This video succinctly captures the mood of the moment.
Though we have spent weeks at sea and accomplished something that many dream of, I have to say on some levels I am sad to see this transit end. Over the past 22 days I really have enjoyed my rituals of personal development (the ukulele, French and Bible) and I know that now we have hit land those rituals will be impossible to maintain in the face of beautiful beaches, amazing island hikes, delightful food and tropical paradise. Don’t worry, I’ll cope 😉
While everyone else was working at dropping the anchor and launched the dingy, I was tasked to establish friendly relations with the natives who, in classic Polynesian fashion, came out to greet us.
After which we all hopped in the dingy and got our butts to land.
Our first stop? We’re sailors, where do you think? Two words: Money & Beer.
Which is a good thing we got money, cuz everything here is nutzo expensive! To give you an idea, we got in during the morning and went into a burger joint for our first landside meal. Tiff got a burger, I got a local “cheap” fish snack (poisson cru for you Frenchie speakers) and we each got 1 beer. $30.00 US later we decided we’d finish celebrating on the boat. The local beers were eight bucks each in a little snack shack! Big upside to sailboats: you bring your own hotel with you.
…and yes Daniel, I survived, so no, you don’t get my hot tub or my Xbox 360.
Oh hey ya, we have actually done some actual sailing over the past few weeks.
I’d actually like to take a moment to describe to you our relationship with the sail featured in the last video: the spinnaker, or as I like to accurately call it, the petulant child. You see, our spinnaker halyard shackle has no difficulty at all holding onto the spinnaker while we set the sail, and I have to say it releases fairly easily as well…it just seems to like to release the spinnaker while we are still flying it, turning our high-speed light wind sail immediately and without warning into a high drag and fairly effective parachute brake. This would be a great side feature of this shackle…you know, if we had some way to actually control it. As it stands though, when this happens (typically while Allan is on the stern showering) it leaves us with a sail to pull out from under the boat and a line to pull down from the top of the mast.
(Hey Mom, did I mention I was 1000 miles from the nearest hospital? Just thought you should know ;-).
Tiffany has gotten so sick of the whole affair that while doing laundry she began testing replacement sails.
Expect patents to be filed once we make landfall. Needless to say we installed a new shackle.
Despite our best fishing efforts, pickings continue to be rather slim
(If you watched that…I apologize. My only defense is that when you’re this long out to sea some things seem funnier than they are.)
We did manage to hook a deepwater fish. Before parting the strongest line we had onboard, our finned friend hung around long enough to make sure I received an extensive education why I need to keep my big mouth shut when I think about talking smack about a sport I know nothing about.
What’s on the dinner menu for Greg? Looks like a double portion of humble pie.
To pile on the humiliation, it appears that my role as a B-movie sci-fi horror flick victim was prophetic in nature. Either that or the booby birds have enlisted the help of their fellow sea creatures. Either way, the ship’s cockpit is becoming a nightly target for the beasts of the sea.
In that video I mention the term ITCZ. This is sailor slang for Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. Basically it’s this place where all the horrible weather from the northern hemisphere has gigantoid WWE style thrown downs with all the horrible weather from the southern hemisphere. If you take Michael Jackson’s music video “beat-it” replace the street thugs with rain squalls and take out the really cool dancing and hit music single, you have a good idea what it’s like.
Despite seemingly every creature of the briny deep, with the notable exception of an actual edible fish, deciding to make our ship their vacation home, morale remains high. Just a few days ago we took solace in the stoic example of Captain James T. Kirk as we conducted another installment of our mandatory ships training regimen.
Even though we have not seen dry land for weeks, we remain confident God has not flooded you all out of house and home.
That’s a Bible reference yo. Noah, from that first book. Told you I was listening to it.
And so we come to it, that invisible yellow line in the water that separates the pollywogs from the shellbacks: The equator.
(If you don’t understand what I just said, you’re a pollywog 😉
Now while most people know that crossing the equator is a big deal and that it is a major milestone in the life of any mariner, what is not common knowledge is exactly how this little ceremony is supposed to be celebrated. Since conflicting rumors abound and I was the one who went to that maritime school thing (yay Coast Guard Academy…), Allan and Alison assigned me to research and design our equator crossing ceremony (Tiff was busy at the time flying to the Caribbean to “work” on a private sailing yacht). I hope that any of you cruisers looking to do your own crossing will find our experience helpful in planning your own ceremony.
Doing some online digging, I found that the majority of equator crossing commemorations ranged from the messy, disgusting & mildly sexual on the civilian side to the time honored military ceremony of beating people with rubber hoses while they kissed fat men on the belly. I am not exaggerating either of these statements; feel free to look it up yourself. After 9 years of service in a sea going military branch I can tell you this: I don’t care what argument you make about tradition…you hit someone with a rubber hose or humiliate them publicly and you just hazed them.
So being as I didn’t exactly feel like cleaning up a vat of lard off the deck and I thought most of the crew would agree with my feelings that physical abuse makes for poor celebration, I decided to get a little creative.
First off, cheesy costumes have been a traditional part of Equator crossings for a long time and well, I had a lot of spare time on the night watch. Tin foil and 3 hours with nothing to do but listen to the Old Testament and you too can look like this!
