Syzygy Sailing

(refers to events on July 10th)

I felt like a champ after having found the VHF.  Back at the boat, cold but ecstatic, we hurriedly tied up the dinghy and enjoyed a sweatshirt and beer in celebration.

I wish we had not hurried.  In the middle of the night, our dinghy decided to float away.  The knot somehow slipped.  Matt told me in the morning that he woke up at 3 am to pee and the dinghy was gone.  He then went back to sleep.  What else could he do?

I found out at 6 am when I woke up.  The prospect of a new dinghy was not pleasant.  A minimum of $1000 for an engine.  Another $2000 for the dinghy itself.  This was an expensive problem.  Getting to shore was now a major challenge, involving swimming, paddling the two-person kayak, or hitching a ride.

It slowly dawned on my through the morning that it was I who had tied up the dinghy.  In my rush and because I was cold, I apparently did a poor job.  Perhaps it wasn’t as tight as it needed to be on the cleat.  It is doubtful that I went back over the knot, and I clearly did not tie up the dinghy with the second painter line that has now become mandatory but at the time was rarely used.

Matt was always magnanimous as we talked to various people about the incident.  Careful to never blame me or express anger towards me.  I had in fact, watched a knot of his nearly come undone just two days before.  You would think this might have made me more wary and it did in the moment.  I did not remember to be wary when I was cold and wet and exhausted from searching for over an hour for the VHF.

We discussed what to do.  It was clear this was a blow to Matt and had effectively resigned to buying a new dinghy and engine.  He didn’t really like either anyway.  I thought we should go looking for it, for which I received a ‘Yep, you should do that.’  I radioed the anchorage intent on getting a ride to shore, and relayed my embarrassing sob story over the VHF.  “Good morning Rangiroa.  You know its a good day when you wake up and discover your dinghy has floated away in the middle of the night,” I began.  A couple of our yachty friends replied and two hours later I had a ride into shore.

There, my miserable French tried to describe to people on the dock what happened and ask them if there was any hope.  This was not easy and I certainly wished for Matt and Karen to help with the language.  My vocabulary is limited to “Des sole, je ne parle pas francais. Parlez-vous englais?”  However, with the help of a local dive operator, I managed to talk to one person who was insistent that our dinghy would be on sure somewhere.  Just walk the shore he said.  It will be there.  I am positive it will be there.  This was encouraging!  Others however were not so enthusiastic.  But I had to try.

So walk the shoreline I did.  It was six miles between Passe Tiputa and Passe Avatoru.  at which point I would have to stop.  Walking along the shore was not like some stroll along a beautiful white sandy beach.  Or even a kinda crappy beach.  There was no beach. It is all bits of coral, usually only 3 feet wide before land starts.  At the land were peoples’ houses, schools, restaurants, a police station: the gendarmarie, other businesses and dogs.  Lots of dogs.  I am not a dog lover in the United States, though I lived with one for 8 months and quite enjoyed it.  In French Polynesia, I strongly dislike dogs.  They’re mangy, dirty, underfed, bark randomly and bark protectively when coming near a home.

I filed a police report.  I a couple dozen people.  Walking through peoples backyards will do that, and they frequently eyed me suspiciously.  Particularly the couple I came across whose wife was sunbathing nude in her backyard.  The husband was quite nice about it, despite my intrusion.  Each time I would tell swallow my pride and relate my story, often in short keywords with much pantomiming, as the person I was talking to did spoke only a little English.  Yet again, having Matt or Karen along would have been nice to try and communicate.  Frequently, the people would exclaim something, walk closer to the shore, look either way and say something to the effect of, ‘i do not see it!’ Yes, I know.  I wouldn’t ask be asking or talking to you if I could see it.  My patience was growing thin.

One person would say it probably went out the western pass.  Another would say it might be at the school where the land bends south.  Another reiterated some of the people on the dock by saying it might be at the blue lagoon.  Each time I said merci, asked them to tell the gendarmarie, the police, if they heard of anyone finding it, and continue trudging on my way.

At about 5 pm, I had made it to the other pass.  Resignation beset me, Our dinghy was lost.  Misadventure part 2: failure.

