south pacific

Louis Theroux Interview: Extreme Parenting – At Sea (Part I)

Jun 16th, 2013

Louis Theroux is a BBC documentary fimmaker who exposes facets of life previously hidden to the average citizen. Most Americans, like us, have probably never heard of him because he typically exposes the absurd realities of fringe groups in the U.S., such as prostitutes, meth addicts, prison inmates, white supremacists, religious extremists, survivalists. And now, liveaboard sailors. He recently visited Wondertime to see what life is like for a family of four living and sailing on a 38-foot yacht. This is the first of three parts.*

Louis (voice over, walking down the dock to Wondertime): After a grueling 35 hour multi-leg flight from London, I’ve just arrived this morning in Auckland, New Zealand, a tiny green speck of land way down at the bottom of the South Pacific ocean. I’m here to visit a young family that has recently arrived from Seattle, Washington in the United States and are living here now. Normal people would simply hop aboard a jet and endure the long flight across the Pacific. But these two parents, along with their two small children, chose to sail their tiny yacht at walking pace across this enormous ocean. I’m curious to find out just why.

…

Louis (calls out from the dock): Ahoy! Is anybody home? It’s Louis from BBC Two.

Sara (pops her head out of companionway): Hi Louis! You’re here! Welcome aboard. Oops, watch your head there, that’s our rain cover. Careful on the stairs too, they are pretty steep.

Louis (climbs down ladder awkwardly, stands below in galley and looks around): Wow. So this is your home, huh? It’s even smaller than I had imagined.

Sara: Yeah, this is pretty much it. Kitchen, or galley, right there. This is our table where we eat, play games, do art, whatever. And this counter here is our home office. (laughs)

Louis: Interesting. I see you have an oven and everything. Do you have a fridge?

Sara: Yes, that’s it, right there (points at galley counter). If you lift the lid up that’s the fridge right in there.

Louis (continues to look around): Can you pretty much cook anything, or do you eat freeze-dried food. You know, like camping?

Sara: No, no. I’ve never had freeze-dried food. I can pretty much cook anything on the boat. If I have the time and the right ingredients. You should stay for dinner.

Louis: I think I might. Where would I sit though? That table only looks like it seats four people.

Sara: Yeah, that’s about the max. But someone can sit on someone else’s lap.

Louis (looking perplexed): Ok. So where’s the rest of the family?

(At that moment, the two girls come running into the back of the boat from the front, Holly is growling and snarling at Leah and yielding a plastic unicorn. Leah reaches the settee and curls in a ball, covering her head with her hands. Holly starts hitting her sister with the unicorn. Both are screaming.)

Louis: That must be two of them. Do they always beat each other with unicorns?

Sara: Yeah, that’s pretty normal.

Louis: So where’s Michael?

Sara: He’s right over there. (points to Michael’s rear end hanging out into the hallway, his head is in the engine compartment.)

Louis: What’s he doing in there?

Sara: Well, he found some oil in the bilge a few hours ago. He’s been trying to track down the leak all morning.

Louis: Hi Michael! (waves)

Michael (head still obscured in engine room): Hi Louis! I’m almost done here, just a few more things to check.

Louis: No problem! Take your time. (turns to Sara) Where do you all sleep?

Sara: Right up here. Follow me.

(Sara steps over Michael’s aft end in the hallway swiftly. Louis tries to do the same but smacks his head on the overhead beam. He trips on Michael and just catches himself from falling. Camera also shakes and jars as cameraman tries to step over Michael and slams gear on the walls too.)

Louis: Ouch!

Sara: Sorry! Watch your head there. It’s kinda low here. We’re sure glad we’re short.

Louis (rubbing forehead): I bet you are.

Sara: This is the rest of our little home. Michael and I sleep in this double bunk here, the head is here and the girls each have a berth in the front cabin.

Louis: Head?

Sara: Toilet. “Head” is the boatie term for toilet.

Louis: This here? Where’s the door?

