarrassed about the first time or two but which doesn’t seem to faze her. And, she can’t even read the nav instruments correctly! Today she was on watch and Sven asked what the course over ground was and she gave one number, which was wrong, and because I could see the instruments from where I was sitting, I, instinctively, without thinking, gave the correct answer, and she got upset and said I was wrong and Sven came over and taught her that COG stands for course over ground. Really? After two years she doesn’t even know this? Their relationship baffles me.

And this, all this rambling, it is all about, really, not her, but me, and the question of what I want to do with the rest of my life. Do I want to hike alone with the freedom but loneliness that that entails? Sail as crew with the exotic destinations but with random people and their foibles that that entails? Try to put my marriage back together, yet again, to have a permanent partner to do things with? Do I want to work forever keeping the security of an income, and, eventually a pension? Or quit my job completely and live the life of a vagabond? I just don’t know. Lisa is happy where she is, intends to remain here forever, but me, I don’t think this exact life is for me.The grass frequently seems greener on the other side of the fence to me. I often feel that were I to jump over into the greenest field possible and then look back over my shoulder I would find that the one I had just rejected was greener still. But, for now, for this spring and summer, there is no doubt whatsoever that I am exactly where I want to be – not necessarily who I want to be with - but where I want to be.

For now, that will have to do.

And soon, very soon, I will make a life plan. (Yeah right!).

Anchored at Pitcairn Island, waiting for the swells to settle so we can go and visit land, I spend most of the day working with Sven fixing the second reefing line. I had noticed at some point during the last leg that it was sorely in need of a stitch in time and when we pulled it out we saw this was very much true and so the two of us spent most of the day fixing it. Lisa spent the day indoors doing data entry putting old logs onto the computer but I was out in the sun, on the foredeck, with Sven, and had a wonderful little conversation with him along the way about life. He asked about my job and my marriage and I, after having given candid answers, asked if what he had was enough, his boat and the freedom to travel anywhere and his family back home and he admitted that it was not. “I am not happy,” he said. And he went on to explain that he would really like to have a partner, intellectual stimulation, permanence and commitment, but that he does not. He has a $3 million dollar boat but is stuck with Lisa and I (my words not his). Man. I guess whoever said that money can’t buy happiness is right after all. But it does buy freedom. Is that enough? According to Sven, No. Hmmm. If he, who is brilliant and had such a very successful business life, cannot get retirement right what hope is there for me? 

On the other hand, on the small scale, it was a perfect day. I, ironically, was totally happy. Sitting in the sun, stitching meter after meter of black and yellow line with bright red highly waxed thread, while the huge swells, deep blue and turquoise and white, crashed into the black volcanic rocks beneath the rust coloured cliffs beneath the multi-green palm covered hills of such an exotic island, my life was, for today at least, perfect. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing, and, if I was not with exactly whom I wanted to be with, well, then that was a compromise that I was willing, today at any rate, to accept. We finish the line about 5, sit altogether out in the cockpit having a drink, and then retire to the pilot house to read or relax. 

Yes. It is not all bad. That is for sure!