(concerning events: July 3rd -July 6th)

People have lived in French Polynesia for around 2000 years and ever since have been eating fish.  Lots and lots of fresh fish.  We have not been eating lots and lots of fresh fish.  We have been eating little to no fresh fish.  This vexes me to no end.  We had fresh fish once in the two weeks I have been here.  Native Tuomotians Ken and Martin caught it for us.

Karen is a fantastic cook.  She probably cooks the most dinners, though I cook my fair share.  Matt and Karen seem to have tired of their repertoire of recipes.  I certainly haven’t though and everything that Karen makes I think is delicious.  Everything that Matt makes I think is delicious.  Everything that I make…. well Matt and Karen eat it, so it must be edible.

But we all acknowledge that our meals are with drawbacks.  Nearly every meal is ‘x’ number of cans + [either] pasta or rice + alcoholic beverage of choice = meal.  Sometimes this is canned spaghetti sauce plus canned chicken plus pasta equals a meal.  Sometimes this is canned roast beef + canned corn + canned mushrooms + canned yams + canned gravy + boxed potatoes = meal.  I think they are delicious every time.  But something fresh would be wonderful.

When Karen makes various fresh bread, it’s a little slice of heaven.  Sometimes sourdough english muffin.  Sometimes tortillas.  Or sourdough french bread.  Or puffy donut holes with cinnamon and sugar, oh sinfully delicious.  So bread, bread we can do fresh.  Otherwise, cans.

I feel like we should be eating fish.  For one, it’s free.  For two, it’s not cans.

Matt and Karen reported no luck fishing while sailing across the Pacific and while cruising the Marquesas and the Tuomotus.  This poor showing on the part of the fish to readily enjoy our lures, combined with Matt’s reticence at the idea of cutting up live things with guts in them has led to a decline in fishing attempts onboard s/v Syzygy.  Who can blame them?  They never caught anything.  With my arrival, I bring fresh hopes and renewed vigor to the idea of fishing.  And an indefatigable arrogance that it has to be possible to catch something.  Anything.

And I have failed.  Failed as all other attempts at trailing lines has failed on s/v Syzygy.  Please other cruisers who are able to catch fish regularly,  tell us your exact set-up of trolling lines and how you catch fish, down to the minutest detail.  Because we are incompetent.  We have read a book and we have not learned.  Nearly all things done on this boat, all the sailing knowledge, all the boat projects completed are because we read a book and learned about it.  We read a book about fishing, but we cannot seem to learn how to fish.  Please tell us everything about your set-up.  Length of line out, type of knots, length of mono-filament.  Type of lure.  Color of lure.  Number of lures.  Depth of lure.  Time of day.  Depth to ocean floor.  Distance to land.  Boat speed.  Wind speed. Current. Hook size.  Hook placement within lure.  Allowable rust level on hook.  Bait used or not.  Leader weight used or not.  Chum used or not. Teasers used or not.  Pagan gods to whom you might give sacrifice in order to make the ocean share its bounty.  Please include video of ceremony, text of chants and incantations, list of all incense types used and step by step instructions for actual sacrifice.

I have, actually, caught some fish.  But I was only able to do that at anchor.  When we were in Apataki, and in having beer and an excellent lunch at the cargneage(boat haul-out center)/pension/restaurant/happy hour/pearl farm establishment, fishing was brought up with the family who owns all this enterprise, Alfred and his wife.  They said they had a surefire way for us to catch fish involving hermit crabs as bait and that next time we come to shore, they would show us.  The next day, we show up but Alfred is off fishing and his wife is gone.  Karen manages to relate to the very nice ancient lady that met us at the dock (Alfred’s mom??) our intentions.  So before we know it, this 80-ish year old woman has grabbed a hermit crab.  Matt and I are hustling around trying to watch every little step of what she does.  She then gets a hammer, one shot smashes the shell, grabs the hermit crab, one hand around all it’s legs and claws, the other around its guts and rips it in two pieces.  She threads it on the hook and done.  30 seconds have passed.  I am in awe.  In a couple of days, I will no longer be in awe of the process.  Instead, I will be a one-man professional hermit crab death squad.

