Stowaway

Our ad was very clear. I specifically asked for ONE crew member, because this a small boat, we live in close quarters, and there’s no room for a whole mess of people.

So I was pretty annoyed to find out we have a stowaway. And this situation’s been going on for weeks. More than three months, from what I can tell.

I smelled a rat when our food started disappearing. Sour pickles, chocolate, salty nuts. Whoever this bum is, he or she’s got a hell of an appetite.

And he’s not pulling his weight, either. If I’ve got extra mouths to feed, I want a little help around here. Doing the dishes, standing watch, or just picking up Silas’ Legos off the floor. I don’t ask for much. But this joker just stays in his comfy little dark place, taking warm baths and eating my food. Getting fat on my dime. By May, this guy’s gonna be huge. Eight, nine pounds at least.

It wasn’t easy catching the rascal. For one thing, he’s only about the size of my thumb. Plus he’s pretty wily, and he never makes a peep. We finally snapped a picture using sonar. And here’s the proof:


Look at him. Lounging around. Relaxing. Sipping amniotic fluid, with no thought for the future. I can tell you right now that when he comes out in May, things are gonna change around here.

For one thing, a good night’s sleep will be a thing of the past. And then there’s the diapers. The long, dark tunnel of diapers, from which we may never emerge.

As of next May, we’ll be a family of four. And Sereia’s gonna need more bunks.

Crew

It’s amazing how many young people want to get abused in the name of adventure. We posted this ad on a local backpackers website, and instantly we were flooded with responses. Travelers wrote us long letters, attached their resumes, brought us excellent bottles of wine. “Wow!” they wrote. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime!” “It’s always been my dream to live on a sailboat!” “How soon can I come on board?”

I know how they feel, because I used to be that young person. Specifically, I was twenty-four when I started prowling the docks in Fort Lauderdale, two years’ worth of savings in my bank account, hoping desperately that someone would ask me to crew on his yacht. During my searches, I met a French boy named Jean-Christian. “Eet ees so easy for a girl to find eh boat,” he moaned, with typical Gallic melancholy. “For a boy, not so easy.”

It was easy all right, especially if you wore a short skirt and a pretty smile. But there were other challenges for a girl looking to catch a ride at sea. Fresh out of a lifetime of private schools, I was clueless about the way things worked on the water. When an eight-fingered captain named Bob asked me to join him on a weekend trip to the Bahamas, I had to ask around for advice.

“He says he wants to show me how to sail,” I asked my hosts at the crew house. “Do you think he wants something else?”

Harry looked up from the television, where he was watching Animal Planet, a can of beer balanced on his gut. He looked startled, then burst out laughing. “COURSE he does,” he guffawed. “Cap’n Bob wants to get LAID.” Then he schooled me, as gently as he could, about “gas, grass or ass—no one rides for free.”

For the most part, he was right. There was the Captain who inquired, in an interview, what size bra I wore, and then there was the really creepy one—Captain Joe, who kept telling me how important it was for a captain and cook team to act like husband and wife. “It makes the guests feel right at home,” he explained, snapping pictures of me for his charter brochure. Later, while dusting behind the bar, I found a small pile of photographs. It was a stack of heads—my head—carefully torn from the prints and tucked behind the bottles, like a rat might hide a stash of rotten food. I cleared off that boat without even saying goodbye.

There are exceptions, of course. We’re not asking our crew to put out free sex, or pay for our gas, or supply us with drugs. We really are just looking for help. It’s a lot of work to go to sea, and with a toddler on board, it’s too much for the two of us to handle alone.

And that, I fear is where we may shatter some youthful illusions. When I was twenty-four, going to sea represented freedom, a red-blooded life in nature’s pulse, a long way from heavy books and dried-up, intellectual theorizing. Pushed by the wind, buoyed by the sea, illuminated by moon and sun, we were utterly independent of the world and its cynics.

Then I bought Sereia. And now that I’ve owned her for six years, I know that ideal is both true and illusory. We touch that sense of freedom at times, beam reaching on a moonlit sea, phosphorescence in the water, a magic carpet ride of stardust in our wake.

The rest of the time, it’s a hell of a lot of work.

