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Transitioning to the world of to-dos

Jan 3rd, 2013
by Sara.
5 comments
Wondertime girls at Roberton Island, Bay of Islands, New Zealand

Wonder. Time.

I realized yesterday what it is that has been driving me crazy lately. Anxiety has been creeping into my soul once again, a sense of hurry that starts as soon as I open my eyes each morning. The feeling that there is not enough time in the day. Going to bed each night thinking of what I didn’t get done that day and wondering if I can get it done tomorrow.

It’s my new to-do list.

One of our most favorite places in Auckland so far? The library!

One of our most favorite places in Auckland so far? The library!

I haven’t had a to-do list for well over a year now and as we head out of cruising mode and into – what? – work/school/errand/shop/whatever-you-call-this-not-moving mode I’ve starting making the lists that ruled my life before we spent all our days exploring little bits of land by sea. It seems there’s a lot to do to fit in to city life, and more importantly, make and spend money which is mostly what every metropolis seems about. I’ve got lists of things to buy, places to explore, homeschool activities to sign up for, items to complete for our work and student visas, books to read, blog posts to write, boat projects, appointments to make….

Did I not have these things before? What has changed exactly? Sure, some days were busy during our time in the islands. When we got to town there were provisions to buy, laundry to drop off, ice-cream cones to eat. Emails to write. Um. Hmm. I guess that’s it. Must be why I hadn’t had to jot down any tasks – there really weren’t any.

But we must have eaten a lot of ice-cream because here we are working on that cruising kitty again. And doing that in a new country requires a bit of red tape. And the price of not having a to-do list for a while simply means that quite a few things just got pushed into the future and we’ve finally met up with them. Then again, I just like making lists and tend to jot down any old thing that crosses my mind to do.

But then those lists tend to rule my days: I check my daily tasks in the morning and plan out how I’m going to get them done. The girls beg for pancakes but I make oatmeal again because pancakes take too long to make and clean up. I feel anxious when the girls want to get out the paint when I’m planning on heading out in an hour to the laundromat. Everyone wants to walk to the playground but I am struggling with the fact that I have 10 starred emails in my inbox…. By the end of the day I am exhausted and – of course – I check my to-do list and defer the four undone items for tomorrow.

Pt. Erin Community Pool

We love hot summer December days at the pool

One of the lessons that cruising has taught me is to take the lessons that cruising has taught me and bring them to the life we live when we are not moving. This one: that the best days are not the ones where I get the most things done. The best days are the ones without a list leading the way, where we just let the day unfold and explore the world however we feel that day and let whatever happens, happen. They are the days when we take the time to wonder.

We had such a day last weekend: Saturday morning dawned with a list of things we needed to do to go visit friends who live several hours up the coast for the weekend. We packed, made a treat to bring, showered. Out in the parking lot we found a screw embedded in the front tire of our car and drove out to a tire shop on the way out of the city (resulting in four brand-new tires to replace the bald ones). At noon, we found ourselves sitting in northbound traffic with the rest of Auckland’s residents heading out for a long New Year’s weekend. After taking nearly two hours to travel what normally takes 20 minutes, we phoned our friends and regretfully made plans to visit after the holidays. We felt terrible.

Nothing to do!It was a beautiful sunny summer December day so we headed over to the community pool for an afternoon swim. On the way home we got an invite from some new friends for a BBQ dinner at their Auckland home and drove over that evening. The wonderful visit and dinner culminated with a night stroll under the full moon to a park reserve near their home. We walked in the dark into the trees which led to rock caverns that were illuminated with the tiny fairy-lights of glowworms. It was absolute magic, an unforgettable evening for everyone. I couldn’t have planned that day if I tried and tried.

So this morning when I woke up I did the best thing I could think of to reduce all the weight these to-dos have been putting on my soul and our days: I started deleting them.

The view from our cockpit - our new playground!

The view from our cockpit – our new playground!

With her rust stains, chipped paint and bowsprit, Wondertime sticks out like a sore thumb amongst all the other slick and fast New Zealand boats. But we love her anyway.