We collect a dozen hermit crabs and head back to the boat.  At dusk, apparently good fishing time, I retrieve a hammer, a cutting board, and a hook.  I ask Karen to retrieve a video camera.  The nice ancient lady completed the steps in about 30 seconds.  It takes me 30 minutes.  So despite that it is now dark, I try to fish anyway.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  I take solace in the fact that it is pitch black out and vow to try again in the morning.

In the morning at 6 am I begin setting up to try again. Success!  Within a half an hour I’ve hooked two fish.  Karen comes on deck.  I ask her what to do now that I have a fish flopping around in a large green bin.  She says I have to kill it.  I don’t know how to do that I reply.  She fetches the book.  We read it.  We learn.  The fish dies.  Knife shot to the brain, one inch behind the eye.

After reading the book for each step in the process of gutting and cleaning we take the fish into shore to make sure that we can eat them.  Some fish you can’t eat because of a nasty little disease called ciguterra  I refer you to a blog post from our good friends Mike and Hyo aboard Io, Mike is a marine biologist and so can explain all the nastiness of ciguterra better than I.

Matt gets the job of cooking the fish and that night we finally dined on fresh fish.  The next night we again dined on fresh fish.  It was wonderful, albeit a bit bony.  Then we moved anchorages, losing our source for local knowledge of ciguterra (Different fish on different atolls have it) and we have not had fish again.  Back to cans.

So fellow cruisers, please help us become better fishermen and fisherwomen.  Please help us spare the cans.

(post dated–this post generally refers to events on 3/29 and 3/30)

At midnight Karen grabs my foot and gives it a shake. I take off my eye mask and take out the earphones I’m wearing which along with my I-Pod and Sarah McLachlan, had me asleep in minutes three hours earlier despite the noise of the engine.  I was surprised at how much louder the engine sounds at night versus during the day.  I suppose the new soundproofing in the engine room was doing something, but I couldn’t tell.  I stumble around for about 10 minutes, getting dressed slowly and wobbly.  I can’t find my headlamp or my sailing knife.  I want some light and so switch on a light in the cabin, and quickly move the switch to the red light setting that is supposed to preserve your night vision.  The cabin now resembles a submarine on high alert.  I half expect Gene Hackman to barrel down the companionway yelling “down ladder!”  I imagine us on high alert.  Matt is up, walking around and off-handedly comments that he and Karen stopped using the red lights.  They don’t really provide enough light to do anything, which I quickly found to be true, and your eyes adjust fast enough when you are up on deck. High alert deflates immediately.  The engine continues to groan away as we travel through unfortunately light winds for our passage.  I plop down at the nav station to look at the log book and the AIS chart on the computer.  My night watch is about to start.

Before I even arrived, we had started talking about sailing a day or two north to San Blas.  However, the weather seemed to be less than ideal to the north, so Karen found a entry in the cruising guide that talked about a fine anchorage to the south that had some snorkeling and a fantastic sounding dinghy river trip.  South it was.  Next came talk of who was going to take what watch.  I knew this conversation was coming.  And i knew exactly what I wanted.  The night shift.  Wake me up at midnight or 1 am and send me out.  I wanted this for a number of reasons.  One, I feel, (it’s not just a feeling, I definitely am) behind in this obscure scale of mine that measures “personal discomfort” investment into the boat.  I don’t have much of this.  Matt has, well it’s somewhat amazing he hasn’t collapsed under the weight of how much he has endured.  Second, I wanted to experience as much of the cruising experience as possible.  Taking the night watch fit nicely there.  Finally, it just seemed the nice thing to do, to let Matt and Karen sleep together through the night.

After examining where we were on the AIS, I head up on deck.  Matt joins me and says we should put up the main sail and the drifter.  I’m super excited that we’ll actually be sailing on my watch, at least to start, instead of motoring.  It feels so much more pure.  After Matt helps me put up the sail, he heads off to bed, and I’m left alone on the night watch.  An alarm is set to ring every 23 minutes.  After two iterations of the alarm, I’m starting to get tired, and so lie down in the cockpit, realizing that I’ll be sleeping during some of this watch.  I’m looking directly up at the stars, and soon I’m dozing off, 1/2 awake, 1/2 asleep, dully waiting for the alarm to go off.  It does, I go through the watch routine, and quickly get back to lying down.  This time I’m out quickly.  Thirty minutes later Matt is in the companionway reaching out to the cockpit to hit my feet saying “Dude, you slept through the alarm.  You can’t do that.  Put the alarm closer to your head.”