Sailboats are powered by the wind, it’s true. But they also need tons of stainless steel, fiberglass, teak, epoxy, solvents, electronics, and thousands of square feet of sail. They need a crew, all of whom must be fed, clothed, cleaned and entertained. And in order to learn the skills that are necessary to pilot a sailboat effectively, the crew must delve into mountains of heavy books, then spend hours on the docks with other sailors, trading dried-up, intellectual theorizing.

Tim has joined us for this next leg, from Whangarei to Auckland. He’s laid back, he works hard, and he’s eager to learn. He’s also twenty-four years old.

I hope we don’t teach him too much, too fast. And I hope there’s lots of phosphorescence, lighting our way down the coast.





There's magic at sea, even when you're anchored in town. Here's some genuine Kiwi dolphins, cruising past Sereia.

Clinical Opinion

There are a few things you’d rather not hear your pediatrician say, such as “cancer,” or “this is a fatal disease and there is no cure.” Then there’s this one:

“So. Is there any possibility you two are related?”

The doctor’s rust-colored hair was cropped close to his head, and he wore an extravagant blue bow tie, likely an affectation from the years (he made a point of telling us), “I practiced in Boston.” When he saw Silas he peered at him, tilting his head like a viper assessing a mouse for juiciness. Silas stared right back.

We sat down in his office, my heart thundering as though this pediatrician were about to administer an oral exam—which, in a sense, he was. “Do you think Silas can hear? What does Silas like to do? How does Silas play with others? Does he eat well? Sleep well?”

He skimmed through the medical records, scribbling notes on a separate sheet of paper, then looked up, continuing to stare pointedly at my son. Sensing the tension in the room, Silas crept behind my chair, then peeked out at the doctor with a tentative smile, not sure if he was friendly or not.

“He makes good eye contact,” the doctor declared. “But it’s not a social gaze. It’s a sort of a cold, hard stare.”

I didn’t want to be the silly mother in denial, so I kept quiet. Not a social gaze? I wondered to myself, knowing full well the way Silas’ smile can light up a room. You’re staring at him as though he were a Petri dish, growing an interesting species of mold. What do you expect him to do?

Then I began answering the questions. “Silas loves to chase balls and bottles, anything that will roll. He loves to spin things. I once saw him spinning a smaller pot lid inside of a larger pot lid, adjusting both lids very gently, to get them spinning together just right.”

“Obsessed with spinning things,” the doctor noted, jotting this down in his notebook.

Peter spoke up. “But it’s not like a mindless action. He’ll take the big basin we wash him in, turn it on its side, and get that rolling in a huge arc around him. He’s very concentrated, and he gets very frustrated if it isn’t just the way he wants it.”

“Short-tempered,” the doctor scribbled. “Easily frustrated.”

“He absolutely adores—and he has always adored—his books,” I ventured. “He can sit and listen to a stack of books, one after the other. And he has a rapturous love for music. Some of the mixes I’ve made for him, he’ll sit and listen to for an hour at a time, just entranced.”

The doctor ignored the part about the music. “When you read to him,” he asked. “What does he do when you read to him?”

“Do?” I was a little taken aback. What’s a toddler supposed to do? What was the right answer? “He smiles, looks from me to the book. He’ll turn the pages when we say ‘turn the page.’” Then I admitted, “But he doesn’t point to things. If you say ‘where’s the dog,’ he won’t point to it.”

“But he knows his books,” Peter interjected hopefully. “Antonia can start reciting the words from one of his favorite books—even when the book isn’t there!—and his face will light up. He recognizes the book, definitely.”

The doctor was writing furiously. “Cause and effect,” he announced, without looking up. “Would you say he has an understanding of cause and effect?”

I was eager, the little girl in French school again. I felt like raising my hand, anxiously calling oooooo I know this one! “Definitely,” I told the doctor. “From a very early age, as soon as we had him up at the table with us, he had this game he’d play with the water or wine glasses.”

Peter took over. “He figured out that if he bounced in his seat, the table would shake, and he could make the water slosh over the side of the glass.”

“Obsessed with water,” the doctor muttered, jotting this down on his pad.

“But isn’t that cause and effect?” I asked. “And turning the pages of a book because he wants to see the next page, isn’t that cause and effect? And flipping the light switch to see the light go on and off?”

