While Greg spent the majority of his time feeding and mucking Tiffany got to “train” the horses.
At this point we should point out that Tiffany has a tendency to…smack things (Aside from Greg, that is). We’re not saying that Greg has ever been approached by a pastor at church but he has had to field a few worried glances from time to time from fellow parishioners. It came with the territory when he decided to marry a woman who gets her kicks zip lining over tropical rainforests and sailing through gale-force winds. As Tiffany puts it, “I don’t bruise easy. I just hit things hard.”
Don’t be fooled, she’s probably better with a hand gun than you are. Seriously.
Now we’ve already gone over how these horses are half-ton hyperactive 2 year-olds that are fed nothing but sugar all day, every day, right? You put them together with Tiffany on a daily basis and well…
Looking out over Auckland Bay towards Mount Rangitoto.
We don’t do this very often, but there are a number of pictures that we’ve taken around Auckland that just don’t have much of a story to them, but are still pretty cool. Here they are for your viewing pleasure!
At long last we finally come to it. Our grail, our Mecca, our El Dorado, our own little land of Canaan in New Zealand, if you will. (yeah, we’re still reading the Bible.)
The culmination of our quest, the living beating heart of our journey (well this part anyway), the Vegas of our Great Kiwi Roadtrip…
Castle Kiwi
(Aka Larnach Castle)
There remained but one final obstacle to overcome, one last trial to endure before the castle would indeed be ours as the very land itself conspired to bar our path… Continue reading “Storming the Hedges”
This is the third in a 3 part series on how to prevent and overcome seasickness by Greg. Take a look at the firsttwo articles.
Mindset is critical. After all, seasickness is all in your head. No, seriously, it is (and yes, that means it’s all in my head too).
The short explanation for the reason people get seasick is that their mind is attempting to compensate their sense of balance with what they see and feel. (Long explanation here.) On a boat, what people see and feel for motion don’t always line up like they do on land. The mind gets confused in a new environment with odd motions and then wham, down you go.
So can someone literally think them self sick? Yes. Yes they can. That’s another reason for all the preventative methods. Dumbo has his feather and I have my eucalyptus oil. Placebo or not, who cares? It works and I even smell better than Dumbo. The good news is that you can also use the same mental effect to feel better. Though there is no cure for seasickness, I have witnessed time and again people feeling significantly better when forced to steer the boat by hand.
Side benefit - You also get to look rather dashing.
Yes people, the ship’s auto pilot is the enemy here – turn it off. There are a few possible explanations for why this works:
This is the second in a 3 part series on how to prevent and overcome seasickness by Greg. The first article can be found here.
The only cure for seasickness is an overwhelming amount of prevention.
1) Sooner or later, just about everyone deals with seasickness
2) You either take action to prevent it or suffer the consequences
I have managed to only get seasick a few times in my life (which was more than enough) and I have successfully sailed though 40 knots of wind and 18 foot seas with the rest of the crew down for the count. Except for Tiffany of course, Tiffany was happy as a clam down in the galley cooking. Unlike Tiffany, the secret to my success is not near-godlike fortitude – it’s planning ahead.
Yes, it takes planning to look this good.
Being proactive is crucial because once you get sick, there is little you can do except suffer though it, and working while sick sucks. Strike that. Horrible. It’s horrible enough that over the past decade I’ve spent no small amount of my time testing every home remedy I could find over until I found the stuff that actually works.
The main questions we get all revolve around the same issue:
“I am very comfortable on the water. However, I have been seasick twice in my life (both time on rough seas in motorized fishing boats), and I was wondering your opinion of how that might affect me while on longer sailing trips? Does your body adapt? I’m sure it’s pretty different person to person, but I was just wondering if you have some general advice.”
OR
I’d love to do this. It’s just a matter of convincing my wife. Unfortunately, she suffers somewhat from the violent seasickness. Any chance she could outgrow it if she sat a boat long enough?”
Seasickness, (and its prevention) easily the number one concern we get from those looking to get into volunteer crewing. As such, we’re doing a 3 part series on the issue.
Tiffany chipped this one over to Greg simply because she has a superhuman cast-iron stomach and has never suffered from seasickness in her entire wild life of deep sea ocean racing, Coast Guard storm rescues and sailing instructing. Tiffany is part mermaid and bleeds salt water. Greg, on the other hand, is a mere mortal who dearly loves his aquatic-born bride. As such, where she goes so must he. Being mortal he is not immune to the ravages of Neptune’s fury and has learned to actually deal with it.
