Tips n' Tricks

We’re back in Whangarei now, since we’re giving up on this whole sailing around New Zealand thing. That’s a crazy idea anyway. What we really need to do is sell the boat, get jobs, and live like reasonable grown-ups for awhile.

The only problem is, we’re not reasonable. Or particularly grown-up.

So I guess we’ll have to keep sailing. We’re just in Whangarei for a week, where we plan to tackle the endless mechanical projects and errands that keep sailboats afloat. Our month in the Bay of Islands was our shake-down cruise, where we learned a few tips and tricks for sailing with a baby in New Zealand. Curious? Allow me to share our hard-earned wisdom:



Babies Don’t Need To Be Bathed
As we’ve recently learned, the need for a daily baby bath is dangerous bourgeois propaganda. No, instead we’ve discovered a new invention, one we heartily recommend to parents everywhere: the FHAT bath. This handy acronym stands for Face, Hands, Ass and Tootsies. With a mere inch of soapy water in the bottom of a bowl, we can wash the baby’s critical systems without running an entire bath. We love the FHAT bath because it saves water. Silas loves the FHAT bath because it means he doesn’t have to get his hair washed, which as far as he’s concerned, is the baby version of waterboarding.

Folding Clothing is a Silly Waste of Time
As a hardened old sea dog, Silas doesn’t have time to fold his clothes. Instead, he has five colour-coded sea bags, into which his gear gets stuffed. They’re made out of polar fleece, which is a fascinating plastic-based material that seems to repel water.


Increased Deck Time = Decreased Baby Vomit
At first, I was so nervous having Silas on board underway that I kept him down below, in a padded room, reading Dr. Seuss books and eating snacks. Of course, that’s enough to make the toughest sailor sick as a dog. Once coated in baby vomit, I decided to try bringing Silas out on deck more. And guess what? He loves it. However, he doesn’t think Peter is a very good helmsman, and he is anxious to take over the wheel.

And While We’re on the Subject of Baby Vomit
You don’t want to take the vomitous towels and shove them in the bottom of the laundry bag until you happen to find a Laundromat two weeks later. They will… GROW things. FURRY things. I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination.


Navigational Hazard Buoys are Tasty
Not strictly baby-related, but good to know all the same. The waters around New Zealand are positively infested with delicious things to eat. With the help of our dinghy, we managed to pull bushels of fabulous green-lipped mussels off of a hazard buoy, which we later consumed in obscene quantities, with lots of garlic and lemon butter. While not strictly legal, this maneuver does save on grocery bills, allowing you to spend more money at the Laundromat (see above).










Touching the Void
Remember the story of Joe Simpson, who pulled himself down the sheer face of an icy mountain with a shattered tibia, after his climbing partner left him for dead? He didn’t do it all in one go, because that would have been impossible. Instead, he used his watch. “I just have to get through the next twenty minutes,” he told himself. “If I can get through the next twenty minutes and not die, then I can make it.” Basically, that’s our philosophy on sailing with a baby. When the kid is screaming, the boat is rocking, and the pressure cooker sails across the cabin, we just have to make it through the next twenty minutes without losing our minds. After that, we’re home free.

So: we’re not sailing around New Zealand with a baby. That would be crazy. But we’re not giving up, either. Hell no. Next week, we’re sailing to Auckland. Then we’ll see.

Nouvelle-Zélande

We’ve decided to claim New Zealand for France. It’s not just us, actually. France claimed New Zealand for France, back in 1772. But instead of raising a flag, or drafting an organized treaty for the natives to sign—as Britain did in 1840—the French just buried a bottle.

I’m sure it was a very nice bottle, probably a wine bottle, or perhaps an excellent cognac. They had to drain the contents first, so the glass would be dry for the note they slipped inside. And consequently, they would have been plastered—which makes perfect sense. No one but a drunken sailor could think any of this would work.