Here’s Wondertime in her new Auckland slip. With her rust stains, chipped paint and bowsprit, she sticks out like a sore thumb amongst all the other slick and fast New Zealand boats. But we love her anyway.

 

Merry Christmas from the Crew of Wondertime!

Dec 26th, 2012
by Sara.
2 comments

Treats for Santa We arrived in Auckland last week, after Santa granted us an early Christmas gift of a new damper plate shipped from the UK which got us motoring along again. With the remains of Cyclone Evan hot on our heels, we had a quick overnight trip 130 miles down the coast from the Bay of Islands into our cozy slip here in downtown Auckland. Our first days in the city have been a blast with amazing playgrounds, parks, pools, libraries, museums and shopping just a short walk or bus ride from the boat.

This Christmas, we are thankful for arriving here safely and with so many stories and memories of the last 18 months of travelling together as a family that it seems overwhelming at times. The hardest part is definitely the wake of family and friends we’ve left behind and are missing very much this season. Just know we are thinking of each and every one of you and wish you a very merry season and the time to look back at all the amazing memories you’ve made this year.

Wondertime - Christmas 2012And look forward, as we are, with excitement and joy at all the memories to come in the coming year.

Wondertime girls - Christmas 2012

Familiar But Foreign

Dec 4th, 2012
by Sara.
11 comments

Our first days in New Zealand were not very glamorous, or should I say glamourous, but it has been thrilling to be here even though our first orders of business were to get started on our long list of chores that have piled up during our time lazing around in tropical paradise. We’re in rural country up here in Opua with miles kilometers kilometres of roads winding crazily through rolling green hills dotted with sheep exactly like we’d pictured it here. You can’t really do much without a car so that’s the first thing we bought (after plunking our $2 coins in the shower meters, our first hot showers since Niue in August). We picked up a sweet late 90s Subaru (this may be something like our 10th Subaru) and immediately drove to the grocery store where we gleefully filled our cart with fresh NZ strawberries, blueberries, apples, avocados, zucchini, and bottles and bottles of cheap delicious wine. Which I thoroughly enjoyed after the 10 loads of laundry finished this week….

Meet “Kiwisube”…she blends in.

Beautiful spring produce, all NZ grown

While walking around dainty little Kerikeri we felt a little scruffy, even for laid-back Kiwi standards, and made the hair salon our next stop where all four of us got a little snip snip. Here’s Holly getting her first haircut ever:

Holly’s curls get an adjustment

Our cruising kitty is not really set up for 1st world living so we pretty much had to get on the job-search program right off the bat. Thanks to old cruising friends who lived in Auckland for several years after sailing here, Michael had appointments set up with several IT recruiters practically moments after we tied off our docklines. As you may have guessed, one of the tricks of this lifestyle is to combine the many chores that seem to pile up with pleasure, so we took a field trip down to the metropolis of Auckland last week.

“Look! It’s a school of sheep!” -Holly

It was a grey, drizzly three-hour drive to the city from Opua and as we crossed over the bridge into downtown Auckland we had complete deja-vu: with the weather, the sailboats scattered across the waterways of the city we could have sworn we were driving into our hometown of Seattle. But not the Seattle of today, more like the Seattle of my childhood: New Zealand’s largest city has half of Seattle’s population and although we were warned about all the terrible traffic, we found ourselves cruising easily through the downtown in the middle of the workday. The city was incredibly clean and largely populated with small, local businesses. We grabbed coffees and warm milks at a hip cafe in Ponsonby and then toured the nearby Westhaven marina which we hope will be home soon.

Wondertime family in Auckland

While Michael was at his meetings the girls and I window-shopped and lunched at a tiny sushi restaurant together. We gleefully visited every bookstore in a 5-block radius.

Sushi lunch in Auckland with my girls

Holly happily buried in books

This week we are still in Opua, waiting for the arrival of our new damper plate which is being shipped in from the U.K. We hope to get the boat down to Auckland by Christmas, but in the meantime are enjoying kicking around in Northland. We drove to Whangarei for the day and explored the local parks which included the beautiful Whangarei falls and a lovely Kauri forest. On the way we also toured an ancient cave which is populated by glowworms – one of the many life forms unique to New Zealand. Leah is fascinated with caves and hopes to do more challenging spelunking in the future.

