Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  In New Zealand eggs came in sizes of six, seven, and eight, whole chickens came in twelves and fourteens. My bra size dropped to a twelve and my shoe size grew to a thirty-seven. Hokey Pokey was a flavour of ice cream, not a dance. It was fifteen degrees Celsius in the dead of winter and no matter what the weather, every Kiwi’s comment on it was, “It’s not usually like this.” The water swirled down the drain the other way, the cold winds came from the south, and summer came in January. Our world was upside-down.

  We’d come to New Zealand to extend our cruising time in the Pacific and to make some money. Our decision was made when, still in the islands, Nik’s former Vancouver employer responded to an e-mail proposal and agreed that Nik should work a short contract for them, testing their product in the New Zealand market.

  Nik’s pre-arranged work set him up nicely. But what was I to do? With fifteen years of geology and mining on my résumé, looking for work in a country where I had no work permit and they had no mining industry wasn’t going to be easy.

  Nik’s six-month contract began in March and that meant that we couldn’t leave New Zealand at the end of the cyclone season in May 2002. It would be eighteen months before we could depart for the southwest Pacific and resume cruising in May 2003. Our decision to sail south was no small pit stop.

  I felt a loss at letting go of the cruising life and fell into a grief of sorts. I mourned the freedom of being out there exploring the world and pined for the wonders of the previous year. I worried that we would grow roots or not grow at all. Mostly I worried that we would not go at all. I wanted to live as frugally as possible, to preserve every dollar toward more cruising.

  Nik, on the other hand, felt it was time to let loose. Soon he’d be busy during business hours and we’d have money coming in. In Nik’s mind our interminable privation was finally over, so why not live it up a little? Within a week of being tied to the Bayswater dock, Nik had bought a flat screen TV. He waited slightly longer for a new surfboard, a board bag, and a roof rack – perfect accessories for our new used car. Once the landline and the high-speed Internet connection were installed directly to our berth on E-dock, all was well in Nik’s universe. If only a La-Z-Boy recliner would’ve fit in our salon.

  Nik was not the only one. The landlubber came out in everyone.

  Excluding boats with paid crew, the cruising world is a relatively level playing field. Sure, some folks have fancier boats, more gadgets or better toys; some folks go out for dinner more often, or pay for more touristy outings, but when you’re cruising offshore, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. Your head still clogs, your engine oil still has to be changed, and your sails tear like everyone else’s. Out there, on the big blue, we shared a waterfront view with our fellow sailors. We all lived in the same neighbourhood. We all had the same address: Boat Name, blue ocean, no fixed address. We’d all stepped away from our familiar social circles. We’d all left our comfort zones behind. We’d had to make new friends and new fun and we did. The best times were the games nights and snorkelling outings, the potluck dinners and birthday parties where everyone hand-made a gift or a card or a cake.

  When we arrived in Auckland everything changed. The used-car purchases said it all. Our friends purchased flashy red sports cars, his and hers BMWs, and kitted-out camper vans. At the other end of the spectrum, some bought decade-old cars with mismatched doors and jammed locks. We were somewhere in the middle, settling on an inexpensive Honda Accord at an auction. The cruising community of the Pacific Ocean had not emphasized financial status, but life on land did.

  Suddenly being out with the gang meant taking part in costly outings. Restaurant dinners, movies, rock concerts, go-cart racing, glow-in-the-dark bowling … “We’re going this weekend – you should come!”

  The instant lifestyle change put stress on our relationship. Nik loved to be at the centre of whatever was going on and was inclined to say yes to everything. But the consumption caused me concern. I didn’t want to spend money on glow-in-the-dark bowling. I wanted only to go cruising again. As a result, I became the restraint – the boring voice of reason.

  I found it difficult to abandon the finely tuned focus we’d had on cruising while Nik embraced everything about stopping. He wanted to enjoy the time before his contract began while I saw my future – an expanse of days with nothing to do – as a slow form of torture for my goal-oriented, A-type personality.

