Return to the Boat
2005
Despite my best efforts, I keep having new experiences. Just a few weeks ago I removed wallpaper from the bathroom. (I didn’t say they were all good new experiences.) And last week I had what is still a relatively new experience for me: I returned to the boat.
For several decades I never returned to whatever boat I owned because I never left it. The boat—even the 18’ open boat CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE—was my only home.
I thought then, and I think now, that maintaining a boat is a full time job. Not that it can’t be done part time, but it is more difficult. A boat like any other machine needs to be used. In the past I often watched others come back to their boats to find batteries dead, engines recalcitrant, seacocks blocked, wires corroded. And now that I spend about half my time on opposite sides of the world, I do too.
The worst return was last year in Tahiti, where I had left THE HAWKE OF TUONELA at the Tahiti Nautic Center near Taravao while I flew back to spend time with Carol in Boston.
The original plan was to haul the boat and store her on the hard. I was assured that draft and weight were not a problem, that the Nautic Center could haul a boat as large as 50’.
I had not been down to Port Phaeton, as it is properly known, about 25 nautical miles south of Papeete, for more than twenty years, and was pleasantly surprised to find that life down island is still reasonably tranquil, at least when compared to Papeete, which quite simply is toast. Even Papeete’s own tourist literature talks about traffic jams and ugly mismatched buildings.
I was less pleased when the Nautic Centre tried to haul the boat by sending a one-sided cradle down a rickety marine railway. I have never before seen such a cradle. Why there are supports only on the port side, I do not know. That the tractor engine failed to pull my moderate displacement sloop from the water I do know.
With an airplane flight scheduled two days later, the only alternative seemed to be to leave the boat at anchor in the lagoon, where it would probably be safe; but the director of the Nautic Center said that he thought I could get into their small dredged basin at high tide, though THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s 6’8” draft is several inches deeper than the stated depth.
It worked. We eased in by an inch or maybe less, tied up in front of a café with loud live music, and I left.
Two and a half months later I returned. Carol flew with me. We found the boat full of mold and spiders. I have no problem with spiders in moderation. But this was spiders in excess.
We borrowed a chain saw and cut enough spider webs to squeeze through the companionway and then killed enough of the mold to be able to sit down in the cabin. Somewhat later I discovered that the cockpit mounted engine control lever had irreparably corroded. The throttle worked, but the gear shift did not.
After waiting two days for a mechanic who never showed up, we left, Carol on deck at the tiller, I below shifting gear manually at the engine itself. Not entirely satisfactory for single-handing, but for three weeks I wasn’t a single hander, and we only really needed the engine to get out the narrow dredged access channel from the tiny basin.
The best return was the most recent here where I left THE HAWKE OF TUONELA on her mooring just off Opua in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.
I found only a bucketful of water in the bilge. I left the bilge pump and float switch in automatic as I always do and this time it seems to have worked. In the past the pump has been known to develop an airlock and continuously run until it burns itself out and/or the batteries down.
This time the solar panels kept the batteries fully charged.
Almost no mold. Only a few spiders. And one gecko that I inadvertently killed when I stepped on it in the dark. I’m truly sorry for that. A gecko sailed from Fiji with me on CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE and no doubt died when the open boat flipped halfway to what were then the New Hebrides. I recall him standing on tiptoe looking forlornly back at the receding land as we left Suva.
I bent on the sails, including the mainsail which had been at the sailmaker for minor repairs, cleaned, cleared a blocked seacock from the galley drain, got the head working and reduced the inevitable odor from water standing in the discharge hose.
This time jet lag was even minimal and soon it was simply a great, great pleasure to be back on the boat, to feel her moving around the mooring, hear ripples against the hull, smell the damp earth and foliage at dawn, feel the breeze on my skin, and be more or less continuously outside. And to use my body again. Working out inside the Charlestown condo is just not the same as living aboard, where I row ashore, walk, carry, lift, pull, push. It takes a little while to get back in shape, though I didn’t feel I was out.
While writing one morning I heard chirping nearby and went to the companionway where I disturbed a flock of sparrow size birds who were sitting on the lifelines. They took flight in a flurry of feathers.
And soon I was able to email the bad news back to February Boston: I had a tan.
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There are ideas so bad it is difficult to understand how they ever could have seemed good. Such an idea was painting the cabin sole with nonskid paint.
I did this last November shortly before leaving to fly back to Boston.
I disliked the paint from the moment I started to apply it and continued only in the unlikely prospect that it would look better when the entire surface was covered. It didn’t, and at least I had the good sense to throw the unused portion of the can away and not apply a second coat.
The paint was supposed to be beige, but came out more a cream color. It was light where the interior should be dark, and drew the eye to every mark and speck of dirt. It did make it easier to see spiders.
While in Boston I thought about what I would do to the cabin sole when I returned. I considered covering it with Treadmaster, or an artificial teak decking called Flexiteek, or replacing the sole with new teak and holly veneer plywood. I even told myself that maybe it wasn’t as bad as I recalled. But the moment I stepped below I knew it was.
Perhaps it was my recent experience of removing wallpaper that suggested I first simply try to remove the offensive paint. $15 for a liter of paint remover, and I already had putty knives and sandpaper. And time.
What took one hour to do took three days to undo. But unexpectedly it finally was satisfactorily undone and I began to apply the first of many coats of Deks Olje.
This is an effective, but not very efficient method of refinishing a cabin sole. I do not recommend it.
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I was in Paradise, but I liked the next place better.
This paradise was nominal, not subjective: Paradise Bay at Urupukapuka Island, the biggest island in the Bay of Islands, though still only a mile and a half long and generally less than a half mile wide.
