As cruisers we tend to spend a lot of time searching out tiny islands surrounded by clear water and fantasyland (fantasysea?) colors. The downside of such tendencies is that we spend a fair amount of our time in lumpy anchorages. Every once in a while the bump gets to us, particularly in a long stretch of windy conditions, and we find ourselves retreating to bays (when available).

New Caledonia has a huge main island, riddled with bays with reasonable anchoring depths and great holding. We’ve spent most of our time here exploring the islets in New Caledonia’s lagoon and have visited only a few spots on the main island besides the capital city of Noumea. Two of those main island anchorages were recent stops in Maa and Uere. Both are wrap around anchorages, protected from most conditions and very well protected from trade wind conditions even allowing for the wind to slop about a bit in angle. They also are another visual and textural side of New Caledonia – big land mass, sometimes desert looking. It’s been lovely, tranquil and we are starting to regain our drive to explore lumpy anchorages again.

Since we arrived in Tonga/Fiji/New Caledonia it has been a balance for us between time in exposed fabulous anchorages and flat less gorgeous (to us) areas. In the flat we catch up on chores, cleaning, boat work, writing, long walks, etc.

I think this is why we love atolls so much. Even though they are exposed from many angles, you can have very strong trade winds and still be in flat, flat water. On the contrary, small islets get wrap around waves and the wind doesn’t have to change angle much for them to become more exposed.

Sometimes of course we get flat windless conditions in the more exposed anchorages. Those times are marked in my memories as some of the best cruising we have had. That windless day in Mopelia. Our recent time in Mato. Tauna in the Gambiers…

Arriving in New Caledonia was like coming home. Not because it is French (although, man, the French know how to pick them), but because it has everything we love about the South Pacific: insanely clear water, jaw dropping lagoon colors, shallow sandy anchorages floating in those colors, uninhabited islands, and great sailing conditions inside a lagoon with easily predictable wind and land effects. 

In addition, because it is French there is a large community of water sports participants which include a strong contingent of women, people sailing their boats in every wind direction, very little restrictions on what you can do as a boater, and not a lot of fuss over what bits of your body are covered. Try telling a French woman (or man) that women have to cover up to be respectful of the locals and you will quickly learn why French colonies don’t play that way. We are not Francophiles by any means and we have been surrounded by French boaters for long enough to know the downsides to these upsides, but still, we love these upsides.

Too bad they only give us North Americans three months… Still, we are going to enjoy the crap out of what time we have here.

There was this “award” going round cruising bloggers a few months ago (or maybe still?) which I have to admit I found both weird and fascinating. Weird because it was more like a chain email or pyramid scheme than a real award and fascinating because, let’s face it, I love the idea of interviews*.  I cherry picked a few questions from two interviewers and even though I am making fun of the award I was still very flattered you guys thought of me.

Leah’s questions:

Why are you cruising wherever its is you’re cruising right now? How did that become a destination?

Well, it’s the South Pacific and I think that answers also how it became a destination!  It’s amazing. It’s everything I wanted out of cruising. It’s a dream. I am making memories of a lifetime almost every day. I’m forgetting details of better places than I had ever visited before. It’s overwhelming and awesome. So, yeah, I like it here.

How’d you find your boat? Have you had other boats?

I (Livia) had never had another boat. Carol (my husband and supercruiser) had owned a 26’ Robert Perry design (Mirage). We decided to hire an expert to help us decide what boat to buy because we didn’t feel we knew enough. We knew so little that he encouraged us to visit a few boats while we were in Seattle visiting family over the holidays. The very first boat we stepped on that trip was the boat we bought and went cruising on (!) even though we went and looked at bunches of other boats.

If you weren’t sailing/cruising, what would you be doing?

Working to fund the next vagabonding adventure? Homesteading? Caravaning? More cruising?

What’s your big-picture plan? Where do you hope to be in 5-10 years?

Still alive and healthy and active. Still searching working on keeping the fun-to-suck ratio in the appropriate balance.  Perhaps seasonally working and seasonally traveling?

How do you keep yourself entertained on long night watches?