Another a classical piece of the ceremony is the sacrifice to Neptune, the ancient god of the oceans. Typically a sacrifice of wine or Champagne is made but Alison asked, “how often do you think poor Neptune gets tropical flavored popsicles out here in the middle of nowhere?” Always concerned about the feelings of mythical gods with legendary powers to create whatever they wish, and looking to score some brownie points for good seas on the last leg of our trip, we made our ritual sacrifice with a twist.
Next Allan thought, “Hey guys, we have a perfectly serviceable boat. Why don’t we jump off it in mile deep water and swim across the equator?” This seemed like a reasonable idea to everyone (don’t ask me why, see below). Our first attempt left Tiffany, Allan and I concerned that, after 15 days at sea, Alison might just have decided she could do much better single-handing.
Our second attempt garnished better results.
However it should be noted that I made our very first shark sighting of the trip 10 feet off our starboard beam about 30 minutes after we got out of the water. Needless to say that was not my favorite.
After drying off and drifting back over the equator so Alison could swim across (this was before I saw the shark, OK!?) we allowed ourselves a wet ship for one bottle of wine. After polishing off the bottle, I thought we could add another finely established maritime tradition to our ceremony.
In retrospect, looking at a chart of countries that intersect the equator, writing the notes only in English probably was not the best idea.
Finally, basking in our newfound glory of being accepted into the sailing elite, full of confidence & beaming with our new royal designation of “trusty shellbacks” Tiffany and Alison added to the festivities by unearthing our finely preserved treasure of the freezer.
Thus ended our observance of the Equator crossing. All of us had a great time, a few laughs and went home happy (except the shark, but hey I like my legs where they are.) The whole thing was pretty easy and took about 90 minutes to pull off. I’d highly recommend other cruisers taking what we did as a baseline for their own ceremonies. Hey, if you have any other ideas about fun ways to celebrate the crossing, leave a comment!
Tiff thought we would start out by giving you some perspective on what we see all day, every day. (PS- don’t watch this video if you are prone to seasickness.)
[Tiff thinks this one is better 🙂 It’s kinda long though, I was having editing issues.]
My daily schedule basically looks like:
Noon – wake up, shave, brush teeth
12:30PM – eat lunch, do dishes
1:30PM – personal projects (like sewing zippers in my pants pockets, doing laundry, showering.)
3:00PM – Stand 4 hour watch
7:00PM – Get off watch, eat dinner
8:00PM – Do dishes
8:30PM – wrap up personal projects, putz around
9:00PM – Practice ukulele
9:30PM – Practice French (usually involves me making spitting sounds at my computer)
11:00PM – Pre-watch nap
12:45AM – wake up, stand 3 hour watch. Listen to Bible on audio book.
2:30AM – midnight snack time! More Bible on audio
4:00AM – Get off watch, go to bed
Aside from occasional interruptions for critical ships business
… and pods of dolphins using our bow as a jungle gym
Our days are much the same. This would drive some people mad, but I love the relentless progress I make daily toward mastering my ninja-like French-Bible-quoting-while-playing-Beethoven-on-ukulele skillz.
But heck, I sleep until noon every day, so they could all be learning kung-fu and naked tribal dancing in the morning for all I know.
I want to convey to you our daily life. Have you ever had a personal montage? The underway life is a daily existence of extreme ritual, when you allow it to be, and that ritual allows you to focus on whatever you want with unprecedented clarity. For 30 days of my life I have the opportunity to dramatically increase any skill set I want to study. I describe it best to my mother when I emailed her:
I am spending my time sewing zippers on clothes and reading the Bible
(I feel like a monk)
…and learning French
(a Franciscan monk)
…and learning the ukulele
(a Franciscan monk with a toy guitar)
…and talking to Tiffany
(a Franciscan monk with a toy guitar and a wife….ok, fine, bad example)
This is my life for the next month…no Gregorian chanting though.
Allan spends his time developing his at sea tech support business …
… and getting an “A” for effort in his many attempts to land “the big one”.
Tiffany and Alison spend most of their personal time focused on the inspection of our cookie stores …
… and the restocking of our cookie stores (a chore in which I am sometimes impressed into service).
To give you an idea, I offer for your consideration this typical evening “crew ration”
Stuffed peppers, avocado, fresh tomato salad and hand-made garlic bread… All par for the course for our dining experience (trust me, were you here you would not dare to dishonor the glory of our consumption rituals by addressing them as “meals” either). Any fool who told you that people lose weight on long voyages was either a liar or someone who did not give proper respect to the culinary creation process. Translation: they did not have a duty cook, which is one of the major advantages of having more than 2 people on your boat.
In this sailor’s opinion, Allan probably made the best call of his ship captaining career when he took our advice of assigning a duty cook. He actually did it cunningly well. We have 2 duty rotations each 12 hours in length: Day watch and night watch. During night watch, each of us stands a 3 hour and during the day watch, three of us stand a 4 hour shift and the 4th person’s sole responsibility for the day is to make sure the rest of us eat meals that would make Bacchus envious. Tiffany and Alison typically take this burden on and they have done a fantastic job. The reason for this is that Allan and I have both stated that Ramen noodles and a can of coke every night sounds like a fun experiment. Alison agreed with this idea, however her idea of Ramen noodles is a travesty of college gourmet cooking.