Sara: We took it off.

Louis: Why?

Sara: It just got in the way. There is this curtain to shut for privacy.

Louis: Ah, I see. Can I try it out?

Sara: Um, sure. Here, let me close the curtain for you.

Louis (from atop the head): Wow. This is certainly cozy. (finishes) What do I do now?

Sara: You just need to shut the lid then push that red button right there. That will flush it. We just put in an electric pump instead of the manual one. It was my birthday present.

Louis (over sound of pump running): Your birthday present? Really?

Sara: Yeah, the girls couldn’t handle the manual pump by themselves and I was getting sick of pumping it, like, 30 times a day. Now they can just push the button themselves. It’s very cool.

Louis: It is cool. Hmm. (looks around) So, you were on this boat for how many days sailing to get here?

Sara: Well, it was about 60 altogether. But the longest in a row was 26. Mexico to the Marquesas.

Louis (in disbelief): 26 days! The four of you all cooped up in here!

Sara: No, five.

Louis: Five?

Sara: Yeah, we had another crewmember, a friend, aboard on the 26-day trip.

Louis: No way!

Sara: Really! It was pretty crowded. And we ran out of peanut butter. But we all got plenty of sleep. That’s the worst part of sailing with kids, not being able to nap during the day as much after only getting five, six hours of sleep at night.

Louis: That sounds pretty miserable.

Sara: Well, yeah, it can be. But we like it anyway for some reason.

Michael (joins Louis and Sara in the front cabin): Phew. I’m finally done. It was just a loose hose. All fixed now.

Louis: That’s good news! How often do you have to work on the boat?

Michael: Um, constantly. Or else it gets out of hand.

Louis: Do you like it? Boat projects?

Michael: I do. It sure beats sitting in front of the computer screen. My day job.

Louis: I can understand that. How’s the project list looking these days?

Michael: It’s pretty much out of hand.

Sara: Want to go in the back and sit down? I can make some coffees with our Aeropress.

Louis: That sounds great. I’ll be sure to watch my head this time. (all laugh)

to be continued…

*Not really. This is a work of fiction. But if Louis did interview us I’m sure it would have gone just like this.

Missing Pieces

May 19th, 2013

by Sara.

9 comments

My eldest daughter cried herself to sleep a few nights ago. She’d been acting up all day, you know, just generally being snotty and dramatic and teasing her younger sister to no end. After we finally tucked her in with a sigh she read to herself for a while. Michael went in to give her one last hug and that’s when the tears simply bubbled over.

He tried to soothe her, asked her gentle questions, trying to garner a clue about what it was she was feeling so emotional about. She was sad about all the toys we gave away when we moved onto the boat she said. She never wanted to give away Teddy. She loved Teddy with all her heart, squeezing him to her chest tightly. She missed her friend B. She missed all the people we’ve left behind. There was that My Little Pony toy that didn’t make the cut onto the boat and was passed on. No, she didn’t remember what it looked like. But she wished we had kept it.

A lot of what she blubbered out didn’t make a whit of sense but we understood perfectly.

There’s been an unrelenting hum of questions aboard the boat for months as Michael and I try to make plans amidst the uncertainty of our lives in New Zealand. Do we really want to stay here, so far away from the rest of our families and old friends, or should we sail back to Washington? But we really do like it here on this peaceful little life raft of a land in the South Pacific. Will they let us stay for longer than the two years of our work visas? If we do stay, and they let us do we want to do more sailing, say a little trip up to Tonga and Fiji and back before really getting serious about saving for retirement? And then what? Nursing school for me? Finishing that novel I’ve always wanted to write? Perhaps a screenplay for my neighbor Peter Jackson? A boat business for IT-weary Michael? Where? Opua? Auckland? Wellington? Invercargill? (The only place we could ever dream of moving off the boat into a house here in NZ. Forget Auckland.) Maybe we should just resign ourselves (again) to a forever liveaboard life, pick up a bigger boat for cheap in Mexico and sail it right back across the Pacific?