I do a long night watch from midnight until 5am. After trying a bunch of different standard watches we settled into our own idiosyncratic watch schedule. My usual plan is to make a cup a tea while “safe-ing the route”. This means I do the zoom in and zoom out double check on the electronic charts which we’ve already done prior to leaving on the intended route but is the responsibility of each watch person to double check on the actual route. I take my tea to the cockpit and zone out, absorbing the horizon, the sails, the weather, the windvane, for at least an hour. I then often grab a second tea, and a snack, and repeat that process. Somewhere around 2:30am when I need distraction, I alternate horizon sweeps with email writing. If propagation is good at that time of night I often do a weather download while uploading the emails I wrote. At this point, around 3:30, I go back to the cockpit full time with either: an audio podcast, an ebook, video podcast on the iPad. Once I’ve toughed out that hour until 4:30 or so, I come back down and start alternating horizon sweeps with settling down rituals – face washing, teeth brushing, whatever.

Dos Libras’s questions:

What is the one thing you wish more people knew about you?  Don't be afraid to brag here... this is your chance!

I wish more people knew about the Newly Salted project and volunteered for Newly Salted interviews. Now that I am cruising it can take a while for me to respond to those interviews (which is why I put the Interview With A Cruiser project on intermission) but I really appreciate when people participate. If you are newly off the dock (< 2 years) or know someone who is, the deal is that you self-interview and I publish it. Consider it a donation to the dreamers out there.

What would you say is your partner's greatest contribution to your success (current or future) as sailors/cruisers?

Carol has an amazing attitude and I didn’t realize how critical that is to cruising before we left the dock. Carol is ready to put on his game face and do dirty jobs at almost any time. I’m not saying he loves it, but he is ready to “pay the piper” for all of the good times and he does so with good humor and a good nature.  This leads to some “leadership by example” in the sense that I see him gearing himself up to do something he didn’t necessarily want to do and I “man up” as well because I’m not willing to let him deal with it alone. He brings out the best in me during those situations. He is also really  good with dealing with on the fly information gathering.

When will you/did you REALLY consider yourself to be a Cruiser?  What does the word "Cruiser" mean to you?

I don’t really care what people call themselves. I was a cruiser the day I left the dock to start cruising. I think the main problem is when people who are cruising fail to indicate the limits of their expertise.  If you have been in one region , doing one specific type of cruising, you can’t talk about whether “all cruisers need windvanes”. We have been in the South Pacific for a couple of years and we have only seen a few countries so really we know only a taste of the region. Lots of cruisers go on and on about things they really know nothing about just because they’ve been cruising a long time. Length of time cruising tells you very little about how much someone knows and it doesn’t tell you if what they know will be applicable to your cruise.

What do you think will be the thing that ends your Cruising journey?  Andy why?

Before we started cruising I didn’t know if we would stop when we ran out of money or when we were done with the hard work/discomfort aspects of cruising. I knew we wouldn’t get bored. Now I think we will run out of money before we don’t want to put up with the uncomfortable parts. I think this is because we’ve somehow managed to spend a fair amount of time off the boat every year. Whether it was for good reasons (visiting family, house/resort sitting), or bad reasons (repairing the boat), each time refreshed us. After a break we start missing the boat, missing the travel, and we come back with refreshed emotional reserves to deal with problems.

What size boat do you/will you cruise on?  And if money were no object... would you buy a bigger one?

We cruise on a 30+ year old, 35 foot monohull. In our price range, we wouldn’t change boats. We have a solid boat we can take almost anywhere in the world (ice would make us nervous). 

If money were no object we would be on a performance catamaran (think Atlantic or Outre-mer, not Lagoon or Fountaine Pajot). The additional space would be great and appreciated (particularly for our toy collection – kites etc) but really we would switch for the fun of sailing that fast, between anchorages sailing well in very light air and making fast passages.

*I loved creating the Interview With A Cruiser Project. Although on intermission, the IWAC still gets a lot of regular traffic and I love the idea that it remains standing as a free and open resource. And, admittedly sporadically, I am still publishing Newly Salted interviews.

Being in Neiafu reminded us in many ways of being in La Paz. We had a great time in La Paz, and have a lot of great memories of good times with good friends there. Unfortunately, when we think of the town we also think of the bad apples in the ex-pat community. I don’t know if it was a fluke, or just our year, but we found that although most ex-pats living there were nice there were two annoying themes that kept repeating themselves: the cruiser-police who spread weird rumors and the angerballs. An example of the cruiser-police is the person who kept saying that if your Mexican courtesy flag was smaller than your ensign, you were insulting the Mexicans. The angerballs seem to restrict themselves to making rude and aggressive “anonymous” comments on the VHF. Both of these minorities left a bad taste in our mouths about La Paz, despite the fact that we had a great time there.