Back to the duty cook thing. The real advantage here is that the cook easily spends 4 hours (the length of a watch) preparing lunch and dinner. Everyone realizes this, so none of the other watchstanders feel like the cook is shirking duty. Also, because the cook doesn’t have to worry about a watch during the day, they can spend a lot of time creating excellent meals, despite having to deal with problems straight out of Das Boat:
Also, this way no one gets overworked between standing watches and preparing meals.
The cooks almost got a fresh sushi reprieve when we landed our first fish of the trip until we realized it wasn’t a good “eating” fish (what the heck else are fish good for!?)
Our last communication ended with our loyal crew recovering from a blitzkrieg-style home invasion from the booby birds.
Tiffany, Allan and I quickly devised a counter-strike offensive. Luckily, between Tiff’s years of nautical experience, Allan’s fighter-jock skills (no, really – F-16s!…these birds seriously picked the wrong boat to mess with…) and my supremeknowledge of the multiple uses of sailing line we routed the enemy and chased him squawking into the night.
With the main thrust of their attacked repelled, their forces routed and in shambles, the enemy made a final, desperate play for a beachhead on our extremely delicate solar panels, which our reserve forces quickly repelled.
Unfortunately they kept coming back, growing so bold as to land on the boat hook as we attempted to poke them with it! Eventually, with both sides weary from literally hours of intense non-stop action, our side proposed a truce: One bird on the dingy, as long as no one poops. Of course he defecated easily twice his own body weight onto our small boat and at first light his fellow bombers attempted to join him, so we rejoined the battle this time determined to offer no quarter…
Though we survived the brutal hand-to-halyard combat of that night, our boat still carries the scars of the battle …
… and, as you can see from that video, we must remain constantly vigilant for skirmisher forces lying in wait to catch us unawares. For we are alone, cut off from other allied units, hundreds of miles from shore and should our efforts fail, we would be overtaken before help could arrive. There is no truce, no peace. That is the lesson the “night of the attack of the boobies” taught us. A lesson we pass to you, my friends, from the front lines. Pray for us as we battle on…
I finally sorted out the DNS stuff for our site (if you don’t know what DNS is, ugh, don’t worry about it!), so no more redirect. Now when you type www.CoastGuardCouple.com in the address bar, that’s what you’ll get! Sweet!
Tiffany and I got ourselves a ship for the trip to Tahiti! Our friends Allan & Alison on FLY AWEIGH have decided to change their plans from sailing to Florida to sailing instead to Australia. Those of you following the blog for a while now will remember Allan and Alison from our many adventures in Baja Mexico, in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Mazatlan and now Puerto Vallarta. They have asked Tiffany and I to accompany them over the first leg of the journey, basically to help them sail their boat over 3000 miles of open ocean … one of the largest expanses on the planet.
To give you an idea of what we have signed on for here, imagine driving from New York City to San Diego in a camper. Now reduce the camper’s speed to 10 miles per hour max, make it impossible to get off or stop the camper at any point during the voyage, remove all signs of life, habitation, fuel or help for your journey and put 4 people in the camper, one of whom must be driving at all times and two of which are vegetarians. Sprinkle in the potential for a few natural disasters and add a dab of motion sickness. Oh yeah, no cell phones, wifi or FM radio either. That’s not quite it, but it’s at least close to what we’re doing.
(Ok, this time Greg made a comparison to a camper van. Last time, he said we were “crossing the ocean in a bathtub powered by a bedsheet”…)
Naturally, prepping for this trip was a major project for the four of us and took us about a month to get FLY AWEIGH, an already well equipped and well maintained ship, ready for the journey.
How do I describe to you what we did to prepare our ship and ourselves for this undertaking? I mean, how many bottles of bleach does one need to cross an ocean?
And how many hours a day should you devote to the important task of de-moisturizing your mushrooms for storage?
We also got 2 new sails for the trip: a storm trysail in case of hurricanes and a spinnaker in case of light winds. Thanks go out to Mike of PV sailing who got the sails down to Mexico and took the time to do some training with us on them.
Overall it was a lot of work and the four of us all pitched in and made it a good time. This video gives you an idea of what it is like to prepare a ship to cross an ocean:
Another important factor in our preparation was mentally preparing ourselves for what I estimated would be 30 days living in a constantly moving 400 sq foot apartment with no means of leaving. Now the idea of unplugging for a month may sound rather appealing at first but, as I learned from my patrols in the Coast Guard, you have to keep busy or you’ll go bonkers after a while. To that end I had Tiffany bring back a few things for me from the states: a French review program (because in French Polynesia, that’s what they speak! – Tiff), an audio Bible and a ukulele. In our final month in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle here in Banderas Bay, I’ve managed to learn one song on this thing.
So either I’ll get better or they’ll kill me and dump my body in the ocean. Nothing like a little motivation to begin one’s musical career. Anyone know what song I was playing?