The adults onboard try to keep these questions hushed but little girls have keen ears. I imagine that Leah is already worried about having to say goodbye to her new best friend at school, as she has had to do with all the other friends she’s made on this journey. I watch her and S. together, two giggling 7-year-olds lost in their own private world of whispered secrets and notes written in code, imaginary stories told above the earth in the branches of trees. I clean out Leah’s school backpack and find little cards and drawings with “I love you” and “Best Friends Forever” written on them, with lots of hearts and smiling cartoon girls. I give them to Leah to tuck away under her bunk with her other “special things.”

Friendships at this age are formed so quickly but they go deep. They are the truest kind there is: face to face, hand in hand, simultaneous smiles. Leah makes (or has learned to make, perhaps) friends fast and the leap to “best friend” status happens in days. These friendships aren’t the type that most adults have nowadays – nurtured though the joy and annoyance of Facebook, emails, texts, sometimes an actual phone call. But when Leah’s friends are gone, they are really gone for a good long time. Might as well be forever, to a 7-year-old’s scale of time.

Our daughter’s tears reminds us that traipsing around on the big blue all footloose and fancy free is not really. Every place we’ve been we have made friends, set down ties. Then just when we get comfortable we promptly leave all of it behind. Including part of ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about my daughter’s sadness ever since. Wondering if it’s really fair to her to know such difficulty because of a dream of her parents. Sure, it’s true that she has loved and benefited greatly from our months of sailing together. The time we’ve spent as a family together has been priceless and we are closer than we ever dreamed. She’s experienced the wonder of nature first hand, the beauty of untouched places. She’s seen how our fellow humans really are the same as us, even with different languages, foods, cultures. She values experiences and friendships far above material “things.” But I have to wonder, isn’t it possible, though, to find these things without leaving so much behind?

All the uncertainly of our chosen lives makes us want to bubble over too, at times. Maybe saying goodbye is just a life lesson that everyone learns at Leah’s age. Friends come and go, even if you don’t move anywhere yourself. Some of our life questions will resolve themselves whether or not we are patient. Maybe it’s time to put down some roots again, to show the girls that staying put is full of it’s own special joys. Maybe the islands will hold more mystery and intrigue if we sail over to them every now and then. I don’t know.

This is but one example of Holly’s “house art” series. Nearly all her drawings include a cozy cabin of some sort. In the corner you can see a postcard we recently received from our friend Frances all the way up in Canada. “I can’t wait to see Frances again,” is what Leah said upon finding it in our mailbox. I agree.

Raft-UP: UN-moving afloat

Mar 7th, 2013

by Sara.

5 comments

“Back when I was a kid I had to walk three kilometers down the dock to school…”

The Raft-UP topic for March is “Moving Aboard” – making the transition from land to sea, from deciding to go cruising to moving aboard the boat to dealing with slack-jawed family and friends and finally cutting the lines to head to sea. But this topic is well covered on just about every sailing blog out there (including ours: see this and this and this); it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s thrilling to think and write about and share.

What you don’t read much about however is what happens when it is all over, or at least when a long hiatus from long-distance sailing looms. This is not a fun topic to think about, write, or share but it’s probably more important than the beginning simply because nothing can quite prepare you for what happens after the dream has been achieved. With our South Pacific adventure on Wondertime coming to a close for now, this is the third time we’ve made the transition from sea to land and I can say that for us, this is much much more difficult than leaving.

At first, life on land seems thrilling and novel. Well stocked grocery stores are right down the street and I can fill up the back of the car with our weekly stores and drive the whole lot practically to our boat without breaking a hint of a sweat. I’m still getting used to the fact that I don’t need to stock up on everything; if I run out one of us can pop over to the nearby dairy to grab a dozen eggs. Internet is fast and I’m learning where all the free spots are. I’ve got a cell phone again and can get mail anytime right at our post office box up the street. Our library card gets weekly use and our sheets are always clean thanks to the abundance of laundries around town. Even “cask” [so much nicer than “boxed”] wine is plentiful and cheap here.

