Arohanui South Island! Passagemaking Northward.

Leaving Tory Channel, entering Cook Strait. Tough leave, South Island … we’ve felt HELD by you! Arohanui Haley and Liam!

Picton to Opua via Napier and the East Cape (duh, duh, duh)

Diana’s last log entry on the first leg of this passage: “worst passage ever.” Maybe, I’m not sure, but I confess to getting seasick, for only the third time ever. Even so, I think the hardest part was leaving the South Island in dead calm with the threat of drizzle. After two and half years, it felt like leaving home, not least because we were leaving Haley and Liam, and knew it would be a while before we could get back.

Fueling up, (which for some reason is always a little stressful for me), was extra stressful knowing it was the last thing to do before saying goodbye. After multiple hugs and lots of tears, there was nothing to do but cast off the lines and pull away. 

We were on a bit of schedule, running out of time to get to Opua before Maddi arrived from the States. Also, it was crucial to time our exit from the Tory Channel for a reasonably favorable current, the basic recommendation was leave on high tide out of Picton. We led that by an hour or two to try to avoid encountering head winds in Cook Strait. It was pretty mild to start and Diana made some super yummy wraps for lunch (she is the undisputed Empress of wraps in my book). As seems to so often be the case sailing around New Zealand, there was no chance of entirely missing the wind shift, and about halfway across we were sailing close-hauled. At least the seas, at that point weren’t too bad, not stacking up against current or anything. I went down to take a nap, and missed Diana logging 13 knots surfing on seas that were getting pretty steep. In fact, we wandered into the edge of an area of rip tides and overfalls, ‘Korori Rip,’ that was pretty dramatic. As it got dark the wind was on our beam and so were the steep seas. Diana was feeling pretty awful, and then I got sick too. This might have been where Diana logged “worst watch ever,” – she was really feeling bad and then the rudder on the hydrovane (our wind vane steering system) came off and started pounding on the stern. It took Diana a couple minutes to figure out what was going on, what the loud noise was. I donned a PFD, clipped the harness in and took a knife out onto the swimstep, hoping that I could cut the safety line off without losing it. It was pretty wet, but I didn’t want to take time to put on boots, so I opted for bare feet. Anyway, it actually wasn’t that bad, Diana has set up holder for a good sharp dive knife and a pair of pliers under the lid of the lazarette where they are super handy (she’s pretty good at coming up with that kinda stuff). I took the next watch and Diana tried to sleep off her seasickness. Once we cleared Cape Palliser things improved dramatically.

Another way through the Tory Channel and across the Cook Strait … bet they have a smoother ride? (Our food may be tastier?)
Exciting though it was, it was also time to stop taking pictures and turn away!

No doubt timing arrivals, departures, capes and channel entrances can be the trickiest part of sailing. You’re always trading one ideal for another. The next challenge of this passage was the East Cape, which is massive and takes a couple days to fully round. The forecast was for 4 meter seas and forty knot gusts… not super inviting. We liked better the sound of a snug marina slip at Napier to wait for the weather to ease up a bit, but that meant arriving at midnight, which is something we are loathe to do if we’re not really familiar with the layout. It’s never nice to feel like your options are bad or worse. As it turned out, the wind in the harbor was still and the passage in, though shallow, was well marked and very well lit. We glided to the visitor’s berth next to the travel-lift, easy peasy. The quiet and calm felt glorious.

We really like the Art Deco town (stayed awhile on our way south in early 2021) and I wished we had more time to stay; I made a provisioning run to include my favorite health food store, Chantal, a freezer stock up of ready made yummy meals from Mylk and had a dinner date night with Marcus at Three Doors Up in Ahuriri, near the Yacht Club. There’s a phenomenal Astanga studio here, with Peter Sanson teaching, but our tight schedule wasn’t creating the space for a deep breath, let alone 2 hours of it!
We’re back out and it’s CHILLY! A hint of a smile goin’ tho …

Waiting for the gale at the East Cape to ease came with a trade off — the near certainty that we would have to pass through a frontal system to reach Cape Brett. Yeah, I know, a lot of fretting about capes, but there’s a reason so many of them are given awful names by sailors (Cape Fear, Cape Runaway, Punto Malo, Cape Foulwind), they really do run the show. In the meantime, that lay two days in the future. We rounded the East Cape in the early morning, jibed and then enjoyed a glorious daytime sail headed northwest, pretty as you please, even got the guitars out for a little music.

Might have to start calling him, ‘Hendrix.’
Allora meeting the waves. The hint of orange that you can see ahead of our mast is our Stormsail, rigged on the bow to deploy just in case of really high winds. It’s essentially just a reefed down version of our jib/normal headsail. You’d have to go up there to run the sheets and then to hoist it up using a topping lift at the mast, so gladly, I can say, we haven’t had to use it. Later, on our Fiji passage, we sort of wished we had. The sea has so many moods …
Haley (right) and Liam made this awesome sign to welcome Maddi (left) to Aotearoa/NZ! These two hadn’t seen each other in 3 years! They met in Wellington for a few days of solid catch up! Plan: Maddi then flew up to Opua to meet us and crew to Fiji (next post!). We received this sib pic while on our northward passage and it cut right through the chilly temps to warm us through and through!
One more sister shot, because it’s so happy making!
All shades of blue. Oddly enough, there’s a deep sense of grounding while floating on the ocean??!
You can look out and think you see nothing but ocean and sky, and then a blatant reminder that there’s always more!
For instance, these cheery friends!!!
Huddling contentedly, staying warm-ish.
Another night of quiet and watches. NOT!

The squalls started with darkness (naturally). Note to self: frontal passages are not to be taken lightly! Also I’m going to try to remember that the forecasts don’t really represent true wind speeds in these conditions. These are more like what you get with squalls in the tropics (sudden doubling of wind speeds) but over a much more sustained area and time period. Soon we were double reefed on main and jib, taking big seas over the whole boat.

Once again, Diana took the hardest watch (you might accuse me of scheming here, but I swear this is just a matter of chance). Her words from the log: waves over bow, raucous, deluge, still dumping. Mine: rain, clearing, wind finally calming. At least I tried to make up for it giving her a longer watch off, putting in four hours to clear Cape Brett. All the while looking forward to the forecast easing and a swing of the wind for a quiet sail into the Bay of Islands. No such luck. Wind died, and then the engine died, 8X according to Diana’s notes. At 5AM I was back on, and eventually the mystery of the engine was solved. I was so focused on the last engine issue back in Fiordland (which was entirely electrical) that it took me a while to realize that the current problem was oil pressure. I’d checked the oil, but with a heeling boat, the reading was off. I added oil and the engine was happy again. More engineering-inclined-sailors than I have expressed skepticism about black boxes (computers) on marine diesel engines, but for the less mechanically minded (yours truly) they can actually be a life saver. Better the engine shut itself down than damage something, though it’d be kinda nice if the $1000 panel offered something a little more elucidating than “CHK ENG.”

Dawn came quietly, and it worried me a little to see fog along the coast, but it dissipated as we arrived, and pulled into a quiet slip in the Bay of Islands Marina. ~MS

Our radar shows Allora smack dab in the middle of a front – and yet so close to our destination of Opua! Logbook entries say, ‘Wild ride, just took a couple intense waves over the whole boat!’ We also had a series of engine issues in the morning while rounding Cape Brett before arriving in Opua. Plenty of excitement, but NONE matching that of seeing Maddi the very next day!!!!

 

Abel Tasman to Waikawa Marina, Queen Charlotte Sound

Making our way from Bark Bay to Torrent Bay, Abel Tasman National Park.
The famous ‘Coast Track’ is along this route. Bark Bay has a hut and Torrent (also called Anchorage Cove) does as well. Took some adjustment to get used to other boats and civilization onshore!
And company on Allora!
We loved being greeted by the local birds! We thought about lowering Namo so we could hike a bit of the Coast Track, but found ourselves just being content as is.
In the channel at Nelson. We were appreciating our ‘soft entry’ back into the world of people, but the cool little town of Nelson drew us in. Marcus also walked a wheel barrow into town to fill up 3 jerry cans of diesel to be sure we had enough to get to Picton.
Nelson Marina. First time in a Marina since February when we left Lyttelton.
First order of business! EDIBLE GREEN THINGS!!!
Cool mushroom (need to ID all of these!) in the park on the walk into Nelson.
We’re not in Fiordland, anymore!
We only spent a quick couple of nights in Nelson – great town, but we were Picton bound with heaps of boat work on our minds.
The day we left Nelson the sea was insanely glassy and serene.

There I go again!

These fish farm buoys were in quite a few places in Croisilles Harbor, so we had to look around a bit before we found an anchorage without them. It was particularly noticeable, in contrast to Fiordland, the impact of human use on the environment, both land and sea.
Ended up in a spot called Whakitenga/Squally Cove, but it wasn’t!
Still the NZ bush just GETS me!
The smooth mud that came up off our anchor in Croisilles Harbor could be a wildly pricey spa treatment!
We had to poise ourselves the next morning to go through French Pass, the narrow gateway between D’Urville Island and Marlborough Sounds. It’s a tricky bit of water, known for its treacherous tides and currents; the pass has the fastest tidal flows in New Zealand, at up to 8 knots (4 m/s).
The lighthouse and lookout at French Pass. We actually arrived about a half hour early and went for it. This pic makes it look rather placid, but we did see 1.5 knots against us. Marcus ran 2400rpm’s on the engine with some serious concentration to stay out of the back eddies which have been known to spin boats in the wrong direction.
Nukuwaiata Island in Chetwode Nature Reserve sits at the entrance to Pelorous Sound. This was our last sweet stop before REALLY immersing in civilization and all the imminent boat projects.
It’s forbidden to step foot on the beach (the nature reserve is a predator free island), but I could kayak a loop around Middle Bay.
Cormorants and Fur Seals call this home.
The birdsong was spectacular here!

No lines to shore, just easily holding in 50′.
Read a really beautiful and important book recently called, ‘Islands of Abandonment,’ by Cal Flyn, about the resilience of landscapes when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. It’s lovely, but also sobering.
Hard to see in this shot, but the morning we left, these two Little Blue Penguins swam right by and all the way around Allora!
On our way to Queen Charlotte Sound, we took a slow loop around Titi (Muttonbird) Island, another predator free Nature Reserve.

And still more Little Blue Penguini!
I watched Allora do her thing and felt so thankful for my life on the ocean…
… with this dear person.
After passing Cape Jackson, we gybed down into the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound.
Allora, resting at the temporary dock at Waikawa Marina, awaiting haul out. She’s worked so very hard to get here!
Waikawa’s just 4 kilometers from Picton, which is just 30 minutes from Haley and Liam!!!

Passagemaking: Milford Sound to Abel Tasman National Park, South Island/NZ

It was a bit spooky sailing out of Milford at midnight without a moon. We had our inbound tracks on the chartplotter to follow, but it’s pretty amazing how disorienting darkness can be, even for feeling whether to turn to port or starboard to follow a line. Also with the steep granite walls, we didn’t feel 100% confident in our GPS. Diana went to the bow, and I stepped away from the helm to try to orient myself every few minutes, as we moved cautiously down the fiord. Though the GPS did seem to have a decent idea about where we were, it was also reassuring to have radar confirming the distance to the rock walls on either side. But what helped me relax most at the helm, was when Diana shouted that the dolphins had come to escort us out. I leaned over the rail and could just see and hear them splashing off our port headed for the bow. It was hard not to feel like they’d showed up intentionally to reassure us.

South Island of NZ and our sailing track. We spent 3 months in that lower SW corner and then dashed up the whole island on the west side in 3 days!

One of the many challenges of the passage from Milford up around Cape Farewell into the Cook Strait, is that there is only one place you might possibly stop, but that requires negotiating a river bar entrance at Westport (just north of Cape Foulwind!), which is safe only in decent weather. Otherwise, it’s a solid three day run (if you keep your speed up), which just barely fits into the cycle of weather shifting from South to North. The weather window that presented itself to us seemed pretty typical, catching the end of a southerly, motoring and motor-sailing through variable winds in a race to meet the Cape with relatively light winds rather than the usual NW or SE gale.Leaving sooner, we’d have had more wind to sail with, but we’d risk arriving too early for the switch of winds at Cape Farewell.

Diana took the first watch just after 2 AM after we cleared the hazards on the north side of the entrance to Milford and could head more directly north. “Really cold, icy hands,” she wrote in the margins of the logbook. “Overcast skies heading further out to clear Arawua Point/Big Bay Bluff.” Just after sunrise on my watch, I got a glimpse of the mountains south of Mt Aspiring, which reminded me of Wyatt’s 100 mile run the length Aspiring National Park. I wondered if he could have seen the Tasman Sea from any of those lofty ridge lines he traversed?

NZ’s wild west.
Hard to sail away from that remarkable corner of the universe. Allora always seems up to the task, even if we’re a bit reluctant.
I’m afraid we have a stowaway!
He looks about as eager as I did for this passage.
His ‘foulies’ are cooler than ours!
There are mountains in them thar clouds!
Sunrises and sunsets don’t go unnoticed out here.

Also in the logbook, I see a lot of scribbles in these notes about fuel rates, and estimates of actual fuel burned for miles ‘made good.’ Allora carries 190 gallons full which is more than enough for the distance as long as the weather is reasonably cooperative, but it makes a difference if you’re burning 1.5 gallons/hour or pushing the engine and burning 2.5 gallons/hour. The extra gallon doesn’t double your speed. People better at the maths would probably be able to calculate exactly what fuel rate is most efficient. I settled upon 1.6 or 1.7 as an nice compromise of efficiency, speed (to make our date at Cape Farewell) and comfort.

We had rain. We had current steadily set against us. We had dolphins streak by in the night leaving comet trails in the bioluminescence. We fussed about the wind, almost-but-not-quite-enough to sail, ever creeping up on the nose. We almost lost a batten in the mainsail. Then later, Otto, our autopilot made a sudden decision to turn hard to starboard out of nowhere. The switch for the high pressure pump on the watermaker heated up and set off the smoke alarm (naturally at night-while I was off watch). We saw no other boats besides the occasional fishing boat working closer to shore. We caught a glimpse of Aoraki (Mt Cook) at sunset, and at Cape Foulwind a couple of seal lions waved as we passed by.

And my lil’ camera could not capture how stunning this scene was!

On the last night, as seems to be a theme lately, Diana drew the toughest watch of the passage. There was just no way to completely avoid a patch of heavy winds slated to meet us as we approached the Cape, straight on the nose. We tried to time it for the least possible, but Poseidon wasn’t going to let us off feeling too clever. For her whole watch, Allora slammed into 20 knots on the bow clawing her way up the last bit of coast to Cape Farewell. Finally, after calling Farewell Maritime radio to try to find out whether it was generally considered advisable to cut the corner at Kahurangi shoals (which they weren’t really able to commit to), we decided it probably wasn’t, so we slogged on. Diana went off watch and very soon after, we were able to fall off the wind. Just five degrees made a big difference. Pretty soon we were motor-sailing and by Diana’s last sunrise watch she was able to shut the engine off and sail along Farewell Spit, an amazing 25km sandbank off the northwestern corner of the South Island at the opening of Cook Strait. The winds were light but sweet. Finally! ~MS

We had to ‘hot bunk’ which (sounds better than it is), means sharing the same berth in shifts because the boat is heeling too much in one direction to utilize the other side. I left Marcus a chocolate on his pillow to further sweeten his off watch experience!
Gotta love modern times – ship captains of yore didn’t used to provide their first mates with latte’s as a wake up! Feeling grateful …
First light on the last day of our passage.
Oh hello dawn, we see you!
The same sunrise unfurling.
Allora and her crew get some sweet, smooth motion before finally rounding Farewell Spit and finding an anchorage.
Allora seems to keep a steady pace, but her crew at this point can feel like horses heading back to the barn, anxious to just GET THERE! It’s definitely a lesson in savoring what IS!
Before we even tucked into Abel Tasman, my phone started ‘bleeping’ frantically, the first Wifi messages in nearly 3 months came flooding in. I have to say, both sides of the phone equation are awesome – putting it away, disconnected from the world and then THIS! Siblings reunited for the first time in 3 years! Love in pixels!
And Grandma Elizabeth sandwiches are always delicious!
Marcus’ reaction when I shared these pics.
Bark Bay, our first anchorage in Abel Tasman. We contemplated getting Namo off our foredeck and exploring that little sweet beach, but instead, we just sat on deck and savored the stillness.
This gull landed as we were just feet away on deck.
Grey skeletal remains of wilding pines (invasive conifers in NZ).

 

Magical Milford Sound/Piopiotahi! – Fiordland

The seaward side of Sutherland Sound is blocked by a sand/gravel bar, so deep draft vessels can’t venture far ‘inside,’ and there are no recognized anchorages for yachts.
Couldn’t resist slipping in to Poison Bay/Papa Pounamu, just to take it in.
These would have been the calm conditions described in our book as being necessary to spend the night in Poison Bay, but we didn’t have the time, sadly.
The very dwarfed looking Stirling lighthouse at the entrance of Milford Sound where it meets the Tasman Sea.

Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) resonates with awe and leaves us speechless, like the Grand Canyon or Machu Picchu, or the Magellanic Clouds on a vividly starry night at sea. The sheer mass and scale, the soaring beauty, each breathtaking turn. Words just pour out, but fail to capture what it feels like to sail into this magnificent fiord. The day we spent in this unique-in-the world place, was blue and lit with sun, the water impenetrably deep, granite walls towered over us, beyond imagination and comprehension, the waterfalls gushed bountifully without end. Apparently Captain Cook missed Milford on his first pass, and actually that’s not entirely surprising. Approaching from the sea the fiord begins rather humbly and then builds and builds in its symphonic crescendo of magnificence. A bit much? Not really. Every time I stepped away from the helm and out from under the dodger I caught my breath as I looked up and up. ~MS

The tour boats run in a clockwise loop around Milford, and there were probably FAR fewer than in non-Covid affected years, (saw maybe 12 all day), but we were able to stay quite clear of them just by scooting to the middle or going the other way – basically we had the luxury of no rules! But who’s looking at boats with these sheer rock faces in our midst?

Excited visitors to this breathtaking sound are at risk for ‘Milford Neck Syndrome.’ By the end of the day, my neck wouldn’t support my head anymore – had been looking up too much!!

There’s a resident pod of Bottlenose Dolphins in Milford – they dashed over eagerly to welcome Allora!

Heading up toward Deepwater Basin, the tourist concession. Milford is the only fiord that can be reached directly by vehicle and because of that, it normally receives up to 500,000 visitors per year! When we went via car (with Wyatt) in April 2021, ours was the ONLY car in the massive parking lot. Now, a year later, tourism is inching its way back.
Iconic Mitre Peak, 1683m
Some people book their big Milford trip a year in advance and then get one of the 182 rainy days/year. Feeling such gratitude to the weather gods!
Bowen Falls adorned by a rainbow, as if it needed more?!

We had to keep Allora off shore just enough to avoid a full shower from the downpour of Stirling Falls. She drops 150 meters (a 35 story building worth!)

We were both giddy all day and so so glad we made this quick but rich visit!

Real Journeys offered up their mooring in Harrison Cove since they wouldn’t be using it. This saved us figuring out how to find a suitable anchoring spot in otherwise super deep water.
So EASY! No kayaking multiple lines to shore anymore!
Low light on Donne Glacier, but there’s a GLACIER in our anchorage?!!!
Sweetness!
Last light on the peaks.
Wyatt left NZ for the States on this day. Something about that fact coupled with our sort of ceremonially special last hours in Fiordland left us feeling a bit stunned. We fell asleep super early and woke back up at midnight to start our passage up the West Coast. At 12:15 am, we left Harrison Cove in such pitch blackness that we were grateful for the silhouetted ‘steep as’ granite walls and the resident dolphins which escorted us out with an utterly magical and hushed Fiordland goodbye. Haere rā!

 

 

 

A quick blink in Bligh Sound/Hawea, – Fiordland

Our logbook for the run from George to Bligh says, ‘expecting 4 meter seas, so ‘battening down the hatches on Allora.’ This pic doesn’t begin to show the waves, but we are getting pretty used to these quick hops being worthy of our full attention!

This northern fiord zigzags around 18 kilometers inland to the head at Wild Natives River (surely on a list to be renamed?)
Sizable slip. Some of these are so dramatic you can just imagine the sound and drama of the actual moment when it let go.

The very steep demarkation between mud bank and deep water.
We finally found a spot to anchor in the middle in 80′ of water, so we had all our 330′ of rode out and were ‘free swinging’ without any lines to shore.

On our one full day in Bligh, Marcus took Namo up the Wild Natives River and hiked up with just enough time (with the tide) to fish one nice pool, landing two fish.
‘Marcus’ Pool,’ Wild Natives River.
I stayed back on Allora and did one of my ‘flash’ mosaics. Here and there along our 7 year journey, I’ve tucked these offerings, almost ‘dialogues with nature,’ into various locations. Here, I share some close ups, mainly because that’s all I got up to in Bligh, but I will save the full images for another post!

As much as we choose to be present for what IS, we are starting to really look at forward at the weather for our tough West Coast passage from Milford to Abel Tasman.
I’m thankful for Lightroom so I can prep some of these blogs before finally getting back into Wifi zone.

 

Bye Bligh!
I feel like I can SEE the richness of this journey in Marcus’ expression!

 

George Sound/Te Hou Hou, (‘Georgious!’) – Fiordland

Logbook entry says, ‘Choppy Sloppy!’
Marcus usually smiles and hand steers through the rough stuff!

The run outside between Caswell and George Sounds is around 14 miles. We left early to try to beat some forecast rain and gusty NW winds, and almost made it. The rain started just as we made our turn in. Diana logged the max wind at 27.2 knots, then went down and crossed it out to a revised 29 knots. By the time the wind had blasted us another two miles down the sound, Diana had crossed that out to record 42 knots. Looking on the chart with the wind howling behind us, we were concerned if Anchorage Cove would be able to offer any shelter from this angle of wind, even though it’s listed as an ‘all-weather anchorage.’ We worried it might be too gusty to safely negotiate the narrow spot between the river bar and small rocky island. We decided to poke in and check it out if we could. Right away the wind dropped into the low twenties then the teens, which still felt like a lot to try getting into the tight spot where fishermen had set up a line we could theoretically side tie to. The rain hammered down as Diana watched from the bow for shallow rocks off the island and I maneuvered Allora in, ready to back out if we needed. Despite whitecaps just outside, the winds this close to the little island dropped to near zero and Allora was able to hover effortlessly while Diana (in the kayak) quickly tied lines on the bow and stern, getting absolutely soaked in the process. It was a kind of a crazy feeling, the sudden stillness and security of that spot with gusts in the forties not half a mile away. We wouldn’t have guessed even from a couple hundred yards out that it was worth chancing. ~MS

Super tricky spot to get Allora tucked up into, it required getting sidled alongside the fishermen’s line while keeping Allora out of a couple way too shallow spots. We sat in 6’8″ of water at low tide and we draw 6’6″!
Good thing I love RAIN! (less so, freezing rain!)
We were tied between an island and the very close shore, with all sorts of debris having also been deposited in the relatively calm cove.
Weather’s clearing! The George River valley as seen from our small spot called, ‘Anchorage Cove.’
A new day dawns!!
Heading up with Namo to explore the George River (Marcus with fishing gear, me with a camera, both with awe).
Might we hear Wyatt saying, ‘watch your back cast Dad?!’
Luscious landscape!

I meandered along the trail in the woods while Marcus ambled upriver casting. People often ask about how we manage to find alone time living on a boat – this is one way.

When I saw this ‘rock of plenty,’ I knew I’d not make it too much farther up the trail!

Found this online: “Nurse logs are described as offering a verdant opportunity to contemplate the passing of time, the generational handoff, and the support we can offer each other.” HERE, HERE!