On the night watch, there is one main responsibility.  Make sure the boat doesn’t hit anything.  Two lesser responsibilities are to 1) sail the boat well so you get to your destination faster. 2) control the boat so that it is easier for others to sleep.  Matt and Karen’s system they developed uses a watch that goes off at set intervals.  Pretty much all cruisers have an alarm set for certain intervals.  Matt and Karen have the watch set for 23 minutes.  So every 23 minutes, it’s the job of whoever is on watch to stand up, or wake up if necessary, look all around the horizon for other boats or land, and make sure you aren’t about to hit either of those.  It’s fascinating what you can see at night on the horizon.  All night we were in sight of shore so lights from there abounded.  At various times, other boats were on the horizon.  It’s enjoyable to spot lights on the horizon and watch over the next hour or two as they slowly move in relationship to the boat.  Of course if they are moving that slowly, it’s probably another sailboat.  The fast lights are the ones to worry about.  The cargo ships.

Matt disappears back down the companionway, leaving me alone fuming at myself.  My first night watch and I’ve made a HUGE mistake.  Damn it.  Not how I wanted to start.  Not the impression I wanted to make on Matt and Karen that I was a competent addition to the sailing team.  I am furious at myself and embarrassed.  Sure, the likelihood that at the exact interval I fell asleep 1) another boat would be just over the horizon that I couldn’t see on the last sweep, 2) wasn’t on the AIS that would alert me to boats further out, 3) was headed on a collision course with us and 4)  did not veer off that collision course because they of course don’t want to hit us…. yes the likelihood of all that happening is low.  Doesn’t matter.  Sleeping through a watch interval is way out of line.  I was not happy with myself.

Later in the night, the alarm goes off.  It is strapped to the band on my headlamp now, directly next to my ear, and so it wakes me immediately.  I get up and start to go through the routine I began to do at every alarm.  I rapidly check our compass heading and speed.  I then spend longer than necessary gazing in a slow 360 degrees off into the distance, looking for lights.  Each time I see lights, I get our binoculars (Thanks mom and dad!!!) and using the internal compass of them, note the heading to the lights and try to discern where it’s going.  If I see a red light, it means I’m looking at the port side of the other boat.  If I see green, I’m looking at the starboard side.  You can also tell things by the location and height of the white lights from a boat, but I’m not as sure about those. Need to learn that.  Next I slide down the companionway, moving as quietly as possible past the quarterberth where Matt and Karen are sleeping, generally with the door open to increase airflow and keep it cooler in the cabin.  I  have a seat at the nav station and take a look at the awesomest part of the night watch routine: checking the AIS transponder which is linked into the navigation software MacEnc, on the computer.  Matt has discussed his love for it in the past, and I have to back up that opinion 100%.  After checking the AIS both for ships and to ensure we are headed in the correct direction, I head back up on deck and do a quick scan of the horizon.  Finally, I look at our sails and see if they need adjustment.  Then it’s back to reading, writing or sleeping.

At 2:30 am on the second night, I watched us thread the needle between two 900 foot long cargo ships doing 14-18 knots.  I had seen the two ships when they were 20 miles away on the computer, long before I would be able to see them on the horizon.  Nonetheless, as soon as I saw them on the computer headed straight for us, I excitedly hopped up on deck, grabbed the binoculars, and stared out into space to where the boats should be.  I was met with nothing but blackness.   A black sky with foreboding moon and a glistening, flat, black sea.  An hour later however, I could see lights.  Lots of lights.  High, towering lights.  That still seemed to be coming straight for us.  The AIS, though, showed their actual heading, and ours.  We would pass the first to our starboard, by a mere mile.  The other, five minutes later, passed to port by even less, about 1/2 a mile.  I didn’t sleep at all for that hour, and gained an enormous appreciation for the additional safety the AIS brought us.  I saw them when they were over an hour away and knew their exact heading relative to us.  If we didn’t the AIS, they would have been twenty minutes or less away on an uncertain course that would have looked extremely troubling.  With the AIS, we didn’t have to divert our course, and I felt no danger to the boat, though I did anxiously watch the AIS and the horizon for the entire hour.  I certainly was too excited to sleep, this being only my second night watch.  But I felt confidently safe.  Without the AIS, I would have had to hail the vessel, not always possible, and try and figure out a way by both ships.  I can envision this being a confusing hail, with both boats so close, heading in the same direction and with the approximate same speed.  With the AIS, there was minimal concern.  The rest of the night passed uneventful.  My second night watch slowly winding down, I finished most of the novel I was reading, enjoying the near full moon as it arced lazily across the sky.  My first real introduction to cruising.  I think I’m going to like it.