The doctor raised his pale green eyes. He looked impatient. “Simple, rote behaviors. Repetitive flicking and bouncing. That’s all it is.”

I was quiet; I was wrong. But what about when Silas gets so excited to see what’s on the next page, and he turns it, at the right time, without even being told? That’s a rote behavior?

“His gaze, as I mentioned, seems very intense, but not social. Does he feel empathy at all, do you think? Does he smile socially?”

“Absolutely.” I told the doctor about the time Silas’ little friend Sammi started to cry, and Silas looked so worried and upset.

The doctor shook his head. “He was probably just responding to the sound. Is he hyper-sensitive to sound at all? Does he clamp his hands over his ears?”

“No, never. And he looked really troubled that the little girl was crying. Even her mother noticed it.”

The doctor pounced. “Ah, but was he troubled because the little girl was upset? Or because the sound was bothering him? He’s in his own little world, you see. Does he ever try to get your attention, does he seem gratified when you smile at him?”

“Of course,” I nodded emphatically. “Whenever I’m cooking, and he wants attention, he’ll pull on my legs or hang on me until I respond to him.”

The pale green eyes flashed. “But does he want the exchange with you, or is he just trying to get his own needs met? There’s a difference, you know.”

This didn’t make sense. “But what would a neuro-typical child do to get his mother’s attention? Aren’t all little children selfish? Aren’t they all trying to get their own needs met?”

The doctor snapped his head back and forth. “Even infants show empathy. It’s been shown in studies.” He turned his pale gaze on Silas. “Now let’s have a look at him. I’ll just measure his head, shall I?”

At this point, Silas was sitting in my lap, looking warily at the man with the notepad. He saw the tape measure come out, and he started to squirm. The doctor pushed his rolling chair towards us with gleaming leather shoes. He put the tape measure around Silas’ head. Immediately, Silas started squirming and twisting. I imagined he was whining in protest at this strange man, and his insistence on nineteenth-century phrenology.

“Hyper sensitive to touch,” the doctor noted. “He won’t even let me get near him. He hates being touched, doesn’t he?”

I had to disagree. “Not at all,” I protested. “He loves touch. He just hates being restrained. And we’ve seen several doctors in the past few days, and everyone keeps trying to put a tape measure around his head.”

“I’d be pretty pissed too,” Peter joked, thinly.

The doctor sat back, examining Silas’ face. “Round head. Full cheeks. A tendency to synophrys. He doesn’t really look like either of you, does he?”

Everyone says Silas looks just like Peter, but it seemed pointless to bring this up. I gestured to the space between my eyebrows. “I’ve got a bit of the Brooke Shields thing going. And Peter’s pretty hairy.”

The doctor lifted one of Silas’ feet and examined it. Silas, who had long ago decided he hated this man, kicked and howled. “Rather pronounced heels,” he murmured. “And very mottled skin.” At this point, it was clear to me that Silas’ skin was mottled because he was both Caucasian and cold, especially because he was wearing no pants. However, this seemed too obvious to mention.

The doctor was ready to grade our baby. We sat silent, breathless.

He reviewed his notes, not looking at us. “Without wanting to say the ‘A word,’ there is a possibility of autism. The lack of empathy, the inability to form social relationships, the repetitive actions.” He tapped his pen on his notepad, three short, sharp clicks. “From some elements of his appearance—as we’ve spoken about—there is a possibility of a genetic or metabolic syndrome of some kind.” He began pulling forms out of his briefcase. “I’m going to order a series of karyotyping tests, and we’ll see what comes up.”

He paused, looked at us. “This may be a strange question,” he asked. “But is there any possibility that you two are related?”

What the hell? I hesitated. “There’s a remote chance that we might have the same ancestors from Poland or something, but we’re not cousins or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I know it’s strange, but I have to ask. In some cultures, you know, it’s accepted. And it can increase the possibility of recessive genes appearing in the offspring.”

“The offspring,” at that moment, was down on the ground, crawling over to the doctor. Perhaps he had decided to give this horrible man a second chance. As the doctor talked, Silas pulled himself to a standing position, drooling on what were undoubtedly an expensive pair of black pants. Instinctively, I started reaching for the diaper bag, to pull out a little towel and apologize. Then I stopped myself. The guy’s a pediatrician, I considered. Juicy babies must go with the territory.