Apparently, we are capable of getting smarter ;)

Three months ago we rolled into Neiafu, which has a large ex-pat community, a regular cruiser net, and repeater stations on VHF channel 26 so both the net and cruiser hails can be heard even in the outlying anchorages. After a few hours of being on 26 and the next morning listening to one net, I realized that if we didn’t turn off that channel, we were going to have the same distaste for Neiafu. So we rolled our dial back to channel 16 and have spent the last 3 months enjoying the distance that our lack of participation puts between us and any drama. Now, we hear about the cruiser-police (e.g., trying to enforce a speed limit for dinghies of dubious legality that none of the Tongan drivers or dive boat follows) and the angerballs (e.g., the guy in the crowded mooring field who rows over and tells everyone to turn off their generators and dive compressors) as funny stories told to us by our friends over happy hour beers. Because we don’t have to hear either group directly, those stories are amusing to us, not frustrating.

We really like Neiafu which I’ll post about logbook style separately, and as you can hopefully see through our various posts, we have been having a world class time in Tonga.

VIDEO FRIDAY

This is not one of our videos but a video from the Cabrinha Quest - a charter/owner kiteboarding/surfer catamaran who does some really cool stuff schlepping around kiteboard pros and average kiters plus professional photographers and videographers. Pete Cabrinha wrote and narrated this video and it says so much of what I want to say myself about cruising/vagabonding.

The video is full of amazing footage worth watching but it is Pete's points about nature and remoteness that I feel like sharing with everyone.

You can go to the video directly on youtube here

There were many points that resonated with me. The two that really stick out are:

- The joy of unplugging from the internet. I love the internet, blogging and social media. I also love the fact that my life involves binges of internet and then periods where I am disconnected. I don’t think I would enjoy social media very much if I were always connected to it. The periods of time when I am disconnected are important to me deeply. People often suggest ways I can be more connected to social media while at anchor (e.g., buying local SIM cards, etc) and although I am certain I will occasionally do that, I resist that full-time, every day connectivity.

- The way that connecting with a person from a different culture via a sport is powerful. We made good friends on the water through kiteboarding and spear fishing while in French Polynesia and these connections with people living ashore felt more authentic for us than other connections we made because we shared a common passion with the person.

There was a time when I would have looked at this picture and only seen a vision of tropical paradise. It has the key elements, sandy beach, lovely water, palm trees, blue skies.

I still see that, but I catch myself immediately also cataloguing the negatives, from a cruiser perspective:

• At low tide, that is a rocky landing beach, hard on the dinghy, feet and the outboard propeller.
• If I’m coming into or leaving the beach at night there are reefs just off the beach to worry about.
• That beach clearly disappears at high tide so I better not plan my beach fire for then.

Weird huh?

This is filed under cruiser problems a.k.a. high class problems…don’t worry, none of those stopped us from thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

We had a wet and wild passage from Niue to Tonga. We knew that the seas would be relatively large when we left (3+m) but descending and we would have solid wind. The sailing was excellent but unfortunately we had showers most of the time which made for a wet cockpit. And let me tell you, after a few years of acclimation to the tropics we find the winter here down at 20S to be chilly!

We made landfall in the Ha’apai group in Tonga – a remote part of the country, relatively undeveloped. We had a fast and painless check in, with all of the normal published fees, and even found a currency exchange in the small village with quite good rates. Almost everyone we have talked to who checked into Vava’u this month was asked for “gifts*” from the officials and we didn’t have any of those shenanigans to deal with.

Unfortunately we ended up leaving the Ha’apai group after only seeing that first town and one other anchorage. The reason is that you need good weather to navigate visually in that region, into a lot of gorgeous (but tight) spots and we had a solid week of grey and rain, with more crappy weather forecast. We decided that we would make the 60nm sail up to the Vava’u group and at least have restaurants, cruiser company, and internet to go with our rainy week. We definitely feel we have unfinished business in the Ha’apai group because our short time there gave us the impression that we would love it.

Of course, after having made that decision and having a nice overnight sail to Vava’u our time in Neiafu, Vava’u, Tonga was full of sunshine. Neiafu is quite an interesting place and after some more time there I’ll write about it separately.

After 4 days in the main town, buying produce, filling our dive tanks, using the internet, meeting up with people, eating out, attending some happy hours and socializing with other cruisers, we headed into the outer islands to get a taste of what Vava’u is all about…and to check out 3 kite spots we had been tipped off to.

So far, the outer islands have been full of really picturesque sand beaches, a lot of uninhabited islands on which to have beach fires, and a few really nice kite spots. We love the fact that the distances are short and so we sail everywhere whether it involves short tacking or not.