In 1772, Marion du Fresne and his crew were anchored off Moturua Island, woefully unaware that Captain Cook had circumnavigated New Zealand three years earlier, charting its coastline and learning how to communicate with the natives. Thinking they’d discovered a great new piece of real estate, they decided to claim the country for King Louis XV. So Marion's officers pulled out a piece of parchment, on which they wrote the following:

In the Year of Grace one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two, the eleventh of July, we Captains and Officers of the King's ships "Le Mascarin" and the "Marquis de Castries", have taken possession in the name of His Majesty Louis XV, our King, of the Continent to the Eastward of New Zealand, named by M. Marion du Fresne, our Commander, France Australe, being in a harbour to which he gave his name, situated on 35° 21 South Latitude; and one hundred and seventy one degrees of longitude observed to the East of the Paris Meridian.

It’s what they did next that makes very little sense. Even in the eighteenth century, when folks had a sort of slap-dash attitude to subjects such as hand washing and the finer points of the law, you’d think that claiming a new land was a fundamentally public gesture. I would have thought the French might have erected a flagpole, perhaps a plaque, and begun sending over boatloads of colonists as soon as possible.

Instead, Marion's men just buried their claim in the sand. Presumably, the Frenchmen expected to return for the bottle at a later date, because they wrote down instructions on how to find it again. Crozet, du Fresne’s second in command, wrote in his journal:

The bottle... is buried on the left bank of a stream where we obtained our water and fifty seven paces from the place where the sea comes up at the new and full moons in rising, and at ten paces distance from the said stream at four feet deep.

And that was it. Despite countless attempts to find it in the past two hundred and thirty-seven years, Marion's bottle was never seen again. Instead of France, Great Britain was the country to send over boatloads of colonists, and in 1840 they legalized their claim to New Zealand with the Treaty of Waitangi.

For obvious reasons, Peter and I think this is a terrible state of affairs. Just imagine how different New Zealand would be if the French had taken over instead of the Brits. There would be no limp, sliced white bread on the supermarket shelves, and the very thought of spaghetti in a can would make New Zealanders shudder in revulsion. The women would be tall, statuesque chain smokers, and everyone would smack their lips at the thought of moldy cheese.

Furthermore, all this stress about New Zealand’s endangered native birds would be a thing of the past, because the Franco-Kiwis would have discovered long ago how to braise the little songbirds in an aromatic sauce. We wouldn’t need to worry about saving the birds because they’d all be dead, leaving us free to eat snails and discuss philosophy in peace.

And so we determined to find the French bottle. If we could just locate France’s original claim to the country, we reasoned, it would be a slam-dunk in the international court system. Never mind that New Zealand is now a completely independent state, and has been since 1948. Who could resist being administered by the nation that invented puff pastry, beurre blanc, and the thong?

We began our search in high spirits, well-equipped with Crozet’s expert instructions. But when we examined the sketches he’d made of Moturua island, we hit our first snag.

We were missing a bay. Crozet had drawn three bays on the west side of Moturua, but modern charts only show two.

For a moment, this gave us pause, but we soon recovered. New Zealand, after all, is in the crossfire of every foul weather system blowing across the Tasman. It was perfectly understandable that in more than two hundred years, the coastline might have shifted and changed. Of course, it was unfortunate that Crozet’s instructions pivoted on an accurate estimation of the high-tide line, something that would have moved dramatically with the shifting sands. But our quest rose above such piddling details. We continued undeterred.

We arrived at Mangahawea Bay shortly after high tide, the sand still moist in a clear line across the beach. The sun was high, waves crashing like broken glass in the sharp New Zealand light. Together with our new friend John, a singlehander from Brazil, we stood side by side, and began counting paces.

And here, we ran into our next difficulty. For how long, exactly, is a pace? Is it a bold stride, as Peter thought, or the length of the average man’s boot, as my father had told me years ago? How long, exactly was the average man’s boot in the eighteenth century? Weren’t people small back then? What size shoe did they wear?