The bay--to my mind really a cove--is a pleasant enough place halfway up the west side of the island and well protected except for exposure to a long fetch from the southwest. In the Bay of islands if the wrong wind blows into your anchorage, you need move only a short distance to another equally pretty spot to find protection. But it was not so outstanding that I could see why anyone ever thought it paradise. Ashore was a small sand beach and bush impenetrable without an ax or bulldozer. The bush has been partially cleared from the shore at another cove just north of Paradise, which enables one to walk around a bit there. Still someone once liked this particular cove enough to name it Paradise.
A few months earlier Carol and I had been in a different version of Paradise.
From the time of the voyages of Wallis and Bougainville and Cook, Tahiti and the other Society Islands have been Europe’s vision of earthy paradise. Despite the commercialization, congestion and regulations of Papeete and French bureaucracy, the physical beauty remains, and after a four hour sail from Papeete we were anchored at one of my favorite anchorages in the world in 17’ of warm water so clear you can see the bottom in moonlight just inside the reef on the east side of the pass into Opunohu Bay on Moorea. Peaceful, tranquil, a short swim to snorkel on the reef, only a few houses and a half mile away a relatively discreet hotel visible on the shore, and, except for one holiday weekend when a fleet of local boats came over from Tahiti, only between three to five other boats at anchor.
I have visited that anchorage many times during my six voyages to Tahiti over the past 30 years and it remains one of my images of paradise.
But one of the interesting things about paradise is that generally it is not where you are.
In Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, about which Melville wrote his most commercially successful novel, TYPEE, I was once invited to a home where the teenaged son had the walls of his room, which had a view out over the lagoon, covered with Air France posters of skiing in the Alps. He was looking forward to his compulsory military service in the hope that he would serve in Europe and see snow and ice.
I left New Zealand’s’ Paradise Cove after two nights and explored some other nearby anchorages, finally settling on what is called the Lagoon at Roberton Island. Once again I think the early European settlers used words a bit loosely because it isn’t a tropical lagoon, but a very nice cove on the south side of a low saddle connecting two hills.
One end of the island is privately owned, but most of the rest is a bird sanctuary and there is a marked trail to a lookout over the entire area.
I have seen photographs of that anchorage filled with fifty boats over New Zealand’s summer holiday which runs from just before Christmas to the end of January. While I was there, several daytrip boats anchored for lunch and to ferry passengers ashore to climb to the lookout, but by late afternoon I had the place to myself.
As night fell, I was sitting on deck listening to music with my evening drink, watching lights come on in the few scattered houses on the mainland of the North Island a mile away. I really did like this place more than Paradise.
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I met Eric and Susan Hiscock once.
We were clearing into Neifu, Tonga, at the same time: they coming in from the east in their 46’, I think, steel ketch, WANDERER IV; I coming in from the north in my 18’ open boat, the yawl rigged CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.
They powered WANDERER IV to the outside of the wharf at Neifu as I rowed CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE to the shallow inside of the wharf. They assumed I had been out for a daysail and couldn’t understand why I was flying the “Q’ flag. Susan was friendly enough, but Eric seemed vaguely disturbed that I was sailing oceans in an open boat, as though I were doing something improper, particularly since I was making passages just about as quickly as the Hiscock’s were.
My clearance into Neifu went quickly.
Two big Tongan officials came down the wharf. Together they displaced as much as CHIDIOCK. They stood looking at the little boat for a moment somewhat apprehensively, trying to decide whether to risk stepping down, then one of them said, “You don’t have any…no, of course, you don’t. Welcome to Tonga.” And they turned and climbed aboard WANDERER IV.
I didn’t agree with many of the Hiscock’s ideas about boats, which I thought even in the 1970ties were out of date. For example the advantages of a spade rudder have always seemed obvious to me. But curiously enough, after a lot of sailing: the Hiscock’s three circumnavigations and I, at present, four, we ended up in the same place: Opua, New Zealand. When Eric died, WANDERER V, was moored almost exactly where I now moor THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, and Opua had been the Hiscock’s base for several years. I don’t know that I have finally stopped sailing around the world and ended, but this is my second successive cyclone season in Opua and there will be more.
There are places I like as much as New Zealand—parts of Australia and South Africa and Brazil—but none more, and New Zealand has the advantage of that quality beloved of architects and real estate developers: location, location, location. Sail three weeks east and you are in Tahiti; between a week or two northeast to west and you are in The Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia or Australia.
In New Zealand, the Bay of Islands, northernmost of the ports of entry, has the best climate: nominally sub-tropical but I see many more pine trees than palms. Good facilities. And an almost inexhaustible supply of good anchorages.
It is also a spot of great beauty and tranquility. With points of land overlapping, this southern end of the bay has the appearance of a lake. A circle of hills of various shades of green surround the mooring, from which I look west to the marina and the few buildings of Opua; and to the east a small gumdrop island with an unruly pine tree toupee, a shallow inlet, hills and a distant, often misty, mountain.
Notable by their absence are power boat wakes—sailboats far outnumber power boats and everyone usually conforms to a posted five knot limit; traffic noise—there are no through roads along the shore and in most places no roads at all; airplanes—the nearest airport is twenty miles away in Keri-Keri and it is rare for even a small private plane to fly overhead.
I like the place so much that I bought my mooring and am now the proud owner of two-tons of concrete and various bits of chain and rope. I still haven’t paid the duty to import THE HAWKE OF TUONELA and so have to sail out of the country each year: Tahiti last year; Tonga and Fiji this: a real burden. And eventually I might sail on. Or I might not. I don’t have much confidence in my place in a celestial paradise, so perhaps I should stick close to this one.