Month: April 2020

It isn’t often you get the joy and horror of experiencing a Kafkaesque dream in real life. The walk down empty hallways with closed doors. The lingering-too-long silent glance of the one person you pass. Then one blink, and everything is back to normal. That was our brief existence arriving in Honolulu on Tuesday, in an attempt to come home to our boat and reunite with Tom.

The mere 40 of us on the plane were escorted off ten at a time. As we stepped off the jetway, men in army uniforms took our temperature and directed us down a makeshift aisle, where we went through checkpoints to confirm our quarantine locations, phone numbers, and compliance with the state mandated 14-day quarantine. But it went too fast. Five minutes only, and we were following signs to baggage claim. But everybody else had disappeared. Where did they go? We walked down empty hallways. Empty escalators. We stopped to admire a stuffed pineapple in a dark, closed tourist shop. We followed the signs outside and walked down an empty covered sidewalk. On lone soul, a uniformed pilot, walked toward us, face covered with a protective mask. His eyes followed the kids as they skipped down the sidewalk after a 6-hour motionless flight.

We arrived in an empty room with still, silver baggage carousels lined up one after the other. Thirty-one of them. All still, expect for carousel 26, where my bag rotated slowly around in a circle. The only bag. A little girl about six looked at us. She didn’t respond to my smile, because I had forgotten that my smile was covered up with a mask. But she looked at the kids with a clear yearning to want to come and talk, or play, or engage in some way. But she didn’t, paralyzed perhaps by the same fear that is keeping my kids from getting anywhere near people. I picked up our bag and headed out to the curb. One family waited on a bench and one guard stood watch, but otherwise it was empty and silent. There were no taxis, no shuttles, no traffic. Just the dark gray-brown of shaded cement. Only the occasional dark car driving by looking for their loved ones, ready to whisk them away to their designated place of quarantine.

Our expected car showed up, and Danny’s immediate smile and Aloha snapped us out of the Kafka scene. We piled into the car and drove into the bright sunlight. People ran through parks, walked their dogs, roller bladed on sidewalks. Surfers littered the waves to our right, and kids splashed in the calm waves of protected lagoons. Danny pulled up in front of Hawaii Yacht Club, where Tom was waiting for us. We kissed through our face-masks and hugged for a long time, while Danny patiently idled the car with the kids inside. We released our grip when we saw another car driving down the one-way aisle. We quickly grabbed our bags, helped the kids out of the car, said our farewells to Danny, and maneuvered ourselves and our bags onto Korvessa, our home.

Back to real life. Sort of. Except that real-life for us is to be observed from the deck of our boat for the next 14 days. We expected it. The biggest uncertainty is how long we can stay at our current location. We thought we’d be able to stay when I arranged this over three weeks ago, but then had been told 12 hours before Tom’s arrival that we would have to leave once the kids and I arrived. There have been one or two vocal club members who seem to think that our mere presence on the island has brought plague to them all; other club members took an informal poll and want to let us to stay. If we had received word from other marinas, we would have been happy to move to another dock or mooring ball (still are happy to do that), but nobody will return our calls or emails. And so, like it or not, Hawaii Yacht Club has us until we have another place to go.

Hawaii has just extended its quarantine and stay-at-home order until May 31. Alaska has recently extended its same orders until May 19. And British Columbia doesn’t look like it’s going to open its borders or its restrictions on recreational boating anytime soon. And so we wait.

We’ll be waiting with books and games and movies. We’ll be waiting with attempts to exercise on the bow of the boat. We’ll be waiting with plenty of tasks to do to get the boat ready for another long passage. And we’ll be waiting with an appreciation of being together again, of being home again, and of being reunited in a Kafka-esque world that we no longer know. But we know each other, and we’re waiting together now.

Searching desperately for a reason to get out of bed every morning (other than kids pouncing on me in the wee hours) and trying to identify some goal or purpose to get through this Groundhog Day life, I have started writing our book in earnest, complete with the stories that may have made us cry at the time, but will hopefully be the punchline of jokes and stories told round the campfire years down the road. For a little humorous inspiration, I started watching David Sedaris’ Masterclass on Storytelling and Humor. He starts early on by saying “Everything’s funny, eventually,” and proceeds to tell us a series of stories that, at the time, must have been horrifying and embarrassing, but in retrospect make you smile, chuckle, snort, or just repeat “Oh my goodness” (or something more explicit) over and over.

