1^st December 2012

Happy New Year

Many platitudes come to mind but all I can really say – I hope it is another good year, full of new babies, good health, good cheer.

A 2XS moment – Things Which Stick

It has been brought to my attention more than once that…some things stick and some don’t on a boat.  I am sure that if I put something precious on the deck, securely fixed – my iphone, a $50 note, a photo of my beloved children – whatever it is which is beloved by me or by Pete would blow away, fall into the sea, never be seen again.  But if it is something I either don’t want or don’t care about – well, it sticks!  A yucky bit of paper towel, used to clean the BBQ – this not only stays around forever, it also blows right back up at you, out of its secure garbage bag, and floats daintily round the deck for weeks, looking yucky.  Likewise a used bandaid, tissue, fish scale.  Fish scales are remarkable – I hose them viciously off the deck into the sea, and there are always some to be found, on the deck, on the outdoor carpet, threatening to drift into our meals.  Yum!

When Nick and Steve were on 2XS, at the very beginning of our trip from Australia to New Caledonia, they tied a spare water bottle onto the railing, for emergency use.  For some reason, Nick stuffed a newspaper in, around the middle of the bottle, and tied it on tightly with string.  This newspaper has been drenched over and over, with sea water and rainwater.  The wind has howled around it and it has flapped and fluttered for many months.  And – it is still there!  Bedraggled and unreadable, but definitely surviving.  How could this be??  If it had been treasured documents, or a stash of $$$s, it would have dissolved and deteriorated long since.

A mystery of the sea!!

Wednesday 28^th December

We are staying at Highland Waters, a beautiful little lake, high up on the Central Plateau.  We are reunited with John Miedecke, last seen getting onto a small plane in Misima.  To my delight, John and Catherine helped me find my ‘lost’ photos from my camera, and they are now snugly downloaded onto my computer.  I will try, at some stage to download some onto this blog… next step!  It has been great fun, scrolling through and looking at our beautiful (hundreds!) of visitors in the South Pacific islands.  All those cheery cheeky children!

I don’t know if I have written about the death of my Kindle.  It has frozen up and cannot be moved, re-booted, turned on and off.  I was devastated – my Kindle was such an asset on 2XS, all those books, ready to be read, not taking up cabin space, keeping me contented and occupied.  Every now and then, since its untimely demise a week or so ago, I  would take it out of my computer case and gaze at it sadly.  Presumably it could have been fixed, but maybe fixing it would cost the same as a new electronic book reader.  I was still in a state of mild mourning and indecision when Christmas Day arrived.  And Santa aka Pete showed up with – better than I could ever have imagined - a brand new iPad!  Weehee!!  I am so thrilled with it; it is much better than my poor dead kindle.  Catherine has one, so she and John carefully held my hand while I got it all connected up, with the help of their wireless connection thingy.  I didn’t know it was possible to use the iPad as a Kindle, but within minutes Catherine had shown me the appropriate app.  I went to bed almost deliriously happy.  Not only are all of my Kindle books there, ready and waiting on my beautiful new little gadget, it is all better – technicolour book covers, so pretty.  And, best of all, the page is backlit so I can read in the dark with no need for a head torch or reading light.  I think Pete is pleased that I am so ecstatic with my present, but maybe he is a bit anxious that I will never speak to him again, and will be totally engrossed in the many wonderments of my ipad…

2XS tale - I don’t know if I mentioned that we had many hours of officialdom on 2XS when we arrived in Townsville.  Customs, Quarantine, Immigration.  They were all perfectly polite but much more interested in searching and questioning us than we would have expected.  For example, one of the Customs officials, a very attractive-looking young blonde woman, looked at me sharply and said, “Now, when you were in the islands, did anyone ask you to bring drugs into Australia?”  What a funny question…as if I would say, “Oh, yes, strange you should mention it but Mr X on Panapompom Island gave me a big plastic bag full of white powdery stuff – not sure if I remember where I put it…maybe in the toilet cistern?”  Ofcourse I didn’t say anything so frivolous, but I did say, “No certainly not!  Have you met Pete?  Nobody would dare ask him such a thing, he is very straight, and very honest!”  She looked at me with deep suspicion and snapped on some latex gloves.  (OH NO!!!)  “Well, I think I will go and swab all of the bunks and couches!” she said.  She was very welcome to swab away so long as she kept away from me with those gloved hands…

We had actually heard on the grapevine that there had been a very big drug haul in Bundaberg, off a yacht called Freedom Friday, which had been in the Port to Port Rally, including the Louisiades, a few weeks before we sailed across to Townsville from PNG.  Our merry band of officials wouldn’t tell us anything about it, but they were certainly all fired up and ready to find anything out of the ordinary on 2XS.  They didn’t even have the pleasure of confiscating much fresh food, because we had eaten or chucked everything.  The only thing they took was a packet of frozen mince.