“He certainly does drool a lot,” the doctor commented, distastefully. He edged his knee away from Silas’ wet chin. Silas reached out for balance, then fell backwards on his bum.

“He’s making five teeth right now,” I explained, scooping up my baby. “It’s part of the teething.”

“Maybe,” the doctor mused. “Or perhaps not.”

Oh, God. Is he going to tell us our child is a drooling idiot? We waited.

And then, he did. “In my clinical opinion, Silas is globally at a nine-month level for a nineteen-month chronological age,” the doctor pronounced. “This is what we call a global developmental delay.”

There it was. Our kid’s retarded. “So without sounding too Polyanna-ish,” I asked softly, “is there a chance he can catch up with his peers, with early intervention?”

The doctor studied me, tilting his head in that serpentine way. “Likely not.” His words fell around us like stones. Cold, hard, final. “We can’t test cognition in a child this young, but as a rough guide, we divide the chronological age into the developmental age.”

“So nine, divided by nineteen. Help me with the arithmetic and the implications.”

The doctor didn’t skip a beat. “He could have an IQ of 50.”

Beside me, Peter breathed out. “Wow. That’s heavy.” I looked over at my husband. His face was strained, in a way that perhaps only I know means he is holding back tears.

Silas was on the floor, flipping the pages of his caterpillar book, seemingly unaware that he’d just been assigned a future as a drooling cretin.

“What do we do with this?” I stammered. “I mean, where do we go from here?”

“What do we do?” Peter wanted to know. “How can I help my son?”

The doctor looked startled at our emotions. “There’s really not much you can do. Help him to get out of his own little world, if you can. I’ll leave you with the forms for the child disability allowance. You’ll get money now, every month.” He tapped his watch, pointedly. “I really must be moving on. It’s after one o’clock, you know.”

The doctor handed us forms, and a bill for $350. We tucked Silas’ things into our bags. We changed the baby’s diaper, pulled on his pants. I felt detached, as though I were floating in air.

Silas started to squirm again, impatient with the mean man and his cramped little room. Peter took him outside. I turned to the doctor. His eyes looked troubled, as though he wasn’t sure what it was he’d said to upset us. As though, I thought, he can’t read other people’s feelings.

I shook his hand. “Thank you for your candor, doctor.” What more was there to say?

We paid our bill, in cash, as required. We walked to the elevator in silence. We rode down to the ground level. We said nothing.

We floated to the car. Peter strapped Silas into his seat, removing his jacket first because it was hot and we’d been parked in the sun. He sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned over, putting his arms around me. We sat, rigid, for a moment, then our shoulders loosened. The tears came, hot and tight. I clawed his neck, screaming rage and fear into his shoulder.

After a few minutes, Peter started the ignition. He was wearing his sunglasses, but I saw his eyes were wet behind the lenses. I turned back to Silas. Will he ever love books? Have a stimulating conversation? Challenge someone’s ideas? Fall in love?

Will he ever say ‘mama’?

“Ready to go home?” I asked, and smiled at my son.

Silas looked at me, his face instantly alight with love and joy. His big, brown eyes looked clear and intelligent. He craned his head around, eager and curious to see more.

He doesn’t look retarded to me.

But what the hell do I know? I’m just his mother.

South

Sereia is ready. Or rather, she’s as ready as she’s going to get without an additional two months and fifty thousand dollars to burn. I’ve shelved my hopes for a deep flight submarine, and there’s still no washer or dryer on board. But where we’re going, we won’t need to wash our clothes, and we won’t need to change them, either. Like medieval peasants of yore, we plan to sew ourselves into our foulies, then burn them at the changing of the seasons.

Because instead of sailing to Fiji, we’ve decided to stay close to land. We plan to learn about this new country we’ve adopted as our own. And that, of course, means one thing:

We’re cruising to Invercargill. The frozen asshole of the world.