Luckily – as you will have learned from the last post – Tom is one of those people who can see the humor in the moment, or at least as long as there isn’t an immediate emergency to deal with, like, say, sinking. And in the midst of a world of uncertainty, Tom was even able to find the humor in the 95-degree environment that was making him miserable: I was definitely in a cranky and irritable mood today.  8ft waves on a 5 second period right on the beam, requiring all the hatches to be closed and roasting in the heat was mostly to blame.  No beer available either to take the edge off my foul mood. I also didn’t get enough sleep the last 2 nights. The cat’s food from yesterday was full of maggots, care of the tropics.  Rashes that persist and multiply? Tropics. Constantly dehydrated with 90-degree tap water or 70-degree fridge water to drink? Tropics. Home-brewed beer tastes like shit? Tropics.  Sprouts go moldy before they finish sprouting? Tropics. Stinky clothes that were clean yesterday? Tropics. Two day old cat litter with maggots? Tropics.  Sunburn because sunscreen won’t adhere to my wet sweaty flesh? Tropics. I was in a mood to cut down every palm tree I ever saw for the rest of my life. Give me a home… where the Eskimos roam… and the sky is dark and cloudy all day!  (sing it with me!)

That was 13 days ago, and I haven’t heard him complain about the heat in at least five days, so I think they have finally made it into cooler promised land. Not that we ever expected Hawaii to be that promised land. Images of sitting in cold anchorages in Alaska is what has fueled his motivation for the past month, but if Hawaii is willing to take the temperatures down a notch (83 F) from those of French Polynesia (93 F), he’ll take it. Every degree is a gift.

If Tom made his dislike of the tropics known in that last rant, then Korvessa is making her own dislikes and needs known in this next one. I don’t think Tom meant this to be a poem, but I am turning it into one, and it shall be entitled “Day 51 at Sea, or Rants from a Fed-Up Ketch“. Bonus points for other great titles you put in the comments!

Last night one of Tinker’s securing lines broke.  I fixed it.
Today the vang broke.  I fixed it.
Today the SSB modem broke.  I fixed it.
Today the chart plotter broke and erased all info and placed our boat south of Burkino Fasa on the African coast.  I fixed it.
Today the helm seat broke, with me on it.  I didn’t fix it. I got a huge bruise in the fall.  I punched the mizzen mast.

And from thousands of miles away in our isolation cell here in Anacortes, to top off the many things we will laugh about in the future (can you hear my voice squeak with withheld tears as I write that), we have lost the remote control to the TV (to one of those modern “smart” TVs that doesn’t actually have any real buttons, I might add). Any of you with small kids will understand what a disaster this is. Or maybe you’re among the parents who wisely don’t allow TV time in the morning and carefully control content and time. I am not one of those parents. At least not right now. After experimenting with different times of day to write, I finally settled on 6:00 to 6:45 am, which was the only time of day that I have been able to successfully hide from my kids, thanks to the wondrous invention of the TV. Unfortunately, that is no longer an option. One child crawled into my bed at 6:11 a.m. and said “Mommy, I can’t watch TV, so I’m going to watch you write.” Yeah, right. He did leave, but I can hear him making whale sounds through the wall. The other child is now curled up against me and attempting to hold onto my left arm like a beloved stuffy. I am now typing with one hand. At least he is not making sounds.

Aha! We found the remote after about five hours of searching, which is the sole reason I am able to sit here locked in my parents’ guest bedroom and finish up this post. (Oops, never mind. I was just interrupted. Twice. Three times. That’s it, I need a lock.) I am clearly not going to be able to edit or revise, but you all like nice, raw writing anyway, right?

There will be so many stories we will have from this adventure, so many memories. Many are so good that they will bring smiles to our faces without even trying: kids jumping on the fore-deck while we bounce over waves, beach fires with friends, finding whale bones on the beach, watching breaching whales from the boat. Others, not so much: Demon pooping on the bed right in front of us? Staring in horror at a son who seemed to have turned into a car, because those were the only sounds he would make? The entire bin of Lego and toys spewing all over the v-berth and galley due to a 35-knot gust that knocked us on our side? Dylan puking all over me within the first hour of a 3-day passage? No personal space, ever. We’ll tell stories about those things, too, and hopefully get a laugh out of friends and ourselves. Because everything’s funny, eventually.

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Informational Addendum: The guys seem on track to arrive in Honolulu on Saturday sometime. After looking at weather and currents, they have wisely decide to take the slightly longer windward (north) route around the islands in order to have more consistent winds and swell than what they would encounter on the lee side of the islands. The strong winds coming in over the next few days are predicted to cause some strong winds and confused seas around South Point (on the Big Island) and some nasty-looking gap winds whipping through the Alenuihaha Channel, which would result in a very difficult, uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous last 48 hours. So around the top they go.