It’s also fun to see other boats sailing between islands as well. Somehow, despite the fact that there are a fair amount of cruising boats here, there are so many anchorages that we haven’t felt crowded yet. We don’t have a full sense of the place yet and we haven’t found much underwater beauty (yet) – but of course we’re still in the initial impressions phase of a new landfall.

Weird fact: After over a week here we have seen at least 30 boats underway in between the islands. While more than half of the monohulls have been sailing, not a single catamaran we have seen so far has been sailing**. Isn’t that weird? And they aren’t charters… This hasn’t been our experience with cats normally so it is odd to see here.

*So far we’ve heard of boats being asked for alcohol, WD-40 and cookies among other things. Weird, huh? The boats that declined weren’t given any hassle about it.

**Between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, I saw several catamarans sailing ;)

Are we very adventurous or not very adventurous? Yes, we are.

One of my favorite things about travel is the jarring perspective changes I have when I realize how other people live. When we traveled to Thailand (by plane) for a month, at that time, we felt quite adventurous. Very few people we knew had traveled to that area of the world. When we arrived we met people who had been traveling in SE Asia for years and were disappointed with how commercial and on-the-beaten-path Thailand had become. Our trip, which felt quite extraordinary when discussed with our friends back home, felt quite ordinary in conversation with these vagabonds.

When surrounded by other people sailing around the South Pacific, it is easy to feel as if our journey is an ordinary mainstream one. We are constantly in the company of people who have crossed from the Americas to the South Pacific just like us, who left home and country just like us, and often those people have another ocean under their belt (i.e., the Atlantic). These are our comparison group, our “average”, our peers. Remember, we’re just a bunch of wahoos out here.

In this group of wahoos, even some of our slightly more adventurous than average decisions turn out to be more average than we realize. At the time that we made the decision to turn around at the Cook Islands and return to French Polynesia, it felt scary. We didn’t know anyone who had done it. We didn’t know how our boat would perform upwind in the trades, bucking currents and swell. We didn’t know how our bodies would do living while hammering upwind and perhaps most importantly, how our minds would deal with sailing two miles to make one mile toward goal. Afterwards we met other boats who have done the same route, had friends make the same passage, and have met other people who have sailed much, much more difficult long passages.  And what felt extraordinary initially to us started to feel quite ordinary.

When we meet someone on land, they usually think we are incredibly adventurous, if not nuts. Seeing our lives through their eyes reminds us that we are doing something many people dream of doing, that we are having years of travel experiences when most N Americans get weeks if they are lucky. I’ll admit, we begin to feel pretty cool and pretty “out there”.

Then we meet people who are truly hard core. Our life may feel a little wild to us, until we meet someone who says something like “I normally wouldn’t sail a cored fiberglass hull to Antarctica but because it was my second time there I felt comfortable with it.”, and we feel quite ordinary again.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m definitely not. I love this feeling of perspective shift. I feel so inspired knowing that I could reach for more adventure if I wanted to. It’s always there.

I don’t mind being average in a pack full of crazy people.  It means we are keeping good company.

One thing we love about cruising is the frequency with which we become embedded in a gang, and the energy that those gangs brings to our lives. We’ve had awesome gangs in BC, Mexico, and multiple times in French Polynesia.

It often starts when we have met another like minded boat and we are enjoying their company and another boat joins in (or maybe we are this boat that later joins in), and maybe another boat and suddenly we have a gang, we have group momentum, things are happening, other boats are joining in, there are inside jokes, much later nights than normal, and earlier mornings, practical jokes, nicknames for people, nicknames for the group, we egg each other on to do more, to play more, to live more.

There is a mixed sense of loss and relief when the gang splits up as, in the cruising world, it always does. These people become the close, local substitute for the best friends we have left behind, and the family we have moved away from. There is a wrenching feeling when we separate from them that echoes the feeling of when we left N America.

At the same time, gangs are barriers to meeting other people – perceived or imagined – locals or cruisers. Sometimes people get grumpy about gangs. There can be strange double standards about invitations/greetings aimed at gangs, where gangs are blamed for a lack of invitation/greeting by people who have also not offered an invitation/greeting. People will be people I guess.

While part of a gang, we have to work hard to meet other people (and we do) in ways we don’t have to work when we are traveling solo. When we leave a gang, we go back to activities and routines (and relaxation) that we often didn’t have when ensconced in the energy of the gang.