  A mail packet received from our P.O. box manager in Vancouver exacerbated my funk. In it, there was a letter from a Vancouver adoption agency about the closing of our file. It reopened a wound and stirred a sadness within me. When we’d made our decisions back in B.C., we’d had cruising to look forward to, but now, I was tied to a dock in Auckland with what felt like an uncertain future. I struggled with my identity. The letter was a reminder that I would never be a mother. I was not a sailor anymore. I was unemployed. I felt like I was nothing and I was miserable.

  I took it out on the cockroaches, waging war and winning with copious amounts of boric acid sprinkled liberally throughout the galley.

  Meanwhile Nik was loving New Zealand. Before starting his contract work he reacquainted himself with surfing, a sport he had learned in his childhood on his many Florida vacations. He surfed as often as possible, checking out Raglan, Muriwai, Bethells, Pakiri, Mangawhai Heads, and Piha, his favourite haunt. He couldn’t get enough.

  He constantly tried to reassure me that we would go sailing again and that I shouldn’t fret.

  “Enjoy what we’re doing here and now,” he advised me. “We’ll sail out of here eventually, we’ll get to Australia, don’t worry!” A habitual optimist and a natural bohemian, he was good at enjoying the moment. But despite his assurances, I remained low in spirit and I didn’t enjoy our break in Auckland the way I should have.

  In the end, my job hunt was fruitless and when Nik’s contract work was over, our goals were unified again as we set to work on Green Ghost.

  The paint that had begun peeling off the hull on the first leg of our Pacific crossing continued to sheer off on each successive passage. The topsides looked battered, the bottom side needed attention, and while we were at it, we decided to replace the standing rigging. Of major concern was our compression post, a stainless-steel post that sits atop the keel and supports our deck-stepped mast. It was undersized and it had bowed. It needed replacement. We spent a great deal of time visiting potential boatyards, talking to professionals, lining up contractors and searching the chandleries for equipment and supplies before moving to a haul-out facility to begin our work.

  The move from the Bayswater Marina, Devonport, to the boatyard in Half Moon Bay, Pakuranga, should have been a simple 10 NM trip, but it turned into a morning of drama. Conditions weren’t great on our morning of departure, but we were impatient to get started on our maintenance work and, although it was challenging in the twenty-five knot winds, we backed out of our slip anyway, setting off together with our friend Ian, who had joined us to help out.

  “Something doesn’t feel right – it’s pretty sluggish,” Nik said, handing me the helm outside the marina.

  At three knots, we were making only half our usual speed. We weren’t too surprised as we suspected the hull was covered with marine growth – one of the reasons we were hauling out. We couldn’t make use of the wind because we’d removed all our sails in preparation for pulling our mast in the boatyard. So we motored along, fretting, because we realized our slow speed meant we would miss the end of the flood tide and have an ebb current against us as we turned up the Tamaki River. We were going to be late for our haul-out time.

  After a long slow crawl, within a half-mile of the marina entrance, Green Ghost struggled to make headway. With only one final marker to round before entering the marina we found ourselves in strong current with thirty knots of wind right on our nose. I watched the knot meter go from two knots to one knot to zero.

  “Zero velocity, we’re not making way!” I yelled from the helm.

&n
bsp; In seconds the wind pushed us back, blowing us sideways down the narrow channel. I kept us in forward at full throttle, hoping to regain control of the bow with some forward momentum in the direction of deep water. But the wind and current were too strong, and very quickly we were blown backwards, out of the channel and into the shallow water of the lee shore.

  “Get the anchor down as fast as you can!” I shouted to Nik. If I could not control the boat, at the very least we had to stop it.

  As Nik rushed forward to lower the anchor, we were drifting backwards toward a minefield of small boats on moorings along the rocky shoreline of Bucklands Beach. I glanced over my shoulder, then grabbed a dock line, planning to tie onto whichever one we hit first. The depth sounder flashed ever smaller numbers – the bottom was rapidly shoaling, when finally, the anchor bit. With the first of the moored boats only ten feet off our stern, Green Ghost came to a stop.

  “I think we should motor forward, pick up the anchor, and get into some deeper water. We’ve got to get away from these moored boats,” Nik said.