I’ve hesitated to tell people our idea, for fear they will call us stupid and crazy. The southern tip of New Zealand, is, after all, where we lived last year, and we just recently escaped with our lives. They have horizontal ice storms down there. They have a perpetually overcast sky, bleak with the smoke of coal fires. I’m only just getting over the rash I acquired in Invercargill, a sort of scrofulous skin rot that confounded the doctors and can only be ascribed to a prolonged bout of spiritual malaise.

In short, we didn’t like it. At all.

And it’s not just us. People who don’t sail can’t imagine why we would rather stay in chilly old New Zealand, rather than voyage a mere ten days to the north, where the beaches are made of white powder and the snorkeling is clear as air.

Then there’s the sailors, the people who actually know what they’re talking about. Like Ken, for example, our Kiwi friend who’s built several boats and sailed them all round these waters. The other day we were sitting at his picnic table, quaffing homemade fruit wine and chatting.

“NOW,” Ken declared, slamming his glass on the table. “WHERE YA THINKIN’ A GOING IN THAT BOAT A YOURS.”

Peter, who is more forthcoming than me, and who was also more drunk, gave him a straight answer. “Circumnavigating New Zealand. We’re going to circumnavigate New Zealand.”

Ken peered at him. “DAHN’T BE BLOODY STUPID,” he roared. “Right the way round? With that kid? You’re CRAZY.”

“You think so?” asked Peter.

“THE WEST COAST IS BLOODY AWFUL,” Ken declared. “Nowhere to go in. You’d need local knowledge.”

“Perfect,” I slurred, with the confidence born of homemade fruit wine. “We’ll talk to the sailors. We’ll get to know people along the way.”

“You serious?” Ken asked, squinting at Peter. “Christ, you’re serious. Right then, you’d better talk to Max. He’s done it.”

“Great,” Peter concurred. “He’ll tell us all about it.”

“He’ll tell you you’re BLOODY STUPID and CRAZY, is what he’ll tell you,” Ken replied. “Go to Fiji. Go where it’s WARM, fer Chrissake.”

So we talked to Max. That man is an encyclopedia about New Zealand waters. And he didn’t try to dissuade us. In fact, he lit us up with excitement.

“I’ve traveled all round the Pacific,” he growled, “and everywhere I go, they ask me what my favorite Pacific island is. They think I’ll tell them some bloody sand dune with coconuts. Na,” he shook his head. “I tell them I live there! New Zealand, mate! You can live off the bloody ocean here! Everywhere you go, you can catch your dinner! Where else can you do that, I ask you?”

His eyes narrowed. “But that West Coast can be a bit rough. Why don’t you stay on the East Coast? It would be a lot easier.”

I fully planned to dodge his question, but Peter came right out with the truth. “Because Antonia’s going to write a book about New Zealand. And this would make a great story.”

I cringed. But Max didn’t tell us we were stupid. And he didn’t tell us we were crazy. Instead, he started telling us where the good anchorages were to take shelter.

“What about Fiordland?” Peter asked. “I hear it can get pretty nasty down there, with those katabatic winds. Where can we pull in there?”

“If it really starts to blow in the Sounds, mate, an old friend of mine, who’d sailed there for years, he told me there’s just three places to take shelter. Remember that. Just three places ye’ll be protected, from whatever comes at ye.”

“Where?” we asked, in unison. I pulled out my notebook to jot them down.

“Precipice Cove, Precipice Cove, and… Precipice Cove. Other than that, you’re on your own.”

There was a pause, while we took this in. I looked down at the baby, who was clutching my leg. I thought about katabatic winds.

“But it’s nice there, right?” Peter asked. “I mean, if we go there, it’s worth it, right?”

“Fiordland? It’s bloody magnificent, mate. It’s like nowhere else in the world.”

Problems With Intentional Movement

We’ve been planning this trip all year. We quit our jobs, moved across the country, and invested two months of time and money into making Sereia seaworthy again. We splash this week, and we hope to move on board by Saturday.

There’s just one hitch. At nineteen months, Silas isn’t walking or talking yet.

He cruises around with great confidence, just barely holding on to something solid. He babbles incessantly, with rhythms and intonations that sound increasingly like speech. His eyes are bright and focused, he makes excellent eye contact and his hunger for books and music is insatiable.