About to enter the amazing Kawiti glowworm caves

Wondertime girls at Whangarei Falls

It’s been wonderful to be back in the land of forests again. At first, it felt like we were back home in the Pacific Northwest. But then the details begin to come into focus. Instead of giant Douglas Firs there are ancient Kauri trees. The song of Tui birds ring out through the treetops, marvelous tree ferns tower over our heads. The greens everywhere are more vivid shades than we’ve seen before. It smells like the forests we remember, damp and mossy, but there are scents in there of spices and flowers that are all new to us.

We visit the fantastic giant Kauri trees of the Puketi forest

A tree fern

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of all the beautiful new things this lovely country has to offer.

Lost in the Islands of Tomorrow

Sep 8th, 2012
by Sara.
7 comments

Why hello there.

I’ve stepped out from underneath the palm trees we’ve been lounging under here in the Vava’u Group of the Kingdom of Tonga for a few minutes as it’s rather time to send you an update.

First off, the most exciting thing to happen on our sail here was that we got to skip Thursday and sailed straight into Friday which the girls where thrilled about (being Friday movie night after all). Somewhere along the way here we crossed the International Dateline moving us a day ahead of all of you back in the U.S. While you’ll be waking up to Friday morning it will already be Saturday here and well into the weekend.

Which means nothing here to us, of course, excepting that I have to remember to get to the amazingly fresh and gorgeous (and we’re talking California-gorgeous) produce market before it closes by noon as it does on Saturdays. Other than that, we’re living the old cruiser’s life of “every night’s a Friday night, every day’s a Saturday.”

This amazing scattered group of islands – there are 60 of them – are nestled together like puzzle pieces in an area only 16 x 18 nautical miles. You weave through them, around them, through channels and there’s a spot to anchor about every few miles. The whole group is surrounded by reefs that keep out any annoying ocean swell and it’s like sailing and anchoring in the Gulf Islands again. Only with palm trees and turquoise water and the soft warm breezes I think I’ve written about before. You can reach just about every anchorage in two hours or so. In the past two weeks, we’ve been to three of them.

This place doesn’t affect everyone the same way, but to us, it’s called us to slow down, stop for a while and just experience the life and place around us without the sense of movement we’ve become so accustomed to. Our first few days in Neiafu, the main town here, were spent catching up with boatloads of friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen for months. Just about everyone heading west passes through Tonga sooner or later and there have been grand kid-boat reunions here.

With Wondertime loaded down with delightful fresh produce from the local market, the likes we haven’t seen since La Cruz, we headed out to the islands. Or, one island in particular, that of our amazing longtime friends Ben and Lisa who we met in California while we were all on our way to Mexico in 2002 and sailed all over with that winter. They continued on to Tonga in their boat Waking Dream in 2004 and have stayed here ever since, opening up a number of businesses over the years and becoming a true part of the community. They currently have a lease on an adorable 2.5 acre island where they are busy living and building a small restaurant and eco-lodging amongst the palm trees. In their spare time they run the non-profit Regatta Vava’u coming up here in a few weeks.

We’ve been anchored off their island for the past week and have had a blast watching them get to know our new crew members as well as hearing their stories of life on a Tongan island. The girls, of course, adore Ben and Lisa as well as their island home. Countless hours have been spent just talking and pontificating and reminiscing and watching the palm trees sway. We’ve shared many meals together with Ben and Lisa, their local friends, and our cruising friends that have stopped by as well. We’ve danced under the clear light of the full moon while Ben – still the party king — spun tunes on his DJ gear. Michael has helped out with several of the countless projects underway on the island. The girls and I have napped in a hammock. We’ve read, daydreamed, had scavenger hunts. The beach has been combed for shells, many times. The girls have swung on the “hip ball.” We’ve messed around in boats. One clear night, we sat on a roof watching enormous flying foxes swoop overhead in the dark and listened to the crickets sing.