I was right there with this and still don’t know what it is I was seeing?!

No fish, still smiling – tough day on a beautiful river.
Heading back out of the river just in time for some new rain to fall. Allora is just there on the other side of the river bar.
Before we left this anchorage for another, I had designs to see if the existing water hose was flowing so we could fill our tanks. My outfits are devolving, but my motivation was intact!
This was the waterfall right near Allora which was off color from the recent downpour, but the hose would have been buried far above in cleaner water (I hoped).
Sadly, the hose wasn’t producing more than the faintest trickle. There was a fair surge in this little cove and the thick, heavy hose was all entangled in the exposed low tide rocks. Got that cleared but still no water. After some soaking wet, slippery scrambling a ways above the falls, I found the other end of the hose and ‘yahoo’, all I needed to do was secure it back in the water! I was PRETTY tickled with my own cleverness and couldn’t wait to tell Marcus about my heroic efforts (yeah, I’ve been reading about the role of the ego, yeah, I still need to read more!) but you probably can sense the anticlimax here – it didn’t work!!! UGH. So sad. I was exhausted and deflated, but thankful that I’m also reading about gratitude so I could be appreciative of our water maker!
We moved down to the end of the sound, poked into a somewhat famous (for sandflies) anchorage called, ‘Alice Falls,’ but didn’t stay because we were itching (pun) to sit at an old school free- swinging anchorage, which was also an option at the head of the bay.
More typical weather for Fiordland.

Little Blue Penguins seem pretty tiny to handle what Fiordland must dish up?!
My mom moved from southern to northern California while we were in George Sound. Thank you, dear siblings, for manifesting such an effort! Wish we could have helped, but know that we were sending soggy hugs from Fiordland! Weird to be on the other side of the planet when bigger life changes occur.

The rain eased but the wind came up in our free swinging yet exposed anchorage, so we moved back over to Alice Falls – tucked back in a very sweet cove offering lots of protection. Believe it or not, besides the prolific sandflies, this place mainly gets complaints about the noise from the roaring falls!

The next morning, we had glorious sun!
Good thing, because EVERYTHING was wet! Scenic laundromat.
We took Namo over to the George Sound DOC hut, to take the hike up to Lake Katherine.
Again, mainly a hunter’s cabin, but it was past the season, so we found it empty.

This hut is mainly used by hunters during the season. There is also an ‘expert’ rated 18 km (one way) tramping (backpacking) route from Lake TeAnau to George Sound, but it’s seriously overgrown and described by Wyatt as ‘burly.’ We hiked up just 2k (one way) to Lake Katherine and it took AWHILE on some very soggy but ‘georgeous’ trail!
Nicer hut than the Caswell 2 person.

One of the first things we had to do was something Marcus had hoped to avoid entirely – a classic 3 wire bridge with no netting or boardwalks. These are being replaced almost entirely by swing bridges or suspension bridges, but some remain in Fiordland. This river was just too high to try to wade.
So many glorious hours spent traipsing through Fiordland’s grand forests. In Japan it’s called, ‘shinrin-yoku,’ or eco-therapy forest bathing. (It was our most frequent bathing!)
Noticing the wee ones.
Textures, too.
And oh so fresh mountain water!!!! (Consider that we normally drink reverse osmosis water from our de-salination system).

Some Root Beer gummy worms?

Had hopes of seeing this Wapiti at the lake since this track was so fresh.
Lake Katherine.
Look what showed up just as we arrived?!
Sweetly imperfect.
Colorful plate mushroom.

Our return. More my kind of thing – I’d have paid to go on it!
Idyllic scene, lovely day.
It’s entirely unnerving to send that drone up and off the deck of Allora. I give Marcus huge credit for being willing to face the tummy tumult -maybe he’s tempted by the comfy clothing?
He uses the screen and I watch the actual drone, just in case.
So worth it, right?!
We tried scrambling up the true left side of Alice Falls the next day to maybe reach Alice Lake, but neither of us had what it would take!
After 5 nights in glorious George, we set out on a ‘splitter bluebird’ day for Bligh Sound. Too cold for sandflies on this sunny am!
And LOOK WHO accompanied us, smiling all the while?!
Thanks for the mighty sweet escort!

Caswell/Tai Te Timu Sound – the 45th parallel – Fiordland

Pretty little welcome rainbow as we get set to enter Caswell Sound.
There are a number of rocks studding the entrance to this fiord and caution was definitely on our minds. Often we can see that there’d be gorgeous coves to explore, but not in Allora!
How do you REALLY feel about that entrance, Marcus?!
Shirley Falls, dropping 365 meters from Lake Shirley on Caswell’s southern side. There is supposedly evidence of an old marble works that ran between 1882 and 1887 here, but I suspect it’s quite overgrown!
Ooh, let’s go look at THAT one?!!
And then this sweet, unnamed waterfall, one of a zillion that show up after each deluge. Thank you sun, for lighting her up!
We may have chosen to skip Caswell were it not for the Stillwater River at the head. It’s a gorgeous fiord though, with steep shores and rugged peaks and we spent 3 lovely nights here.
This boat, Ponowhai 3, came by to offer us some fresh fish, and I missed the shot where they were holding up the enormous Grouper (they say Groper here in NZ, same fish), but they passed over a downright SLAB which ended up being 4 meals for us two. Gratitude to the boat folks AND the grand fish.

Big Fish

a big fish lived here
under this rock
in this sound
70 meters of water
down down down
finning the murky fathoms
there must be something it is like to be
a big fish
broad tail to the tide
jaw slowly moving, gills filtering
oxygen and salt from darkness
listening to the strange whirr of a prop churning distantly overhead
scent in the current
vibrations of much younger, much smaller, more foolish fish
everyone makes mistakes
joy to the world!
big fish on!
the breathless mystery of something deep
that unremitting pull of an invisible line
uncompromising bite and stick and metal barb
is there hoping it might break free
what is it like
to be another’s flesh and dinner?
exhausted thrashing on the surface
searing bright light and fierce dryness
the gaseous, ethereal world
where white birds like cherubs flitter and follow
where albatross glide like shadows of another understanding
what is it like, big fish?
now that two men hold you in firm hands
knife wielding hands
careless hands
is this the dance?
waves surge against the rocks
seaweed starfish worms green saltwater alive
o’ fish shaped wave
these men call you big fish
men who came to find things to take
big trees all in a row
is there something it is like
to be a man holding a gray dead fish
for a picture
flesh stripped from her ancient bones ~MS

 
‘Stay put,’ we always say as we zip off to check out the Stillwater River on this grey and soggy day.
Our big adventure: get Namo upstream just far enough to pick up the scenic track along the Stillwater River which leads to Lake Marchant. We had to be tide conscious though, as there were 9′ tides here!
This is the two bunk hut run by the Department of Conservation (DOC), mainly used by hunters, but we were there just past the season, so were able to burn a bit of our paper trash in the fireplace before setting off toward the lake. Caswell sits on the 45th parallel and Wyatt’s NZ friends/roommates, Tanya and Ben had just been there in February raising funds and advocating for women suffering from domestic abuse. They scrambled, ran and traipsed the entire 45th as it crosses the South Island in NZ, from where they were dropped via helicopter at the ocean entrance to the sound to Oamaru on the east coast. We had heard from Wyatt about their effort and knew that they had planned to be exclusively off trail, but ended up coming down off the staggeringly high ridge to seek shelter from a massive storm for 3 days in this hut. The river, just below in this pic, was so high – they were worried that it would flood and the cabin might be washed away. Indeed, we were there just following a big rain, and the flow was anything BUT a still river! It would have been terrifying to be in their situation, truly. You can read about it here: https://runliketanya.com/athlete/challenges/the-45th-parallel-traverse/ I think Ben might be putting together a documentary on their arduous mission? We found their entry in the logbook which all DOC huts have and made our own, too. ~DS
The most humble DOC hut we’d ever seen.

Such a happy place.
Gorgeous hiking!

Perchance some fish thoughts, hmmm?

Nearing the lake, we had to slog through some boggy ground.

Plenty of water to be had and squeezed from our clothes!
Marcus had to be super sneaky and crawl around so as not to be seen by the fish at the glassy lake edge.
Stealthily casting to fussy fish.
Fish on! I had to run from this vantage point all the way slopping through the marsh to get there for a pic!

Several nice fish in the shallow water’s edge, but they were super spooky.

 

Brown Trout from a brown lake – not easy to spot! This one took a small nymph.
Back at it! Tying on a fly in sandfly country means there are sacrifices which must be made and sometimes you just have to hope it’s a male that lands on your face and finger (the females are the biters).
Neat place to be just hanging out. I heard the ‘pffft’ of a startled deer as I was taking some pics in the grasses, but never saw it.
Thistles throw a gorgeous flower to seed.

Going to have to do some research to learn about this fungi?!

Oh, I see your whimsy, Nature!
And your complexity, too.
Sweet spot, captivating to us both.
Another exquisite purple.

Took our face protection down for a pic and see, I’m just about to get bit. Their sensors are spectacular!

Through the droplet glass.
Moody and broody and time to go back!

Allora just waiting for us!
We saw no real wind here but got plenty WET. Waterfalls appeared all around our boat!
Had to bail Namo out and secure her up on the davits with the drain plug open!

Leaving Caswell in sloppy conditions, but arguably easier than Ben and Tanya’s method!

 

 

 

Northward to Charles/Taiporoporo Sound, Mesmerizing – Fiordland

We glided through Thompson Sound early in the am so as to avoid forecasted weather and seas on the outside.
On our way out to open ocean. Had to go check out this unusual formation?!
What looked like snow was actually bare white stone under shallow rooted vegetation (including trees) which ‘slide’ in big rains.
This mauve color was authentic and WOW!
The rocks at the fiord ‘mouth’ are always treacherous and we keep PLENTY of distance. This weather is more characteristic of the area than the gorgeous month + we’ve been wildly lucky to enjoy.
Of all the fiords, we only skipped Chalky Inlet and Nancy Sound. This was the narrow entrance to Nancy and although you can’t see it in this pic, it looked sufficiently tight and rough to make us feel ok about our earlier decision to give it a miss (based on our need to get to Picton for some much needed boat work before our Fiji passage in June).
Charles Sound/Taiporoporo. It had rained the day before, and often we are on the lookout for debris, but this downright tree wasn’t going to be missed! Later, we did hit a log at full speed and never saw it, just heard the dull thud on Allora’s hull 🙁

Charles Sound doesn’t have quite the extensive ‘tentacles’ as Doubtful or Dusky – there are only two! We chose Gold Arm and found such a dear spot for Allora just through this narrow gap, behind Catherine Island. There was a fisherman’s line in place, so we pulled right up alongside it and secured Allora at all 3 cleats, Voilá! (No anchor.)
Birdsong and sandflies aplenty!
The shoreline of Charles is entrancing!

Seaweed left high and dry on display at low tide.

Abstracts

My favorite of Diana’s photographs from Fiordland are the “abstracts,” which she discovers by looking in a very careful, unique way, at the tidal line along the rocks, that magical transitional space between the hidden world underwater and the green, vibrant life-on-fire world above. Bare stone, stained and painted with time and color, bent and reflected by the still, secret, freshwater shimmering over the tide, the infinite, creative capacity of nature. Diana uses framing to share this vision, to point out Nature’s mastery of abstract art. It’s no surprise (and no accident) that these images feel so profoundly connected to her mosaic work. Most of the time these photographic expeditions are her solo meditations, which she shares with me when she gets back to Allora (after hours in the kayak!). But I’ve also been with her, paddling Namo gently into position, sitting right next to her, appreciating the wholeness of a beautiful place but without quite seeing what she is seeing. These images, for me, represent a particular (and particularly magical) collaboration between Diana and this very, very special world we are navigating in Fiordland.~MS

 

We heard dolphins exhale RIGHT beside Allora, so donned our goofy outfits, lowered Namo off the davits and went out around the corner to see if they’d still be about. A visual feast: the bush, the shoreline, dolphins and the water, ahhh!!!
There were 6, and they were nonplussed by us. (I just went down a Wifi wormhole reading about how ‘nonplussed’ is a contronym!)
See the dorsal fin shape in the intertidal zone, too?!

After that glorious evening light, we settled in for what would be torrential rain all night. We saw 38.5 knots of wind as our max, but from the N/NW – a good direction for this location.
In the morning the water was chocolate colored and there were gushing waterfalls EVERYWHERE!

We had hopes of taking Namo up the Windward River at the head of the bay, but it was a raging ‘NO!’

Sinuous lines, ‘tidelines’ of foam where two currents meet.

Instead of moving Allora over to Emelius Arm, we left her tucked by Catherine Island and ventured 5 miles with Namo in the FREEZING early morning! Visibility was almost nil, but we went slowly and visualized a log free path!
By the time we arrived at the head of Emelius Arm, the sun had started coming up over the peaks, so we knew we’d be warm soon! It’s always harder than we imagine to find where the river (which comes from up high in the canyon ) flows into the sound. Sometimes our guide books showed an approximate position, but not always. We were tempted to follow these shadow arrows, as they seemed to be pointing the way!
Found the Irene River, though at this early stage it was as still as a lake. Our plan was to take Namo up as far as we could and then hike up beyond that until the tide dictated we return.
Hallelujah for the sun!
Sun makes us all so warm and fuzzy!
Through a narrow little offshoot, trees all around, we took Namo back and in (following the sound and a glint of white water) and look what we found?!

 

Looked it up on our favorite (offline) app, NZ TOPO 50, and learned that this beauty is Marjorie Falls!

 

Super hard visibility for seeing the myriad snags. It was gorgeous, but took intense focus getting upriver.

Time to hike/fish and let Namo rest.
And to the cicada’s surprise, two new creatures showed up!

Happy to get in the forest on foot and lay some hands on these wise elders!
Marcus didn’t end up seeing any fish, but it was such a pleasure: gravel beds, a reasonable trail on the true left bank, deer sign and a sun dappled forest.
I left this for Marcus so he might see it on his way back down river. Glad I took the pic, because he didn’t!

A fine, fine day!
Had to tear ourselves away and still we left about 1.5 hours after our intention, so the water was REALLY ‘skinny’ for our return.

We negotiated snags the whole way and had to walk/pull Namo out the last 200′!

What a beautiful sight, to see Allora peacefully resting just as we’d left her! Phenomenal day!
Left Charles Sound at 10am – 3 days of solitude and bliss.

 

Doubtful/Patea, aka Gleeful Sound – Fiordland

Dash from Dagg to Doubtful:

The relatively short distances between sounds along Fiordland’s rugged coast allow for mad dashes timed to brief calms, but you can’t really read the ocean’s mood sheltered in the steep granite walls of the fiords. Often the designation, “all weather anchorage,” means that fishermen have figured out that even in the worst conditions, certain spots are spared. The only way to know when it’s time to go, if you don’t have the benefit of years of local knowledge, is to study the weather models that we download twice a day from PredictWind. Because they are downloading via Iridium satellite, the resolution of the models cannot be higher that 50km. So there’s a bit of an odd effect as the models average how much the wind on the Tasman Sea is slowed down by the mountainous Fiordland coast, giving the appearance of lighter winds close to shore. They probably are a little lighter compared to what they are 20 miles out at sea, but our experience is that the models generally underestimate what it’s like on the outside and overestimate what we’ll experience once inside.  Wind or no, gale or no, the seas are almost always a mess, particularly where local winds funnel through the openings of the sounds. Schedules are well known as the bane of sailing but in the land based world they are unavoidable, and Wyatt had a particularly narrow window of time to squeeze in a visit to us amid preparations to leave New Zealand. So we considered ourselves unreasonably lucky when the wind that pinned us down for a couple of days in Daag, relented in perfect time for us to make the dash. We arrived at the opening of Doubtful with what Wyatt would call a ‘splitter bluebird’ sunny day. ~MS

We saw the full flow of waterfalls after the previous day’s rain as we left Dagg Sound. By the time we got to Doubtful, they were less vigorous, heading into their ‘elegant’ phase!
The clouds came and went, as they do; a reminder that Wyatt would soon join us and then be off again. Even these monolithic mountains, seemingly in stasis, are ever in flux.
We scooted directly on up to Deep Cove so we’d be all set for Wyatt’s morning arrival the next day. SO EXCITED!
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Allora on a mooring (all by herself) in Doubtful Sound, tucked right up next to the roar of Helena Falls. Evening spent getting the aft cabin clear of STUFF to welcome Wyatt the next day. Here, I don the particular ‘happy parent’ expression, just moments after snagging Wyatt off the bus!
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Yep, the same one!
Triad of smiles.
Wyatt made a fairly long journey from Wanaka to meet up with us: ( 4 hours via car to Manapouri via Queenstown, Ferry across Lake Manapouri to West Arm, Bus via Wilmot Pass Road).  We hardly paused before whisking Wyatt away on the last leg of this long adventure toward Hall Arm.
Oh, how we love VISITS!!!
It was a dramatic day, light wise. Sometimes it’d be broody and dark and then beams of sunlight would break through and highlight just one sliver of the mountainside.

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Think we would have been happy gathering anywhere, but this is most definitely Wyatt’s giddy inducing environment!
I have interspersed Wyatt’s pics throughout this blog post – and used ©WS to indicate his shots.
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These two …
We had to stay ‘on our game’ to keep anchoring strategies as thorough despite Wyatt’s being with us. Thankfully, the weather cooperated, with the max wind being 21 knots, and Wyatt always has a good sense of being responsible to the situation, anyway.
Anchoring – We never did buy the ‘marriage saver’ headphones which might be a bit softer in the decibel department for communicating between bow and stern. But in this steep sided environment, sometimes our voices would even echo! (Fun for music playing, too!)
Found our spot! Hall Arm is actually breath-taking!!
©WS
Oh yeah, this’ll do!
©WS We anchored in 68′ of water – so pretty deep – with all our rode out.
I think all 3 of us held a quiet awareness around how hard our next goodbye would be, as Wyatt was planning to leave NZ after spending 2.5 years building community in Wanaka and sharing some real quality time with us.

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Ok, let’s go EXPLORE!!

©WS Snagging one of these close ups sometimes involves a bit of scrambling! (Wyatt was too busy grabbing me from the icy water after I slipped and fell in to take a picture!)

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Ha, Wyatt caught us both entranced!

We have experienced a profound cumulative effect traveling through the wilderness of these southern fiords, as we mash through the tangled forest or glide like a whisper through glassy, watery mountain reflections. We feel a growing, deepening awareness of the liveness and power of this unfettered place. Every day Diana peers a little closer into the magical profusion of the rainforest, its tiniest creatures (or the smallest we may perceive) all this abundance of life fueled by fresh water, gray stormy clouds, shifting rays of sunlight, massive stone faces fading softly into the distance. The boundless imagination of nature is vividly accessible here, free of scheming human interference. Inexhaustible, effortless celebration. We feel blessed to feel like we belong, to participate at our particular scale, with our particular way of perceiving. Gratefully reconnected as dolphins come to play alongside Allora, turn and smile and look back at us with familiar eyes, into our own delighted gaze. As the sky softens at sunset, or looms heavy with rain before the storm, as water gushes from waterfalls that were not there before the deluge, thundering into the fiord, as williwaws tornado in wild rainbow mists across startled coves, how delightful it is to be alive, a part of, this marvelous, miraculous world. ~MS

©WS
The layout of Doubtful/Bradshaw/Thompson Sounds. You can see why they’re called ‘arms.’
©WS We moved each night because Wyatt had just 5 with us and although we KNOW ‘more isn’t more,’ we couldn’t resist! Also, weather necessitated we seek certain protection, so we had THAT excuse (wink).
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Gaer Arm up Bradshaw Sound is a famously hard spot to set anchor, normally only a daytime or fair weather anchorage. The Camelot River is at the head and offers great potential for dingy/kayak exploration at high tide, so we strategized and came up with a plan since we had some moderate winds forecasted.
Anchored off the mud bank of the Camelot at the head of the arm.
Just starting up the Camelot, Allora barely in sight. We timed our Camelot River foray and left two hours before high tide, towing the kayak behind Namo. We crept up 2k carefully avoiding snags and rocks until reaching a clear ‘no go’ spot for Namo. At that point, the guys hiked a couple more kilometers up the gorgeous river and I turned back toward Allora with the kayak, so as to be on the boat for the predicted winds.
Learned something about how cloudy days can actually be more subtle light for shooting.
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I turned back toward Allora while Marcus and Wyatt fished upstream.
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Making my way back to Allora in some pretty ‘skinny’ water. There were sulphuric smelling hot water bubbling spots all across the shallows!
Allora nicely sitting just where we left her and in very placid conditions. The wind did end up picking up, but not in any significant way and our anchor stayed set nicely.
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We moved across Bradshaw Sound to Precipice Cove/MacDonnell Island, an all weather anchorage.
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Still quite giddy about having one on one time with Wyatt before he flies back to the States.
Wyatt went off on a long kayak while we heard word about our long awaited boxes of pre-ordered ‘fresh’ veggies! Real Journeys offers the service in collaboration with a grocery store in Te Anau. It’s kind of a miracle and although it didn’t go flawlessly, we were more than happy to jump through a few hoops to get celery and lettuce and carrots, oh my!
The Milford Mariner, a boat run by Real Journeys, called us on the VHF and said they had our 3 boxes of veggies! We were expecting them to arrive the day we picked up Wyatt, but they kept going missing. Anyway, we zipped over to the head of the bay and their lights made them look even more angelic in my eyes! The first ‘freshies’ since leaving Oban a good two months ago! I definitely did a vegetable dance!
Instead of the 45 knot winds which were predicted, we saw only a few mild gusts but LOTS of rain, enough to almost fill both of our water tanks (200 gallons!).

Before heading to Crooked Arm, we went a bit farther on to see some of the waterfalls at the head of Precipice Cove.
©WS Yeah, it DID rain A LOT!
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Marcus was super generous to be helmsman while Wyatt and I ran around gleefully taking pictures!
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Looking down into Thompson Sound from Penoulo Reach.

A frisky band of Bottlenose Dolphins took to leaping in the wake of a Real Journeys boat which whizzed by us. We weren’t even sure if the folks on that boat saw the antics because they just kept on keeping on. Meanwhile, we stopped and spent over an hour and a half with these VERY social and smiley creatures! All of these dolphin shots are Wyatt’s. My camera fogged up and he needed an SD card anyway, so I just spent the whole time giggling!
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Always and already …
We spent our last evening at the end of Crooked Arm, just 1 mile as the crow flies to Dagg Sound. I was sure Wyatt would want to run across, but we didn’t arrive till quite late in the afternoon and we were cherishing our last time for sweet conversation.
And what an evening it was! Fiordland showed off a wee bit.
We shot this when we thought Wyatt had the possibility of extending his stay one more day, hence the smiles. We learned soon after that we had to rush in the morning to get him back to Deep Cove for an earlier bus because they’d cancelled the other option. 🙁
One last kayak outing.
Leaving Crooked Arm and working our way back to Deep Cove, Marcus maneuvered Allora right up next to these stunners.

Last things to say. This appears to have more lightness and less tears than I remember?
©WS Such gratitude.
Back at Deep Cove. We ran Wyatt over to the place where we’d picked him up and we saw his bus leaving – 15 minutes EARLY! It was against my better interests, because I’d have loved to KEEP him for 2 more days, but I screamed my throat raw, the driver stopped and he made the bus. No Italian style protracted goodbyes though – he was off in an instant! OUCH, rip the bandaid! (Was glad we’d had that heart to heart in the morning!) Ciao bello!
Marcus and I took a walk, hardly talking, just savoring the blissful blur of the 5 past days traipsing all over Doubtful Sound with our baby!
The light was even a bit melancholy.
Never too disheartened to be lit up by a new mushroom find!
We found a trail right up to the base of Helena Falls.
Last light of the day along the tail-race looking in the direction which Wyatt headed, starting this new chapter in his life.
We had to fuel up Allora and do some laundry (real life after sustained play), so we stopped one last night in Snug Cove/First Arm of Doubtful before heading northward.
Almost like a dream …

 

Doubtful we’ll ever forget this.