For the first time in over seven years the Wondertime family is spread across the city, off on their very own separate adventures. Michael has been busy collecting paychecks through his IT consulting gig. Leah started Year 3 at a local primary school a few weeks ago, a wonderful happy place with students from all over the world. (She has three best friends already.) This week, Holly started preschool (or “kindy” as they call it here) and is over the moon to get to paint each and every day. She attends for a few hours in the mornings which gives me some time to myself each day, the delights of which I haven’t experienced since 2005.

As usual, Holly is the one that vocalizes what the rest of us are unable to put into words. “How many more days does Dad have to go to work for? How much longer does Leah have to go to school?” She sees this as something temporary, a break from our real life up in the islands where we were together each and every day. Where we slept until we weren’t tired any more, read books together and alone, explored the infinite beaches, swam, watched fish, had dinners with friends most nights. We heard new languages, tried new fruits, listened to new music and danced together. We always knew what phase of the moon it was.

Now we have alarms, schedules, traffic, and only a few hours in which to gather together each night to share how we spent our days. I tackle my daily list of to-dos, rush around from one activity to the next. To cope, we tell ourselves that Holly must be right, maybe this is temporary. But maybe it’s not. We like New Zealand, quite a lot, and we might have the opportunity to live here for a very long time. Leah loves her school and her teacher, loves seeing friends her age every day and having a routine to count on – things she needed but that we couldn’t give her while sailing from place to place.

We all miss what we had though, as I knew we would. Many times a day memories will come flashing over me and I am transported for a few seconds with visions so real and vivid I am almost back to the islands, to the white sand beaches, the hot green mountains, my hands sticky with sweet pamplemousse. There is a frangipani tree next to our marina office and each time I pass I am walking down a road wet from rain in the Marquesas, island music pouring from every home. Some days it’s impossible to tell what is temporary and what is real.

Blood Draw

Feb 9th, 2013

by Sara.

4 comments

The phlebotomist tightened the strap on my right arm. She was getting ready to draw three tubes of my blood, the last step of my immigration medical exam. She double checked my passport which lay on the desk in front of her. Then suddenly she asked me what seemed like a simple question: “Do you like the United States or New Zealand better?”

The young woman’s slight accent hinted that she had learned English at a very young age, her golden skin and dark hair told that her family was from another sunny island in the Pacific. Her belly was huge, she clearly was due to have a child of her own any day now. I found I didn’t know how to answer her so I stalled. “Have you ever been to the United States?”

“No, but I would like to someday,” she replied.

“It’s very big,” I stated randomly and wracked my brain for the answer to her question, when all I could think of was how surprised I was that I suddenly couldn’t answer such a simple thing. “Everyone in New Zealand has health care. That’s really nice,” I finally blurted out.

“Just look at the poster on the wall. I’m going to draw your blood now,” she suggested.

I looked up at the poster. It was a government notice that all children going into school at age 5 were eligible for a free health checkup. It reminded me how thankful I was that since Michael has a two-year work visa that he and the girls are in New Zealand’s public health system now. It’s the first health care we’ve had in nearly two years.

“They actually seem quite similar to me,” I finally said. “They are beautiful countries.”

“I think Americans are so friendly,” she pondered aloud. I wasn’t sure if she was suggesting that New Zealanders were otherwise so I just agreed, “Yes, I think they are too. Kiwis can be a bit more, um, reserved.” I could relate to most Kiwis in this regard though, being one of the shyer Americans myself.

The poster in front of me blurred as she silently filled the tubes of blood. All the reasons I love America came flooding in suddenly but I didn’t think it was the type of answer she was looking for: my Dad, my step-mom, my brothers and their wives, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, Michael’s family, our friends, the girls’ friends they’ve known since they were infants. This was all I could feel that America had that New Zealand didn’t.