You never know what will pass by when you stop and watch and listen for a while.

The Wondertime Girls in Neiafu, Vava’u

17 Reasons Why We Think Niue is Brilliant

Aug 17th, 2012
by Sara.
14 comments

After nine days at sea, we found the tiny island of Niue, the only bit of land for hundreds of miles around. It was 2 am when we arrived off the main town of Alofi and picked up one of the moorings maintained by the Niue Yacht Club. Our night approach was easy: Niue no longer has a fringing reef and there’s no danger of running into anything other than the island itself. Niue is a former atoll that’s had it’s entire coral center pushed 150 feet or so straight up into the sky. The island’s edges are now littered with caves, chasms, and crystal clear pools before what remains of the surrounding coral reefs drops steeply into the ocean for thousands of feet. We were excited to see this petite island nation for ourselves, and beginning when we woke up in the morning a few hours after our arrival we found many reasons to love this island.

1. Niue’s Clear Blue Sea

Niue is affectionately known as “The Rock” as the whole island is basically a huge chunk of coral limestone. It has no rivers or streams and very little soil resulting in little to no runoff. What this means is that the waters surrounding Niue are absolutely crystal clear. When we looked around on our first morning on Niue we were awestruck by the clarity of the water around us. We could see the bottom 120 feet below our keel! The strikingly pure shades of blue of the seas around Niue are the most beautiful and otherworldly we’ve ever seen.

2. The Wharf Crane

Before we arrived here, we’d heard horror stories about Niue’s wharf. We’d heard it was pummeled by swell, you had to climb a slippery, rickety ladder 50 feet up and then you had to use a cranky old crane to actually hoist your dinghy up after you. I have no idea how these rumors get started. Niue’s wharf is the best we’ve encountered in the Pacific: all four of us can easily step right off the dinghy onto a sturdy concrete staircase and climb the five stairs with good handholds all the way up. The crane is a blast to use: you simply hook it onto your dinghy’s lifting bridle, use the controls to hoist the dinghy up into the air and swing it over onto a wheeled trolley, then park the dinghy amongst the others lined up on the wharf nearby. Truly the most fun dinghy-parking experience so far.

2. The Check-In Process

Right after we hoisted our dinghy onto the wharf for the first time, we were met right next to the crane by two customs agents, each of which had us fill out a short form. 10 minutes later we were driven by Keith, the super friendly and helpful local SSCA representative, up the road to the police station (with a quick tour of the town of Alofi on the way). Here we filled out another short form and we each got our passports stamped. Check-in done, literally minutes after we’d begun the process.

3. The Niue Yacht Club

We left the police station after completing our check-in and wandered a few hundred meters down the road to the Niue Yacht Club. This place deserves a list of it’s own but I’ll just have to start by saying how impressed we are with the 14 heavy-duty moorings the club maintains (it is nearly impossible to anchor here due to the depths and coral-choked sea floor). The mooring balls are even covered with reflective tape to make them easy to find for boats coming in at night like we did. The club itself in town is a wonderful, comfortable place to hang out with very friendly owners, a huge book exchange, free internet, a fridge stocked with cold beers and sodas, and potluck events.

4. Fish & Chips

Niue is a “self-governing nation with free association with New Zealand.” What we hoped this meant was excellent fish and chips and we are happy to report that indeed we enjoyed amazing fried wahoo and chips washed down with New Zealand beer on our very first day here. Yum.

5. A Little Piece of New Zealand

Besides the fish & chips, it has been a thrill to experience a little preview of what New Zealand holds for us here in Niue. Everyone on the island speaks English just like the how Jimmy John Shark speaks(with a Kiwi accent to boot!), which is thrilling after our Spanish didn’t help us much in French Polynesia in terms of getting to know local people. Most of the food products in the grocery stores are from NZ and you have to be careful when crossing the street as it’s left-side driving here!