 

Dagg/Te Ra Sound, shared only with Wapiti in the ‘roar.’ – Fiordland

Heading north along the west coast of the South Island, soon to turn east into Dagg Sound!
The sun started making an appearance, highlighting the seemingly endless layers unfolding into … infinity?!
We both saw a crazy optical illusion as we headed out of Breaksea Sound – of breaking waves in the distance ACROSS the entrance/exit. Turns out, the path was clear and calm, but some light bending effect had us both pretty focused and ready to retreat back to Stevens Cove if necessary! In general, the chart plotter and real life conditions both need our attention. We found our Navionics charts to be thankfully accurate in Fiordland, though still a fair amount of erroneous depth readings and the occasional goofy moments when small islands would be charted which weren’t there.
Approaching the Dagg Sound entrance.
Always a nice exhale when we cross from the ‘outside,’ to the ‘inside!’
The ‘grotto’ beneath this waterfall must have been gorgeous?! I wanted to drop the kayak and go over there, but we had an anchorage to go find.
Dagg Sound is 8+ miles long and branches into two arms. We first chose
‘Anchorage Arm’ and had glassy calm conditions. Instead of trying to find shallow enough depths in the middle to anchor in, we snugged up super close to shore utilizing some fishermen’s lines which are rigged in place. Wonderful protection from winds, mellifluous creek sounds and voracious sandflies!
Such a little creature to cause so much mischief!
My armor: fleece onesie, scarf and balaclava/hat (ready to be dropped over my whole face when, after about 7 seconds of being outside, every sandfly in the universe descends on me. Haha, unless Marcus is out there too!)
Caught this Albacore on the ‘outside,’ just seconds after videotaping Marcus setting out the rod and line, and commenting that I wasn’t sure I wanted to even catch a fish because of the large swell!
Went out on Namo with MS to explore the colorful shoreline at the end of the day.

We moved to the southern arm of Dagg to the ‘All weather anchorage’ since bigger winds were predicted and we liked the idea of a swing anchorage instead of being tied so close to shore.
Always fun to see what’s around the corner!
New spot!

Something happened when the twenty North American Wapiti Roosevelt gifted to New Zealand in 1905 found their way into the heart of Fiordland’s steep and impenetrable wilderness. Maybe there’s a perfectly rational scientific explanation (maybe it has something to do with crossing breeding with Red Deer?). They got a bit smaller than the fat and happy elk of Yellowstone (which certainly makes good sense given the dense rainforest) but they also changed their tune, no longer bugling with that iconic, haunting call that resonates across the frosty parklands, lodgepole forests and granite peaks of the Rockies. Our visit to Daag coincided with height of the “roar.” It’s a sound that does not “belong,” but also feels so fitting, as though giving voice to the thick ferny jungle of that unpeopled wilderness. Deep, guttural, plaintive and haunting (in their own way) – their roars echo across the still water and ridiculously precipitous canyon walls. You can hear individual stags make their way up and down the steep shore, and we paddled Namo as stealthily as we could manage along the shore hoping for a glimpse, and though they often seemed very close, we never saw them. We could only imagine their antlered heads tilted back, belly’s trembling as they gave voice to the wilderness.~MS

There’s a 1 kilometer trail between Dagg and Doubtful Sound, so we set out (too late) to try to dash across, but only got halfway and had to turn back, both because of light and falling tide.
One of the many amazing things about the bush is that there are very few ‘pokey’ things. I am in the occasional habit of ‘greeting’ the ferns as I walk by, but I found one that didn’t want to be touched.

 

Jellyfish!

We had one day and night which was cloudy and rainy; the water became very brown with loads of fresh on top, heaps of forest debris floated around us and new, gushing waterfalls sprouted everywhere! Most folks agreed that these conditions were more the ‘norm’ and that we’d been having wild good fortune to experience a of almost non-stop glorious conditions.
Guess we’re playing music!

 

When the weather cleared, I went on a ‘playdate with nature’ hike across to Haulashore Cove/Doubtful Sound, while Marcus went out on Namo to perchance catch sight of the Wapiti which roared in ‘surround sound’ most of the time we were there!
Ok, wanna go have a close look?!
Seaweed on shore, looking so ET!

Last sight of Allora for a few hours.
Even a ‘dead’ tree stump is quite full of life.

The kōtukutuku, also known as ‘the tree with the peeling bark’ or Fuchsia, is one of the most easily recognisable trees in the New Zealand bush. I must have been hungry, because I saw artisan CRACKER!
Most of this short trail is in dense forest, but occasionally I’d pop out and see these peaks.

Too many years of berry bewareness to feel free enough to nibble these, however tempting!

Just seein’ if you’re paying attention!

Classic ‘Tarzan’ vines following their twisty, viney nature! And Spanish moss/Tillandsia usneoides is not a moss at all, but a bromeliad, which means it is in the same taxonomic family as pineapples and succulent house plants!

Although Spanish moss grows on trees, it is not a parasite. It doesn’t put down roots in the tree it grows on, nor does it take nutrients from it. The plant thrives on rain and fog, sunlight, and airborne or waterborne dust and debris.

Known for it’s friendly, ‘cheet cheet’ call and it’s crazy flying antics, the Fantail or Pīwakawaka often follows another animal (and people) to capture insects. Time and time again, though, they acted as guides; when we were off track in the woods, they’d appear, chirping energetically, as if to say, ‘no … not that way, THIS way!!’ I learned to always follow them!

Ahhhh!!

Some fungi fun: I haven’t had the time to research ID’s on most of these, so write me if you know and are keen to share?!

These ‘nurse logs’ are fallen trees which become garden beds for new life with the help of insects, microbes and fungi, eventually turning back into rich humus.

REALLY want to learn about this ‘web,’ which was considerably thicker than any spider web I’ve ever seen and the filaments looked to be made of the same ‘stuff’ as the mushroom?! Anyone?!

My very favorite find! In a process called, ‘gutturation,’ the mushroom will ‘weep’ excess pigmented moisture!!

Quite late by the time I got back to shore.

Marcus had dropped me off, so I hailed him on the handheld VHF to come retrieve me – thankfully he could get across the ‘bar’ in what amounted to no usable light.
Our red half way track and my green, very distracted by flora track. A 1 k hike turned into almost 6 round trip! I didn’t get any interesting pics from the Doubtful Sound side, but that’s our next Fiord, so there will be PLENTY!
Eagerly heading out of Dagg … Why? Because Doubtful is our next Sound and Wyatt is joining us there!!!! Allora scoots along with a bit of extra oomph!
Formations near the exit of Dagg Sound.
Wonderful little ‘nook.’
On the outside now, through the pass. Last look back at Dagg.

 

 

 

 

 

Vancouver Arm: Head of Bay, Third Cove, Stevens Cove, Breaksea/Te Puaitaha Sound – Fiordland.

Bathymetric chart of Vancouver Arm – gives an image of the size, shape and distribution of features underwater.
We just spent one quick night at the head of the bay in Vancouver Arm. We had plans in place to meet Wyatt in Doubtful Sound, 2 north of here, so we had to strategize our short stays with the weather predictions and what protection each anchorage might offer.
Third Cove Anchorage. We worked hard finding suitable depths to anchor in here and ended up dropping in 25 meters (83′), which is quite deep, but the mud bank at the head of the bay was also tough to see and the edge of it fluctuated, so all in all, challenging. Our ‘guidebooks’ didn’t say anything about where other ‘yachties’ would anchor. First impressions: amazing birdsong and echoes in this biggish bay!
I wonder if we were hideous even to the flora/fauna …?!
… ok, I feel better now. This flora is pretty ‘warty!’ We had heaps of fun checking out the very colorful intertidal zone. Started at higher tide, but it was dropping really fast, so we had to be sure Namo didn’t get stuck ‘high and dry.’ Not sure what these are, but they were ALL OVER!
You can probably imagine the smell that went along with this falling tide and exposed sea creatures?
Marcus found this one shell just sitting in this position. No others about.
Then we made it to the very spongy and lush forest. We’d been told there was a waterfall to be found, but we never found the ‘trailhead.’
No matter, there’s plenty of water and wonder right here!

The Audrey Hepburn of the plant world – playful and elegant, both.

These little ‘webs’ of water droplets were everywhere!

One version of an Umbrella Moss.
This whole area had a playful feel about it. I took a million pics, very sprite like and Marcus had the good sense to keep track of how we were going to actually make our way back to Allora. Gratitude on all counts.
Sticta Coronata.

Dr. Seuss land
A cello leaf.
Peace.

NEED to put these in my INaturalist/ISeek app to find out what they are, besides so wonderful?!
Clever seed design!

Allora, free swinging in deep water, but staying put, thank goodness! (Imagine leaving your home for the afternoon and wondering if ‘she’ll’ still be there when you return?)

Kahawai
It seems to be an autumn thing that massive schools of Kahawai, Kingfish, and other predators chase the baitfish up to the heads of the sounds and gleefully spend their days slashing and crashing and feasting upon them. It starts at dawn and continues until dark. At completely unpredictable moments the water will suddenly boil with feeding fish only to disappear within a few moments. The first Kahawai I caught was with a spinning rig, which is well suited for frantic Hail Mary casts into the abyss. I will admit that catching that fish was closer to an accident than anything premeditated. One fish nearly chased the lure right into the boat. As we traveled through the fiords, the fairly constant surface action was nearly impossible to ignore, and sometimes the predators would use the boat to trap the bait and Allora would find herself at the center of the melee. Finally, at the head of Daag Sound I couldn’t stand it anymore; I rigged my 8 weight and propped it next to the dinghy ready to go at the next irresistible provocation. What ensued was pure madness. The fish would pop up, I would zoom over with the outboard roaring, then kill it as I coasted in, frantically start casting and get maybe one quick retrieve before the fish disappeared. As I zigged and zagged across the fiord, I’m probably lucky that we were certainly the only people then in Daag Sound so that no one arrived with white straight jacket and concerned expressions to intervene. Back and forth I dashed, tangling myself in my line, frustrated at the utter futility of stripping the fly back with the dinghy still moving forward. Once every tenth attempt, everything would work out, I’d even get in a second or third cast, and manage to get my fly to move fast enough to get some attention, and a slash maybe, a miss and back to the frantic game. I was exhausted and my shoulder was on fire by the time all of the crazy variables aligned and a willing fish slammed my fly and headed straight for the bottom of the Sound. The seriously outsized strength of that fish made me instantly regret picking my lighter 8 weight over my sturdy 9. In fact, I was pretty sure I was going to break the rod. What a relief it was to release that fish and release myself from any future notion of fly fishing for Kahawai. A River Runs Through It, it was not. ~MS

We let this Kahawai go since at that point, we weren’t even sure what it was! Turns out it would have been within regulation size to keep, but we already had a dinner plan in place and it always feels good to release them.
Cityscape in the rocks (a bit dystopian).
And mountains, too!
One lone dolphin came cruising through the anchorage and did a rather quick loop around us. We kept thinking there must be two because he’d go under and then come up much farther along than we’re used to seeing, but we never saw more than the one.
Moving from Third Cove to Stevens Cove!
We stopped to fill up Allora’s water tanks at a little floating hut which is used by fishermen during the season. Our watermaker worked fine in this mix of fresh and salt, but it’s always nice to get quick, free fills.
Another (power) boat queued up for a water fill after us so we got to talking and they shared a small Pāua (abalone) which they’d just harvested and described how to prepare it. I read that there’s a place in Hong Kong where they charge $2k per person for a Fiordland NZ Paua dinner! It was ALOT of work and yielded very little to massage this muscle into a source of protein! It would have been at least 5 years old.
The name wasn’t the only thing compelling about Stevens Cove. It was super close to the entrance/exit of Breaksea Sound, so we’d be poised for a quick transit up to Dagg Sound when ready. The only thing is that it’s such a tiny spot that we had to hope we’d fit in there! The opening can barely be seen in this picture near the turquoise water.
It was our trickiest maneuvering/anchoring to date, but we settled in to our little namesake anchorage quite sweetly. This is normally used by power boats/fishermen since it’s so close to outside and they squeeze 3 little boats in here.

There were these two ‘keyholes’ inside Stevens Cove where you could see the main Sound which would cover over at high tide and I could squeeze the kayak through, theoretically, but my kayaking happened at lower tide, so no go.
View of Allora from the Sound.
Time to go check out the ‘archipelago’ of nearby islands!
New forms to take in!

Tried to see this Chiton better, but the surge was quite strong and I really didn’t want to tip.
Then I just got into the abstract of it. I could feel myself shift from trying to make something ‘clear’ to allowing it to be simply light and color.

Shadow play.
The ocean is miraculous!

One of my favorite pics. See the green sea worm?! (Going to look that up, too!)

The water at sunset.
Preparing to slip away from Stevens Cove, the birds regaled us with some riotous farewell songs! Dagg Sound, here we come!

 

Broughton Arm, Breaksea/Te Puaitaha Sound, Captivating! – Fiordland.

Drying out the PRADA on Allora’s lifelines!
Moving from Wet Jacket Arm to Breaksea Sound.
Reflections
Being at sea, on the sea, there is always a close and present awareness of the line which divides the landed world and the underwater universe, though normally, the waves demand our attention and keep that parallel universe well hidden, and away from our thoughts. The eerie sense of depth creeps in at odd moments when something reminds you of the rocky bottom and the multilayered world of fishes below. In tropical water sometimes the bottom is visible at enormous, ludicrous depths, as the time we motored into the Gambier on a glassy sea and Diana could see sharks clearly in the pass a hundred feet below us. But in Fiordland, the water is usually hundreds of feet deep within just a couple boat lengths away from the “shore.” The water is not murky but light barely penetrates. Stillness is legendary here, also the shimmering layer of freshwater floating atop the tide, that looks like heatwaves in the desert. You can peer straight down and see golden leaves tumbling in the current above the darkened depths. But most of the time, the Sounds keep their secrets well hidden and the water mirrors back the soaring peaks and luxuriant waterfalls and exuberant beach and fern forests, doubling the awe. As stunning as it is, the obvious trick of the mind is to delete the bottom half of the image as “merely” a repetition. Sometimes I had to be reminded to see it another way. Perhaps because she was photographing these landscapes, Diana learned to see these reflection even more vividly, to delight in the ubiquitous natural Rorschach.~MS
Neat that this stunning landscape so often gets a glimpse of itself!
Wile E. Coyote
One of the handful of times we were able to actually pull a sail out – too much or too little winds to work with.
We’re not in the islands anymore!
‘Real Journeys’ run tour boats through some of the fiords. They never stay put for long.
Approaching the ‘head of the bay,’ to anchor, we’d have to be really cautious about the typically steep sided, silty sandbank which gets created by the river outflow.

We were primed to love Broughton Arm. Tony, a New Zealand sailor we met in Tonga (from an Auckland sailboat building family) got there ahead of us and posted his impression, the humbling sense of privilege he felt to be in the remote presence of such mighty granite walls and peaks. “Paradise found!,” he exclaimed. It’s hard to think of a way to convey the heart sense of moving through pristine and unpeopled areas like this, the sense that goes beyond the imagery, the waterfalls, and magnificent trees, the wildlife. The sense of living stone and water and place. You look at one of the these peaks soaring above the the fiord continually stunned by the mass and energy represented there, and then by the bounty of life exuberantly, vividly greening those granite flanks. And water, water, water everywhere. ~MS

When the sun shines overhead, the sandbank (and its’ creatures – see the ray?) are super visible and too shallow for Allora’s 2m draft.
We found a deeper edge (50′) where we dropped our Australian made Sarca Excell anchor. Started with one shore line and added another later when the wind picked up.
The fog came flooding out of the canyon head early in the morning and I ran out (coffee in hand), jumped in Namo and started rowing into it to take some pics. Didn’t realize I was still in my warm fleece onesie and had no sandfly protection. Totally worth it.

The sun reached the highest peaks and it only morphed the fog into yet more beautiful iterations.

This is a close up from the lower left corner of that last photo!
And the last wisps were seen at 11:15!
Whitebait are eaten whole with the head, tail guts and the lot still intact – most often fried, the tiny, delicate nature of the fish make them a highly sought-after dish. We were generously given these and they were described as if they were a truffle, so I was hoping they’d taste like lobster!
Been vegetarians for a couple years, but pescatarians, really, since we live on the sea and can catch FRESH fish. These were only attempted because they were a gift.
RoShamBo: fish beats butter, sadly.
Prepared/Disguised as described by the local fishermen, in eggs, but they were a no go for me. Marcus ate them but said he wouldn’t walk across the street to get some more.
My kakak excursions were often 2-3 hours and almost a meditation with the slow movement and extreme focus on details. Instead of covering distance, I got into just looking closer and closer at EVERYTHING!

It had rained the night before, so everything was drippy and bathed with fresh water. The top 10 metres or so of the fiord is freshwater. The area gets 7-9 meters (22-29′) of rainfall every year, emptying into the sounds via its many rivers and waterfalls. On its way, this runoff picks up tannins from plants and soil that stain the freshwater the colour of tea.
Even the boulders share their world with lichen.
Suddenly 10 of these HUGE 1 meter (3-4′) fish darted all around me! They had a shark like, predator attitude and I only learned later that they were Kingfish, or Haku/Kahu in Māori. It definitely broke me out of my close focused, serene mental state!

Saw this and had to go closer to see if I was imagining a ray shape?!
A New Zealand/Australian Eagle Ray (Myliobatis tenuicaudatus)! (Looked it up later – I have never seen an eagle ray like this).

I did a double take on this daisy, as it was the ONLY one I saw in Fiordland, EVER! Must have been early or late season?!

Time to head back to Allora when this is what I’m seeing!
Time to get yet another perspective!
Bird’s eye view!
Not the easiest thing to pilot from aboard a sailboat, but at least we’re at anchor!
A much clearer view of that sandbank we need to avoid.
Another phenomenal day dawns in Broughton Arm.

We’ve had to carry all of our trash since leaving Oban in Stewart Island, so we clean and cut any plastics, smash our aluminum cans and stack paper. Talked about making this a weekly practice, but usually we’d wait till the buckets were overflowing!

More kayak time.

See the face?!
And the kind of Kokopelli-esque shadow?!

 

How ’bout Narcissus seeing his own reflection?!
Hehe. Couldn’t resist. (Marcus, in sandfly attire, was actually looking at fish!)

Heading from Broughton Arm to Vancouver Arm.

Wet Jacket Arm, not just any Arm – Fiordland.

Our wake was the only disturbance as we slinked up Acheron Passage toward Wet Jacket Arm.
Did the whole Astanga practice in sandfly attire on the foredeck, underway but oh so calm.

In our past experience, being this close to shore would NOT feel like where you’d want to be in a big blow, but when in Fiordland …
We’re tied every which way!
Lavishly colored intertidal zones.
It’s always fun to explore after we get Allora all set and secure.
Not sure if the sandflies avoid us because we’re covered or just too dorky.
Me if we stayed in Fiordland much longer.
We just kept cracking up at our ‘get ups.’
These teensy charmers were just about a half centimeter!
Nature has some clever solutions for seed distribution.
Walked up this creekbed for a ways. In general, we managed far more hiking than in most places, despite the clear challenges.
Possibly another lichenized fungus, but I’m not sure?! Will research!
Let the rain begin …

We ended up with buckets of rain and big winds from the west. At night there was bioluminescence as the raindrops hit the water!!!
The next day there were waterfalls everywhere, and the creekbed we had walked up was a river!

Lots to captivate ~ lingering rainbows, new waterfalls, breathtaking bush, dolphins and surreal reflections while moving up to the end of Wet Jacket Arm. I wrote these words in the logbook from that day: ‘OH MY GOODNESS – A VISUAL FEAST!’

A group of maybe 12 Bottlenose cruised along the shore, paralleling our movements for :45!

Called this my ‘surfboard.’
Such a pretty palette
Sphagnum magellanicum, commonly called Magellanic bogmoss.

Another stunning move to our next anchorage NE of Oke Island. Happy me.
While trying to decide if we’d head out on an afternoon hike at Herrick Creek across the bay, this rainbow arched directly over the access point, so our decision was made!
We should most definitely look up to them.
As if ‘normal’ colored mushrooms weren’t rad enough already?!

And THESE?!!! (I’ll hope to edit in some names later).
Classic Fiordland.

An altar in the woods.
Heard there are no poisonous berries in NZ, but we didn’t dare.
Lush habitat.
Okay, THEN we came upon THIS!!!
Time time time
the blink of an eye
this old tree stands
long passed her prime
twists and turns and bends
green and tattered limbs
once a luxurious crown, thin and brittle now
built a mighty trunk
roots bound to ancient stone
deep fissures of wisdom
etched by sun and boundless sky
age like vines creeps in
dancing with cruel and gentle winds
obliging every whim
mist and storm, drought and deluge
now these wooden branches 
broken and hollow 
hang as open arms
rings within rings
home of a million creatures
grateful or indifferent
loss and love make her beautiful
mother to a forest ~MS
Phenomenal, truly.
Cohabitation.

 

Symbiotic joy!
A shelf mushroom with the same myriad colors as our magic tree.
These water droplet patterns reminded me of molecular structures from Chemistry.
We reached the lake!
No context, just expression!
There are more. Message me if you want the full repertoire?! I kept thinking that our Magic tree might know just what was being communicated here.

Heading back to Allora.
And this was our post hike rainbow!

 

 

 

Delightful Dusky/Tamatea Sound – Fiordland

Dusky is the longest and most extensive fiord in Fiordland at nearly 24 miles in length. Named ‘Dusky’ after Captain Cook’s evening sail by in 1770, and ‘Tamatea’ after the renown  Māori explorer who spent much time there. He’s also known for the coining the longest name of a place near Hawke’s Bay ‘Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu,’ so I’m glad I didn’t have to work that into our logbook! ~DS

From ‘the outside,’ transiting open ocean between Preservation Inlet to Dusky/Tamatea Complex. The endless layers of blue …
Sometimes the entrance to the fiord would be relatively narrow and the transitions could be tough depending on the conditions. We avoided a reef by taking a dishearteningly named shortcut, ‘Broke Adrift Passage,’ leaving Preservation.
Thank you, Albacore, for being just the right size and feeding us.
We wove our way back through the narrow twists and turns to find ourselves alone in this magical nook.

Inner Luncheon Cove on Anchor Island, Dusky Sound 

We are anchored in an 18th century naturalist’s illustration. The Kākā, subtly colored parrots, russet and carmine, gray and mossy green, chatter in mobs back and forth. Fur seals and their pups bawl and rumble along the densely wooded shore, draped on rocks, sunning just out of the vivid green tide, or hidden mysteriously in the forest. Rays and Broadnose Sevengill sharks patrol the shallows. Bellbirds chime and Wood Pigeons dive and soar in mating displays, wind whirring in their wings. The water is supernaturally still after the tumult and breaking swell of Broke Adrift Passage, and the long motor up the easing blue Pacific around Cape Providence. The scale of the world is abruptly more intimate. Captain Cook dined on crayfish here in 1773. He left behind a recipe for brewing beer from the bark of Rimu trees, molasses and yeast. The island is also predator free, and refuge to the rare ground parrot, the Kākāpō, once thought to be extinct – rediscovered in Port Pegasus, Stewart Island by Rodney Russ, a sailor/explorer we met in Christchurch.

A chance to sit on the bow and meditate outside, to the constant music of birds, “Here and now boys, here and now.”

The dearth of sandflies and still air made for a pleasant barbecue, cooking up fillets of the Albacore tuna we caught on our way into Dusky. 