  “That’s not going to work,” I said, “because we’re at max rpms right now.” We lay at anchor with full forward throttle and we were still being driven back by the wind with our anchor chain pulled taut. I had tears in my eyes. After making it all the way to New Zealand, I thought we were going to lose the boat right there in Half Moon Bay.

  Fortunately, help was at hand. We radioed the marina and got towed in for the price of a case of beer. The marina had already cancelled the crane that was to pull our mast and cancelled our haul-out too. Conditions were too windy. It was a harsh lesson in impatience.

  Later, relaxing over Chinese food and cold beer, we laughed and congratulated ourselves that during the whole episode no one had lost their cool. We each admitted that in the direst moment, as we drifted toward the rocky shore, none of us had been afraid for our own physical safety. Instead we’d all been silently making a plan for how we would step off Green Ghost and wade ashore without even getting our hair wet.

  The next day upon haul-out we discovered a large colony of fist-sized mussels growing on our propeller, the main reason for the boat’s lack of performance. The ordeal was also a lesson in local knowledge. Not appreciating how the wind conditions behaved around local landforms, not realizing how quickly the tide turned to a strong ebb current in the channel, and not knowing the biology of the marine environment at Bayswater Marina had all contributed to our harrowing experience. Next time, we promised ourselves, we’d dive our hull, or pay a commercial diver to dive the hull when we’d been sitting in foreign water for over a year.

  And so began our time at the Half Moon Bay haul-out facility. For ten weeks from September to November 2002, we lived aboard high and dry, up on the hardstand in the boatyard. Our lives became all about carbide pull scrapers and sandpaper, orbital sanders, earplugs, dust masks and safety glasses, two-part epoxy fillers, and more sandpaper, micro-balloons, masking tape, fibreglass, epoxy primers and more sandpaper, undercoats, topcoats, brushes and rollers, more masking tape, and even more sandpaper. It went on and on, but the end result was a gleaming jade mist green topcoat, a stunning white boot strip, and an epoxy-barrier-coated bottom with bright red anti-fouling paint. Except for the undercoat and green top coat which were professionally sprayed, we did all the work ourselves. In the end, Green Ghost looked sweet as.

  With the maintenance done, but still a few months to wait out the cyclone season, we took the opportunity to fly back to Canada for a visit. I spent time with my family while Nik attended a dinner party at his sister’s Toronto home. The story of our sailing lifestyle preceded him and many of the guests at the party asked questions with interest. Not one to shy away from the spotlight, Nik amused enthusiastic listeners with a few salty tales over drinks and appetizers. Later, seated at the long dining table, a bejewelled woman beside him leaned over.

  “I want your life!” she announced in that exaggerated dinner party manner.

  “Well, it’s not all Hendrick’s and hammocks,” Nik replied. “I mean, it is fantastic, we love it, but there’s some hard work involved, and the living conditions, well, it wouldn’t be for everyone, that’s for sure. It’s a lot like camping … on a roller coaster.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s fabulous, it must be fabulous!” she said, unconvinced. “I want your life! I do!” she repeated, poking the air with her manicured nail for emphasis.

  With the gold-rimmed crystal wine glasses and sterling silver cutlery gleaming at every place, Nik thought the setting too elegant to explain what ten weeks in a boatyard was like, peeing in a bucket in the middle of the night because you had no saltwater for flushing the toilet when you were up high and dry on the hardstand, lugging the bucket down a twelve-foot ladder each morning to dump it in the public loo. The maintenance and repairs, the day-to-day boat work, the provisioning and planning, the physical demands of offshore – it was hard to describe that to landlubbers. From a distance, from the outside, I suppose cruising a boat to Fiji did sound simply “fabulous!”

  The early months of 2003 passed quickly. Since our time on the hardstand, we’d had several more visitors pass through. We enjoyed hiking and surfing through another New Zealand summer and we thrilled to the America’s Cup racing in the harbour, but before we knew it we had only thirty days left in the country. Through April we wore ourselves ragged with the preparations for departure. It was just like the fall of 2000 when we left Vancouver, only this time we knew the hard work would be worth it.