Then, as I soon learned, there was the problem of all the stuff in the way. Beaches are not empty places, as a rule. They are scattered with rocks, shells, and yucky pieces of rotting seaweed that you don’t want to touch. I counted my steps: sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. When I had to navigate a particularly large piece of driftwood, I stepped over it, adding half a pace to my usual stride. Nineteen and a half, twenty and a half, twenty one and a half.

No one ever said anything about fractions of a pace. I wasn’t even sure if they had fractions in 1772. We finished counting steps, and took note of our positions. I was in the rear, Peter and Silas were in the middle, and John was way the hell out front. Between us, I estimated a good two hundred feet of distance. Now what? Do we dig a trench? I cast a look over my shoulder, disappointed to see our footprints in the sand. Preoccupied with counting, our path had meandered and curved, hardly at right angles to the high-tide line. Wherever that was.

Of course, after quaffing an entire bottle of cognac, the French were probably a little wobbly on their feet as well. So perhaps we were being historically accurate.

In our favor, we were now near an actual stream, and according to Crozet’s instructions, we should count ten paces to the left. But ten paces from where, exactly? The bank of the stream? The edge of the water? How high was the stream, when they buried their bottle?

Annoyed and frustrated, Peter kicked the sand. And then he found it. A bottle, glinting in the sun.

“It’s here!” he called. “Come look!”

John and I came running, and we held the precious artifact reverently in our hands. It wasn’t a cognac bottle after all, as we’d so innocently assumed. It was an empty bottle of Nestle Quik, its plastic lid faded and worn with age.

“Are you sure this is it?” John asked doubtfully. “Did they have plastic in those days?”

“Of course this is it,” I chided him. “What else could it be?”

Peter held up the bottle, tilting it gently. Inside, some sand and a few pebbles slid across the glass. “Where’s the note?” he asked.

“Stolen,” I told him. “Obviously. By British agents who wanted to destroy France’s claim to the land.”

Peter and John nodded, exchanging a dubious look. It’s not my fault they’re ignorant. People should read more history, then they’d have a better idea of what they’re dealing with.

Take Marion du Fresne, for example. If he’d read up on Captain Cook’s voyage, he would have learned that this strange new land had already been discovered by Great Britain. He would have read, too, about Cook’s encounters with the Maori, how they had a tendency toward sudden mood swings. And he would have learned about the grisly way they supplemented their seafood and kumara-based diet.

But du Fresne didn’t know any of this. And that’s how he ended up in pieces, roasting slowly in an underground oven.

But Sereia’s crew will not fall victim to such heedless ignorance. The rest of the world may think Britain held legal dominion over New Zealand for a century, but not us. We have the bottle that held the French claim. We have the proof.

It’s right here, in our galley, sprouting lentils. And after all these years, it’s doing an excellent job.

Sources:

• New Zealand in History
• Kelly, L.G. "In the Path of Marion du Fresne," The Journal of the Polynesian Society (Vol. 42, No. 166)

Flagpole

By the time I get to the top of Te Maiki hill, I’m amazed Hone Heke had the energy to chop anything down. It’s a hell of a climb up here, a steep and winding track through tangled bush. And there’s a pretty good path for us to walk on. Back in 1844, running up this hill would have meant shoving your way through bushes and brambles, overgrown trees and angry British soldiers.

When we get to the top, the entire Bay of Islands is laid out before us. We can see all the way across to Opua, out to Cape Brett and the famous Hole in the Rock. And right here, standing firm in thirty-five knots of wind, is an empty flagpole. That's what we came to find.

In 1844, this flagpole really pissed off one man: Hone Heke, chief of the Nga Puhi tribe in the Bay of Islands. And he was the one who’d bought it in the first place. It was supposed to be a symbol of the peace between Maori and Pakeha. But the British, who had promised to raise the Maori flag, were flying the Union Jack instead. And Heke was starting to feel like that piece of paper he’d signed four years earlier—the Treaty of Waitangi—might have been a big mistake. More and more, the English were calling the shots: telling his people they couldn’t chop down their own trees, moving the capital to Auckland so nobody was making any money up in the Bay of Islands anymore. Then they hanged the Maori son of a local chief for killing a white family—something that wasn’t their business, and wasn’t their affair. Little by little, the English were stealing Heke’s rangatiratanga—his tribal authority—and it was time he taught them a lesson.