The trails on Anchor Island are named and well marked, though oddly, do not seem to clearly indicate which of the many paths lead to the lake (just a kilometer or two away). We weren’t very far along the “wrong” trail when a mob of Kaka settled noisly into the trees over our heads. We sat still and waited and they ventured closer and closer, sailing back and forth, gnawing at the branches with their strong beaks and then landed a few feet away, turning their heads upside down for a curious closer look. A South Island Robin/Kakaruai (re-introduced in 2002) also hopped over to say hello, as they do, finally summoning the courage to peck at the bottom of my shoe. ~MS

Itty bitty baby fur seal curious about my kayak.
Some facts. Thanks Southland Historical Committee!
We’d have to consider the sizable tides when tying up Namo (our dinghy).
Until this encounter, we’d only seen Kākā from a distance.
A connection was made.
Gorgeous underbellies!
Such a treat!
South Island Robins follow hikers, nibbling on what gets stirred up underfoot and generally being joyful.
Still haven’t figured out what these are called – besides COOL!!!
The view from atop Anchor Island and the freshwater lake in the interior.
Coulda stayed here forever!
Dusky (Bottlenose) Dolphins bringing GLEE with every splash!!!
And smiles …

Fanny Cove, Dusky Sound

It was still when we arrived after the move from Anchor Island. Along the way we enjoyed the company of some of Dusky Sound’s residence Bottlenose dolphins, and stopped for a closer look at a waterfall, a hundred feet of depth under Allora’s keel a boat length or less from shore. We ate some bread that Diana pulled from the oven just as we entered the broad cove and thought about our plan for anchoring. The forecast was for twenty-five to thirty knots of northerly on the outside (a little less than the full Pusygar gale which prevails three hundred days out of a year), but all the models showed much less fifteen miles inland form the open sea. Still with the wind and williwas, we didn’t really know what we might get. The dramatic cove with the huge granite wall of Perpendicular Peak at the head is much bigger than in looks on the chart. The opposite of intimate Luncheon cove. We dropped in 60 feet of water and laid out all of our 100 meters of chain at a shallow angle along the shoreline, still sitting in thirty feet of water but with rocky shallows close by. Our first line would not really hold us off, and we ran a second as the wind came up and it was clear that the topography of cove seemed to twist the north wind with just a hint of west in it to solid west, coming at Allora from the port side and pushing us toward shore. The cove is big enough for a reasonable bit of fetch too, but the water on the east side is just too deep. Already worn out from setting the first two lines we debated putting out a second anchor from our midships cleat, but we worried about dealing with picking it back up if things got rough and we hand to move. We finally settled on putting out a third shore line using forty feet of chain to tie around a rock and pulled that up tight. By then the wind was pushing us with gusts of 18 knots. It went against every sailor instinct to be holding off a lee shore this way, but as long as our lines held it would take some mighty force indeed to drag 100 meters of chain and an anchor uphill. A power boat came in, and poked around on the east side and dropped anchor along the east side which we thought was too deep and we briefly wondered if we’d read the situation wrong (having no advice in our books about where to anchor in this broad open cove). But then they sent a dinghy over and we recognized the driver as he approached. Junate! from Hokey Pokey, a catamaran we knew from Papeete and the Gambier! We shared a brief excited catch-up about the last three years before he headed back. They’d also decided that it was too deep to anchor on the more protected east side and were zooming off (as only a power boat may) to find a mooring in another cove, much too far away for us to make before dark. And we were left alone with the wind, checking our shorelines and worrying how much more the night would bring. Just before dark the wind gusted to the mid twenties and Allora settled back about fifteen feet closer to shore than she had been. Our starboard shoreline went momentarily slack and the depth rose to twenty five feet. It began to rain.  We donned foulies and went on deck ready to take more drastic action if it turned out that our anchor was actually not holding. We tightened up the breast line chained to the rock to pull us out into deeper water, and checked the GPS. We finally decided that the low tide had allowed some slack in our chain which the gusts shook out and we were holding fine. We made sure the dishes were away and everything was ship shape for the night, just in case, and then the wind quit completely, the rain settled in gently. In the middle of the night we woke up to an amazing stillness, just the finest pitter patter of rain. Light from a still nearly full moon softly lit the stunning granite faces that guard the entrance to the cove and the fine rain softened their reflection in the still water. It felt like a big reassuring landscape hug for a wonderful, still, uneventful night of sleep. ~MS

We could motor over and get super close to shore with Allora because of the steep drop offs/depths.
Couldn’t resist. Dropped the kayak while Marcus held Allora just off shore. The force of the water was strong enough that I couldn’t swish under it like I’d imagined.
This is one frame of one spot in one fiord. Think about the scale and magnitude and impenetrability of this wilderness area?!!
I kept seeing an Animé character in this one!
Fanny Bay: Choosing the exact whereabouts of where we’d be about!
It’s so exciting to add a whole (reflection) dimension to your visual field.
After 7 years, my Oru kayak is on its’ last adventure (I was sitting in a fair amount of water!), but boy did we get about! (Me here in full dork garb for sandfly avoidance.)
There are more where this came from! I had a blast cruising along the water’s edge and finding snippets to savor.
There were heaps of these backlit webs, but no spiders to be seen?

Special spot, Fanny Bay.

Ahhh, the graceful FERNS!!! So so many!!!
The wind in Fiordland has two speeds: gale or glass.
We ended up feeling like we wound our own web with all the lines securing Allora!
Had some fun trying to find a lake which we’d read was just a kilometer up the forest basin.
A healthy shelf fungi – they get HUGE in Fiordland.
It was love at first sight – Marcus meets sponge moss! Nap time.
Hehe. Seeing through new lenses.

So much green … So much life …
Finally made it to the lake, but we’re not getting any FKT’s (fastest known times)!
OOPS! Also not making any ‘how to’ videos on leaving your tender! Didn’t quite calculate THAT tide right! Sorry Namo!
Back on Allora, watching the moonset.
On the move again, heading through Bowen Channel toward Shark Cove.

Shark Cove Anchorage – our bow anchor and two stern lines to shore. See ‘backstory’ below!

Seaforth River, Dusky Sound

It took us three tries to get the anchor to hold in Shark Cove. Communication from bow (Diana) to the helm (Marcus) is always a bit challenging (West Marine sells headsets called “marriage savers”). The view is different, too. We did alright for the first couple of attempted sets, but both got a little impatient and grumpy by the third. It held, and we were finally tied up, but tired and neither of us feeling great about how the teamwork had held up. There’s a lot at stake — sudden weather switches, unpredictable williwaws make it crucial to get this right. Every couple of days we get another chance to see if we can improve on our mutual desire to work together.

We got a little of a late start for the longish dinghy ride over to Supper Cove where the Seaforth River enters the Sound. It’s reported to hold brown trout! The Dusky trail slopes along the banks, through mud puddles and a podocarp forest of magnificent rimu, kahikatea, miro, mataī and tōtara trees. The river tumbles off some boulders and then flattens like a lake for several kilometers. Tea stained with tannins, spotting fish (the only way to fish in New Zealand) was tough. Ultimately we didn’t see any, though a few rocks got some very intense attention.~MS We took Namo over to the next bay, Supper Cove, to be able to hike on the Dusky Track. It’s an advanced tramper track – 84km one way, but we just did 6km and found it muddy but heavenly (not bushwhacking).

An official TRAIL, baby!
Forest light can look like studio light!
Focus schmocus, look at those colors!
The non-green vegetation really stood out.
The leaves of the Beech trees leach acidic tannins into the rivers making them appear ‘tea stained.’
Sticta Coronata, a lichenized fungi. We learned from our Lyttelton artist friend, Virginia, that it makes fabulous natural dye for fabric!
Virginia’s Sticta dyed wool.
Back in Shark Cove. No sharks spotted but some magical kayaking and wise trees!
Some really lovely Australians invited us aboard their custom built boat of 30 years, s/v Fine Tolerance for tea!
I’d heard a waterfall from the kayak and went back to get Marcus so we could try to find the source! Took this pic to show that we can drink the water ANYWHERE in NZ without fear of getting Giardia. This ‘quick cup’ is our favorite thing from Wyatt’s running world – clip it on your backpack and it’s light as a feather – voila, water at the ready!
Paradise found!
What is it about falling water?!!
Just might have to be a mosaic someday?!
Our last night in Shark Cove. We ended up with just under two months in Fiordland and we’d have loved twice as much at least.
We saw so few other boats, but at dusk this boat ‘Flightless’ showed up and picked up the big mooring. In the wee hours of the morning (hence the soft focus), the morning, the helicopter dropped in from the head of the bay, landed and shifted out crew for this tour boat operated by a conservation minded company called, ‘Pure Salt.’
The Acheron Passage is a north/south running inland route which connects Dusky Sound to Wet Jacket Arm to Breaksea Sound. Quite nice from our perspective as we didn’t need to go ALL the way back out to the open ocean to traverse up to Breaksea. Plus, we had the benefit of securing ourselves in what’s known as an ‘All Weather Anchorage,’ and the safest spot in all of Fiordland for a W/NW blow due in the next day. Sure couldn’t imagine it with these mirror like conditions though …

While Wet Jacket Arm and Breaksea Sound are still part of the Dusky/Tamatea Complex, I’ve broken them up, if for no other reason than my own sanity, so I can feel a sense of progression, ha! ~DS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mountains and Waterfalls and Reflections, oh my! Preservation Inlet/Rakituma – FIORDLAND,

 

Heading across the Tasman Sea, the farthest South Allora’s ever been!
I took this pic of Marcus cozily sleeping off watch …
… and without knowing I had, he took this of me in the same state!
Arriving early (too early)!

 

Last Cove, Preservation Inlet

My first series of thoughts were about the precariousness of our situation, and how much we depend on our engine, despite being a sailboat. What in the world would Captain Cook do? We had arrived at the entrance to Preservation Inlet a couple of hours too early, despite our attempts to slow Allora down. No wind but a big southwest swell colliding with a northerly chop was making going slow under power uncomfortable, the mainsail slatting back and forth despite the preventer. We had already decided to edge up toward Dusky Sound (another twenty miles onward) and go in there instead as long as the forecast northerly held off. I’d barely turned Allora in that direction when the wind began building, directly on our nose, gusting up to 16 knots. No harm in poking a little further that way, to kill time. The Puysegur lighthouse flashed bright and high on our beam, a reminder of where in the world’s oceans we were. Puysegur hosts gale winds or stronger 300 days a year. The weather models showed the next gale arriving by afternoon, by which time we needed to be safely tied up at anchor. The first issue with the engine I noticed was that the display at the nav station was off. Weird, I thought. Then I noticed the gauges in the cockpit, shutting off  and popping back on. Very weird. Then the engine warning came on, beeping insistently. What the heck? Thinking mainly at this point of not waking Diana who’d had a very rough night already struggling to get to sleep for the first few hours of my watch, I quickly shut the engine down. Then as we slowed in the airless swell, I pushed the button to start it back up. It flashed and went off. I tried again, it stayed on long enough for me to get a couple slow, battery dead, rolls of the engine. I had been thinking it was time to replace this starter battery, in fact, I had just had a conversation with Willy on Pazzo about how you know when your starter battery is dead. I should have known better than to bring this up with him, since the last boat conversation I’d had with him was about our flawless autopilot, which literally failed the next day (the first time in six and half years). For a few panicked moments I couldn’t think about anything except the weather forecasts I’d been looking at that predicted wind on the nose if you tried to sail for Dusky and no wind at Puysegur until the arrival of the gale. I guess Captain Cook would just have had to sit there roll in the three meter swell and wait for however many hours it was going to be until the gale chased him in. I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I went below and switched the starter battery to combine with the house batteries and the engine started up. Phew! But the engine warning was still blaring CHCK ENGINE. Amazingly, Diana was still sound asleep, despite about the blaring warning lights, or me running up and down the companionway, starting and stopping the engine. Okay, I checked the oil. I checked the temperature. I checked the cooling system. I checked the transmission. All good. The engine sounded absolutely fine. I’d installed the display at the Nav because supposedly it might give me more information than just CHCK ENGINE… how about check battery, or check electrical system? I reluctantly woke up Diana to tell her about the situation. It definitely did not seem like a good idea to head toward Dusky, we agreed. I figured out how to make the engine warning beep a little bit quieter below and she tried to get back to sleep. I started a slow zig zag toward Puysegur lighthouse, chugging along at under 3 knots, keeping a wary eye on the churning cauldron of Balleny Breaks less than a mile northeast of us and slowly got used to the steady ringing of the engine warning. We motored up the stunning Preservation Inlet to Last Cove as I kicked myself for ignoring my instinct to replace that starter battery. I’d checked it and it seemed okay, but it would have been relatively cheap and easy to replace it, just in case, and not be in this situation. Our first anchorage in Fiordland. We’ve been working on how to set our anchor and lines, a sleepless night from the passage and an engine with a steady CHCK ENGINE still blaring did not make it easier. With a big blow coming we wanted to get it right. 300 feet of rode and two lines to shore. 

The weather models, all four that we download via satellite, predicted this narrow window for rounding the great cape on Stewart Island and sailing with an easterly breeze up to the notorious Puysegur before the wind switched northerly with forecast 50+ knot gusts. We put a lot of faith in them, and they were spot on. After a long nap, I started the project of dealing with the starter battery. My idea was to replace it with one of the house batteries. In the process, I had the thought to check the Duo Charger which regulates the battery charging from the engine’s alternators. The installation showed two fuses and as I pulled the wires to find the inline fuse, I noticed the one for the starter battery was a bit loose. I tightened it up, started the engine, and the charging voltage jumped up right to where it belonged. A loose wire. That was all. Three turns of a screw. ~MS

Dropping the Mainsail. Last time we’ll be sailing for quite awhile. Fiordland is either glassy calm or all out gales.
Oh so happy to be in Fiordland!!

The new GEEK garb, protected (hopefully) from sandflies and the chilly temps!

We started to learn about seeing in this new dimension of the reflection!
Totem

The tides can be sizable and what’s revealed at low can be a wonderland of color.
Last Cove
Stern tying still takes awhile to finesse.
Let the storm begin! This is another ‘all weather anchorage,’ so we hoped the name was apt.
Most of the time it was calm inside and were spared the fury of the wind.
Adjusting the snubber and letting every bit of rode out.

 

These rainbow williwaw’s would wash over Allora with about 40kts of wind – I had to hold on tightly to get the pic!

Cascade Cove, Preservation Inlet

We arrived as the announcement came over the PA on a small Real Adventures cruise boat anchored at dead center in the cove, “the generator will be turned off at 9:30 and then back on again at 6:00 for your convenience…” Two crew walked to the bow, short sleeved black uniforms and to our delight, weighed anchor, the boat disappeared past the head of the cove and left us to the cheerful sound of a small waterfall pouring down the rocks next to a stout blue shoreline. We dropped our own anchor and tied up a boat length from shore. One of our books said that brown trout inhabit the river which flows into the lake above the dramatic falls at the head of the cove. A mere two kilometers as the Tui flies. All we needed to do is scramble up the side of the falls, then bushwack along the lakeshore. We clambered up, relying on roots and branches for hand holds, worrying about the way back down, and somehow made it to the top of the falls. The steep sided outlet of the lake forced us up and up over fallen mossy logs and broken rock faces. Every step was a miniature triumph as we inched and wiggled and scooted minutely closer. The edge of the lake, walking in the shallow was better for a while, until it became a mote of surprise waist deep holes and fallen logs. After hours invested in about a kilometer of progress, we admitted defeat and turned back, now knowing what lay ahead. Many times we expressed gratitude for the near absence of sandflies and the forest herself was pure magic of green mosses and deep ferns and wise old trees. Back at the outlet of the lake where for a brief time there had been trail flags to follow, we found a row boat pulled ashore that we had walked right by. Those Long River brown trout will never know how close them came. The biggest challenge was finding our way back down to the dinghy tied up in the outflow below the falls. We had cleverly laid out markings with sticks on our way up to mark the way, but those didn’t work out any better than bread crumbs did for Hansel and Gretel. We cliffed out, over and over again, but eventually, banged, bruised and muddy found a way down, never more happy to find Namo, dutifully waiting to take us home.

Real Journey’s boat on mooring.
Cascade Falls, as seen from our anchorage.
Waterfalls appeared after every rain.
Some anchorages had water hoses attached to falls (fishermen installed) so we filled up our tanks by scooting RIGHT alongside this wall, keeping Allora’s mast clear of the overhanging trees.
I know, let’s climb to the top of the Falls! And then cross that lake up there to get to the river beyond. Extricating limbs from branches. The adventure begins …
Where to now?
Fiordland’s stunning (and impenetrable) bush.
I am wild about Umbrella Moss!
We kept calling out to each other, so as not to get completely lost!
You could spend a lifetime learning about all the ferns of Fiordland.

Not going that way.
Cascade Falls cascading and falling.
A majestic Rimu.
Dancing with the vegetation.
Wild man Marcus with a sandfly friend!
Plate fungi.
Words cannot describe the magical trees of Fiordland’s bush.
Giddy despite the challenges.
So close to that river, and yet so far …
Gorgeous cliff faces.
We ‘hiked’ to the top of Cascade Falls/Cascade Basin
That river is so close, but without deciding to swim, we just couldn’t get there.
Cascade Falls in low light upon our return.
What a day!
A circuitous track, indeed!
Allora stays put while we go off adventuring.
We’re where we’re meant to be!
Heading over to our last anchorage in Preservation, Isthmus Cove.
Marcus was able to maneuver Allora crazy close to these walls because the steep drop offs and sufficient depths.

I found myself seeing abstracts in the tidal zone.
Our last anchorage.

Next stop: Fiordland/Dusky Sound

 

Port Pegasus, Pikihatiti, southernmost region of Rakiura/Stewart Island

Port Pegasus

After a long period in the 19th century of surprisingly energetic efforts to master and exploit the natural “resources” of Rakiuru,  whaling, mining, seal fur trade, fishing and harvesting lumber, New Zealander’s finally left most of this southern island alone, so that ninety-eight percent of the island is under the management of the Department of Conservation (DOC). It is wild again, and feels that way. There are a few DOC huts scattered about, and a system of trails but most of the island is difficult to reach in any other way than a boat. Port Pegasus still has the remans of some of the settlements, rusted and covered in the bush, but arriving by sea it feels beautifully raw and untouched with very few visitors. We saw a few other boats, including Pazzo, who we met in Lyttelton. The fishing was ridiculously prolific. We caught something on nearly every drop of the jig, and it took less than fifteen minutes to have our first legal sized Blue Cod for tacos. All in all, a very special, wild, rarely visited place that was a little chilly from steady winds that certainly had a whiff of Antarctica on them. 

Ben’s Bay Anchorage, Port Pegasus, only accessible by boat.
South Island Robin or Toutouwai, is found only in NZ. They follow hikers hoping to benefit from the stirred up soil.
A preview of the intense reflections seen in Fiordland.
Rosy Sundew, Drosera Spatulata
We have to collect all of our rubbish, so everything gets reused.
Gorgeous hike up the Tin Range Track. There was a tin mining boom here in the 1890’s. We followed the old RR ties up to the top.
Mesmerized by the close up flora.
Allora at her happiest!

Beach found on a 15 minute hike from the protection of Disappointment Cove.
Pretty notably these sea lions rule this beach.
Sea Lions can’t hide their movements!
Fiordland Crested Penguin fledgling.

Tucked up in the all weather anchorage/Disappointment Cove with 5 lines next to s/v Pazzo awaiting a storm.
Plentiful Blue Cod! Yum, yum, more fish tacos!
Jellyfish
Marcus giving Willy from s/v Pazzo a filleting ‘how to.’

Serenity.

Anchors Aweigh! Lyttelton to Rakiura/Stewart Island

Just a LITTLE bit queasy, no big surprise!

Flea Bay, Banks Peninsula

Diana has put in some epic kayak explorations already, along the rocks in Flea Bay on Banks peninsula where the cute little Blue Penguins perch under the rocks and baby Fur Seals flop about in confused excitement. 

The rugged coastline of Banks Peninsula!
There is a fabulous Blue Penguin recovery project in Flea Bay.
Moulting Blue Penguins (also called, ‘White Flippered’)


Look for the brand new baby fur seals!

Takamatua Bay, Akaroa

Our friends on Blue Goose – the calm after the winds.

After a day hiding from the southwest wind and rain in Takamatua Bay, we spent a sunny day in Akaroa walking up a hill lined with small wooden houses to the “Giants House,” where a purple haired mosaicist and sculptor (don’t they all have purple hair?), Josie Martin, spent a lifetime creating a magical inspired garden. The expressiveness and joy of her work was dazzling, full of color and peopleness.

We’re still adjusting to the sea again. Remembering little things about Allora that we forgot. Relearning things we may have come to take for granted. The first leg of our first passage in two years, the winds were light but steady and graciously allowed us to sail to windward with out tacking. The shelter of the shore, never more that twenty miles away, kept the seas mild. It was chilly, but our foulies are pretty bomber and it was a lovely day.

Royal Albatross!

A fisherman came out in his short sleeves to take a picture of us as we sailed closeby downwind and he pounded homeward into it.

Galley antics!

The wind died to nothing under a full moon, after some mechanical glitches right at dusk. At dawn the wind returned for a nice broad reach and then wing and wing downwind all the way to the end of the south island passing “the Nuggets” to enter Foveaux Strait. 

We motored through the night, anticipating 15 to 30 knots on the beam by sunrise, but that never materialized. The famously rough Strait was calm – though with strong, swirling currents that confused our brief attempts to sail. The wind came up like a long slow meditative breath and then relaxed to glassy seas as the sun rose spectacularly and we approached Rakiura/Stewart Island.

The humble main town of Oban, Stewart Island
Sandy beaches but muddy seabed.

We’re learning that anchoring in mud and weeds isn’t the same as sand. Diana used to say we should package the fine, fine powdery pink stuff that came up with the anchor in the Gambiers, and sell it to spas. I haven’t heard that comment about the pungent muds of Rakiura (Stewart Island). Maybe a different brand (“Glory Bay Green Lipped New Zealand Muscle” brand) for the truly hardcore mud bather. It also hasn’t been holding us quite the same way. Not sure to do with the full anchor of weeds that came up the first time our anchor did a little dragging in 30 kts wind. 

Becoming more familiar with these mid latitude winds is going to take a while, too. The basic idea is becoming apparent — fronts every few days followed by strong SW blows, and then they spin around and do it again. Locals have been complaining about a dearth of rain with these fronts, the filmy ferns in the understory are feeling it, rolling up shop and hoping for a change. It’s possible that La Nina is to blame. That doesn’t mean summer is warm here on the edge of the Southern Ocean, even when the sun shines.

Here in Paterson Inlet, after the wind blows itself into a calm, it has been glassy as a lake sometimes. Ninety-Eight percent of Rakirua is conservation land, with trails and huts along some of the bays and coves, and otherwise, lush wilderness. The bush grows slow but lush, and the winds carve a limit to the canopy.

One of the sweet DOC (Department of Conservation) huts along the Rakiura Track.
What do YOU see?!

Blue Cod, with their delicious white meat seem to be ridiculously easy to catch. A little jigging provided us, after quite a few small fish, with a keeper for fish tacos. Reminded me of the one taco, two taco, three taco sea bass of the Sea of Cortez. 

We’re re-learning, too, that it is not, and never has been, all fun and games. The carburetor on the outboard has used up a few hours on a couple of different afternoons. Despite being ‘fixed’ at great expense in Christchurch, the gummed up high speed jet closed up and our outboard carburetor is compromised. We’ll have to be extra careful and baby it. Since we depend on that motor so much, I’m afraid to try to drill out and replace it with the spare jet we have. If it doesn’t go right, we’d be stuck. The closest replacement carb is in Japan and weeks away. 

The classic – making repairs in exotic locations!
Whaler’s Base, Paterson Inlet

Mussels for miles!