  This time we wanted to capture it. Unable to afford the digital cameras that were being introduced to the market when our journey began, we’d been shooting slide film in 35mm cameras, making our photographs inaccessible, even to us. Realizing how profoundly special our experiences had been, we wanted to record our Coral Sea adventures in the most modern way possible, in a way that was easy to share.

  Before leaving New Zealand, we splurged extravagantly on a state-of-the-art digital camera. The Nikon Coolpix 5700 captured five megapixel images and had an eight-times zoom. At C$2,000, it was considered the top digital camera on the market. It was an enormous price tag for us at the time.

  After all our hard work in New Zealand, Green Ghost was ready to go. I was happy again – happy to have a direction and a role to play, happy to be moving on to Australia in our steamer trunk with a mast.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Gouda Cruise to Fiji

  (May – August 2003)

  Once again, we’d reached escape velocity. We left behind the convenience of a car, the normality of a mailing address, the comfort of a social circle. We disconnected the phone, the TV, the Internet, and we did it all on schedule. Departing takes enormous energy and considerable faith. There are few sailors who fail at cruising, but there are plenty who fail to ever leave the dock. If letting go of all you know was easy, everyone would be doing it.

  On May 1, 2003, we began with a short trip out to New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island and the Coromandel Peninsula as a shake-down cruise. Our first few days went like this: the first afternoon was okay, the second day it was blowing thirty knots and the chop was so terrible that I burped spring garden soup all afternoon. I never want to taste that soup again. The third day we spent at anchor, rained in all day. The fourth day we stayed put with settled weather, except for a two-hour pulse of high wind that slammed our cozy little anchorage with thirty-five-knot gusts. A mere two hours of high winds may not sound like much of a hardship but you’re probably picturing a windy afternoon. When you’re cruising, the shit hits the fan in the dark.

  Nik awoke from a deep sleep at midnight.

  “I think we’re dragging anchor,” he said as he climbed over me to get out of bed. “I can hear it rumbling over the bottom.”

  “Shit,” I answered, getting up too.

  Nik looked around outside and confirmed that our position relative to the shoreline had changed. We were dragging into shallow water.

  I turned the battery switch to the st
art position and Nik turned the ignition key in the cockpit. Our Isuzu diesel engine rumbled to life. It was a relief to know that we still had anchoring down to an art form. As Nik went forward to the bow, I manned the helm. With arm gestures Nik indicated where the anchor lay and I drove the boat forward at low speed while he operated the electric windlass to bring in the chain.

  “We’re up!” he yelled back when he saw the anchor at the surface.

  I repositioned the boat, bringing it to a standstill with the bow pointed directly into the wind.

  “Ten feet below the keel!” I called forward, giving Nik the depth of the water so that he would let out the appropriate amount of chain as the boat drifted back. Nik then attached the anchor bridle, two strong lines that took the strain of the anchor chain off the windlass and transferred it to the deck cleats on either side of the bow.

  “Okay!” Nik called back, as he signalled to put the boat in reverse. I backed up slowly, setting the anchor, then revved up to 1,500 rpms just to be sure we had a good hold on the bottom.

  Even though we were pretty good at it, re-anchoring at midnight never made for a good night’s sleep. On our fifth day, we were tired, the weather was poor, and we didn’t move.

  A friend wrote an e-mail from Canada: So, you’re back to not having a care in the world. Is cruising better than you remembered it? In my journal, I answered her question: It’s all coming back to me now – I remember cruising, first some bullshit, then some more.

  We tried to settle into it, sailing through waters alive with tiny blue penguins bobbing at the surface, dodging water spouts, and reacquainting ourselves with the frustrations of too much wind, not enough wind, and just the right amount of wind but from the wrong direction. We struggled to hit our stride.

  At least one thing was good. Considering our eighteen-month hiatus of dockside living, Nik’s stomach was doing well. He wasn’t experiencing any seasickness. I figured that meant he was feeling pretty relaxed until the incident in the bilges one morning.