As soon as we could, we googled the Big Drug Bust.  Freedom Friday had been under surveillance for about ten months.  They had about $30million worth of heroin, and even more millions of $$$s on board, and they were nabbed when some people came on board with suitcases to remove the loot.  There were photos of the main perpetrators, some fun-loving young party-people from Spain.  They had been life and soul of the rally festivities, and were photographed, dressed very appropriately in pirate costume and waving wildly at the camera, drinks held aloft.  They will probably spend life in prison…

Boxing Day

Much food, much family, good cheer...

A 2XS dinghy story

We heard a horrendous story the other day from one of our young sailing friends, Andy, from another yacht travelling around the islands of Vanuatu.  He and a group of friends had gone into shore in their tender, and were on their way back to their yacht when everything went wrong.  A big freak wave capsized their tender and everyone was tossed into the sea.  The emergency flares didn’t ignite; the VHF radio failed; all safety equipment was washed away; the boat didn’t float on the surface, it wallowed around under water; nobody from their yacht was looking out for them.  Various ropes and cables wound themselves wound themselves around poor Andy’s legs as he was trying to hold the baby aloft… yes they had a very small baby in the tender, with his distraught mother…The baby was passed from one person to another as they tried to get things sorted, but the poor little thing kept swallowing great gulps of ocean – the waves were by this time very big.  They eventually managed to get mother and baby more or less sitting on the upturned tender, with big waves threatening to heave them both back into the sea.  Andy and one of the other girls, Alana, decided to swim for help.  But the tide was running very strongly and they hardly made any progress at all.  As well as this, Andy had emptied the fuel containers, to try to create some sort of buoyancy support.  The fuel ran all over him and combined with the sea water to create some dreadful new compound – he was covered with what looks like acid burns.  Alana is a strong swimmer, and was very confident of her ability to reach the yacht.  Andy was not so sure; he too is a very strong fit swimmer, but he knows about the sea; Alana had only ever swum in rivers and pools.  He took with them a raft of coconuts which they had obtained on shore with a view to feasting rather than floating.  He could tell they weren’t really making any progress at all, and he was very much aware than they were a tempting and tasty target for the famous Sharks Of Malekula.  “I have such pale legs!” he told us.  “I knew they were flashing in the sea like a beacon!”  Fortunately this story has a happy ending; after two hours the yacht came to find them all; the swimmers and the floaters.  They are all very shaken and upset and they are going to try to instate better safety systems on their boat… But Andy said the whole way through, they kept laughing and keeping up morale; I am very impressed.

Saturday 24^th December

Merry Christmas to one and all…

And I so agree with Stephen Fry on Twitter, who is sick to death of all the Grumpy Old theme on TV…the latest being Grumpy Old Christmas: a whole lot of English people grumbling and whining away about the festive season.  Just shut up and enjoy it, he said.

2XS - Back in Australia we were once again treated to the night-time sound of the curlews, also known as Murder Birds, or Banshees.  They are lovely in the daytime, middle-sized, strange-looking wading birds, very tame and cheeky.  But at night-time…they make a sound worse than a brush-tail possum.  Shrieking and screaming, they fill the night with fear and dread.  From our marina berth in Townsville, we could hear party-time sounds from Jupiter’s Casino, just across the way.  I thought there were lots of girls having far too much fun; in fact - it was (mostly) the curlews, doing whatever curlews do at night which incites them to such cacophony.

Friday 23rd December

We only had two or three movie sessions for our village friends in the South Pacific islands.  I think if we manage to go back, I would make sure of taking a better thought-out selection for local consumption.  Dances With Wolves was very popular, but it is in fact much more violent than we remembered it being, and maybe there is something more gentle and pleasant.  Maybe some David Attenborough docos??  Any suggestions?