The woman withdrew the needle and placed a cotton ball on the wound. “Hold this for a moment,” she said and got a piece of tape ready. “That’s it! You’re done,” she declared. “Best of luck with your visa.”

“Thank you,” I replied, “Good luck with your new baby!” She smiled as I walked out the door back into the lobby, then out the glass sliding doors into the bluish glare of the Aotearoa sunlight.

June – November 2012 Cruising Expenses

Jan 10th, 2013

by Sara.

5 comments

You will run out of arm strength long before you run out of money at the Tongan produce markets - this is about $20 worth.

You will run out of arm strength long before you run out of money at the Tongan produce markets – this is about $20US worth.

I promised you that we’d keep track of what we were spending during our cruise to the South Pacific and share the totals, good and bad. While I got a little behind on actually blogging the numbers, we did keep track all the way across and here are the final budget tallies.

Hopefully this will help future cruisers in planning their Mexico/South Pacific cruise budgets. I’m sure you can see areas where we could have saved a LOT of money (less beer and trips to Neiafu’s Aquarium Cafe perhaps?). But compared to what we’re spending now with a car to maintain, cell phones, marina moorage, etc. anchoring for free in front of a deserted South Pacific island munching on fresh papayas and mangoes just can’t be beat. Even if beer is $4/bottle.

S/V Wondertime’s June – November 2012 Cruising Expenses

June 2012 (French Polynesia)

alcohol – $305
books – $78
bus fare – $36
clothing – $91
dental care – $162
diesel – $262
eating out – $378
groceries – $1,044
internet – $131
laundry – $8
medical care -$27*
mooring -$144
museum -$12
petrol (dinghy outboard) – $39
pharmacy -$22
phone cards -$30
postage -$10
souvenirs -$493
stereo speaker replacements – $202
storage unit (annual) – $374
supplies – $122
toys – $24
web hosting (annual) – $122

total: $4,116

*This was my total bill for having an infected stye on my eyelid lanced by a French surgeon in Nuku Hiva on a Saturday night. I might be a fan of socialized healthcare….

July 2012 (French Polynesia)

alcohol – $176
butane/propane – $10
clothing – $25
diesel – $55
eating out – $183
galley – $18
groceries – $542
heiva tickets – $13
horse riding – $150
internet – $40
laundry – $45
mooring – $20
souvenirs – $30
supplies – $46
water – $10

total: $1,363

August 2012 (Niue & Tonga)

alcohol – $144
bank fees – $67
car rental – $45
eating out – $434
garbage disposal – $12
groceries – $329
laundry – $47
mooring – $142
Niue driver license – $19
Niue flag – $33
petrol (dinghy outboard) – $64
petrol (rental car) – $25
showers – $4
souvenirs – $90
theatre – $30
Tonga check-in fees – $129

total: $1,614

September 2012 (Tonga)

alcohol – $201
bank fees – $24
books – $49
cell phone – $30
eating out – $356
galley – $30
groceries – $456
internet – $4
ipod replacement – $230
laundry – $82
petrol (dinghy outboard) – $80
souvenirs – $23
Tonga tourist visa extensions – $120

total: $1,685

October 2012 (Tonga)

alcohol – $278
cell phone – $18
check-out port fee – $17
diesel – $300
dive tank fill – $12
eating out – $242
gifts – $22
groceries – $630
internet – $8
laundry – $90
mooring – $70
pharmacy – $52
propane/butane – $37
taxi – $18
water – $9

total: $1,803

November 2012 (Tonga only)

alcohol – $48
diesel – $270
eating out – $106
groceries – $228
laundry – $29

total: $681

Exploring Auckland’s One Tree Hill…free!

south pacific

Louis Theroux Interview: Extreme Parenting – At Sea (Part I)

Missing Pieces

Raft-UP: UN-moving afloat

Blood Draw

June – November 2012 Cruising Expenses

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