Off On A Lark!

Tonga to New Zealand is 1100 miles, as the crow flies. Sailboats, however, are not crows and we sailed, well, who knows? Maybe 1300-1400? [Side note to non-sailors. Sailboat performance, and life aboard the boat, depends very much on the direction of the wind. Think of a clock with the 12 at the bow. The fastest point of sailing occurs when the wind comes from either 9 o'clock or 3. That's called wind on the beam. Exhilarating, in a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride sort of way. And you make tracks miles and miles of them. When the wind is behind (from 9 to 6 to 3 o'clock) speed is less hence the need for those huge, brightly-colored sails known as spinnakers. Wind from behind is the most pleasant on the boat sort of a rocking motion with whishing sound as the swells pass under the boat. Mesmerizing. Alas, on this trip, we never had wind from behind. Last choice, all things considered, is wind from the front. Known as beating into the wind; the term beating is apt. Traveling at 5 knots, with a wind of 15 knots, the apparent wind is 20 knots. (With wind behind it would be 10.) Forces on the boat increase with the cube of apparent wind speed, which just means the boat and its occupants take a good deal more beating than you'd think with just a small incremental increase in wind speed. And you're plowing head-on into the waves. Crash, the boat stops, rolls, winds hits the sails, you pick up speed, moving along until, crash again, when you plow into another wave.] We leave Tonga at 3 in the afternoon on Monday. By 5 we've got the sails up and, Yipee!, the wind is on the beam. Brad nails the sail trim and we fly!!! Two full days of 7-8 knots of boat speed. We hit 9 a couple of times. Wow - we're getting close to 200 miles a day!!! Until the wind died on day 3. Rolling in the swells, we turn on the engine and drive. Brad and I are prone to seasickness, Linda not at all at least not until she made mac and cheese with strong-smelling cheese days later on. But, by the third day Brad and I are less like zombies and even capable of conversation. Life aboard a boat takes on a momentum of its own. From 9 in the AM to say, 5, we have social time, with short naps now and then. Then dinner and the night watches start. Mine are from 10 to midnight and from 4 to 6. (I asked for this schedule because few things are more pleasant to me than dawn on a sailboat in the open sea.) I knap after dinner, Brad wakes me up at 10. I bobble around trying to stay awake until midnight, when I wake Linda. At 4, Brad wakes me again and I watch the dawn in the east. Back for a nap and then we share coffee or hot chocolate in the cockpit around 9. We talk about art and architecture and garden design. And books and movies and American culture and, well, all those conversations one has in college augmented always with what is the wind going to do next? (One day, Linda tells Brad and me to shut about the weather Long time since anyone told me to shut up, but hey, she's the captain. Brad and I sulk to the cockpit and whisper about tomorrow's weather, sotte voce.) What is art? We disappear down that conversational rat-hole for a whole day. Later on, Linda asks me, more or less, to tell her how a computer works. I enjoyed it, but Linda was reminding herself to be careful what you ask for. Have her tell you someday how early computers subtracted by adding. It can be done. Oddly, she wasn't very interested in how operating systems boot themselves. How do you read yourself into memory if you're the program that does the reading? Truly, it's fascinating and will only take one more hour for me to explain. Well, maybe two. We went back to design and whether people like her and my wife, Lynda, an artist, are in touch with deep principles of art that people like Brad and me don't have. Why my Lynda is so impatient with my artistic selections. As in, "Are you kidding? You like that? What are you thinking? Can you see?" I suspect they are in touch with principles that help them see patterns that the rest of us miss. OK, back to the sail. No wind for two days and then IT started. Wind from the front of the boat. For the next 6 days we beat, hard, into the wind. Bang, bang, bang. It sounds like we just hit a rock in the road. Bang, bang. Wooptidoo bang, bang, bang. Then, agonizingly, 200 miles from Opua, our NZ port, the wind came straight from Opua. Right on our nose. That means tedious sailing back and forth, inching our way to Opua, occasionally re-crossing our own path. Yuck. Big blow one night and day. Gusts of 35-40 knots, not fun. Bang, bang, bang on the hull. We're getting exhausted. I go to bed and sleep hard for 4 hours. Later, Brad and I watch the sun come up over tight 10 foot swells. It's cold. Around 9 we decide to reef down to the storm jib, and an exhausted Brad works up on the foredeck in the bouncing way up and way down in the waves, raising the small sail. Double reefed main. The boat settles down and we meander along at 3 knots, boat perfectly at ease with wind screaming in the rigging. Alas, even ugly storms come to an end at sea. There's a short break in the wind, we turn on the engine and boogie, fast, straight to our destination. Running the engine hard. And, 24 hours ago we arrived. Tied up at the dock at Opua. I write this in a small marina café, a café that is weaving and bobbing up and down. How can this table rock so when it's sitting on the hard ground? (The effect will go away in a day or two.) That's it. Except, I neglected to say that Linda can cook! Never have I had such great food on a passage. Baked cranberry and other breads for snacks, delicious soups and Indonisian dishes. Spicey burritos, homemade foccacia bread. And Brad contributed his specialty -- homemade ice cream. Today, we're off to visit a couple of nearby small towns. Then tomorrow I work my way to Auckland. I have a meeting there on Tuesday and then fly back to Seattle. Au bientot Kattywampus! Thanks for the safe passage!