So he hacked down the flagpole. Or, depending on who you ask, Heke might have ordered one of his men to do it. But either way, the Union Jack was found lying in the dirt, and the British had to build another monument to Empire, this one at their own expense.

They did. And six months later, Heke chopped that one down, too.

The British built a third flagpole within a week. And less than two days later, it lay in splinters on the ground.

What was wrong with these tattooed savages? Why were they getting so angry, when they’d willingly signed a treaty that gave the British complete rights of government? As it turns out, the problems were complicated, but a lot of it came down to sloppy translation.

The Treaty of Waitangi wasn’t written by lawyers or career politicians, but by William Hobson, a navy man, and James Busby—a retired grape farmer. Though they did their best, these guys didn’t think about the finer points of the law. And when they realized that an English treaty would sound like babbling gibberish to a gathering of Maori chiefs, they brought in Reverend Henry Williams to translate it. Williams gave it his best shot, but he didn’t have much time. He pulled an all-nighter to crank out a Maori version of the treaty by morning.

The result was that the Maori chieftains signed a subtly different document to the one that had been read to them in English. In short, they thought they were retaining chieftainship over their land and all their treasures. And as far as the English were concerned, they’d just pledged allegiance to the Queen.

The fourth flagpole the British built on Te Maiki hill was made to last. They sheathed the bottom twenty feet in iron, and assigned armed guards to defend it. So on March 10, 1845, Hone Heke sacked the town.

The Battle of Kororareka probably wasn’t intended to be as deadly as it was. A few muskets fired, a diversion created, and Heke and his men could have chopped down the fourth flagpole, sending the English a serious message. But unfortunately, some poor jerk dropped his pipe on a barrel of gunpowder. When British troops saw the explosion, they assumed that war had begun. And from the safety of their ships, they fired on the town.

Kororareka burned. And Hone Heke, undeterred by iron sheathing, chopped down the flagpole for the fourth time.

Not every building in town was reduced to ashes, though many were destroyed. Christ Church still stands, and you can stick your finger in the musket holes left over from Hone Heke’s war. But for more than a decade, no one built another flagpole. It was just too dangerous.

By 1857, tempers had cooled a little, and the flagpole was replaced. This one—the fifth to be built on Te Maiki Hill—has a massive iron base, at least twenty feet high. The control lines are sealed in a locked box, so no one can raise his own flag. If Hone Heke wanted to knock this one down, he’d need more than an axe. He’d need an acetylene torch.

But it’s possible he wouldn’t even bother. On the day we visited, there wasn’t any flag flying at all.

Passage to Russell

Unlike Captain Cook, we didn’t have four or five hundred natives with “tattou’d backsides” rowing out to meet us as we rounded Cape Brett. Instead, we had a gorgeous, peaceful sail up to the Bay of Islands, with fifteen knots on the port beam and not a lump of swell. These are the conditions Sereia loves best. Silas and I took a gentle nap down below, lulled to sleep by the rushing ocean as Peter steered us north at seven knots.

And then we rounded the Cape, and it all went to custard.

Sailing in New Zealand in 2009, surfing the Internet from my shipboard laptop, it’s hard to remember that just a couple of hundred years ago, Captain Cook was the first European to chart this wild coast. But study a map, and you’ll see his mark is everywhere. We pass Piercy Island off Cape Brett, a dramatic rock formation with a massive hole in it. The name is Cook’s little joke—he named Cape Brett and Piercy Island after one of the Lords of the Admiralty, Sr. Percy Brett—only he changed the spelling in honor of the rock that was “perced quite thro'…like the Arch of a Bridge.”


Today, it’s a tourist attraction. For a hundred bucks, you can take a speedboat ride out to “Hole in the Rock,” and they’ll buzz you right through the stone archway. They’ll probably tattoo your backside, too, for an extra fifty bucks, then take you back to Russell for hot chips and cold beer.