Predator free Ulva Island was a particular treat. We walked with a guide, a woman who came here in the 90’s as part of the effort to rid the island of predators, particularly rats, to save the birds. Kiwi, Robins, Bellbirds, Riflemen, Kaka and Kakariki (including one rare Yellow-Crested), huge Wood Pigeons diving and soaring in noisy acrobatics for mating season, and a beautiful extremely rare Saddleback with russet shoulders. Ulva Island has never been logged, and the native trees were breathtaking, Rimu, Totara and Miro . One grand old giant estimated at 1200 years old, with a whole ecosystem of her own thriving in the higher branches. ~MS

These pics were all taken with my iPhone, as one of the first things I managed to do was tip my kayak and lose my beautiful Sony. A lesson in attachment for sure.

This will be our last cell coverage for at least a month as we head further south, down to Port Pegasus and then on to Fiordland. Starting tomorrow (28/2/22), we’ll move over to our Inreach and Iridium systems to communicate! (You can see those details on the Contact Us page.) Be well, friends and fam. We’ll be breathing you into our hearts! ~DS

Tonga to Minerva to New Zealand, dunh dunh DUNH!

It’s just over a thousand miles from Tongatapu at the southern end of Tonga and the northern port of Opua in New Zealand. What makes this passage different from pretty much all the sailing we’ve done so far is the transition from tropical weather (low pressure systems and troughs) to the temperate cycle of fronts dividing high pressure and low pressure which march eastward across the Tasman sea and wash over New Zealand in waves. The ideal passage strategy is pretty well known, but perfect cooperation from the weather is probably pretty rare.

We used a weather prediction software called Predict Wind which allows us to download four different models of wind files (called gribs), GPS (the US model), ECMWF (the European model) and two variations on these models produced by Predict wind PWG and PWE. 

Generally, they are in pretty good agreement for one to three days out and then they tend to disagree on what’s going to happen, sometimes quite radically. The value of comparing different predictions is that it gives you a heads up for ‘what-if’ scenarios. 

The most common strategy for this passage is make a long westward loop, with a stop at the Minerva reefs which provide a good anchorage and a chance to get the latest predictions for the final push.

*See our post from Minerva: minerva-north-haven-in-the-pacific

What everyone looks for are decent (enough) conditions to make that arc as you leave Minerva (not bashing directly into southern head winds) and timing which assures you won’t encounter a nasty cold front north of 30° South latitude.

The ideal is to arrive on the tail of a high just ahead of the front with nice north or even northwest tail winds … but that timing can be risky. 

As we arrived this year in Minerva we’d been looking at the models that suggested ten to fourteen days out that there might be a weather window around November 6th (which is the date we arbitrarily listed with NZ immigration as our arrival date). The European model, however warned of some very high winds from due south or even south west that would make going straight from Minerva tough. Still, the other models weren’t showing conditions quite as strong. They predicted that the high pressure creating this squash zone wouldn’t stall as long as the ECMWF predicted. We got to Minerva very early and waited for daylight to go in (in fact, we now know you can go in and even anchor in the dark, the Navionics charts are accurate and there are no big hazards). We could see boats arriving behind us and some came in after us, but several made the decision to keep going. One Kiwi boat we know left the morning we arrived, also hoping to make a possible earlier arrival in NZ.

 As it turned out the European model called this one, and the boats that continued on had a pretty tough time. One trimaran we know reported 7 meter seas and 50 knot gusts, the captain described it as an ‘exhilarating, wet sail,’  but it didn’t sound very comfortable. I’m not totally sure his crew was in complete agreement.  The experienced Kiwi boat called it “gale conditions.” One boat turned back for Minerva after two days. The bottom line is that no one who continued on was making very much southing, despite getting beaten up. 

We spent three nights in Minerva watching the weather and enjoying that magical spot. The winds blew in the twenties but it’s a very solid anchorage and was perfectly comfortable even when it got a little bumpy at high tide. 

By the time we were ready to leave for the 800 mile leg to New Zealand on November 1, there were 30 boats anchored in Minerva (it could fit a hundred easily). Twenty-three left at the same morning, and we joined them, leaving toward the end of the pack. 

What we were seeing in the gribs that made us go were predictions that the wind should start to swing east as the high finally moved off and that the next front ‘shouldn’t’ hit New Zealand  until the 7th (a weak front) and maybe not even until the 9th or 10th (more of a real front). Based on watching the weather this year, I’d say that made for an unusually generous weather window. 

The two obstacles we needed to plan for were wind and seas that were still more southerly than optimal and what looked to be a big chunk of calm airs for the last two days. For this passage I think most would accept some windless motoring rather than encounter the 6 meter seas and gales conditions off the coast of New Zealand that sunk a boat this year 22 miles from her destination. 

This is the passage that Allora was made for. She sails to windward like a champ so that we were able to comfortably point higher, meaning head south a little sooner, than much of the fleet. She’s also fast with wind ahead of the beam, mainly I think because she handles the seas so well. We started passing boats the first night, most during Wyatt’s midnight watch. Diana had volunteered to help run an SSB radio net (the “Tonga to NZ” net), so we were apprised of most of the boats positions that way. By the end of third day of windward sailing (45-60 degrees apparent) we had passed everyone except a Dutch trimaran. Then the wind began to die, and this is where Allora’s advantages as an offshore passagemaker also shine. We carry 190 gallons of diesel so we had no reason to save fuel and wait to start motor sailing to keep up our speed. Our experienced Kiwi friend, Tony, who’s done this passage many times had counseled us not to let our boat speed drop below five knots, and since we had the fuel we turned directly on the rhumb line and kept her moving. With an 80 horse Yanmar, Allora also motors comfortably at 7.5 to 8 knots (uses more fuel, but we had it, and it is better for the diesel to run hotter). In the end, we used our engine for two days, which is the longest we ever have. But boats that waited to turn their engines on arrived a day later than us, so they ended up motoring pretty much just as long. Boats without the fuel range came in two days after us when the wind began to pick up again. We arrived at 1:00PM on the 6th of November.

Okay, so now please forgive me for a little boasting. A lot went into planning this infamous passage and we’ve been thinking about how it would go for a very long time. We were the first of the “Minerva Yacht Club” boats to arrive in Opua, ahead of the trimaran because they did not have the motoring capacity we do, and ahead of a 52 foot catamaran because that boat could not sail as fast with the wind ahead of the beam.

Part of what made this a great passage was our strategy. Initially, we heeded the common wisdom of heading for “John’s Corner” at 30S 173E. The idea of this approach is that it gets you closer, but you’re still in a position to slow down if a front comes in sooner than predicted so that you confront it above 30 degree where it is less dangerous. Then, as the wind swung more east we headed up, but not right away on the rhumb line, but cutting the corner. We were faster at 50 degrees apparent and getting a better distance made good (DMG) to New Zealand. Boats that headed for the rhumb line too soon fell behind us because the seas were rougher to the east. Boats that waited even longer to head up added a lot more miles to their passage. Using the engine to motorsail when our speed dropped below 5 knots, allowed us to turn on the rhumb line once it was clear that the coast was clear for a Nov 6 arrival, and assured that we could spend one less night at sea. 

Though we love to sail and hate to motor, the conditions were eventually so beautiful and glassy calm it was a different kind of pleasure. With the sails down it was also easier to detour when we spotted a pod of pilot whales and to pause for Wyatt to get some beautiful shots of the first Alabatross we’ve seen. It also gave Diana, Wyatt and I a chance to get the boat ready for inspection by Customs. 

Wyatt’s shots of the Grey Headed Albatross.
©WLS

In the end, we couldn’t have wished for a better passage and we couldn’t be happier with Allora. What a boat!

~MS

Diana disclaimer: All these shots are taken during the placid last two days of our passage. Before that, the camera wasn’t coming out too much!!

 

Minerva North, Haven in the Pacific

©s/v Taurus

Of all the places Allora has taken us, North Minerva Reef, is a stand out. The reef literally emerges only 90cm at low tide, and when walking on what feels like the Pacific’s very precipice, we had the surreal sensation that we’d been transported to another world. I urge you to read this article from New Zealand Geographic, which lays out the inherent hazards and contentious history of this fascinating ‘land:’

empire-of-the-sea

We, like many others, made a stop at Minerva North, to break up the often difficult  passage between Tonga and New Zealand. Most boats poise themselves to try to stop, but the weather conditions have to be right to enter the pass and take the time in ‘pause’ mode as opposed to continuing onward, so we felt lucky to manage 3 days in the fold of the protected lagoon. We weren’t alone, though! The 30 boats at anchor around us were dubbed, ‘The Minerva Yacht Club!’

Wyatt and I freedove the pass and found a wonderland of color and life.
Marcus sought some Giant Trevally in the surf, but the surf almost sought him!
Remnants of a less positive interaction with the reef.

Sweet Tuamotus, Last round through …

 

The majestic Humphead/Napolean Wrasse. This guy is 3.5 feet!

I’m going to ask Marcus to wax poetic about our final weeks in the Tuamotus. Suffice it to say that this region of French Polynesia is most definitely a favorite of ours and I even heard Marcus say he could live there. If fresh produce was available, I might be on board! For the time being, these pics can be a placeholder. These are shots from Tahanea, Fakarava and Rangiroa.

I shot a gazillion shots to finally snag this one! Thanks, Katie, for holding such enthusiasm!

 

 

Visitors in the Gambier and Fakarava

“This time is hard to find heaped under a mountain of machines and motivations all founded on hours and minutes.” ~Wyatt Stevens

The decision for Shannon, Josh and Wilder (3, almost 4) to visit came down fast, and within a week and a half we were picking them up at the little motu off the eastern side of the Gambier Archipelago. They dove in, they played, they pushed themselves. We laughed, we learned, we loved. It was a 3 week plan, which, in  hindsight, should have been simply spent in the lagoon, but Josh was keen to take an ocean passage, so we gave it a shot. Shannon was facing some real demons by even considering the feat. There’s a superstition in the sailing world about not undertaking a passage departure on a Friday. Well … not only was it a Friday, but guess what the date was?! Yep, the 13th!! Needless to say – we ended up shifting gears; they flew instead and we met them with Allora in Fakarava, 5 days later. Plan B worked out great! The memories from this adventure have been distilled into flashes of Wilder being wonderfully true to her name, snippets of her remarkable imagination with words (notably ‘Shit Bullet’) and scores of her laughter as she’d commune with the fishes. We were struck by a force from which we will never recover. Oh, and yeah, her parents are sensational, too!

“To see the world as it awoke in its own defenseless candor.” ~WS

Haraiki to Hao, Tuamotus

“Today” is a song my mind sings to itself.
~MS

“I am neither happy nor sad, neither really tense nor really relaxed. Perhaps that’s the way it is when a man looks at the stars asking himself questions he is not mature enough to answer.”
~The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier

Swept Away

Ian likes to plan and he has a knack for thinking through the details, even when the boat he’s planning for is not his own. He’s also devilishly persuasive. Long before we’d given any real focus to the question, he’d figured out that we needed to know where Maddi would fly in and out of when she came to visit in December. His suggestion turned out to be Fakarava, where by incredible coincidence, Makara (Ian and Erika) and Starlet (Jennifer and Mark) both intended to be for Christmas. We regretfully explained that while we didn’t really have a plan, per se, we would be much too far east by then, well on our way to the Gambiers. But every once in a while, he’d gently ask if these poor, confused American sailors had a plan yet. After luring us to join them in Moorea for an unplanned (by us) detour, we burned up enough time that, as predicted by Ian, Fakarava actually did make the most sense.
Lo and behold, we found ourselves Christmas eve, faced with an unusual northwest turn in the weather, sailing upwind and backwards (as in north and west), to get to Fakarava according to Ian’s plan, for a delicious Christmas dinner with Makara and Starlet. 
This was only the beginning. Jennifer and Mark had their own devilish ways of derailing our plans, mostly involving Mark’s boyish grin and sentences like,”Let’s sail to Kauehi, dive the pass!” Why not? More north. Then all voices raised the call, “On to Toau!” West.
Ian, meanwhile, had been doing some more scheming. He was willing to concede that we did indeed need to start logging some south and east miles but… rather than sail back to Fakarava in April after visiting the Gambier (as planned?) it would make much, much more sense for us to sail north and meet them in Hawaii to join them for a northwest cruise up to Alaska and down the coast of North America. Back to our beloved Baja and from there, almost a year later than planned, we could hit the Palmyra and the Line Islands on our way to Tonga.
We actually got out Jimmy Cornell’s World Crusing Routes to check it out. Ian’s plan was diabolically clever (it sill sounds a little tempting).
It was only an extra 12,000 miles.
It was difficult indeed to finally turn southeast (as planned?) and leave our friends to continue their northwest journeys. This is the very hardest part of sailing. These goodbye’s feel so sudden and irrevocable. We will almost certainly see Starlet more, which is great, as they are circumnavigating along the same route, more or less, that we will be. But after Alaska, Makara is headed back to the Caribbean and then home to England.
And that’s a long way around for Starlet and Allora.

~MS 

Silver Apollo

 This magnificent fish appeared to us first as light
a silver flash, deeper than we dreamed we could perceive
rising Apollo of the Pacific
ancient enough to carry some scars
close in his iridescent skin, yellow blue purple and black
finely etched lines
how long had he been living in this wide sea
how many leagues of luminous ocean 
glided by that scepter of yellow fins 
 
    We are bruised, but he lost his life
we have food, he is gone
confounded by a line, a hook to his jaw
his moment of victory, 
crushing his prey, fouled in a startling, confusing instant
he headed for the safer deep,
he ran
for how long
he thought he must win
and he nearly did
fickle luck decided his fate
cruel chance was on our side
 
It was not a fair fight
but he was not a fair fighter either
prowling the Pacific, picking on fish his own size
at least he and I were nearly exactly matched in weight 
a fish my own size
I had huge mechanical advantages, technology 
reel built in Italy, graphite rod from China, lure from Japan
a global conspiracy
 
  
Monofilament, 80 kg 
a few pounds under our weight in breaking strength, too
for three hours the outcome hung on that scale, 
our tug of war, 
each had the means to break that transparent thread
his pure muscle
my miscalculation
if I set too much drag
if he could pull suddenly, powerfully enough, fool the rod
catch that thread on the rudder, the keel, the hydrogenerator
Ping! he tried that too, dirty fighter
 
 
Most unjust, we knew the terms of the contest
he had only terror, confusion, instinct – shouting, get away!
how could he ever ken
the nature of the power that vexed him 
what steel contraption of death hooked him
the end that comes without explanation
before that
he circled for an hour
a slow spiral up
silver mirage in the gleaming blue
what restrains me?
 
 
He could not know my arms were pumping, failing
but he could feel moments of my weakness
of hope
did he wonder if we knew he was blacking out from exhaustion
rolling on his side relying on fins and broad side 
like a sea anchor to stave off the inevitable
that he came up to the surface those times 
because he couldn’t fight the light for another second
until he found that with everything to lose he must
fight
it wasn’t a test of strength, there never was any question about that
o powerful god of the sea, we know
 
 
When sharp gaff bit tender gills
life faded with salty blood into the water of his birth
and when
with the last of our strength we pulled him from the sea
the Whitetip shark could smell his death
came in cautiously, sensing danger
we fooled him, too
found strength we didn’t have to lift our prize
The fish is gone
we have only replicas of his majesty.

~MS

 

 

STATS:

Yellowfin Tuna

64 inches tail to mouth, 44 inches in girth

190 pounds

240 steaks

8” purple and orange Yozuri lure

     180 lb test line with 300 lb wire tippet section

 

 

           

 

 

  

THE DETAILS:

 

After we broke two fish off near Bora Bora, I decided to do something about it. A big new rod and a reel that weighs more than all my other reels combined.180 pound test line, 300 lb test wire leader, eight inch Japanese Yozuri lure with two I don’t-know-what aught giant hooks. We were ready. 

We wanted fish. So I had my secret weapon out, which I learned from a sport fishing boat in Mexico. A teaser trailing about thirty rubber squid in a school formation. Gotta get the fish’s attention, especially when you’re sailing downwind in light airs.

When a saltwater fish starts taking line, you don’t really know much about what you’ve got, unless you’re lucky enough to see the take, as I did with my first Marlin. But even small fish are crazy strong out in the ocean. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be here. They live with sharks. 

We’ve learned the hard way how difficult it is to battle a big fish from a sailboat. Lines, sails, rigging, davits, hydrogenerators, long rudder and keel. The first thing you need to do, is slow down. When this fish hit we were sailing wing and wing with the genoa poled out to starboard. Luckily, since crossing the Pacific we’ve been setting the pole out with a bridle, so when we decided to hove-to there was a foreguy already in place to keep the pole from swinging back into the shrouds. 

Diana got on the VHF and called our friends on Makara who been sailing close by, to let them know we had a fish on. Having broke the swivel on one of the hooks before on this rig, I went easy on the drag, and the fish ran and ran. When we’d slowed to about a knot or so, I started putting more pressure on, though I stopped the run, I couldn’t gain anything.

Diana dug out the “Golden God” which is the name she came up with for what she thought was a ludicrous fighting harness when I’d bought it back in California.  

With no good place to be, I set up with the rod on the starboard side. The stern was blocked by our dinghy, dangling teaser, steering vane post and hydrovane. It looked like about half the line I had on the giant reel was out. I set more drag, but couldn’t get the line in. This may have been the first moment that we began to guess that we were in for a long haul. Makara called to find out how it was going. Little to report. 

For the next two hours. Two hours. I would reel in as much as I could, and then lose at least two thirds what I gained with the fish pulling inexorably away. I was fighting the fish facing sideways, since the dinghy and everything else was on the stern of the boat. We were drifting slowly off course to the northwest, and the fish was pulling east. I was getting tired, but it was too much for Diana to hold very long on her own, so she helped relieve me by supporting the rod from the side. I’d get a couple winds on the reel and then we’d catch our breath. 

Makara called again. No fish. We hadn’t even seen it yet. We heard Starlet come on the radio, they were hearing Makara’s side of the conversation. 

Finally, somewhere in the second hour the fish started to rise, and I was able to take in some line. We got our first glimpse of the beast. A silver flash, deep deep deep down in the blue sea. Then Diana thought she saw yellow. 

We already thought, hoped, prayed, that it was a yellowfin tuna. It had to be. Marlin jump. Dorado jump. Tuna go deep. What else is that big?

We told Makara we could see it, but that it was still a long way off. 

The fish acquiescing so much line and coming up, fooled us into thinking that we were getting close. I think we even got the gaff out. 

Wrong, O’ how wrong! The really brutal part of the battle had only just begun. The tuna started heading for the other side of the boat, getting the line wrapped around the hydrogenerator and the dangling squid teasers and just about everything else on the stern. Both of us were already bruised up, me from the pole slipping out of the harness and Diana from trying to hold the pole at the rail, getting her hands trapped between the rod and the Bimini frame. 

Both of us took turns unwrapping the line and Diana started the engine to try to turn the boat toward the fish so it would be off our side instead of behind us. More than once we heard the line “twang” off of something on the stern, sure that we’d lost the fish after everything. 

Just about the time that I began to think about the looming probability that the muscles in my arms were seriously going to give out, we got a small break. The tuna started doing deep predictable circles. Diana guessed about 70 feet below us. With each circle I could gain a little as he passed closest, and then lose some of that gain as he pulled away. A few inches at a time and Diana was able to report to Makara that we had the fish at about fifty feet. Diana would help me lift the pole and I would reel like crazy on the drop. The fish too was getting tired, but sometimes just as I could feel him falter, I realized I had to take a break, too. I just couldn’t pull him up. 

Diana gave me water. My arms were pumped, literally spasming involuntarily as we got the fish near the surface. He was still pulling in circles, but now he broke the surface and we could see how enormous he was. Diana tried to gaff him, but the reach from the deck was a few inches too far for her, and the fish wasn’t done yet.

After awhile we realized that the only way to get him was for her to take the pole. She donned the Golden God. 

I gaffed him, but it took all my remaining strength just to hold him near the surface. When we caught that big tuna crossing the Pacific we lost our gaff at this point, so Diana got a line tied onto the gaff in case I lost my grip. 

We were contemplating how we were going to lift the fish, thinking about using the block we use for the dinghy, when Diana saw a shark swimming in, no doubt scenting the blood from the gaff. 

There was NO WAY we were going to lose this fish to a shark after three hours. We put a line through its gills and put the rod back in the holder and worked the tuna around all the many obstacles at the stern of the boat as the shark circled (I kid you not). Thankfully the shark was taking its time. With both of us heaving will all our might we got the fish up on the swim platform, tail dangling out over the water. Diana tied the fish off and we both sat down and tried to catch our breath. The shark would have to leap out of the water to get the fish now, but we had to get it on the boat more securely before we could move. 

Diana took a picture of me, totally exhausted with the fish half in the cockpit. We got another line on it, heaved one more time and the fish was secure, though to steer Diana had to straddle it at the wheel.

Three full hours. 

I was too exhausted to help Diana roll up the genoa and reset the main, start the engine and get us moving. We called Makara and told them we had the fish. 

Starlet could hear us now, and Mark suggested we come raft up to them when we got to Fakarava, so they could lift the fish onto their trawler. A much more convenient place to butcher it. The wind was very light so we used our engine to make up for three lost hours. We wanted light for transferring the fish. Meanwhile Mark also made arrangements to put the fish, once it’d been cut into steaks in the freezer of a local magasin (grocery store). We had to have the job done by eight o’clock which is when the owner said he was going to bed. 

Sharpened knives, everyone dove in. We butchered on the back deck and, Jennifer shuttled them into Diana cutting steaks in the galley. Ian bagged them and estimated we had something like 240 steaks in all, plus bags of trim meat Diana and Erica sorted for sashimi or for curries. 

We measured the tuna, from the bottom jaw to the crook of the tail. Mark found a chart online to determine its weight. The first graph he found didn’t even go up to this tuna’s 64 inches/44 inches girth. 190 pounds. 

It takes a village. 