Once they get to the dock in Waikiki, they will hopefully be able to get some beer, pizza, and a very very long sleep (pretty sure that’s the order they want things in). Roberto will fly out on Monday. The kids and I will fly in on Tuesday. And while we complete our 14-day quarantine together, we’ll work on cajoling and repairing Korvessa and all her tough but tired parts. We don’t know what lies ahead after that: a little time to explore Hawaii by car? Or by boat? Will be there for three weeks? Four? Seven? We don’t know. What we’re hoping is that, when the time is right, we’ll fly the kids back to grandparents for a few weeks and take off on the 2,200 nautical mile trip north to Alaska!

So reads the title of the email I just got from Tom, with instructions to post it on our blog. Here is his direct account of the past 24 hours:

The log entry for today at 7N 147W shall show that we continue on, where the trade winds are supposed to be, in beam winds of 20 knots and angry seas of 10 feet from 2 different directions.  Beam winds…  Sounds nice eh?  Sheets eased to allow for a gentle flowing air motion across your non-stressed sails as you adjust your heading to whatever course you desire as you sail a rhumb line to the nearest palm-frond island of your choosing… 

Bullshit!

“Fair winds and FOLLOWING SEAS” is the traditional sailor’s parting phrase that one bestows on a voyaging friend.  “Fair winds and beam seas” is what you might passively-aggressively say with a smile, to your ex-inlaws or the tax man.  It’s not as nice as it sounds. In our beam winds & seas we have as much canvas up as we can stand, causing the boat to heel at unnatural angles.  We do this in order to avoid the “death roll” of being side on to the waves without a massive press of canvas to slow the roll.  We are learning to live on the wall.  Ocean blue is the new black. The port wall is the new floor. 

My crew Roberto and Jake are sick in the head.  They’ve both sailed enough ocean miles to think that this is normal. 35 degrees of heel in the bigger waves does not bother them. Occasional “sneaker waves” crash over the top of the pilothouse roof.  I think they suffer from some kind of Stockholm syndrome.  Have I been too kind as their captor?  Are they learning to love this motion and not desire escape?  Our Himalayan Snow cat “Demon” on the other hand, sharpens her grudge daily.  She doesn’t like living on the wall in the hot and humid tropics.  She is currently refining her “dead cat impression”, seeming to lay lifeless on the low side of the boat with an expression that says, “adopt me into your land-bound home now, save me from this life afloat, do it before it’s too late!” She remains lifeless only until a can of chicken is opened, then she is instantly reanimated like some kind of furry zombie, demanding her portion under penalty of being clawed or meowed to death.

Jake is heroically making dinner in the galley in this awful sea state.  Imagine cooking chicken Alfredo on your favorite roller coaster ride. I sit  conversing with Roberto on the upper dinette when I notice a new orange light illuminated on the electrical panel.  The forward bilge pump is on.  No need for alarm.  I’m a recovering wooden boat owner.  Bilge pumps are my friend, and having them running all the time used to be considered normal.  Wooden boat hulls aren’t waterproof you see, and “take up” sea water from time to time.  Sometimes they “take up” sea water through their hulls at a rate that would alarm any sane human.  We’re a fiberglass boat though, (which shouldn’t leak) but we’ve had 8″ of rain in the past couple of days and I know the mast-to-deck seal leaks.   It must just be rainwater which has found it’s way to the shallow portside forward bilge under the mast.   The bilge pump light persists though…

I open up the floor and am greeted with water in the bilge and sloshing contents.  A familiar sight to any wooden boat owner.  I am also greeted with an unopened bottle of wine!  Hooray!  No alcohol sales have been allowed at our last port of call due to the Covid virus regulations and we’ve been dry for quite a while.  Mana from heaven! Mana floating in a flooded bilge on a boat 600 miles from the nearest land, 1,000 miles from the nearest boatyard, in 10 foot confused seas, with no other boat sighted for days.  It’s Chilean Malbec of recent vintage BTW.  I know you were wondering.

I offer the crew “good news and bad”. Red bilge wine being the good, sinking far from help being the bad.  I offer my assessment that it is rainwater and Roberto and Jake begin pumping it out while I focus on more important tasks, like finding the corkscrew.  “The water level isn’t going down.” says Roberto.  I stop corkscrewing.  Really?  It’s just rain water and it’s not raining.  It can’t be seawater can it?  There is a time-tested way to tell if it is seawater or rainwater… I take a cup of the nasty brown bilge water and sip and spit (as one would do with a fine wine) the contents.  If it’s rainwater it will be fresh-tasting, perhaps with faint notes of engine oil or diesel.  Nasty, but fresh.  If we’re sinking, It’ll be salty.