We talked on the radio to David, the skipper of Flamingo Park, the charter boat anchored near Willis Island, providing accommodation for the building contractors.  He, by the way, had been anchored here for sixty days and had not set foot on land even once, so strict are the regulations. So we were very lucky to have been able at least to stand in the shallows before being repelled back to 2XS.

David had spent some time in the islands recently.  He said he often showed movies on deck, on a large screen.  The most popular choice was – Disney cartoons, universally understood, no language required.  He made the mistake on one occasion of showing Jurassic Park to some of the island women who he had employed to clean the boat.  They were absolutely terrified.  Apart from anything else, their particular island was Jehovah’s Witness, and they don’t believe in dinosaurs; they had never heard of such a thing.

We met up with the Americans off the beautiful big yacht, Delos, from Seattle, in Vanuatu and the Solomons.  They too would show movies to villagers.  On windless nights they could project movies onto their big headsail, making a perfect movie screen.  The most popular movie, they said, was Iron Man.  Too funny!  I actually think the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder Superman might be a hit, come to think of it…

Thursday 22^nd December

More coffee, farewells, reunions, dinners, hospitable offspring…

Another 2S bit…

We received very stern advice re anti-malarial medication.  I don’t like taking antibiotics, not unless I have a major infection or disease.  I think – well it’s not just me thinking this, it is a widely-held belief – that they are vastly over-used in western countries, and that they are becoming ineffective because of this.  (Also…they have side effects to which I am prone and which I particularly dislike.)

I think I already wrote that, when we were in Port Vila, we went to buy some for Pete.  You can get this sort of medication over the counter, in Vanuatu.  I had decided not to take any, but the pharmacist, an expressionless Chinese woman, looked at me severely and said, flatly, “You have to take them.  You have no choice.”  So…I did.  (I am very obedient!)  We had a big plastic container of doxycycline on the tea & coffee shelf and it was my self-appointed task to dish out the drugs every night during dinner.  We hardly missed any, and were very diligent about swallowing them down with our pre-dinner G & Ts. 

So we didn’t get malaria… The funny thing is, we hardly saw any mosquitoes.  If there had been any, they would have been swarming around because every single living thing which had the ability or propensity to bite or sting loves to bite or sting our poor Pete.  He did get bitten, ofcourse, but only once or twice by mosquitoes.  So maybe we didn’t need to take our drugs after all.  But…maybe they were beneficial in another way, because we didn’t get any infections at all.  Infections spring forth at the least opportunity, in the tropics, especially in tropical water, fresh and salt.  We were very diligent about washing out any cuts or scrapes with diluted bleach (ouchy ouch) but we would have expected at least some of our wounds to blossom forth nastily.  But the doxycycline kept everything at bay.  We both started to develop a bit of Kerry’s painful eye infection (sorry Ann-Marie, my eye-phobic friend, I will not put in any further details,) but even that came and went without causing us any grief.

So…if you are travelling to malaria-prone countries, my advice is – take the drugs!

Monday 19th December

Another busybusy Hobart day

Some furniture moving, bed making, hunting for this and that in the basement of Pete’s house.  (Where ARE those single doonas?  Those pristine white towels??  That food processor, ancient but functional??) 

At the end of the day I met up with a dear friend in Salamanca and drank half a bottle of sparkling wine.  While I was showing her a videoclip of children dancing on 2XS on Ramata island in the Solomons, I saw – James Butler, our Tasmanian Hydro friend who spent some time with us in Honiara.  He was the very one who recommended us to go to Ramata in the first place…small small world!

A lovely woman I spoke to at the lunch in Bothwell yesterday told me of her time working as a galley girl on one of larger big tall ships in the 80s.  On one of their trips to New Caledonia they had very violent stormy weather and were diverted to New Zealand.  One of the poor paying passengers, whose dream it had been to travel on a tall ship, was dreadfully ill.  She just wanted, as I can understand, to DIE.  They had to set two people on guard to watch her at all times otherwise she would have hurled herself into the surging sea!!  Oh hell!

(Where are we staying?  Well we are sharing ourselves – ahem – around our family, inflicting ourselves upon this set of offspring or that, willy-nilly… At the moment we are with James and Bronwen in Mt Stuart.  Tomorrow is another day!)