 

DS RS 13 of 18 6298 

   
DS RS 16 of 18 001
  
DS RS 17 of 18 6322
 
 
 
 
 
 

Madison’s Tuamotus Visit

We’ve fallen in love with the Tuamotus, as most people do, so getting to share this utopia with Maddi over her winter break was really special. We’d promised a much needed rest, but ended up playing pretty hard, so hopefully her soul was recharged and enriched by the warm, turquoise waters brimming with life and the sun kissed days filled with simple, yet active goals. We ended up hanging out in Fakarava and Tahanea, two atolls with abundant wildlife/wilderness, (always appreciated by Maddi) and we just may have spent as many hours in the sea as out of it! We’d been renting diving gear from a local provider in the south of Fakarava, but once we met up with our cruising friends, m/v Starlet, they ‘hooked us up’ with tanks and together, with s/v Makara, we dove daily.  Pics of these shared adventures will be on the next post, but here we focus on our middle daughter, the shark whisperer.~DS

“Groupers Shining in the Light”

Fakarava, famous for sharks
rows of teeth, sinister, graceful
ominous patience at the top of the food chain
keen senses for a slip-up, a moment of inattention
fish hide in the coral after dark
unaware of a tail poking out
sharks imprinted with curiosity
follow every lead, investigate every anomaly
de facto enforcers of the status quo
stick to the rhythm
you’ll be alright, maybe
it takes attitude to be a grouper
shining in the light
defending your rock
even more attitude to be a grouper at night,
You should try living among swarms of predators
try to sleep or procreate, try to enjoy a little leisure
not surprising that groupers get a little touchy about their neighborhood
food funnels with teeth in their gills,
they present themselves to the world mouth first
Prettier tropical specimens keep a wary eye
slip between branches of coral as though sipped by a straw
everybody seems to know
that the sharks know
they’ve traded decent eyesight and speed
for jaws and uncanny 3D senses for smelling fear and panic
traded chewing teeth for biting teeth
Six Gill sharks eat as little as once a year
(you don’t want to be reincarnated as a Six Gill shark)
Triggerfish, with beaver-like teeth
flopping, rooting, peering under rocks
Bluefin Trevally terrorize the shallows, manifesting classic symptoms of ADD.
Parrotfish seem to know that they’ve been named after birds
fluttering over the reef
crunching coral, shitting and spitting sand
along with their groupies, Maddi and I call “friends of parrotfish”
Moray eels scowl from their caves
Moorish Idols parade along the branching staghorn
huge green Napoleon Wrasse contemplate a sex change
an octopus camouflaged in the rocks
how much brain power it must take to run eight arms
and change color and texture instantly?
I can barely pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time
those unblinking eyes
that gambler’s mouth breathing tube
shoals of shimmering, blue, wide-eyed baitfish
birds above, predators below, strength and peril in numbers
bobbits with scissor-like jaws lurk in the sand
800 species of deadly cone snails
Everything that can be eaten
is
iridescent ink glows in perpetual darkness
volcanic vents in ocean trenches are planning for the future
human concentration suffers from lack of predators
evolution is happy to start over
when our moment of inattention
gets the better of us
~MS

Pacific Ocean Crossing

Galapagos to the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia 4/25 – 5/13/17

It’s been 6 months since Allora’s first ocean crossing. I am writing this from French Polynesia, eking out the time and wifi to finally share this treasury of experience. Gathering our 3 kids, Haley, Madison and Wyatt, as crew (we call them, ‘GREM’, to be explained later) was ideal and a bit of a miracle at this point in their busy and widespread lives.  I have to say,  I love that it felt imperative to each of them to make the voyage – what adventurous souls! Haley had already crossed the Indian Ocean with SeaMester; I think she knew something of the quiet and solitude we’d be experiencing.

We’re family, yes, but in this experience, we formed an alliance, a team. I was reminded of leaving Montana to live in Ravenna, Italia; we were drop shipped into a new culture – it was palpable, the intense newness of it all – but after that year, our family had shared something indefinably rich. Here, out on the illimitable sea, we truly relied on each other once again to ‘navigate the waters.’ Though I think each of us came away with an impression that also felt wholly personal, as I look back at those sweet days, I see a point in time in which we were able to slip into an eddy in our lives, to come together and share this magic – we were uncertain and proud, bored and content, tired and euphoric, collectively.

I hope to always recall the slow but sure rhythm of these 18 sweet days. My mosaic work often feels like this – bit by bit, piece by piece and one day, something’s manifested. In this case, we, with the wind, landed in paradise, Fatu Hiva, Marquesas. ~DS

Stats:

Distance: 2,956nm (3,401miles)

Avg. speed from Isla Isabela, Galapagos to Fatu Hiva, Marquesas: 6.895 knots/hr (7.9 mph)

Avg. 24 hr distance: 165nm (189.8 miles)

 

I’ve been thinking about the tuna I killed
the exhausted fish bleeding into the water
after our gaff cut its gill then came apart and fell overboard
clouds of blood, Maddi thought of whaling
what it would be like on another scale
the rivers of whale ichor gushing into this exact ocean
from a heart bigger than all five of us
even this, probably average tuna, appears from its deep refuge like a giant
the mass of muscle that challenged our arms despite enormous mechanical advantage
We confounded the powerful, sleek prince of blue water
though we cannot actually lift him, but barely heave him aboard
like a deer drug through the snow
our muscles are spent
chunks of sashimi as big as an elk quarter
deep in the cheek, beautiful stuff I could, should eat from my knife even as I filet
I never ate deer raw
I worry I may one day think I have taken something I shouldn’t have
more than is left to take
for a man living in a world where food is easy
taken invisibly with efficient economic precision
swaddled in styrofoam and plastic
a big mac or burrata
seared tuna or sushi
for anyone who indulges a whim
anywhere, anytime
even in places that in my lifetime once offered only boiled meat and potatoes
peaches and apricots in the season of miller moths beating against the screen door
the man across the street in Hillrose, Colorado had collections of arrowheads
chipped stone for killing, scraping and digging
New technology just a few decades or a century ago
Here we see white fishing boats with towers for spotting the game
powerful motors for dragging it from the deep
fishermen like whalers still, raw
distant lives, sheltered by unquestioning pragmatism
shortsighted, strong armed servants of a frivolous city dwelling species
below us shifts Melville’s eternal blue noon
the multitude of shades of azure
that would have names if we were like eskimos naming snow
it all deepens to black
red squid and sperm whales
all that’s left of the world falls like ash into the deepest sea
~MS

Landfall Galapagos! Isla San Cristobal, 959nm from Panama City, Passage April 8-15th, 2017

Archipelago de Colon, April 15-25, 2017

 

Where is the tempo set?
on the avenues of new york london tokyo paris
or are they older than that
set by Luther’s hammer on the church door
the herd school flock shifts in rhythm to what secret signals
why does it matter if a man has something to do today
too much or too little
the sun is busy, the moon too with her secrets
and naked celebrations
water is always about to do something unexpected
the sky on a mission that does not tabulate human considerations
the stars are moving so fast they have time for little else
they don’t think for a moment about the implications of an infinite universe
belittling space and time and the business of anything or anyone, even stars
we move because life is motion
though even rocks are not still
there is no still point
no rest for the wicked
no rest
no rest
anticipation of the next wave or swirl of wind
is enough
until a stomach cramp, or the same anxious energy that brings a smile and satisfaction
sets a leg to tapping 
mind worrying about something far away I cannot change
a fish and a hook
a plan and minor success to distract from the basic fact
that there are no ringing triumphs
or perfect endings
stubbed toes and broken knuckles and mosquito bites
that are more real than the scale of these mountainous islands
as out of touch as dreams and manmade stories
~MS

Sailing southeast – El Salvador to Costa Rica

Our hearts ache without our GREM!! BUT, (and this is a pea sized consolation) – there is quite a bit more space aboard s/v Allora! Haley was going back to March in the DC rally and Maddi was off to India, so we had to release them!! Having been more leisurely with our movements from Mexico to El Salvador, we now realized that our time is getting somewhat crunched, so our pace has to pick up in this next zone, which is regrettable. Weather really dictates many of our  ‘should we stay or should we go’ movement decisions and it can be capricious. We’ll get a flavor of Central America; enough to know we could happily come back – on a slower pace.

After saying goodbye to Haley and Madison and this particularly thorough provisioning stop at the market in San Salvador, Marcus said, ‘we could have kept the girls here and just cannibalized them!’ (haha, this way I can tell if they are reading our blog!).
The “Marte” – Art Museum in San Sal. Retrospective on El Salvadorian artists; interesting!
It’s a messy job to switch the paddle wheel (sensor for measuring our boat speed) which is essentially a hole in the boat which gushes water when we replace the wheel with a temporary plug.
Scraping the paddle wheel to rid it of barnacles, which render it unusable as a gauge.
We flew our tattered American flag upside down and half mast – and although we saw no one all day, it felt good to make a statement about this particular Inauguration Day, 2017.
Gulf of Fonseca, El Sal/Honduras/Nicaragua. We hoisted our brand new, ride side up, American flag on the 21st – in solidarity with the Million Women’s March, 2017!
Gulf of Fonseca, where El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua come together (this is an El Sal hill!).
El Tigre Island, Honduras, in the morning light, before slipping away toward Nicaragua.
Marcus’ first Sierra on the ‘ugly stick’ (trolling rig). He did catch and release one on a fly on Isla Tiburon. It’s one of our new favorites for eating!

Dolphins continue to join us almost every day we sail, but whales have been missed in these waters.
Customs Officer, Puerto Capitania and Immigration officers came to us!
The other two officials were much more interested in Marcus’ fishing gear!
The flag of Nicaragua!

Inside the estuary adj. to Puesta del Sol marina.
Puesta del Sol, Nicaragua.
Puesta Del Sol, Nicaragua

We took a taxi to the nearby town of Chinandenga to get some cash from an ATM to pay our check in fees. It was low light (late afternoon to sunset) and the driver was quite heavy on the pedal, so we whizzed by idyllic pastoral scenes of a Sunday in a Nicaraguan village. Nicaragua was basically a beautiful blur, as you can see in this smattering of shots from the bumpy cab window:

Loved this! LOTS of folks pulled their rockers out in front of their homes to take in the evening.

Costa Rica!!

Bahia Santa Elena hikes, but the guidebook is OLD, so the jungle has consumed the trails and almost us!
Dubbed, ‘Worst hike EVER!!’
Not sure what these blossoms are, but they highlighted the verdant hills in Bahia Santa Elena.
Turkey vulture’s plea for some compassion?
I saw (and smelled) two dead sea turtles on a kayak excursion, hence the healthy turkey vulture population.
Bahia Santa Elena, Costa Rica. This anchorage, with zero development, is a gem. It’s almost landlocked, so a Papagayo howling wind can be wreaking havoc on the seas outside and this place sees no more than some chop and wind gusts. REALLY sweet!
One of our iPhone anchor alarms. This is the course our boat ran around the anchor all night!
We swab the decks (!) every morning there’s dew, to give Allora a nice fresh water rinse.

Bahia Samara, Costa Rica (near Punta Guiones). Big surf area. In this tucked away corner, we had numerous reefs and shoals to deal with to get into a good anchoring position. Here, you can see that our charts are sometimes incorrect, because they have us going over a bunch of rocks when, thankfully, we weren’t. We use other sources, our visual clues (water riffles and breaks over reefs) and radar to piece it all together. It’s tough when the depths are only a few feet more than our keel.
Bahia Ballena. Noodling around.
Puntarenas is a REAL place. Working boats ply this estuary. We are tied up to a pontoon dock (itself floating and secured by two anchors) with never more than 2.5′ of water underneath us. This morning, if our instruments are correct, Allora was touching the soft mud bottom by 3″. Unnerving. But we are here to check in to Costa Rica and these formalities with the Puerto del Capitaniá, Imigracion and Adouana are proving to be the toughest yet.
Our yellow quarantine flag flies as we await the ability to fly our Costa Rican colors.
The Customs and Immigration folks came to the boat, but only after we waited for 36 hours or so for them to show up. The yellow, quarantine flag means we aren’t officially cleared into the country yet, and as such, we have to stay aboard Allora.
Really?! All THAT for two papers?!
Quarantine and Costa Rica flags. Yellow abajo, CR encima!
Our view from the floating pontoon at Costa Rica Yacht Club (fancy words for that experience).
The pilot boat leads us out of the extremely shallow and shoaling estuary at high tide, around 6:30 pm. Southeast headings and a favorable 1.5 knots of current move us away from the Nicoya Peninsula toward Quepos.
Early morning chill accumulates from hours on night watch.
Since our destination was only 55nm away (in a straight line), we had the unusual focus of trying not to move too quickly – to avoid arriving at night. The winds cooperated and we sailed sweetly and slowly along, splitting the night into just two 4.5 hr. shifts between us. Lovely sail. Sunrise and a cup of Central American bourbon coffee (just the name of the bean, no actual bourbon!); perfect setting to clean our dusty fans underway.
Our needs come in bike sized packages! Provisioning for southern Costa Rica with the Mamas.
Marina Pez Vela, Quepos, Costa Rica. This newish marina caters mainly to sport fisherman and is charging the highest rate we’ve seen on this journey! It costs us $180. a night for a slip here. SO … we scooted away for a couple nights (2/4 & 2/5/17) anchoring off Manuel Antonio National Park. By 4pm when the park closes, we have this lush backdrop all to ourselves.

Capuchin Monkey mama and baby

 

That’s a sloth in the center of the pic!!
Marcus was relieved that wasn’t the spot we chose to land our dinghy – although our effort wasn’t uber smooth and I walked around in salty clothes all day!

 

Parasailers at sunset, with the anchorage at Manuel Antonio Park all to ourselves!

Leaving Mexico for Central America, with Haley and Madison as GREM!

 

Our well worn Mexican flag comes down after a year.

On one of our first passages, I was typing labels for our personal flotation devices (PFD’s) without my glasses, so I asked Maddi if what I’d typed said,  ‘CREW?’ Guess it didn’t! That laughing went on awhile, but the term has stuck and now whenever anyone comes to help out aboard Allora, we call them our ‘GREM!’

Music to my ears.

Just a mile from Rio Suchiate on the Mexico/Guatemala border. Allora’s been in Mexico for 13 months, which is at least double the time we thought we’d stay. Spanish is still embarrasingly slight, but you’d want us on your charade team. I am sure I’ve said, ‘Lo Siento’ (I’m sorry) far too often, with ‘mucho gusto’ coming in a close second. This part of the world makes me want to be a young backpacker again!

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Land of Volcanoes – El Salvador has 788 we’re told! (Lovin’ that new tat on Haley!)
We saw up to 37 knots, beating into the wind, but Allora dug in and got the job done.  It was a tough couple of days!

Like many sailors we were so focused on crossing the Gulf of Tehuantapec, we didn’t think a lot about the Papagayos until we left Chiapas. We heard they were frustrating and unpredictable, and they didn’t disappoint. Our first brush with them came farther north than their usual haunts as we sailed passed Guatemala. The wind jumped from nothing to the twenties in a matter of minutes. We’d been lulled by the forecasts and the calm weather into sailing further offshore than the recommended strategy and so we headed back in before the wind waves got too rough. The breeze was on our beam, but we we were going to have to turn into it to continue on toward El Salvador. On the other hand we could run off, 20 miles in the wrong direction, and find a spot for the night in Guatemala’s one marina, Puerto Quetzal, then wait for a better forecast for the next day. We gave it a little test, but no one really liked the idea of slamming into what was now 27 knots (plus) for who knew how long into the night. We decided even if the wind didn’t die down, it’d be more pleasant in the daytime. We had heard negative things about Puerto Quetzal – like they weren’t welcoming, or there was a coal plant nearby that dropped soot on your boat. They might have mentioned before complaining about the mood of the place that the docks are complete SHIT, totally unstable and completely inadequate for any boat over 30 or 35 feet. They didn’t have ‘surge,’ they had full on rolling waves that would have made an anchorage unpleasant. We had every fender out and zig zagged a 300 foot line across to another dock to try to hold Allora off and still she was slamming into the slip and the mast was rocking back and forth through a ridiculous arc while Diana tried to negotiate a deal where we could spend the night, but not have to “check in” to Guatemala. Though the port captain said we were okay, the marina people were not cooperating. I couldn’t imagine getting a wink of sleep at that slip, so we decided to forget it. We untied our lines and backed out of the slip fast to keep from hitting a piling as the wind gusted and waves surged. We’d back tracked two hours for nothing. And I still had a dorado to filet (it would have been easier at the dock). Diana took the first shift, but I was up with her by midnight. The winds were 37 knots and you couldn’t peek out from under the dodger without getting drenched. Allora slammed into the seas to get in close to the beach. Everyone later assured us that these were unusual winds, that the Papagayo’s never came that far north. So special treat for us. The bar crossing into Bahia del Sol was mercifully uneventful even though it was still blowing over twenty. We were very happy to get our welcome drink and tie up and that cozy Marina.

I was standing out looking at the volcano in the distance at sunrise …
When this happened!
Guess it’s time for a wardrobe change!
Early morning watch.

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The river bar crossing into Bahia Jaltepeque, Bahia del Sol, El Salvador. Some days this gets wild, but ours was particularly uneventful, with flat conditions. Bill, from the Annual El Salvador Rally and a panga pilot led us through the shoals and into the estuary.
A ‘welcome’ drink was handed to us as we arrived in Bahia del Sol. We’d had a tough passage and the warm welcome was extra sweet.
Rigging the El Salvadoran flag for Haley to hoist.
Always eager to climb the mast! We had some SSB antenna repairs to make.

(See the Drone blog post with more mast/Bahia Del Sol pics!)

We took Namo 4 miles west up the Jaltepeque Estuary to this little market village of Herradura.
Everyone has either a wooden canoe or a panga.

Nap time:

So good for us to have both girls.
Selfie by the sea

A short walk across this spit of land and we are back on the Pacific side; a different perspective than looking at this from the sea as we came in. LOVE THAT!

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!!!
Lifeguard station in the tropics. (Lifeguard nieces, what say you?!)
Basura is a sad, but true part of many beaches.
Thought of my sis and her love of animals as I watched these two dogs frolic like there was no mañana!
Might make some necklaces?!
Sticks and stones …
Kind of serene and kind of creepy all at once?
Now I want to get a tat!
Soooooo strong!

A glimpse of the island of Cordoncillo in Bahia Jaltepeque:

Most of the 280 ppl. on Cordoncillo Island don’t own property. They are squatters, but have no protection from floods or lightning strikes. Half of them are under 18 yrs. old.
Hammocks are ubiquitous.
The typical El Sal country kitchen.
Diana Carolina and her cousin, Stephania Tatiana. Fullest smiles EVER!
Almonds drying!
The mooring field at Bahia del Sol.
We scooted Namo over to have our first Papusa, the national food of El Salvador, at this waterfront palapa restaurant. We LOVE THEM!!! Quesadilla’s in El Sal are an amazing sweet cheese pound cake, whereas the papusa is like a smooshed quesadilla (by our definition) with a cheese and bean or cheese, bean and pork filling. They serve it with a pickled cabbage, called Curtido, on top. Delicious!
Happy papa.
Love the wave in Haley’s tropical hair!

This young guy delivered water to Allora when we were on a mooring buoy.

We took a short dinghy ride over to the nearby village on stilts, called “Tesajera” for lunch. There were about 15 different options, but Bill and Jean (cruisers who came to Bahia del Sol and never left – they now run the El Salvador Rally) had their favorite to share. Other options were McDorado and the one they called ‘Hooters,’ spelled Juurers.

 

The girls took a walk as these lovely women prepared our fish.

Bill, Di and Maddi take a mid-high tide swim after our fried fish lunch.

Some classical guitar with Bill.

 

Haley’s taking up the ukulele, too!!

©HRS

 

Huatulco and the Gulf of Tehuantapec (to Chiapas, Mx) with Haley and Madison!

We mainly see Spotted Dolphin, Common Bottlenose and Spinners.

Bad day to be a Bonito. Marcus snagged him first and then a marlin closed in.
Fresh dorado ceviche! So thankful this captain loves to fish!
The catamaran, ‘Sweetie’, also on the way in to the Bays of Huatulco.
Show off!
The whole town of La Crucecita came out to celebrate we don’t know WHAT (!), but the parade was lively with extravagant costumes and big brass sounds that made me think of Toby Dylan Hocking!
Always love the dragons!

Grabbed this gem of a GREM!

Marcus had the boat all ready to push away from the dock as we arrived from the airport, so Maddi spent her first night aboard Allora at an anchorage in Rescalillo, Huatulco.

Spotted dolphin buddies.
Bubble stream.

Art always helps. My Uncle Tommy died on my Mom’s 80th birthday.
Too far away to attend the memorial in Philly, we had our own celebration for my beloved UT.

Creative morning.
Creative mourning.
Treasures on the beach for my treasure of an Uncle.
Lots of bits add up to lots of love.
To the Moon and back …
Avoiding footprints!
Music and water and laughter and love –
Love you, UT.

From our anchorage in Rescailillo, Huatulco, Mx, Marcus mans the drone (and edits this vid), Maddi plays the ukelele (first introduced to the instrument by U.T. in September – sings the song, ‘Hummingbird”) and Di gets scribbly in the sand. For the Tramontana’s –

TUNA sushi!!
Marcus went out fishing with a local guy to learn some tricks. Guess he paid attention!
Can never decide what to make of a Dorado, though I can easily choose what to make WITH it.

Maddi works with her dive instructor, David to get her certification.
Yay! 4 out of the 5 of us are PADI certified. Wyatt’s next!

Look who else we snagged?! The crew member with the most miles (though at almost 8,000, we’re closing in on her 10,000!). So good to have the girls both aboard!

So excited to lure Haley away from the freezing temps in the big apple!

So many caption possibilities here!

SO fun to be able to dive together!!!
Found this consignment store – and got goofy – the gal who owned it was off eating lunch, so we had the whole place to ourselves.
To be fair to Maddi, we DID say, ‘Make a Silly Face!’

I first noticed the Gulf of Tehuantapec long before we even had Allora, when I was just learning about Grib files (wind forecasting models) back in Montana. If you look at the wind patterns along the west coast of North and Central America, you can’t miss this funnel of gale strength wind pouring across the narrow patch of Mexico at its southern end, between the mountains in Guatemala and the southern reach of Oaxaca’s Sierra Madre. The weather reports we listened to on our Ham radio in the Sea of Cortez always included a Tpec forecast and it seemed like it was always blowing 50 knots down there. Sailors call them Tehuantapeckers and they usually last for days and days with brief breaks which inspire mad sprints to get across before the gale starts up again. On our way south we got lots of advice on how to deal with this fierce section of coastline. Everyone warned us not to underestimate the Tehuantapec. “Don’t be tempted to cut straight across, keep one foot on shore… stay in 30 feet of water. You should be able to see people walking on the beach.” This last bit of salty advice didn’t prove useful. Not surprisingly, there was definitely NO ONE  “walking on the beach” when we passed this desolate stretch of coast even at sunset with wind in the mid 20’s.

We chose to leave on Christmas Day, in what was described by the locals as more of a lull than a “weather window.” We made great time in the back current along shore approaching the apex of the gulf, following a trail of turtles that dotted the way like trail markers. The Tehuantapec did not disappoint and we hit the worst winds (of course) right at dark. After a little reefing madness (that a little reefer madness might have helped), we settled in for a gusty ride, resisting the temptation to add more sail when it seemed to fall off before slamming us again. It never broke thirty knots, but with each gust we would be reminded  that we had been hearing for a year how it could hit 60 without warning, By 3:00am the winds were gone completely and all we had to do was weave our way through a maze of shrimp boats, wishing the gulf could offer us a better choice than 40 knots or less than four. -MS

The playlists are always stellar when the girls are onboard! ©HRS
Yowza, she’s almost 25!
©MPS
Practice, practice, practice and all is ROLLING. ©HRS
©HRS
©MPS
Allora loves to MOVE!
©HRS
Thanks, Haley, for this one! ©HRS
Just to see if anyone’s paying attention!
©HRS
©HRS

Gonna fatten those girls up with some enchiladas!
Happy at the helm.
Puerto Chiapas, Mx

We left ALLORA in the calm and safe marina at Puerto Chiapas (used to be called, “Puerto Madero”) and went on an inland excursion to Guatemala. When we returned, a week later, we’d heard that the Mexican government had raised gasoline prices too much and the people were rioting and looting to show their disapproval. A few people were even killed in the mayhem which reached Mexico City. To us, that meant that the big provisioning that I’d planned to do in Mexico wouldn’t happen. The Wal Mart, which is (sadly) the mecca for provisioning, was pitted – nothing left in it. The Oxxo’s, which are convenient stores (like  7-eleven) were particularly hit hard (they are gov’t. run) and the local shop was all boarded up. One of the more savvy cruiser’s at the marina anticipated this and bought everything she could find in the little marina ‘tienda.’ We waited till the last minute and Maddi and I did a modified version of the gluttonous stockpiling I’d imagined in the sleepy, small village of Puerto Madero.

As if being just a chick isn’t cute enough?
Yes, they painted their Chahuahua.