It is salty.

I tell the crew that the water is salty and am greeted with the exact expression that mirrors the cold damp feeling I suddenly feel in my chest.  Shit.  Salt water means it’s likely coming in through the hull somewhere.  “Sinking” would be the term used by someone who has never owned a wooden boat. I have bilge pumps.  Lots of them! 6 installed ones to be exact and 3 more large or improvised ones that can be put into service quickly if needed.  I am a recovering wooden boat owner who would never consider his boat to be “sinking” until the pumps can’t keep up, and yet I have that feeling too.  Our 1985 fiberglass Nauticat was lovingly built in Finland with a 3/4″ thick fiberglass hull. Overbuilt some would say. It’s like having a house with 2 foot thick walls. The fiberglass hull itself definitely isn’t leaking as is fashionable in the wooden boat world.  I know how sturdy the hull is because I recently helped install 2 new through-hull fittings right where the water is coming in…  Oops.  New hull work that penetrates the hull right where the water is coming in… A candidate for water ingress.  Not something easily fixable in our sea state or location either.  Also in the same area of the bilge are 4 other through hulls.  We may be pulling up all the floorboards soon looking for our leak.

The small section of bilge is the only flooded portion, which is very reassuring, and it is pumped dry in a few more minutes.   Water isn’t flooding in, so we decide to wait and see what the ingress rate is.  I continue to try and think of where it could be coming in.  Yes it could be the new through hulls, but I’d really prefer to brainstorm something more easily fixable and less catastrophic, so I continue thinking. 

Wham!  A sneaker wave, a combination of the new East and older Northwest swells tries to knock me off my feet.  Merrowww!!  Our furry quadraped is not impressed either, despite her having twice the ability to stay upright.  We heel with the port rail in the water again.  Hey… rail in the water…  The outflow through hull for the forward bilge pump is on that side, just below the rail, and is normally “only” 3 feet above the water.  At these ungodly angles of heel and roll it might be underwater at times, as could be it’s anti-siphon loop which is supposed to keep water from coming in back.  I go outside  and see that indeed, the through hull that should never be underwater, is frequently underwater in these seas and at this angle of heel.   

I go below and close the valve to this through hull.  We wait and watch to see if more water comes in.  The cat continues to send vibes of hate in our direction.  We eat and wait, the cat’s mood is improved with a portion of canned chicken.  No new water comes in during dinner. The wine made a lovely pairing with the canned chicken and pasta BTW.  Ask for it at your next dinner outing.

It’s now been 12 hours and the sea state has continued to afford us the opportunity to have the rail in the water and re-test my theory of water ingress.  So far so good.  No new water coming in. We’re not sinking! Even with the pumps off we’re not sinking!  Now I can relax and again focus on  living on the wall of the boat, sailing to our destination with a happily demented crew, and with a cat who is hopefully still too lazy to go through with her plans to kill me in my sleep. 

It has been another week of daily changes, though most of them wrapping up many of the loose ends thrown at us in the previous week. Begging forgiveness for a bit of stream of consciousness writing (and for the lack of more pictures), I want to give everyone a short update tying up some of those loose ends for you. Korvessa dropped its hook safely in Nuku Hiva on the afternoon of March 26th with a crew of guys happy to see and smell land, even if walking on terra firma would require a longer wait.

The first priority was to find out if there was a way to get Brian home to the US for work. As a life-long paramedic, his services have been badly needed. As luck would have it, the day before another cruiser’s wife had worked with the US Embassy, an airline, and local authorities to charter a plane that could take stranded cruisers from Nuku Hiva to Papeete (a three hour flight) for United Airlines’ last international flight back to the US. As I understand, 30 people or so bought tickets to cover the substantial cost and jumped on that plane Saturday morning to make the connecting flight in Papeete. Korvessa arrived a mere 40 hours or so before the departure of that flight, but Brian got on that plane and made his connections to Papeete, San Francisco, Seattle, and then home.

Getting permission to get Roberto into the US was not such a straightforward process, but the end result after quite a few calls to various places to clarify options and quite a few conversations with a helpful and understanding Customs and Border Patrol officer, Roberto will have permission to enter the US. He will need to have a plane ticket out of the US right after arrival, and we will need to hire an escort from a security agency to take him directly from the boat to the airport, but at least he’ll be able to help Tom get the boat back to the US. It’s not like he would have been able to do any fun touring of Hawaii right now anyway, as the whole state is on a stay-at-home-order until April 30. And Tom will have to sit on the boat in quarantine for 14 days, of course.