We didn’t chance the archway, and instead steered a course between rock and cape. Once we turned West toward the Bay of Islands, two things happened in quick succession. The wind, so recently friendly and on our beam, blew right in our teeth. The chop kicked up, Sereia started to hobby horse, and our speed cut right in half. Then the rubbish bin went hurtling across the cabin, and I realized that I’d forgotten how to stow.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in anything like a sloppy sea, and I hadn’t really bothered with the nonskid. Now the cabin sole was awash in coffee grounds, soup cans and dirty nappies, and my mistake was abundantly clear. If Cook had been my Captain, he would have ordered a dozen lashes.

As it happens, Cook spent a lot of time on this passage ordering lashes for his men, who seem to have been a ragtag bunch of ruffians. There were Cox, Stephens and Paroyra, who left their guard duty while ashore and prowled off to snatch potatoes from the Maori. Then, just two days later, Gunner Collin, Alex Simpson and Richard Littleboy got hold of the spirit cask and managed to swipe ten gallons of rum, getting dead drunk in the process and becoming completely “useless to the ship.” Those three probably didn’t feel their lashes, but they would have felt the pain of their other punishment: no more rum rations until they made up for what they’d stolen.

By comparison, the natives Cook met along the way were positively civilized. They may have sported feathers and dogskin cloaks, but for the most part “they dealt very fair and friendly .” They sold fresh fish and kumara to the English, came aboard and accepted gifts of cloth and iron nails. Every now and then they got a bit nasty, performing a war dance, tossing stones at the men, or trying to snatch a shore boat from under Cook’s watchful gaze, so he’d just order some muskets fired above their heads, or shoot them with “small shott.” For an eighteenth century white guy, Cook was pretty enlightened. He seemed to understand that the shows of aggression were part of Maori culture, a need to preserve mana by showing him they were unafraid. He wrote: “I avoided killing any one of them as much as possible and for that reason withheld our people from fireing.”

And if his men were caught stealing rum and potatoes, it’s hard to blame them. Cook mentions several times how pleased he is to see “sellery” growing ashore, “for this I still continue to be boild every morning with Oatmeal and Portable Soup for the ships companies breakfast.” Boiled celery, oatmeal, and dried soup. Every morning. It’s enough to make you want to swipe a potato or two, or a flagon of rum, and damn the consequences.

As for Sereia’s crew, we pulled into Russell at nightfall, choking down a horrible meal of rice and roasted squash because it was too late to find our bearings on shore. But the very next morning, we dashed into town, where we gorged ourselves on fresh fruit, fried eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, blueberry muffins, and great big frothy coffees. If Captain Cook had provided rations like that for his men, they would have followed him to the ends of the earth.

On second thought, they did follow him to the ends of the earth. Even without the frothy coffees. Or the blueberry muffins.

Damn, that man was a hell of a sailor.




[Excerpts from Captain Cook's Journal aboard the Endeavor come from the National Library of Australia, http://southseas.nla.gov.au]

Rob

The first thing Rob tells us is that our fish is full of worms.

“She’ll be right for bait,” he smiles. “Barracuda. Kiwis call ‘em cooters, we don’t eat them really. They’ve got a lot of worms.”

Peter and I concede that we had seen some worms in the meat, but we’d just cut them out. Besides, surely if the fish was cooked thoroughly, the worms would die?

“Not the eggs though.” Rob takes a slug of our feijoa wine. “You’ll want to freeze the meat overnight. That’ll kill the eggs. Otherwise you’ll get infected with the worms.”

He knows about hunting and fishing and skinning. Born on the Chatham Islands, part Moriori, Rob’s grandfather raised him from the age of four months on a series of working sailboats. “I’ve got pictures of some real old men, the old cooks and that, bottle-feeding me.”