 

San Jose Del Cabo to San Carlos (6/5/16-6/21/16)

We try to stop whatever it is we're doing and sit on deck for the sunset.
We try to stop whatever it is we’re doing and sit on deck for the sunset.
Our new bit of heaven. We tried sleeping out on the foredeck (thanks, Phil for giving me that flush hatch) and haven't slept inside since! (until we got to the Marina in San Carlos).
Our new bit of heaven. We tried sleeping out on the foredeck (thanks, Phil for giving me that flush hatch) and haven’t slept inside since! (until we got to the Marina in San Carlos).
The wonderland of Puerto Los Gatos. I did another mosaic here. (Pics forthcoming).
The wonderland of Puerto Los Gatos. I did another mosaic here. (Pics forthcoming).
We love (Finding) NAMO!!
We love (Finding) NAMO!!
For everything from Rooster fish to Triggerfish.
For everything from Rooster fish to Triggerfish.

P1060404

Wyatt found a great sling in the automotive section of the grocery store, so we fashioned a swing seat for the bow!
Wyatt found a great sling in the automotive section of the grocery store, so we fashioned a swing seat for the bow!
Southern Anchorage, Punto Los Gatos
Southern Anchorage, Punto Los Gatos

 

Lift off!
Lift off!
For someone who never fancied himself a handyman, this Captain's mighty skilled.
For someone who never fancied himself a handyman, this Captain’s mighty skilled.
See the ray jumping?!
See the ray jumping?!
Good Morning Sunshine! On our latest passage from Baja to the mainland
Good Morning Sunshine! On our latest passage from Baja to the mainland
We've been enjoying running directly downwind with the wing and wing configuration, this time with the Asymmetrical Spinnaker/Main combo.
We’ve been enjoying running directly downwind with the wing and wing configuration, this time with the Asymmetrical Spinnaker/Main combo.
The wind is southeast and blowing, so we move
wing and wing like a magnificent frigate
gliding down the San Jose Channel
in flat water with the genoa poled out we are flying along
we set a course based on how the wind is blowing at this moment
but it always bends, arcing our track to port or starboard
eventually the beautifully curved sails will need to be reset
a trawler rumbles-chugs by reminding us that the wind keeps things interesting
relieves us of the manmade world of straight lines
which probably never existed anyway
the hologram of our viral imagination
a symptom of square houses
back again in the world of timelessness
more than an ocean planet,
this must be an ocean universe
everything curves and waves 
from swirls of galaxies to eddies in a mountain brook
if we trusted our instincts, we’d know 
that time moves the same way
despite the misconceptions of geometry and right angles
which pattern the web or synapses of our curved and folded brains
not a straight line to be found
passion prefers curves after all
-MS
I was on watch when this tanker crossed our path within a mile - the wake from it was sizable! Thanks to our AIS, we know all sorts of information about it, including its CPA (closest point of approach).
I was on watch when this tanker crossed our path within a mile – the wake from it was sizable! Thanks to our AIS, we know all sorts of information about it, including its CPA (closest point of approach).
The wind has become more important than ever
though the forecasts are often wrong
we lean on every scratchy word, warbling through the single side band
you come to expect that if the weatherman says its clear
he’s at least looked outside
seen the fog, or marine layer or whatever it is, with his own eyes
the weather forecasts we get in Baja come in two forms
automated, computer model generated, with caveats
has not been vetted by human eyes
or voluntary, a guy named Geary who lives in Bahia Concepcion
who has an interest in the weather,
won’t forecast more than three days out
no matter how many people ask
cuz he knows better
he’s fascinated by criminals who do stupid things
you should be able to get his weather online
(thank you Geary for the weather)
but if they’d had websites in the 70’s 
they’d have looked like the sonrisa.net, just probably worked better
-MS
We were hailed and asked to tow in the skiff Gitano, with Kristina, Jeff and Willy Dog. We had to backtrack a bit to head to Loreto, but as serendipity would have it, a humpback whale breached right beside us! They were kind enough to give me a lift to the nearest market, treated us to lunch and took the bags of trash we'd been accumulating. Ah, the kindness of strangers (now friends). We may see them again, as they live full time in Loreto.
We were hailed and asked to tow in the skiff Gitano, with Kristina, Jeff and Willy Dog. We had to backtrack a bit to head to Loreto, but as serendipity would have it, a humpback whale breached right beside us! They were kind enough to give me a lift to the nearest market, treated us to lunch and took the bags of trash we’d been accumulating. Ah, the kindness of strangers (now friends). We may see them again, as they live full time in Loreto.
Cortez Round Stingray - came within 3" of the shore.
Cortez Round Stingray – came within 3″ of the shore.
This fisherman's in new territory ... this ain't MT anymore.
This fisherman’s in new territory … this ain’t MT anymore.
Hieroglyphic Hawkfish Cirrhitus - happened to be talking to Maddi, so we sent her a pic and she looked it up online for us! Turns out, they're not good for dinner :(
Hieroglyphic Hawkfish Cirrhitus – happened to be talking to Maddi, so we sent her a pic and she looked it up online for us! Turns out, they’re not good for dinner 🙁
We jump in MANY times a day!
We jump in MANY times a day!
Now this DOES make my butt look small! (That picture exists, but I didn't dare share).
Now this DOES make my butt look small! (That picture exists, but I didn’t dare share).
Fairyland!
Fairyland!
Very Moab-esque.
Very Moab-esque.
Puerto Los Gatos
Puerto Los Gatos
Under the category underestimating people
the boat that sailed in last night
Apolima, Gary and Phyllis
An older couple, she’s a proud great-grandma
you might see them among the motorhomes at the rest stop at 19th in Bozeman
happy to be near Costco and not that far from Walmart
and you might think you know the whole story
her body type fits the casting stereotype
he’s more of the “can eat no fat” line
their boat is the same length as Allora
but nearly twice the weight at 58,000 pounds
we’ve met others in the Sea, who make cruising here a lifetime thing
who keep a motorhome in Guaymas
who have planned for years to sail to the Pacific
but haven’t made it, and now bad knees and shoulders that need surgery
make it an unlikelihood 
but Gary and Phyllis did sail to the South Pacific,
spent three days in hurricane force winds off New Zealand
with four children on board
I promise you would never ever guess
-MS
These rocks were pretty chaucy, as Wyatt would say.
These rocks were pretty chaucy, as Wyatt would say.
Small whale?
Small whale?
My turn! Just one day of fever and nausea - probably a flu bug.
My turn! Just one day of fever and nausea – probably a flu bug.
Our Pressure Water pump failed and the uber handy vintage ice pick (the one we used camping when I was a kid) comes to the rescue as the tool to have for the job.
Our Pressure Water pump failed and the uber handy vintage ice pick (the one we used camping when I was a kid) comes to the rescue as the tool to have for the job.
Water temp 78 degrees - which, as it turns out, is PERFECTION!!
Water temp 78 degrees – which, as it turns out, is PERFECTION!!
The infinite colors of the Sea of Cortez.
The infinite colors of the Sea of Cortez.
Single Side Band Radio
is not compatible with the purring, buzzing, crazy electric hum of modern cities
a bunch of old guys talking about the weather
twenty years ago, thirty
it might have been revolutionary, subversive, banned in Thailand
based on the demographics it will be gone in less than ten years
the last “Delta Whiskey Tango” will whisk away across the galaxy
puzzling some old extraterrestrial geezer on some planet in a binary solar system
thirty thousand light years from now
we’re lucky to have used it when it was still useful
in less than five years, it’ll just be an old piece of equipment
remnant emails made with call signs
WDI2867@whut?.com
Diana needs to hurry up and get her Ham license
-MS
Sweet beach.
Sweet beach.
Love these exploratory kayak trips!
Love these exploratory kayak trips!
This time I moved the swing sling forward of the genoa. Great place to whale watch.
This time I moved the swing sling forward of the genoa. Great place to whale watch.
Nights aboard Allora are pure magic.
Nights aboard Allora are pure magic.
Stars,
it easier to imagine finding your way around the world by the stars 
than I would ever have guessed 
Once that dome becomes familiar, Scorpio and Antares in the south sky
Arcturus directly over head, 
it would be like walking in the mountains
keep the peaks where they belong and how can you go wrong
latitude would be a cinch
longitude would want a clock
the Milkyway rolls across the sky, like the wake of a cosmic clipper
-MS

San Jose Del Cabo/(hospital visit) to La Paz 5/21-6/5/16

Per John, "My mother always says I'm a bum, but if so, I've got the best bum view in the whole world." He lives out here, but dreams of heading to Honduras because he feels Baja's gotten too crowded.
Per John, “My mother always says I’m a bum, but if so, I’ve got the best bum view in the whole world.” He lives out here, but dreams of heading to Honduras because he feels Baja’s gotten too crowded.
Bahia Los Frailes.
Bahia Los Frailes.
Bahia Los Frailes (before we had to head back to San Jose Del Cabo)
Bahia Los Frailes (before we had to head back to San Jose Del Cabo)
I did a mosaic in these rocks!
I did a mosaic in these rocks!
Rooster fishing!
Rooster fishing!
Portuguese Man of War - Small "Blue bottles" - washed onto the beach with the incoming tide.
Portuguese Man of War – Small “Blue bottles” – washed onto the beach with the incoming tide.
The calm before the storm (MS was working on his 'moderate dehydration' all day whilst fishing and not drinking).
The calm before the storm (MS was working on his ‘moderate dehydration’ all day whilst fishing and not drinking).
We left La Cruz finally liberated
engine humming, a nice breeze in the offing
I had a bad feeling in my stomach, thinking,
maybe you shouldn’t eat somewhere you haven’t the night before a passage
it stayed with me and I worried about seasickness
(if only I could be that lucky)
by noon the next day I was sick, 100.7 fever
Off limits prison islands off our starboard, still a navigation issue
you have to give them 20 miles berth,
and of course the wind and current were pushing us that way
Diana got Allora sailing on a nice tack, clipping along our rhumb line
she juggled keeping the boat sailing
with calling doctors on the sat phone to confirm I didn’t have appendicitis
she ended one call, reefed, took my temp and palpated my abdomen, 
and headed back up to check the AIS and radar
we decided to head for San Jose del Cabo just to be safe, 24 hours away in a straight line
she was in for a long, long, night
I later told the doctor the stomach cramps were 10 on the pain scale,
which I guess doesn’t leave room for losing a limb or having a tree fall on your head
“if a tree don’t fall on me, I’ll live ’til I die” I sang to myself between spasms
I don’t see any point in saving up my pain numbers
the darkest part of the night is the darkest part of the night
dawn has nothing to do with it
Diana’s been awake and on watch with only three or four hours of sleep in forty eight hours
like good boy scouts we monitor VHF 16
in the US, the Coast Guard keeps it all official
in Mexico, whistles and other bizarre calls are common
in the middle of the southern crossing, as I suffered for my epicurean sins
and Diana sacrificed her sanity to sleep deprivation
some pendejo started meowing on 16, like a cat
no answer. no apparent reason
other than to emphasize our proximity to the tenth circle of hell
Could hardly get him to respond.
Could hardly get him to respond.
The haloed helper!
The haloed helper!
Marcus was in great hands.
Marcus was in great hands.
Phenomenal care - but our bill at this private hospital was stupendous!
Phenomenal care – but our bill at this private hospital was stupendous!
They must be used to smaller patients!
They must be used to smaller patients!
Finally underway, heading back to Los Frailes and beyond.
Finally underway, heading back to Los Frailes and beyond.
I don’t know what kind of bird that is huddling down in the sand looking like a marabou stork, smaller running down the beach like she doesn’t know the game I’m coming this way the aquamarine border of another world trembles with the shifting air sparkles and confuses with the light long fish with razor teeth lay in wait along the surf line (MS - Isla Cerralvo)
I don’t know what kind of bird that is
huddling down in the sand
looking like a marabou stork, smaller
running down the beach like she doesn’t know the game
I’m coming this way
the aquamarine border of another world
trembles with the shifting air
sparkles and confuses with the light
long fish with razor teeth lay in wait along the surf line (MS – Isla Cerralvo)
El Capitan, back at the helm
El Capitan, back at the helm
Allora, bathed in light
Allora, bathed in light
Caught Isla Cerralvo anchorage under the right conditions. This channel can get ferocious during unsettled seas.
Caught Isla Cerralvo anchorage under the right conditions. This channel can get ferocious during unsettled seas.
A burial site of the legendary 'Vagabundos del Mar' - native Sea gypsies that roamed the area in dug out canoes powered by triangular sails and paddles. Fishing and foraging, they lived in small family groups and avoided outside contact except to trade for hooks or water. When they died, their bodies were brought to Isla Cerralvo.
A burial site of the legendary ‘Vagabundos del Mar’ – native Sea gypsies that roamed the area in dug out canoes powered by triangular sails and paddles. Fishing and foraging, they lived in small family groups and avoided outside contact except to trade for hooks or water. When they died, their bodies were brought to Isla Cerralvo.

IMG_5036

We try to sit in the cockpit each night at this hour.
We try to sit in the cockpit each night at this hour.
Turtle carcass. Eighty-four dead turtles in two weeks, Banderas Bay one drifted by the boat, we almost hit it paddling weakly, nothing to do under sail and miles from shore Diana thought he seemed to want to follow another buried in the sand at Bahia de Los Angeles they died of natural causes eating the wrong kind of jellyfish
Turtle carcass.
Eighty-four dead turtles in two weeks, Banderas Bay
one drifted by the boat, we almost hit it
paddling weakly, nothing to do
under sail and miles from shore
Diana thought he seemed to want to follow
another buried in the sand at Bahia de Los Angeles
they died of natural causes
eating the wrong kind of jellyfish -MS
With summer approaching, we are excited about the heavenly AGUA!
With summer approaching, we are excited about the heavenly AGUA!
A wing and wing kind of day - enroute to La Paz
A wing and wing kind of day – enroute to La Paz
Discovered some seizing wire on our anchor shackles that needed some attention. 3x and a ziptie should do it!
Discovered some seizing wire on our anchor shackles that needed some attention. 3x and a ziptie should do it!
Always a LONG list of 'to do's.
Always a LONG list of ‘to do’s.
Not the easiest place to work.
Not the easiest place to work.
Somniloquy
Last Diana night talked in her sleep about “sauce on categories”
which she “found” to be most effective when popping them
we have a few categories to pop
the first one might be uncooperative, lying Mexican mechanics
A brand new boat with a brand new engine
that won’t run without a part that isn’t broken.
an air leak in the fuel supply that can’t be fixed

-MS

 

Short passage, long couple of days …

Just before we left La Cruz, Diana wondered aloud whether passages would ever feel routine, no big deal. I said I didn’t think so because you never know for sure what’s going to happen. We’ve made it to our planned destination just once out the last four passages. The first time because the wind was blowing a certain way, so why fight it? Then because we had an unexpected engine problem, we made a 90 degree turn for the mainland. On the next big crossing, we made it to Puerto Vallarta as planned, but this most recent trip (unplanned in the grand scheme) we aimed for Bahia Los Frailes and ended up in Puerto Los Cabos. The engine ran flawlessly, but not so my gut. Diana’s single handling skills were tested along with her doctoring skills, to make sure it was not appendicitis. We were pretty sure it was just bad food or water that had me laid out with a fever and nightmarish stomach cramps, but we headed for a port where we could find a doctor just in case, and Diana pulled an all nighter to get us there. It’s confidence building for both of us to know she can come up with the right treatment for me, while keeping Allora sailing along beautifully and reef the sails as she confirms her diagnosis via Sat phone.

I moved Marcus up on deck for awhile to change venues and give him some fresh, moving air.
I moved Captain Marcus up on deck for awhile to change venues and give him some fresh, moving air.
It was good to see MS able to sleep a bit.
It was good to see MS able to sleep a bit.
Sunset over the Pacific. It's going to be a long night ...
Sunset over the Pacific. It’s going to be a long night …
Our modified course put us beating into the wind and waves - in the night they ranged from 3-7', but were closely spaced, so Allora worked hard to keep moving along.
Our modified course put us beating into the wind and waves – in the night they ranged from 3-7′, but were closely spaced, so Allora worked hard to keep moving along.
I kept a detailed log - mainly just to have something to focus on every half hour (and to keep track of Marcus' medicine schedule).
I kept a detailed log – mainly just to have something to focus on every half hour (and to keep track of Marcus’ medicine schedule).
The long night was over!
The long night was over!

 

Passage from San Carlos to La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Passages are dreamy
Passages are dreamy
Marcus got this cool shot enroute from San Carlos to La Cruz.
Marcus got this cool shot enroute from San Carlos to La Cruz.
El Capitan knows his diesel engine! Troubleshooting on the way in to PV. (bleeding the engine).
El Capitan knows his diesel engine! Troubleshooting on the way in to PV. (bleeding the engine).
We never go too hungry! Huevos y Horchata para desayuno
We never go too hungry! Huevos y Horchata para desayuno
Anchorage at Isla Isabel - first time we stopped moving (relatively) in 4 days. The Captain relaxes.
Anchorage at Isla Isabel – first time we stopped moving (relatively) in 4 days. The Captain relaxes.
P1050707
the frigate perched on roca blanca white with her own shit has no illusions, about the garden of Eden the sea lions have plenty to say about that, too – life is hard work (MS)
Chaucy rock on Los Monas off Isla Isabel
Chaucy rock on Los Monas off Isla Isabel
Magnificent Frigatebirds, Brown Boobies, Masked Boobies, Blue Footed Boobies, (so many boobies!), various Terns and Northern Gannets. We had both sets of binocs and our Peterson Guide working.
Magnificent Frigatebirds, Brown Boobies, Masked Boobies, Blue Footed Boobies, (so many boobies!), various Terns and Northern Gannets. We had both sets of binocs and our Peterson Guide working.
Marina Riviera Nayarit, La Cruz. We're leaving on the 12th of May, one month after arriving here! Time flies when you're trying to get a Yanmar guy with a diagnostic tool.
Marina Riviera Nayarit, La Cruz. We’re leaving on the 12th of May, one month after arriving here! Time flies when you’re trying to get a Yanmar guy with a diagnostic tool.
Bummer of a trajectory for this little guy
Bummer of a trajectory for this little guy
You never know what lands on deck
You never know what lands on deck
Can you say 'heart attack?' This is what our banana bread became.
Can you say ‘heart attack?’ This is what our banana bread became.
La Cruz, PV. We sailed almost the entire way and had to end the run with this ignominious tow when the engine wouldn't start.
La Cruz, PV. We sailed almost the entire way and had to end the run with this ignominious tow when the engine wouldn’t start.

Bahia de los Muertos to La Paz – Bahia El Cardonal

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We really didn’t want to arrive in La Paz on Christmas Day, Friday before a weekend, knowing we needed to be all the way to Loreto by the thirty-first. A night sail was proposed. The winds were forecast as practically non-existent, but a nearly full moon would make a pretty motor of it anyway, and we’d have half a day before businesses closed to get a few things done. We weighed anchor after a nice meal ashore, marred only by a drunk Gringo reverting to toddler state from an afternoon of margaritas.

We motored far enough to clear the shoals and raised the main just in case the wind came up despite the forecast. Wyatt and Haley retired to their bunks and sure enough a nice breeze kicked up as we cleared the point. With the genoa unfurled and a beam wind from WSW, Allora took off nicely. The moon was nearly full and it was magical. I went to my bunk and Diana woke up Wyatt to share the watch with her, in case the wonderful sailing didn’t last. But the breeze held as we sailed up the Cerralvo channel at eight knots. There’s something about sailing at night that we really are hooked on, the stars and dark horizon and the anticipation of dawn. Diana woke me around 2 o’clock. The wind had veered ahead of us now, but it still looked like we could make our waypoint at the San Lorenzo Channel into Bahia de La Paz. Haley joined me for the next watch as we headed up and tacked our way through the channel markers, looking up at the stars and snuggling to keep warm. The moon shimmered on the waves and we watched a small forest fire burning high in the Sierra de la Laguna. We inched our way back and forth against a west wind through the small red and green channel markers, that seemed so close, even miles away. Haley went back to her bunk after a couple hours and I continued tacking against wind and current which seemed determined not to let us pass. Swinging ever more due west and forcing me north on the port tack and chasing me back into the channel on starboard. But it was fun sailing and other than waking my sleeping crew with each tack as the sheets ground through the genoa cars right over their heads, it was a great. We had moved so quickly during Diana and Wyatt’s watch and we didn’t want to arrive in La Paz in the dark anyway. Just before dawn Wyatt took over for the sunrise watch and I slept until he got a call from the Lompampo Ferry on the VHF, bearing down on us at 17 knots as we approached the channel entrance. I helped Wyatt with a quick tack and made coffee while he steered and Allora topped 9 knots.

We pulled into our slip next to a couple particularly ostentatious motor yachts (which does seem to be the whole point of these vessels) and Diana went into Diana mode — compressing the errands which any sane crew would allot a week for, to half a day. The plan was to sail to Loreto, upwind over the next five days, so we needed provisions. We also needed to make room for “the Grandmas,” Elizabeth and Camille, which involved some repacking of the stuff in the big cavern forward under our bunk.

Things closed at one o’clock and as we unloaded our provisions, Christmas eve was celebrated with carols sung at the marina in an organized program put on by the boating expats of La Paz. There was amplification and electric guitars, but I couldn’t help feeling that my fellow sons and daughters of meek religious pilgrims didn’t really seem to put their hearts into it. I guess the reticence of our Mayflower ancestors runs deep. Nobody applauded, no doubt because it was a singalong and that would involve the mortal sin of applauding yourself. It was the tenth annual mumble-along to be held at Marina La Paz. Maybe my personal reaction had more to do with misunderstanding the religious component of the holiday. Maybe Christmas eve is supposed to be solemn and serious. We had our own quiet celebration aboard Allora and Haley took some pics of the boats festooned with lights.

We sailed Christmas day on a whisper of wind, which finally quit as we approached the beautiful island, Espiritu Santo. Along the way we spotted some humpback whales, and though a few of the tourist pangas that ferry people out of La Paz for day trips also found them, they hung with Allora. Maybe it’s her black bottom paint that attracts them, but though we didn’t jump in this time, they came close and dove right under us (spottable on the fishfinder), then curiously stuck their noses out of the water.

We anchored at Ensenada el Cardonal. Diana and Wyatt built a driftwood Christmas tree on the beach  (while I tried a little fishing and Haley took a catnap onshore) and we celebrated the full moon and the holiday by rowing ashore in water as still as a mirror. We made a bonfire of the tree  which scattered sparks up into the starry sky, then hiked across the lagoon through the ghostly cactus to the other side of the island.

By morning the wind was howling out of the west. Further lessons were learned about the importance of putting the dinghy onboard at night, and especially getting the outboard off while the sea is relatively calm. Our only other company in the harbor pulled anchor a few minutes before we did and we watched them head out through the pounding white caps. They started to put up their mainsail, but quickly decided not to and headed south, unfurling some of their jib. It was a stiff breeze out there with some steep chop. Our prop worked hard trying to push us out passed the point, the waves slamming over the bow. We left our main furled, too, and unrolled the working jib and were quickly moving at 9 knots under jib only. Haley had her camera out and popped out now and then from behind the hard dodger like a war corespondent to get shots of the waves breaking over the bow, until Wyatt went forward to take care of the main halyard and noticed that the sail hatch was open. Fixing that problem was a lot of work, and there are still problems we’re dealing with including a bowthruster that still isn’t working. There was a lot to be dried out at the anchorage at Isla San Francisco. THAT won’t happen again!