Ironically, the kitty may possibly get to avoid quarantine. Because we had all our papers in order to import her into New Zealand, she is likely to be granted permission for “Direct Airport Release” (even though we’re headed in by boat). I have sent in all the paperwork and fee. Now we just have to wait on the official permission and hire a vet to come to the boat in Honolulu to issue an official health certificate.

Which already answers one of the other cliff hangers: We are headed to Hawaii, and after that at some undetermined point (July, maybe) home to the Pacific Northwest. Not only are almost all the island nations closed in the South Pacific for the foreseeable future, but the trip would not be what we would want it to be. It would be so full of uncertainty, possibly full of fear on the part of people we would want to learn from and about, and limited in scope and opportunities to explore. And with our dwindling finances, being stuck in the Pacific or on the other side of the world is simply not a safe call.

We are lucky as American citizens that Hawaii is “short” sail away (14-17 days) and that the route back to the Northwest from Hawaii is a known and well-traveled one. And EU-citizens are lucky that they can stay indefinitely in French Polynesia to wait things out. For those with other passports, choices become much more complicated. Australians and New Zealanders have the option to sail directly home, but that is an awfully long direct sail to do that. And others have much more complicated scenarios ahead of them. The cruising groups we are a part of are full of stories of changed and postponed plans, huge anxiety over uncertainty of policies in guest countries, and dreams put on indefinite hold. And that’s the story of everybody’s life right now in what seems to be a collapsing world, a story of massive upheaval, fright, anger, frustration, sadness, but also of flexibility, resilience, kindness, support, and love.

For all that they have been strict about rules and quarantine (as they should be), French Polynesian authorities have been remarkably organized and flexible in getting the hundreds of cruising boats arriving, almost all of whom departed before the world shut down. The authorities and agents from various yachting agencies have helped boats get berths or moorings in Tahiti, have helped cruisers repatriate to their own countries, and for those out in the islands, being at least understanding of the need to re-fuel, re-provision, and make repairs.

Korvessa, anchored a mile away from the pier in Taiohae Bay on Nuku Hiva, has a view of the 100 other sailboats in the anchorage, all awaiting…. something. Decisions, permissions, repairs, the chance to sail onto anywhere else. They’re not allowed to visit each others’ boats, of course, or commune on shore at all. They are not allowed to go for hikes, swims, or spend time on beaches (neither are the locals). But for the sake of their own mental survival, they make fun of their own. Every morning, there is a VHF net in which news is relayed and requests and offers of help are made. Every evening, there is VHF trivia, which by all reports sounds like an absolute riot. The night that Korvessa hosted, Roberto (who speaks fluent French) made everyone give their answers in their very best French accents, which had a lot of people rolling on their teak floors. Somebody has taken up giving French lessons via VHF, and others are managing a radio show complete with interviews and lessons with other cruisers and even a comedy fake news piece. This is life quarantined in paradise.

Cruisers are only allowed to go ashore once a week now, and yes, they are checked for their permission slips and official papers at multiple checkpoints in town. They are asked to buy no more than they need, of course, and today the verdict was made in all of French Polynesia that there will be no more alcohol sales until after quarantine is over on April 15. I’m going to guess that that has brought down morale significantly. Additionally, there is rain. Lots of it. And it turns out Korvessa has a few leaks, which we had mostly forgotten about because we only got rain twice in the whole year and a half we were in Mexico. Rain, heat, and humidity do not do good things to wood, clothes, skin, or kitty litter, by the way. The boat still smells, in case anyone was wondering.

As for life here in Anacortes, we are biding our time. We are taking a lot of walks. We are playing a lot of games (thank goodness Dylan has finally latched onto board games!). I’ve started an online memoir class to gain some writing momentum. We are baking, drawing, biking, digging weeds, and doing reading, math, and daily “treasure hunts” (things the kids have to learn to get clues to a hidden candy each week). This past week, Dylan’s topic was Formula One racing, and Andy’s topic was drawing. We’re not doing anything overly creative; I don’t have the mental capacity for it. And the kids have way more TV and tablet time than I would prefer, but, you know, we all have to survive this in some way. Giving myself permission not to feel guilty about it is one of my ways of surviving. That and guilt-free afternoon naps when I can snag them. Because I am tired. And I’m looking forward to easing into a life that is a little less emotionally exhausting. We’re part way there.

I hope everybody is staying as safe and healthy as possible. Stay home and hug your loved ones, physically or virtually.