We made a lazy departure from Santa Barbara mid-morning on the 17th. Our priorities for the passage were to avoid motoring if possible, and to make our next landfall (wherever it might be) during the daylight–no more anchoring during the dark if at all possible. The first half of the day was the most pleasant sailing so far, in consistent ~10knots of wind off the starboard beam, with a 3 foot 15 second swell.  Meaning: the wind was a decent breeze coming directly in over the right side of the boat, and the ocean waves lifted us up 3 ft and down 3 ft (total 6 feet peak to trough) every 15 seconds, which is a barely discernible rise and fall.  Further meaning: the motion of the boat was extremely steady, the sails stayed nicely filled, and the wind was light enough that lounging in the cockpit still felt warm and balmy.

We had bit the bullet and purchased a cruising guide to the islands offshore from the West Marine in Santa Barbara–that turned out to be a very good decision. My charts for most of the channel islands coastlines are not very detailed, and the two anchorages we have experienced so far are small and difficult.

The purpose of an anchorage is to 1) provide shelter from wind and waves, in that order, respectively and 2) to provide access to land.  The unfortunate trade-off of being in an anchorage is the possibility of contact with land.  It is difficult to overstate exactly how undesirable it is to make contact with land in a sailboat.  For a boat even to “bump up” against any piece of land will almost assuredly result in the boat sinking (unless of course your boat is made out of metal, as Pete never loses a chance to mention–but his metal boat is very heavy and sails very slowly though, so I forgive him for remembering the benefits of metal whenever possible .

Anchoring up against the land is like bringing your hand up next to a candle flame for warmth–the warmest you will be is right before you get burned.  Anchoring is just such a gambit: you are angling for protection, but the most protected spot is right up close against the very land that will sink your boat at the slightest contact.

We pulled into the “Scorpion” anchorage on the night of the 17th just before dark, and it was easy to see that being in that spot provided very little in the way of protection from either the wind or waves.  In this case, the word “cove” was completely misleading.  The cliffs were sharp and hard looking, and instinctively I wanted to stay away.  However, a comfortable half a mile away from land, the depth was well over a hundred feet and we may as well have just floated around the ocean, for all the protection to be gained by the spot.  A quarter of a mile away, the depth was finally shallow enough for us to anchor.   It felt very close to the rocks.  Pete assured me that we would experience anchoring situations far closer, so we dropped the “hook”.

Part of the anchoring process is to “back down” on the anchor: one puts the motor into reverse and backs up on the anchor to better dig it into the bottom, and to test that it will hold well.  The first time I backed down on our anchor that night, it started dragging.  I let it settle (did nothing else) and backed down again and it held.  The process had taken close to an hour and we were tired and cold and the wind was blowing us away from the land, safely out towards open water, so at that moment it seemed like our anchoring job was perfectly safe and solid, well done let’s get warm and have a drink, etc.  Then of course the wind shifted just after we got into bed, blowing us diagonally towards the land, and all of a sudden those rocks looked much closer, and much much sharper than they had a few hours earlier.  The fact that the anchor had dragged the first time I had backed down on it came back to haunt me–why did it drag the first time and not the second?  I didn’t do anything differently the second time.  Was it just chance?  If I had backed down on it a third time, would it have dragged?  Given these thoughts, of course I couldn’t sleep well.

We didn’t drag that night, and everything was fine.  I paid for this lesson with lost sleep, elevated anxiety.

The next day we departed for Catalina.  We arrived at the twin harbors area the following afternoon, after a sleepless night on passage bobbing around in zero wind (yet another eventually fruitless attempt to avoid using the motor).  After checking out and dismissing the cherry cove anchorage (full of moorings, not a single spot to anchor) we radioed the harbor patrol to ask where, exactly, was a spot for us to anchor that wasn’t completely full of mooring balls.  We ended up in little fisherman cove.