He warns us he’ll be making some noise tonight, when he’s out shooting rabbit. “Need some tucker to stock up the freezer,” he explains, with a crooked-toothed grin. He has a bushy beard and a grey Confederate soldier’s cap perched atop his head, crossed yellow muskets embroidered in the wool. He’s wearing a filthy hoody, an old pair blue shorts. I imagine he’d rather wear the same clothes every day than do the bloody laundry.

We sit in the cockpit, enjoying the sunshine in Mimiwhangata Bay, the gentle roll of our boat at anchor.

“My Dad was a writer, pretty famous. Bit of a hunter, bit of a bushman, like that. Wrote about the old New Zealand, the way it was. Pub yarns. I'm probably one of sixteen kids. That I know about. He was a dad to about 12 of them.”

“And you?”

“I was one of the lucky ones, that escaped. He wasn't exactly the best of dads. But if I could have impregnated as many women as he did, I wouldn't have minded.”

I ask him who his father was, and he tells me. He really is famous. I’ve heard of him, even with my tiny knowledge of New Zealand literature. “Is he still alive?”

“Dead now. Too much smoking and drinking and living the good life. Can’t blame him for that, I guess.”

Rob takes us on a walk around the nature reserve. We hike up a hill, thick green grass tangled in our Tevas. From the top, we see a stunning vista: jagged rocks crumbling into the ocean, the water shifting from turquoise to darkest blue as the bottom drops away. The view extends to the horizon: the crashing surf blends into rolling swell, and then the great white Pacific, glinting beneath the sun.

Rob’s lived on a boat his entire life, except when he was in Japan for ten years, teaching English. “I faked a university degree, a Bachelor in the arts. Got one printed out and sent over there, and –yeah, 'cause the money was good and everything else. Then I met a Japanese girl, and we got married. We had our twins–in Japan they call 'em "halves," but we called 'em "doubles," 'cause they got a bit of Japanese and a bit of Kiwi in ‘em.”

Since we are damn near exhausted keeping up with one toddler, the thought of twins makes us shiver. “Twins?” Peter asks. “What was that like?”

“Dunno mate,” Rob replies. “Didn’t have much to do with it.” He’s in touch with them now, though. His son’s a bush pilot, flying planes in Papua New Guinea. As to his daughter, she’s studying to be a geisha in Japan.

“It's the last path I'd ever want her to take, but she's stuck with it, it's what she wants to do. A lot of training, a lot of hard work. She's on good money yeah, for Japanese standards and everything else, but she'll never be fully into it till she's about thirty.”

He tells us how she has to study poetry and music, as well as business and the law. She has to be able to sit down with anyone, and converse intelligently on any subject. “Why in the world wouldn’t you want her to do it, then?” I ask, confused. “It sounds as though you’d be very proud of her.”

“Well…” he trails off. “What’s wrong with being the next Jean Batten, or Sir Edmund Hillary?”

“That’s a pretty tall order,” mutters Peter.


Rob points out a Pohutukawa, a magnificent tree with great, straining branches, extended and cupped as though offering their leaves to the sky. The tree is covered with vines, thousands of tiny tendrils twisting around branches and trunk, a symbiotic circulatory system.

The Pohutukawa is sacred to the Maori. There’s a lone, ghostly tree up at the tip of Cape Reinga, at the northernmost edge of the country. That’s where the spirits of the Maori are said to go when they die, into the tree and down through the root system, and on to Hawaiiki, their mythical home.

“Do you take your boat up to the islands much?” I ask. “Fiji? Tonga?”

Rob shakes his head. “I actually prefer the Southern Ocean to be honest. I go cruising down there, go round in circles for a few months, and come back when I run out of food.”

“The Southern Ocean?” I ask. That’s sort of like jogging up Everest for a bit of a holiday. I think about his fiberglass boat, with no pilothouse, not even a dodger. “Ever see anything scary down there?”

“Ninety knots,” he chuckles. “Your rigging actually breaks 'cause it's so iced up, just goes brittle and snaps. Lost my mast and the whole lot. Got saved by some blokes at Scott Base.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupt. “Scott Base? Isn't that in the Antarctic? What the hell were you doing down there?”