But he doesn’t point to what he wants. He doesn’t wave “bye-bye.” He has no recognizable words. And he can’t yet walk on his own.

Peter and I have been through the full spectrum of emotions about all this, from breezy confidence (“Einstein didn’t talk until he was four years old!”), to despair (“Holy crap, what if he’s a ‘TARD?”). The journey has been all the more harrowing because we are alone out here, with no family or trusted friends to confide in. The people we know in New Zealand are new friends, the kind that say, “I’m sure everything will be just fine!” and then tactfully change the subject.

Recently, we determined to stop wasting time with fear and guesswork, and consult a specialist. We drove three hours to Auckland, so that Silas could play for an hour with a developmental speech therapist. Her verdict: he’s not a ‘tard. But his language is significantly delayed.

“Have you heard of dyspraxia?” she asked.

Limp with relief at the notion that I wouldn’t have to feed him with a spoon for the rest of my life, I barely heard what she was saying. But then she explained.

“I’m not saying this is a diagnosis—it’s too early to diagnose this, and I’d like you to see a pediatrician—but what I’m seeing is leading me to think of dyspraxia. Essentially, it’s a problem with executing intentional movement, so the late walking is related to the late speech. Think of speech as a very complicated dance between your tongue and your lips and your mouth. If the child has a hard time coordinating his legs, then you can imagine it would be a difficult to coordinate all the different muscles you need for speech.”

“But it’s not cognitive?” I asked again, my voice breaking.

“Not at all. From what I can see, Silas is a bright and curious little boy. But while other little children will pick up speech patterns automatically, Silas may need to be taught how to move his mouth, or point his finger.”

She pulled out a stack of handouts. “Here are some exercises you can do with him at home, to encourage him to point and talk.”

As she went through the materials with us, I scanned ahead. It was pretty small-scale stuff, like blowing bubbles and popping them with an index finger. Nothing you couldn’t do on a boat.

Because of course, now Peter and I are faced with a choice. Do we pursue our plans, go sailing, write articles, compile a travel book? Can we give Silas the help he needs while living on a sailboat? Or do we need to make a screeching U-turn, get jobs, move to Auckland, and save our pennies for speech therapy several times a week?

What, asks Darwin’s Puppet, is best for the baby?

Could it be, say… circumnavigating New Zealand? That way, we’ll be near the coast, and we can pull the plug at any time, move on land, and get specialized help if we need it. It would be a great chance to learn about our new country, and it should make a fantastic story. We can pop bubbles and do speech exercises as we sail. With periodic consultations, and the assistance of research libraries along the way, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to help Silas learn as we show him how to live an adventurous life.

First stop, Auckland. Silas has an appointment with a developmental pediatrician on August 27th. And we’ll arrive there in the most appropriate way. It is, after all, the City of Sail.

Ixnay on the Ijifay

Up until this point, Peter has been in charge of making Sereia safe for us to live aboard. He’s been fixing leaks, making sure the head and the stove work, and keeping electrical fires out of the bilge. Every time he looked at the bent compression post, he started babbling incoherently about hiring engineers and jacking up the mast, so we tried to keep things manageable. We avoided talking about what it would take to make Sereia safe for coastal cruising, or ocean sailing, because we didn’t want Peter’s head to explode.

And now we’ve moved on the boat. Sereia is safe for living aboard. And Peter’s head is exploding.

The problem isn’t that any one system is broken. Sereia is a thirty year-old boat, and she’s been held together with duct tape and dreams for some time now. Before I met Peter, when I first noticed that my chainplates were rusting out, I hired a rigger to take a look at the problem, and he said:

“Well, you’ll probably be fine. It’s probably just surface rust.” He was a very cute rigger, and he had an Australian accent. I wanted to believe him. But I had to ask.

“What if it’s not? What if it’s deeper?”

“Then you might lose your rig. But you wanted adventure, right? And that’s when the adventure begins, mate!” Then he charged me fifteen hundred bucks, and I realized it would be cheaper to get a husband.