San Jose Del Cabo – Cabo Los Frailes – Cabo Riviera Marina

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We spent a long, cloudy day at Los Frailes. The point was summited by a shore expedition, and I wore out my arm blind casting without any luck along the surf. The wind came up during the night, blowing from the north, but the forecast was for NNW in the teens which didn’t sound bad. We didn’t really know (yet) what to expect from the wave forecast, but the 5 second period (between swells) should have been an obvious warning. We decided to go for it and if it was too unpleasant, head for a new Marina less than twenty miles away. The wind had calmed in the anchorage, and it didn’t look that bad out beyond the point. We left in a bit too much of a hurry. We reefed the main almost immediately and then rolled up the jib. We’re still getting the process of reefing down, so the extra messing around was too much for Wyatt’s stomach, and Haley wasn’t too pleased about it either. Going back would have been a good choice, and we will remember the wisdom of retreat for the future. Especially important for the Captain who was feeling fine and kind of loving bashing into the seas, to take sea sickness more seriously. The second reef, put in hove-to, was too much for Diana, and all the crew was down.
The first mate suggested trying to motor so we could head straight for the marina at Cabo Riviera, but our Yanmar quickly overheated. I thought it was the heel that was causing the problem, so we went back to sailing and puking overboard. On the port tack we were making almost zero headway, but just needed to get out far enough to turn to starboard and then it was only 14 miles. Wyatt settled in from an initial sea sickness panic (his first, ever), to something more of a meditation on misery. Haley, more experienced with the feeling, retreated immediately to a sullen quietness in the aft berth. Soon, all three had found a modified fetal position somewhere on the boat as Allora sailed merrily on, double reefed. This gave me a moment to reflect on the morning’s hasty departure, and to realize that the problem with the engine was that El Capitan had left the through-hull for the engine cooling system closed after checking the strainer. Oooops! But then, with it open, the engine still quickly overheated. Problem not solved. Meanwhile, the first mate, with the earnest desperation only sea sickness can inspire, was making various attempts to contact Marina Cabo Riviera. Nothing on the VHF. A recording from the SAT phone in Spanish seemed to suggest that the phone number did not exist. It was hard to imagine that a ‘new’ Marina could come into existence and then disappear, but there was nothing on the charts and it was only listed in one out of our three books.
I kept an eye on the windspeed, as Diana summoned her early religious life with a prayer that the ghost marina would manifest. The wind had settled in the mid-twenties, which, going up wind, is a stiff breeze, but then it began gusting. It topped 35 for a moment and I looked to see if Diana had noticed, but she was focused on her catechism. Then it bumped over forty. She still didn’t notice, and I resolved to keep quiet. It hit 50 knots as she looked up and then for a second, unbelievably, it topped 60 knots. It must have been some kind of wind sheer hitting the top of the mast where the wind is measured, because on deck it didn’t feel like a hurricane. Finally Marina Cabo Riviera answered on the VHF. I started up the engine and Diana mustered the strength to help drop the mainsail, but in the process, a batten caught in the lazy jack cheek block and before we could straighten it out, the lazy jacks (which help keep the mainsail under control) on the starboard side came raining down on deck. Despite the building wind and crazy seas Diana wrestled the sail onto the boom. Then the engine overheated again and had to be turned off. We didn’t want to deal with the main, so we unfurled the jib and Diana got on the VHF to ask Cabo Riviera about the feaseablitly of sailing into the harbor. They didn’t think it a good idea, mainly because the narrow channel had a shallow spot and they were worried about our 6 foot 6” draft as it was. As we approached under reefed jib we could see waves rolling into the entrance which were going to make it difficult even under power. To the profound consternation of the seasick crew, we hauled up the main to its’ double reefed position and sailed directly out to sea,
AWAY from the Marina with exactly two options. Get enough sea room to heave-to and fix the engine, or if that was not possible, sail 15 miles further on to Bahia de los Muertos, seriously, Bay of the Dead, where we could drop anchor. Cabo Riviera, meanwhile, hailed us on the VHF wondering why we weren’t coming in and expressing concern that conditions were worsening and that the window was closing. I shit you not.
We keep an inventory onboard of where we put everything including spare engine parts. We got the boat hove-to, Wyatt rising heroically from his seasick depths to lend a hand, and I went below to find the impeller, which was my first guess of what could be causing the engine to overheat. Down below, the steep waves had turned our quiet little home into something of a madhouse that required a white knuckle grip to keep from being tossed around like a rag doll. EVERNOTE politely informed me that it could not access the inventory, because, so sorry, that required internet access, though, the cheery little app reminded me, we could solve that problem by upgrading to a paid version. Not helpful under the circumstances. Diana had a couple ideas where they might be and together we tore the boat apart as it slammed and tossed in the waves and wind howled overhead, finding the engine spares, finally, where I had missed them in the first spot Diana told me to look. Changing the impeller was miraculously easy, and in moments we had the engine running.
Now all we had to do was make it in over the waves behind the breakwater and not run aground. It helped me to remember the experience of ducking into Pier 39 in SF Bay in a 5 knot current as we surfed through the steep waves into the muddy channel. It didn’t feel THAT bad. The only remaining trick was to get beyond the shallow spot. Diana convinced the guy from Cabo Riviera that he had to come out and talk us passed the point. I watched the depth as we approached the area – 11 feet, then 9 feet and then seconds after he said we were clear, 7 feet. There were four people to help us tie up, the only sailboat (the rest were fishing boats) and definitely the biggest boat in Marina Cabo Rivera. Diana kissed all four. Allora’s crew regained composure, took a cold shower onshore and the main caretaker at the marina drove us all to dinner, waited while we ate and drove us back to our home afloat. We showered them with packages of marlin to show our appreciation for their very existence.

IMG_3311    The only photo taken during all the mayhem.

Ensenada to San Jose Del Cabo, Baja California Sur

San Diego to San Jose del Cabo, Mexico
We departed with much more time that we needed to sail the 60 miles to Ensenada. We crossed the border in light winds and ghosted by the Coronado Islands. Finally, turned on the engine for a short spell, motoring slowly so we wouldn’t arrive at 3AM. The wind came up at sunrise for a nice sail into harbor. Fantastic fish tacos and a margarita at the marina hotel, that put us all to sleep for a Sunday afternoon.
Custom and Immigration formalities went off smoothly with only one self-inflicted glitch involving our Temporary Import Permit (a long story involving Vilma of Puerto Vallarta, more to come). A temporary solution was found, celebrated by more fish tacos at a street taco stand. We sailed in the afternoon, a glorious beam reach by Islas Todos Santos, accompanied by dolphins which we never tire of.
Our next destination was Magdalena Bay, which would take four days and nights of sailing to achieve. With winds on our tail, pointed (inconveniently for a modern sailboat) directly at our goal, we tacked offshore on as broad a reach as we could manage with our asymmetrical spinnaker.

With a scant crescent of a ‘wishing’ moon – which did not arrive until early each morning, we sailed under a dome of vivid stars. The forecast was for seas up to 18 feet, and we saw some big waves, but they were long and rolling, big soft hills and gentle valleys. Bonita were caught (and released), a yellowtail tuna kept for ceviche dinner and then set up the grill on the swim platform as the wind picked up the next evening with the Code Zero set, leading to what’s now referred to as ‘extreme grilling.’

Somewhere in the afternoon, when the winds had dropped to 7 knots, making running off wind in the big swell unpleasant, we motored for awhile and I took advantage of the moment to set up a trolling teaser, a big lure about 16 inches long, no hook, that wiggles and chugs and generally makes a commotion. The strategy confused me the first time I read about it, why no hook? But the lure is so big, it would be tough to set. This is how they catch billfish on a fly… lure and chum them in, then toss the biggest fly you can launch out there so the fish can take out its frustrations on something smaller. I did the same thing now with heavy duty conventional tackle. I just happened to be reeling in a trolled lure with the idea of adding a squid which had volunteered to be bait the night before, when the swordfish started thrashing at the teaser. I yelled for Maddi, snoozing in the hammock and for Diana who was off watch and taking a nap, and then I tossed my lure back out there and let it drop next to the teaser. The swordfish attacked it immediately, but it took several thrashes to hook up. The first time it seemed to be on, I tried to set the hook but missed. You’d think that’d be it, but the fish came back again and as soon as the hook was in it tore off. I hadn’t really known that I had backing on the reel, but it showed up in a mighty hurry and even with the drag still high, I couldn’t slow it down. By now, Maddi and Diana were there to help. Eventually the fish slowed, and I did my best with the rod in the holder to get back some line, while Diana and Maddi tried to find the fighting harness, which Diana has dubbed “The Golden God” and then tried to read the instructions on how to set it up, laughing hysterically at this ludicrous piece of man gear, a sort of golden cod piece of ridiculous proportions with an appropriately situated receptacle for the butt end of the rod. Maddi finally got it strapped on me and it took about 45 minutes to bring the swordfish next to the boat. Further dramatizing the importance of being prepared, we then had to decide what in the heck to do with it. I simply hadn’t imagined catching a fish this big. Reaching over the side of the boat I grabbed its bill with bare hands and somehow we managed to get a line tied around its tail, we moved it aft to the swim platform and up on the boat. Killing a fish that size felt more like killing a deer, definitely not the fun part. The fish was exhausted by the fight, even with hefty gear meant for big fish, and I wonder if you did try to land one with a fly, how it would fair upon release. Filleting it later at anchor reminded me of the first time we butchered a deer in Montana. All told, we vacuum packed somewhere around 100 swordfish steaks.

We had hoped to explore Magdalena Bay, but a norther put the kibosh on that idea. We spent the morning hoping it would calm, but instead it gusted 30 knots, testing our new bridle. It calmed that evening and I slept better the second night, knowing the anchor was rock solid.

An armada of shrimp boats came into Bahia Santa Maria to get out of the wind, and we sailed passed them early morning. For whatever reason they keep a lot of lights on round the clock, with their trolling poles extended to either side hanging heavy metal cages to steady them in the swell. They looked like large, strangely beautiful floating insects, something akin to their prey.

A Gray Whale greeted us near the entrance to Mag Bay, breaching classically, and we battled the wind and current to gain entrance to the San Francisco sized harbor. We saw a few fishermen passing but no more whales, and we wished we had no deadlines, because it would have been a fascinating place to explore. But Maddi had a flight to catch and Haley was waiting for us in San Jose del Cabo. No doubt it will be a long, and imperfect process, shedding deadlines and schedules that are inconsistent with the natural pace of sailing.

The weather forecast (which never seems to match quite what we’re experiencing) called for nice winds in the teens decreasing and trending eastward through the night. Instead we had low winds from the north which built and became NNW. We had the ‘Zero’ up at sunset and got some gorgeous photos on the bowsprit, but then as Diana brought me up a plate of fish tacos, the wind gusted over 20knots (we’re slow learners, I guess) forcing me to hand steer one-handed (whilst inhaling tacos) until we could pause our dinner plans and get it rolled up and replaced with the Genoa. Diana took the first watch and had such a fine wind keeping Allora flying along at 8 and even 9 knots that she went until almost one in the morning, counting over thirty shooting stars before she woke me up for the graveyard shift. I added one more reef to the genoa and still we were flying. I started trying to count shooting stars but gave up somewhere around 40. The wind was dropping when I woke Maddi at three thirty and I had already let the genoa all the way out again, but it was steady enough to keep the boat happy, and Maddi counted 136 more before sunrise. Turns out we were uniquely situated for watching the Gideon meteor shower, no moon, and thirty miles offshore the Baja, bioluminescence trailing like a comet tail in our wake, mirroring the celestial display.

We passed Cabo Falso, which despite the name does function in terms of weather as the true cape of Baja. The winds compressed by the point jumped to 25+ with white caps, then dropped to nothing as we passed Cabo San Lucas, with its jagged rocks and cruise ship anchored off the beach. Moments later the NNW wind swung east and we pointed for San Jose del Cabo, absurdly fighting for every degree windward to clear a silly little point Palmila before the bay. Just on principle I didn’t want to have to fire up the engine, and we just made it.

Haley was at the dock to catch a line for us, and after a week at sea, we stepped with wobbily legs onto solid ground in Mexico, Puerto Los Cabos. What we’ve been prepping for and talking about for a very long time, is finally happening.

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This from Maddi:

Stepped on land again after 1440 nautical miles of surreal sailing along the coast of Baja, Mexico aboard Allora. Over the course of a week at sea we had winds from still to sublime, spectacular sun (and moon) rises and sets, heaving Pacific swells, plenty of hammock swinging and good books, a few hectic sail changes, a breaching grey whale, a 7.5 foot swordfish caught by the Captain (yummy!) and a last night watch with the Gemind meteor shower overhead (136 shooting stars in just two hours!) and a comet of bioluminescence trailing in our wake. So happy to be a part of this amazing ‘grem’ (crew)!

Departing San Diego/Entering Mexico

Los Angeles to San Diego
My old film school friend Rob Wait cast off the lines for us Thanksgiving morning, and we left Marina del Rey on a port tack, the wind blowing SW almost directly from Catalina. I guess we were so used to being blasted down the coast from SF, that we underestimated the time it would take to get out there. The sailing was good, though it wasn’t taking us very far in the right direction, and we stuck to it a little too long. Finally, near sunset we had to concede the point and turn on the engine. We arrived in Cherry Cove late. Amazing how close a rocky shore feels in the dark, and how difficult it was finding buoy E22 in the tight maze of clustered moorings.
Diana’s birthday was celebrated by doing virtually nothing except a short dinghy ride. I don’t think she got out of the bunk until after 11. What a spectacular day!

We embarked for San Diego at night, having plenty of time if we needed it, to keep sailing. The sea was incredibly calm and we ghosted by Avalon near sunset, going about three knots in just four knots of wind with our big beautiful dragon wing, our light wind sail, the Code Zero unfurled off the bowsprit. Anyone watching the tracker closely might have noticed some erratic zigging and zagging out in the channel as I dodged a parade of cruise ships headed for Long Beach. Star Princess hailed to ask our intentions. “This is sailing vessel Allora, just trying to get out of your way.” Allora pointed her damnedest to avoid that glowing ship of consumer dreams, the natural and perhaps most obscene extension of the power of advertising. Goodbye, for now.

San Diego, our final US port of call, and last Amazon shipping address, will be remembered for our host at the Southwestern Yacht Club, Frank – owner, with his wife Nora, of Outbound hull 16, Ocean Dancer. A former Army Colonel, he chauffeured me around to pick up the last few things, starting the tour with a couple beers and a burger. Over the course of a hectic week, we learned a little about frank Frank, about the couple of hand grenades he managed to keep upon retiring, and how those were put to good use, one to blow up a car. The vehicles owner got the message. Never heard from again in America’s most southwestern city. Learned the useful saying, ‘a three body trunk’, which explains the real use of those ludicrously gigantic compartments on the late model cars of our childhood (larger than Allora’s galley). Son of a NY policeman, he earned $5,000 dollars for services rendered to local criminal organizations, less the cost of chain (for weight) and a lock.
Maddi flew from Churchill, Canada (where she was working with Polar Bears International) to crew with us down to Baja, shedding her subzero down parka for something completely different, ice for tropical waters, polar bears for dolphins and whales.

 

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Frank and Bill – Oh the stories Marcus heard!

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Frank and Nora bid us ‘fair winds’ from the stern of their Outbound, Ocean Dancer (hull#14).
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Sailing away, into the sunset.
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Bye San Diego, bye USA!
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Captain Marcus setting the asymmetrical spinnaker.

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Sunrise, Di’s watch, around 3 hours north of Ensenada.

 

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When they say, ‘punta reunion,’ they MEAN it! Off to have, what turned out to be, some of the best tacos we’ve EVER had!!

 

 

We're official!
We’re official!

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The day has arrived! We’re currently flying our US flag (USCG requirement), departing San Diego, Mexico bound. We’ve got Madison on board as crew (lucky us), and tomorrow, Dec. 6th (6 months from the day we took delivery of Allora) we’ll be hoisting the Mexican flag after a brief stay in Ensenada to get our documentation in order. Here’s all the promised info. as to how to reach us (also found in ‘Contact Us’):

Best is by text via our Iridium sat phone system (free to us, free to you) — in theory anywhere on the planet.
Dial:  00-8816-234-91100 (from the US)
We can receive emails also, no charge to us, text only (no attachments!) at: allora@myiridium.net
Depending on where we are, we will have wifi access from time to time which means normal emails and no trouble with attachments:
dianastevens@mac.com
marcusfilms@mac.com
For as long as we are in Mexico we can also receive texts and phone calls (free to you) on our US cell phones:
Diana – 406-548-1581
Marcus – 406-585-8897
Our blog: alloravoyage.com  Use our tracker to keep an eye on our movements and send a comment request so we can hear from you!
If all else fails, put a message in a bottle, prevailing currents on the west coast are southern.

Anacapa/Channel Islands to Los Angeles

The Channel Islands greeted us with a deluge of rain as we set anchor. The final stretch to Marina Del Rey was warm but not enough wind to sail triumphantly in. We wished we had our asymmetrical spinnaker so we didn’t have turn on the engine, but even so, it was surreal to approach Santa Monica and Los Angeles for the first time by sea.

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Overnight, small craft advisory — Monterey to Santa Barbara

 

We stayed in Soquel Cove an extra day waiting for the small craft advisory for the central coast to be canceled as predicted (also because the sea otters were pretty cute), but instead it was extended. We’d heard for a week before we left San Francisco about a boat coming up the coast that was having a hard time. The owner was a friend of Eva’s at Emery Cove, and she had suggested we should wait a whole week before departing, which we hadn’t done. Somehow she’d picked October 4th as the most auspicious date and she was sticking to it. Robin our sailmaker shrugged it off saying the problem this time of year was not enough wind and having to motor. Phil the boat builder told the story of being surprised by 50 knots of wind passed Monterey (where they had expected things to calm down). The waves were huge, he said, but the boat handled it. The only scary moment came at Point Conception when they had to jibe (change sailing direction downwind). Reassuring words? The fact that we would be sailing off the wind, and not against it, weighed in. We had sailed in the bay in over 30 knots when the breeze was at our backs, and it was suprisingly calm, the boat took some hand steering, but then we were happy to go fast in the flat water. The difference along the coast would be the waves, and that was a condition we lacked experience to assess. We’d also be sailing overnight for the first time.

Plans carry surprising momentum. The problem was that the forecast suggested we’d have to delay another couple days to avoid the predicted 30 knot winds, and then there might be no wind at all, or wind from the south with rain, which did not sound like fun. So we decided to set out. Our back up plan would be to anchor at San Simeon if it looked too big. We left early enough that we could duck in before sunset, otherwise we’d sail all night and to begin passing Point Conception around dawn which, according to one slightly outdated forecast might mean a little less wind.

We passed Big Sur mid-morning. The mountains, viewed from the sea were massive, like Montana mountains. The fog scattered across three miles of the Pacific was backlit by the sun as it cleared the peaks. Even from that distance we could see the surf breaking on the rugged shoreline. The wind picked up, starting at a pleasant 15 knots, but kept going. When it hit the twenties we shortened the main and rolled up a bit of the jib. The waves started getting bigger. One of the things which suprised me was that they didn’t come in long rows, but more in peaks, and you could see big ones some distance out, but it was pretty hard to determine until right at the last moment if they were going to pass by or come right at us. Usually you didn’t really know until the wave was blocking out the horizon. They looked so steep, you just knew that some water was coming on board, but then that almost never happened. Allora would surge forward and rise with the waves, sometimes nice and straight, but other times she would yaw off course and heel over. It was never dangerous, but it did remind us that if things got out of control it might not be as pleasant.

We shortened sail again late in the afternoon. We were in position to make San Simeon if we wanted, though there was fog developing along the coast. We had a decision to make. Were we signing up for the night at sea, or changing course and trying to find a place to anchor before dark? If we did, we’d have to wait a full day at San Simeon and leave in the evening, or we’d find ourselves at Point Conception at midnight. The wind was steady around 26 to 28 knots and gusting over 32, and the waves were definitely getting bigger, but with the sails reefed, Allora felt pretty good. The motion was still a little crazy. Going below you never knew which way she’d rock next. Maddi put a quiche in the oven for dinner, and the stove tipped back and forth wildly on its gimbals to remind us, in case we were beginning to forget, just how far away from Montana we were. We moved from hand hold to hand hold to get around down below and tied in the lee cloths (which hold you in your bunk to sleep). The decision to go for it felt okay.

Dark settled slowly, sunset warming the scattered fog as we set our heading 150 degrees to the true wind, steadily offshore. The running lights on the bow lit whitecaps green and red as they surged underneath us. Diana took the first watch, and we planned to jibe after two hours when she would wake me up. The autopilot was set to follow an angle to the wind. Our best course would have been dead downwind, but modern sailboats are more efficient at an angle to the wind, and in confused seas like these, awkward or even dangerous to sail straight before the breeze.

The moon came up during the night and each of us on watch sat on at the stern on the putative highside and to watch the boat roll before us. Diana looked over her shoulder more than once to see waves looming behind that made her turn away. Ignorance is bliss. We checked bouy reports once we had internet onshore and they’d reported significant waves heights (80th percentile) of eleven or twelve feet for the time sailed by Point Conception. That meant those waves that went unrecognized and unrecorded by Diana, were probably something like 15 feet. Madison took the dawn watch while Diana and I slept. Contrary to general wisdom and forecasts, the wind and waves were biggest just before the light came up, but Maddi enjoyed the moon and stars swinging back and forth over the mast and never felt that she needed to wake us. Despite the constant motion and weird sounds below (the taut jib sheet vibrating against the shrouds like a discordant cello string), we were plenty tired enough to sleep off watch. An even bigger, and more pleasant surprise. No one was sea sick.

I got up at dawn, even though it was early for the jibe, because I wanted to see the sunrise. We were out of sight of land, and there was some fog, so it was a very slow fade in. We were all up for the last sail change, then Diana who’d put in two watches overnight, got a little more sleep while we waited for the promised climatic shift at Point Conception. It was warmer, though not quite as suddenly as reading about it might make you think. Really, I think it would fair to say that passing the point, because of the course change, the hard turn to the southeast the coast takes, was a half a day process. By the time we reached Santa Barbara, though, the wind had died and our foulies were in a pile in the aft shower.

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Our first overnight offshore passage, took us 30 miles offshore with 26 knots of wind gusting over 32 kts (Gale force is 34 kts).

 

Leaving Emery Cove — San Francisco to Half Moon Bay

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We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge many times, and every time it felt like testing an idea. Imaginging our readiness and Allora’s. The lift of the unencumbered Pacific swell beckoned. It really did. If we had been sailors our whole lives, we might not have ever thought of it as such a big deal. Or maybe we would. Most everyone in Emery Cove seemed excited by the Gate. Maybe the power of the free ocean is something too big to grow cynical about. Maybe the idea of sailing out into that vastness, with a new boat, becoming smaller in a relative sense with each mile offshore, would be a big idea for almost anyone.

We started small and kept to the coast, though we heeed advice not to be tempted to cut the corner and head south to soon, but keep our course along the main shipping channel, even though the wind was light and the swell long and easy and another smaller sailboat took the shortcut ahead of us. “Coast Guard, Sector San Francisco” came on the VHF as we made the turn ahead of bouy “R2,” with an all stations “pon pon” alert. A sailing vessel, we could not see it (nor could we see the one that had cut the corner anymore), was in trouble in the surf somewhere along Ocean Beach. Monitoring Channel 16 keeps us from becoming complacent about the risks. The Pacific Ocean is not the sheltered waters of the Sea of Abaco in the Bahamas where ten feet of water is plenty. It was probably not that sailboat we saw, and the shortcut is only hazardous when the swell is running high, and dangerous in a storm, but it didn’t add much to swing wide and play it safe. We’ll leave the shortcuts to experienced sailors and locals.

We were happy to be sailing as the forecast was for light and variable winds, or no wind at all. I’d even contemplated delaying a day, but Marty from Emery Cove pointed out that morning that forecasts are often wrong. We pulled the genoa out, which we rarely used in the trafficky Bay and sailed the whole distance to Half Moon Bay. We carefully followed the bouys in past the reef which was lined with fishermen. Inside we lost a big of time to watching the whales which cruised inside the bay, then turned in by the breakwater, white and foul with pelican guano, a smell which dominated the harbor so intensely that we kept our hatches closed. It made a fine image.

We were close enough to shore all day that had cell service the whole way down, and Valerie made the drive from Stanford to meet us for dinner at a sleepy reastaurant along the wharf.