Infinity V

A week in Majuro.

We are in Majuro for a week, anchored, while some crew fly out and others fly in and the captain works on his new website, does minor repairs on the boat, and reprovisions consumables like food and engine oil.

Majuro is an atoll of 64 motus (islands) with a total area of less than 4 sq miles, a maximum elevation of 3 m, and a single road running round it connecting the more than 20 000 who live and work here. There are a shocking number of cars on the road at all times of day and night and half of them are taxis. (A taxi ride, in a shared cab, is 75 cents.) The population includes many teenagers from the outer islands who board here throughout high school. In the bay about 20 yatchs are anchored and twice that number of huge industrial fishing vessels. Global warming may swamp the entire country soon but likely not before the oceans have been fished out. The town has a super little free museum that takes 30 minutes to visit and one lovely handicrafts store where amazing woven products are being made on site (and sold for almost nothing) and then there are only 6 days and 23 hours of time left to fill. Majuro's only other attraction is that it is considered part of the US so shipping, of boat bits for example, is much cheaper than other parts of the Pacific. The city is hot and run down, it's dismal, dirty, and depressing. Even the 'luxury' resort is sad; no beach, pool closed, and peeling paint. It is NOT on my list of possible retirement destinations.

On board I cook, clean, continue to teach the kids an hour a day each, read, and relax, and then I go into town to internet (yes, it is a verb now) until the slowness of the connection drives me bonkers and so I wander the island checking out the many small stores that all sell a very limited (and identical) set of items. I am, as always, more and more thrilled to have a Canadian passport in my back pocket. Next I sit in the bar by the dingy dock and nurse a beer with the other crew who have gathered while we wait, sometimes hours, for stragglers to arrive. Back on the boat I help with maintenance chores that need an extra set of hands, or, more than once, babysit for hours on end so that Sage, Clem's very young girlfriend, can go shopping or have time to internet herself without her two kids tagging along. (One new crew has shown up and paid in advance (like I did) (which seemed normal to me) so there is $1000 for food. Sage spends it all - who knows when there may be money again - but not before taking the list round to each and every grocery store looking for specials. She even finds canned tomatoes cheaper at one place after having already bought them elsewhere and so returns the first lot (a huge effort, it seems to me, to save a few dollars, and I feel rich and spoiled and privileged as I can't imagine doing the same myself)).

We will check out of the country before Easter and sail south. I will be happy to be back at sea.

My girls, who spend 95% of their time naked, dress up for a trip to town.

Sebastian puts 3 coats of wood oil on each of the shrouds while I have the much less glamorous (and less sticky) job of winching him up and down and up and down and...

Infinity IV

Sea Gypsies
AKA A simple life part 2

The first leg of this voyage has had some fantastic experiences but also huge frustrations. I've often said that sailors come at both ends of the financial spectrum, a bimodal distribution if you will, those who have made their fortune - and so are sailing - and those may never do so - and so are sailing.

The last two men I crewed for were 70 year old self-made millionaires who always docked their state of the art boats at the best marinas in town. I actively decided not to go with another such man this year, despite a fantastic offer to do so, and, for reasons that weren't even clear to me, chose to join Infinity instead, a rag tag boat of misfits that one has to pay to crew on. I didn't realize how far across the pendulum path I would be swinging.

Infinity's best sails are as patched as secondary roads in Ontario and both the mizzen and the main are always flown with one reef in due to huge rips at the bottom too large to be fixed even with the onboard sail sewing machine. Many standard systems are non-existant (auto helm, AIS, sat phone, ...) or permanently broken (radar, washing machine, ...) or exist in the free version only (charts) and weather updates are gained as they were 100 years ago by detouring to visit other boats and asking if they know what's ahead. Needless to say, we anchor out.

The captain's bank account is literally empty. He relies on departing crew's per diem payments to buy food for the next leg, which, as he's both terribly unorganized and a super nice guy, often don't actually materialize. I think to myself that maybe he ought to get people to pay in advance, but, being broke himself, and of a hippy ilk, if anyone claims not to have money he believes them and doesn't charge them anything anyways, which everyone knows, and makes others less likely to actually pony up what they owe. And so it goes. Food for the next leg will be basic; rice and beans, pasta, and bread without even peanut butter because there's no money for that. (I can't help thinking of Drew's boat last summer with the freezer full of salmon and lamb, the nets hanging low loaded with fruit, the fridge stuffed with organic tomatoes and lettuce, and the floor lockers overflowing with Costco's best nuts.) Here ramen noodles are a luxury food, scurvy a real possibility. (My only peeve with the food is that the family eats better than the crew. I was asked to bring certain supplies from Hawaii, which I did, but they were not, it turned out, for general consumption.)

There are jobs to be done and everyone does them, more or less, to the best of their ability. There's a sort of, but very loosey goosey, honour system set up where by you can work off part (but not all) of what you'd otherwise owe by doing extra work over and above cooking and cleaning and ongoing maintenence and standing watch (this extra work includes mainly major repairs and upgrades done when in port, but also, fortunately for me, being teacher in residence for the 4 and 5 year old). So, somewhat ironically, but also totally logically, the paying crew tend to put many more hours into the extra work projects than the crew who are getting a free ride. Clem wants to provide the opportunity to sail with him to everyone, regardless of their financial status, but, due to his good nature and poor bookkeeping skills, he regularily ends up getting taken advantage of. I guess crew have a bimodal financial distribution too.

That said, the future is looking bright for him. A 10 episode Norwegian children's TV Series, Message in a Bottle Season 2, and a short film, Sea Gypsies, were filmed on board last year. Both are being well received and the sequel to Sea Gypsies will be filmed in 2018. These bring in not only money but also notoriety, which, in the long run, might prove more valuable.

My heroes have always been those brave enough to choose to commit to an alternate lifestyle, to take a leap of faith and step onto a path from which there may be no turning back - I would have liked to have lived my own life in such a way but lacked the courage to do so - and Clem is definately one of those people.

So... I did one month on board, could have chosen to leave, but chose to stay.

We will see. I think it's going to be amazing.