Since then, Peter has drilled out the rusted chainplates and replaced them, and he’s upgraded our boat in countless other ways. But we’ve also cut plenty of corners. Sereia’s rudder, for example. Sereia has an enormous barn door rudder, held on by massive gudgeons and pintles that look as though they could bolt an elephant to the hull. Unfortunately, they are frozen shut, so the rudder can’t be removed and inspected. We know there’s water in the rudder, but we don’t know how much. Over the years, Peter and I have dealt with this by drilling small holes in the fiberglass, allowing sea water to drain out for a couple of days, then shooting the holes full of epoxy and calling it a day. “Ha, ha,” we’d say nervously. “If we lose the rudder, then that’s when the adventure begins, mate!” Then we’d have another beer, and talk about how we might dangle a wooden door overboard, to use it as a steering device.

Ha, ha. Side-to with no steering in massive South Pacific waves. Trying to save our own lives with a piece of a door, bobbing on the end of a line. While the baby is screaming down below. Getting rolled. Losing the rig.

Ha…Ha.

As you may have gathered, the problem here is cultural. Now that we are parents, we are raising the bar for acceptable safety levels at sea. Safe play areas, clean drinking water, and PFDs are all good. Broaching in large seas without reliable steering on board is bad. So are brain-eating worms. And busted masts.

Last night, we made a list of everything that needs to be done on board Sereia for her to be safe for a family at sea. Then we estimated how long each project should take, and whether or not we can be living on board Sereia while we do it.

The list looks something like this:


And the conclusions we have reached are as follows:

1. It is going to take between a month and six weeks of hard work to make Sereia ready to cruise.

2. By the time she is ready to sail, it will be too late in the season to go to Fiji. Even if we pick a good weather window, we would then have to spend the entire hurricane season in the islands, and we can’t be out of New Zealand that long without losing our visas.

On the other hand, by mid-September, the weather will be getting warmer in New Zealand. By October, it will be gorgeous. And we have tremendous cruising grounds, right here! We could sail to the Far North, check out all those hundreds of little emerald-rimmed islands that sparkle along the coast, practice fishing, learn a little Maori, explore this new country that we are adopting as our own, and maybe sail all the way down to Nelson and Cook Strait!

Then, come April, we’ll be very well-placed for a safe and timely trip to Fiji.

Our plans are changing. Stay tuned for lots of posts about rudders and compression posts. I expect there will be a few about Vegemite, as well.

It’s going to be a rough winter.

Reasonable Decisions

Fifty million people could lose their jobs by the end of 2009.

Fifty million people is the population of a mid-sized country, like, say: France. The global economic downturn is now considered the number one threat to American security, which means that the clever people who analyze these things think an angry mob the size of France is even more scary than a few crazy guys with beards and shoe bombs. People who still have jobs are feeling extremely lucky. They're showing up to work on time, accepting pay cuts, and thanking Christ they didn’t invest with that Madoff guy.

Except us. Last week, we quit our jobs to sail to Fiji.

It is quite possible that this was not a prudent move. There is very little income to be earned as a boat bum in the tropics. It is difficult to convince a dolphin to contribute to your 401-K plan. And thirty-year old fiberglass sailboats don’t appreciate in value. In fact, if you sit in the cockpit on a quiet night, you can hear a faint gurgling noise, which is the sound of your financial future sinking inexorably to the ocean floor.

But my God, it is a beautiful way to live.

The first time I decided to go sailing, it was 1999, and everyone who knew their way around a computer was busy making their first million, while I savvily decided to drop out on a sailboat in the Caribbean. This earned me a net profit of zero dollars, though it did set my life on a fairly consistent path of seeking more boats on which to drop out, spoiling any long-term career ambitions I may once have had and ensuring that any money I ever made would quickly be squandered on marinized stainless steel and underwater epoxy.

But now I’m thirty-four years old, a real grown-up, a mother. Silas is just learning how to walk. I should be shopping for the best preschool, working my way up the corporate ladder, saving for college and retirement, buying a home and a better car and acquiring a mortgage. Or at least, that’s what the pictures on TV tell me I should be doing.


But one day ten years ago, while sailing through the Bahamas, I leaned backwards over the lifelines and I saw: the pink sky at dawn over a rose-tinted sea. The sun glimmering over the horizon and the moon, watchful in the heavens. I had the sensation of skimming over the surface of a water-washed planet, a human with a place in an intricate cosmos.

That’s what I want to give my son.