“Something about that Southern Ocean,” he recalls fondly. “You can get a month of crap, then one day, the sky will open up, you'll get a huge great big southern swell, and that southern breeze, about twenty knots, and so you'll get some of the big whales coming up, it just makes the last thirty days all worthwhile, even just for a ten minute window like that. You've got a great big whale riding up, and a bit of iceberg out the back.”

“Icebergs,” I repeat. “Jesus.”

“ You don't have to worry about mosquitoes down there,” he adds.

“No,” I say, lamely. “I guess not.”

That afternoon, he brings round a book, by his useless mongrel of a father. “Just please return it,” he asks us. “I just—I want it back.”

It’s a book of short stories, and I read several of them. The writing is excellent, luminous and spare. The stories are full of gum boots, sodden pastureland, hot bowls of porridge, and warm beer. They take place in New Zealand, forty or fifty years ago. It’s clear that Rob’s father loved the outdoor life, self-sufficiency, “a good keen man” who can stand on his own two feet in the world.

Setting the stories aside, I reflect that Rob’s father would have been proud of his son’s adventures in the Southern Ocean, his unconventional kids, his skill with a rifle and a knife.

And I wonder if he knew about any of it.

Tutukaka

Flipping through our cruising guide for the North Island, Peter sighed in despair. “JESUS,” he complained. “Rangaruru, Rangamumu, these names are driving me fucking crazy. It’s a dyslexic’s nightmare out here.”

And it’s true, the Maori place names can be difficult for English-speaking pakeha such as ourselves. Take Taumatawhakatangihangakoauau Atamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu, for example. Though it’s situated in Hawke’s Bay, which is a very lovely area that produces some rather famous wines, we’ll likely give it a miss. We’d crash the boat just trying to read the place name on a chart.

So we compromised, and sailed to Tutukaka instead. Actually, we weren’t trying to go to Tutukaka. We were trying to get to Mimiwhangata (the “wh” is pronounced as an “f,” just to make things easy for you). But we didn’t exactly make it there.

Allow me to explain.

The morning dawned calm and overcast, tendrils of fog slinking over the hilltops. We were right at the mouth of the Pacific, in a lovely little inlet called McLeod’s Bay. The New Zealand landscape is like England, with a twist: you see rolling hills and grazing sheep, topped by jagged peaks shaped like raunchy Polynesian sex gods. And then a penguin swims by, and you think: “Ah. We’re not in Brighton, after all. In fact, we’re rather a long way away.”

Here’s the view from our toilet, known to salty dogs as the “head:”


For three and a half months, we’ve been working, and spending our savings, and worrying about babies and buckets and all sorts of nightmares, and it hasn’t been fun at all. Then last night I went to have a pee, and I discovered this spectacularly beautiful sunset—the kind you see so often from a boat that you take them for granted—and I thought: “OH. THAT’s why we’re doing this. It’s supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be FUN.”

And today was fun. At first.

To begin with, the passage was positively poetic. We raised anchor, and found to our surprise a collection of tiny green and purple starfish, clinging to the anchor chain. This would have been especially sweet and picturesque if the chain hadn’t already snapped off several of their delicate little arms:


Silas was raring to go. In fact, he wasn’t really interested in relinquishing the helm.

For awhile, he was content with peering out at his papa from the companionway.



Then he started to yawn, and I lay down with him for a nap. And it was at this juncture that the wise words of Douglas Adams came back to me: “A towel,” he wrote, “is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” He was right, of course, and same holds true for people who sail with small children. Only in our case, six or seven towels, and a rubber sheet, would have possibly been more a propos.

Silas, I can tell you with authority, had a ham omelette, apple juice, and water for breakfast. In copious quantities. Soon, these ingredients—in liquid form—were all over Silas, his clothes, his mother, and our bed. The poor little nipper was seasick, and everything was covered in barf.

At that moment, Peter started hollering. “FISH!! I CAUGHT A FISH!!” he crowed from the cockpit. “Wanna come up and gut it?”