Yet again, “cove” was innappropriately applied.  More like little fisherman beach, or even more accurately little fisherman bit-of-sand-next-to-more-sharp-rocks.  I positioned us equidistant from rocks and mooring balls, as far away from land as seemed sensible given that we still needed some bottom under us in which to anchor, and that the whole point again is to actually have some protection.  We set the hook, backed down, and all was well.  We went ashore, did shore stuff like shower and laundry and eat french fries, we came back to the boat and ate a great meal, we slept well, the cruising life was good that night, and in this case what I mean by that is that it was actually relaxing and free of anxiety.

Last night we woke up to the sound of our boat banging up against something–this is an unfortunate way to be awakened at 3 in the morning.  It turned out to be a mooring ball–the wind had shifted 180, and apparently our anchor rode was about thirty feet too long to come up short of the mooring ball, and forty feet too short to float past it and tangle us all up in it.  To be frank, at 3 in the morning in my underwear I could have cared less if our rode had fouled around the mooring ball, if only the damn thing wouldn’t have banged against our hull, and then I would have slept for a few more hours and the tangled mess would have at least been a post-breakfast task.

I pulled in 25 feet of our anchor rode–leaving 105 feet of anchor rode in 35 feet of water, or a scope of 3:1.  A scope of 3:1 is the minimum that I was willing to go to, given the situation (usually 5:1 is really nice and 7:1 is overkill).  The mooring ball floated about 10 feet astern of us.  I went back to sleep.  I had just enough time to fall asleep before the damned ball started banging on the hull again.  Given that I was unwilling to shorten the rode any more, I pulled out a second anchor, emptied out the cockpit locker to find the rope rode for it, tied the 300 feet of rope rode onto the anchor, dumped it into the bottom of the dinghy, spent five minutes trying to start the outboard, motored out the second anchor in the dinghy as far as I thought my rope rode would reach, lowered it to the bottom (about 70 ft), motored back to the boat . . . and ran out of rode about 15 feet away from the boat.  Spent 20 minutes pulling the rode and anchor back in, motored 30 feet closer to the boat, lowered the anchor again, went back to the boat, reached it this time, put it onto a winch, then fell asleep laying in the cockpit as karen winched the boat in a hundred feet toward the second anchor.

Moral: anchoring is a skill learned solely through trial and error, and each lesson comes at a high cost.  The price of the tuition is paid with sleeplessness anxiety and unwanted unexpected frantic activity in the middle-of-the-night.  The consequences of failure can be high.  Karen wrote a less serious post about it that I recommend, as an antidote to my worried writing . . .

Karen and I took the boat out to fill up on fuel over at the berkeley marina.  The engine overheated.  We will not be leaving tomorrow.

One of the very first jobs we did when we bought the boat was replace the standing rigging [1] [2].  To redo the standing rigging is to replace the most basic structural foundation of the boat.  All the work we have done since then has, in a sense, been built on that foundation.

Last week, less than a month before we are planning on departing, I discovered that the “knees” of the boat have come unbonded from the hull.  Partially ripped off.  If the rigging is the foundation, the knees are the bedrock underneath the foundation.  Imagine digging up your house to shore up the bedrock.  Of all the projects that I anticipated we would have to do on the boat, I never saw this one coming.  It was my assumption that the knees on a Valiant 40 were more than strong enough, for anything, forever.

After much difficult deliberation, Jonny has decided to move on to other pursuits.  It’s a private affair; this is a public forum.  Neither do I wish to gloss over it; do not confuse my brevity for lightheartedness.  My opinion is that Jonny is doing what is right for him, and I support that.  I wish him luck on his path.

This has been the blog of three friends whose paths have diverged.  In the beginning, this trip was about three guys sailing around the world and making a point to the world in the process.  The trip hasn’t turned out as originally conceived.  It’s no longer three buddies all together, and I no longer feel qualified to make a point to anyone.  I have taken down the Owners and Goal page, the tagline as well, and entered them as the very first blog entries (in the archive).  I think it is important not to ignore where we started; perhaps that way we will not ignore the lessons we have learned.