6. The Playground

During our sail from Maupiti to Niue we read through the Niue chapter in our Lonely Planet South Pacific several times (it is short). I noted that there was reportedly a playground in Alofi and informed Holly of such. Each day after, several times each day she asked me to confirm that we were indeed going to an island with a playground. Happily we found the reported playground just south of the main town and although simple and sun-worn both girls were thrilled to climb and swing and just play here. Holly gives Niue a thumbs-up.

7. History

Once you walk up the hill from the wharf and set off down the main road you can’t help but notice the graves. They are scattered all along the road, all the way around the island. They are varied: there are old, broken unidentified stone ones, there are new ones with fancy headstones with pictures and stories of the occupant. Many have silk flowers draped across them. Some have whole structures built on top to protect the graves. There are a great many more graves than people on this island that struggles to maintain it’s population: the elderly lost to the graves, the youth lost to New Zealand where everyone here has citizenship. The graves are not creepy at all though, even though they are everywhere. Rather it adds to the air of ancient history that is evident everywhere on Niue, both of the island’s geology and also the stories of the families that have lived here for a thousand years. Powerful reminders of time passing.

8. The Friendliest Island in the World

With a fledgling tourist industry, visitors are still novel in Niue. Each time we walk through town we are stopped by local residents who ask where we are from and how we got here and they are truly interested. Everyone waves as they drive by, whether you pass by on foot or car. Last Sunday we wanted to get down to Avatele Beach on the southwest corner of the island so had the girls stick their thumbs out. Within minutes we had a ride from a local fellow. It turned out he wasn’t really heading that way though and was planning on turning right around and driving back to town after dropping us off 15 minutes down the road.

9. Washaway Cafe

What’s not to love about a bar where you help yourself to ice-cold New Zealand beer from a fridge and write down what you took on a piece of paper? And has burgers topped with beets and fried eggs? And has a snorkeling beach right in front? And is the only place on the island open on Sunday? And has a steady stream of fellow sailors also stopping in?

10. A Birthday For Our Captain

Michael celebrated his 38th birthday here on Niue. It was a marvelous day with Dutch babies with French strawberry jam for breakfast, a bit of snorkeling off a tiny sandy pocket beach, dinner at Gill’s Indian Restaurant (the best Indian food we’ve ever had!), chocolate-chip cookie “cake” and two giddy girls who absolutely love celebrating anyone’s birthday, anywhere. But here in Niue, more special for sure.

11. Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road

If you need to practice driving on the left-hand side of the road, Niue’s the place to do it as I don’t think the island has ever had a traffic jam. Although most of the island’s main road is only a single lane, it’s good practice to pull to the left to let another car pass by.

12. Sea Tracks

13. Chasms

14. Caves

15. Snorkeling

16. The Mischievous Whales

Humpback whales are known to frolic amongst the boats moored here in Alofi although the local residents say there haven’t been many sightings so far this season. We haven’t seen them either, but we have heard blows and tail/fluke slapping during the late evenings so we know they are here. Yesterday, our friends on Knotty Lady awoke to find a whale had visited their boat while they’d been out in town the evening before. What they found was essentially all their bow hardware torn off their boat and dangling underwater: their anchor roller, anchor chain, cleats, mooring lines, furled Code 0 sail, bow pulpit and anchor locker door torn clear off. The best anyone can guess is a whale got caught up in their mooring and had to struggle dearly to get free. The damage is breathtaking: whales are strong, much stronger than most boats. Thankfully, the whale clearly got free and Knotty Lady will be repaired and will sail on.

17. Community

By noon of the day after the whale damaged Knotty Lady, the entire island had heard of the incident. Their sail was drying ashore in the afternoon. By evening, bent stainless steel parts were already ashore at local Niuean shops who’d volunteered to rebend and repair the pieces. A meeting was set up this morning for sailors to gather and discuss what supplies we each had that could help repair the extensive damage to Knotty Lady’s bow fiberglass and by this afternoon epoxy was curing. Niueans and cruising sailors pitching in without hesitation to help a fellow friend in need. That’s the beauty of life hundreds of miles from anywhere but here with each other.

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