So lets assume that you read our previous article “Volunteer Crewing 101” and though you may have some reservations, the idea of travelling around the world on someone else’s luxury yacht for months on end visiting far flung tropical islands with your only expense being the cost of groceries appeals to you.
(Look, if the opportunity to travel to Tahiti for free doesn’t get your attention then there is simply something wrong with you. 😉
Let’s also assume you have never once in your life set foot upon a ship. How do you go from clueless landlubber to salty swabbie? Or at least how do you check this out for yourself and see if the sailor’s life is, indeed, for you?
It provides us with endless amusement that after all the places we’ve sailed to, all the countries we’ve travelled around by boat, that we’ve flown into and out of Auckland, New Zealand…the “City of Sails.”
Sometimes we just enjoy being contrarian because we can be.
There comes a moment of truth in every long-term traveler’s trip when they are forced to confront a simple question with a heck of a lot of implications:
After some really great adventures, some terrifying moments and only one major “first aid incident“ it was time to say goodbye to mom and once again become a group of two.
One last piece of Polynesian tourism to explore before she departs though.
Oh you want the zoomed out picture? Being as on that Google map we showed you before the scale was 1 pixel = somewhere around 500 miles or something, I don’t think it would change very much. We’re still in the middle of the blue stuff. 😉
With about 2400 permanent inhabitants (this is a HUGE number by the way, we haven’t seen cities so populous since Nuku Hiva) being only a paltry 220 miles from Tahiti (laughable distance really) and with an airport with actual daily flights (*gasp!*) Rangiroa is the de facto capital of the Tuamotu. Its coral reef is made up of 415 motu (islands) and it has only 2 passes in or out. This is where our story begins:
We had gotten a little cocky about the whole “sailing though a dangerous coral reef” thing but don’t you worry, Rangiroa was kind enough to re-humble us. Her lagoon is big: about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. This atoll actually has its own horizon and generates its own localized micro weather patterns. Land’s still about 300 yards across though, so no help there. 50 miles long, 20 miles wide and a lagoon about 100 feet deep. That’s a lot of water and there are only two skinny little passes (say about 100 yards across) in or out. Perhaps you can see where we’re going here.
Rangiroa has a tidal current.
Those weren’t jumping fish; they were 5 foot long dolphins surfing in the standing waves. Rangiroa is famous for them. Also, some genius French entrepreneur (they did invent the word, after all) built a channel-side bar with an observation deck to watch the struggling boats…it’s like the nautical version of celebrity death match with dolphin cheerleaders & umbrella drinks!
A 6 – 7 knot tidal current shifts back and forth throughout the day, creating 5 foot standing waves in addition to the coral on both sides of the channel just waiting to snack on your fiberglass hull. If you don’t know anything about tides and currents, let us give you a visual. We watched one boat who thought that the reports of the rip tide were exaggerated and decided to just push though. For a full hour we watched this cruising boat, at all ahead full, pedal to the metal, going though gas like a drunken sailor though vodka, transit this 300 yard long pass. 300 yards! At sea – calm. In the lagoon – calm. In the pass, one little boat struggled to get in while 2.09×1013 gallons of water wanted to get out…all at once. Oh yes, we just broke out the scientific numbering system. The same system they use to measure the distance to other galaxies. Do we have your attention?
“Oh but that isn’t so bad”, you say. “Just go in while the current is pushing you into the lagoon.” Bad idea for two reasons:
1) For the non-sailors out there, the way a rudder works is that it’s a board sticking out of the bottom of your boat that turns you by pushing against the water. Turn the rudder, the water flowing past it hits it at an angle, which pushes the board and the boat attached to it, in a new direction. If water isn’t flowing past the rudder, the boat won’t turn. When a boat is in a following current (aka being pushed) in a narrow channel where the speed of the water is equal to the speed of the boat, then no water is flowing over the rudder and your half million dollar floating condo just became the world’s biggest pinball.
2) You know that desert island with the one palm tree that people get shipwrecked on in the movies? Found it. It’s at the end of the fast flowing channel of Rangiroa, right there in the smack dab middle of where all the really fast water lets out.
It’s cute, when the current isn’t pushing you right into it – then it’s scary!