“Not now,” I called, cradling my rancid baby. “Can we have another towel?”

We stripped the baby down, and wrapped him up. Then I brought him on deck, knowing—with the wisdom of someone who has been seasick for a fair proportion of my own life—that the fresh air would make him feel better. On deck, in the presence of a large, gory fish, he fell asleep.



“Do you think we’re nearly there?” I asked, hopefully.

Peter looked perturbed. “Did I say one o’clock? Uh. Maybe I mixed up kilometers and miles. Hang on.”

He went down below, and came up looking worried. “We’re just about a quarter of the way to Mimi—Mimi—Mimi whatever the fuck it is,” he admitted. “It’s actually, uh, forty miles to get there.”

I held Silas tighter. “Can we pull in anywhere closer? I think forty miles is too much for the first day.”

Peter, because he is a hero and a gentleman, plotted a new course. Silas took an exceptionally long nap, as only seasick and dehydrated babies can do. And we pulled in to Tutukaka, which is a very beautiful bay, rimmed with rocky green hills and cheerful holiday homes.

A fleet—or perhaps they were a gaggle? a pride?—of kayaks greeted us as we set our anchor. Silas slept soundly. I made fish tacos. And Peter sipped a glass of feijoa wine, practicing silently to himself how to pronounce our next anchorage.

Perspective

The other day I was having tea with a friend, and I asked her where the toilet was. When I excused myself to head off down the corridor, she hollered, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO THROW IT OUT THE WINDOW,” a gesture that was surely intended to be helpful to trolls like me who’ve used buckets for so long that we’ve forgotten how indoor plumbing works. So I peed on the carpet and festooned the walls with toilet paper, then returned to the living room to finish my tea. I hate disappointing my friends.

But the truth of the matter is that we’ve left the bucket phase of our lives behind us. When Peter dismantled the head this last time, he discovered that her main pump arm had snapped clean through, the victim of twenty-odd years of metal fatigue, corrosion, and low-fiber diets. There was nothing, short of Jesus, that could resurrect her. We progressed through the typical stages of grief: the anger, the denial, the guilt. Finally we accepted the fact that the only thing that could lift us from our life of eighteenth-century squalor was a new toilet, so we bought the cheapest one we could find. It’s plastic, and it’s made in Taiwan.

We’re not getting rid of the bucket.

But we are going sailing. Yes, three and a half months after leaving Invercargill, after an exhausting boat refit and a series of terrifying diagnoses for our son, we’re raising a sail. We’ll just head toward the Bay of Islands at first, an easy jaunt to an area with lots of fascinating history. There’s Waitangi, where New Zealand became an official part of the British Empire, and Russell, once known as “the Hellhole of the Pacific,” presumably because it was one helluva place for a party. Back in the day, the whole town was awash in whale blubber, booze and cheap whores, although now you’re more likely to find souvenir shops and a rather chic breakfast café or two.

I’ve been studying the history of the Bay of Islands, which gives me a valuable perspective on our voyage. While we’ve had our share of troubles, just think of poor Marion du Fresne, captain of the French ship Mascarin. In 1772, he and his men were logging kauri up in the Bay of Islands, working with the local Maori tribes to fix up their ships and reprovision. Somehow, they managed to annoy the locals, and before they knew what hit them, Marion and two dozen of his men were slaughtered, cooked and eaten.

When their captain failed to show up, the French stormed the local village, and they found Marion. Or rather, they found what was left of him: “the skull of a man which had been cooked some days before. All the remaining flesh had been eaten and upon the skull itself were still to be seen the traces of the teeth of the cannibals.”*

Death at the hands of cannibals. And to top it all off, the year was 1772. I guarantee you Marion had to shit in a bucket.

All things considered, buckets and brain-damaged babies aren’t so bad. It could be worse. There could be cannibals gnawing on our skulls.

* Dumas, Alexandre. Translated by F. W. Reed. Captain Marion. Christchurch: Cadsonbury Publications, 1998.