Living & Learning Aboard the Good Ship Learnativity

Our 3rd Circumnavigation of LOVE Begins!

This very first photo captures the moment two years ago today, December 19th 2013, when this beautiful person walked off a plane at Fiji’s Nadi International airport and into my life. 

 

Nothing has been the same or better since the day I met and kissed this most amazing love of my life and life of my love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As per my recent post Thanks for changing my life forever Barney!! it had all started with a cute little video of Barney the Yorkshire Terror as he was called and my seemingly innocent question to his owner who had created this little My Talking Pet video.  But that simple question led to more Emails, then even more phone calls, then even more Skype calls and less than a month later she was on a plane from her home base in Ft. Lauderdale Florida to meet this weird wandering fellow single handed Canadian sailor who was floating on his boat with his little dog in Fiji. 

 

If you are a sucker for romance like me, you can read much more in my previous posts such as:

Wayne Finds His Blankie!

Wayne gets Entangled, Enchanted and Engaged with his Blankie!!

 

 

A few hours after Christine walked off that plane while I was still wandering around dazed in the twitterpated fog I’m still living in,we were aboard our dear friends Colleen & Ian on their neighboring boat m/v Summer Spirit with Ruby the Wonderdog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That evening we had Ian take the picture on the left looking off to the west from Vuda Point Marina and then this past August Ian took the photo on the right from the same spot to mark our “circumnavigation of love” by returning to the spot where we had met for the very first time two years ago today.

 

 

 

 

In between those two photos we filled our life as “we” with more adventures, love and learning that either of us sexagenarians had ever experienced. (a more appropriate term than you might think!) 

The list of our travels and adventures is MUCH too long to write out here so just to mention some of the most relevant ones for this anniversary post:

We spent 3 weeks in magnificent Malta researching what was then Christine’s next book, now known as “Knight’s Cross”  which was published just last week.  I took advantage of this magical place to ask what my heart had been shouting for some time and she said YES!

 

 

 

We took advantage of a brief break in our travelling adventures to begin another grand adventure by first getting officially married on August 4th in Deland Florida.

Then thanks to the help of our awemazing daughter Lia, who is organizer par excellence and over 60 of our best friends and family we had the most incredible four days of wedding celebration in San Diego California on March 21st.

 

Along the way we have traveled through more than 15 countries around the world and covered over 100,00 miles on land, sea and air using planes, trains, automobiles, trollies, ferries, sailboats and motor boats.

 

Since that first day we met, our lives have been filled to the point of bursting with adventures, friends, families, learning and love.  We count ourselves amongst the most fortunate and certainly the richest people on the planet when measured by what matters; profound joy and love.  We have all of YOU, our friends and family, to thank for all this.

 

Most of all for me, on this special anniversary day I have the most awemazing person I’ve ever met to thank. 

I LOVE you Christine Louise! 

Here’s to making our third circumnavigation together of the sun and of love the best one yet!

Thanks for changing my life forever Barney!!

On November 23, 2013 Barney the Yorkshire Terror changed my life forever when he unknowingly introduced me to his Mom Christine, who is now my wife, my best friend, my partner and the love of my life and the life of my love.

He did so in his typically masterful way by posting this simple video.to Christine’s Write on the Water blog.  My curiosity raised, I posted a question asking what software it was that created this cute little video.  Christine, who as Barney noted was deep into the final edits of her second in the Shipwreck Series of books called Dragons Triangle was short on time, hence both the quick to make video of Barney and her equally quick reply that she had used the My Talking Pet app (iOS only sorry). 

 

So I wrote back, which was apparently something which hardly any of the many other people who send questions to the, unbeknownst to me at the time, best selling author Christine Kling, ever do, to say Thank You.  After some quick background checks on who this Thank You writing Canadian was, she felt compelled to write a short note to let me know she appreciated the thanks and that she had sailed in Fiji back in the 70’s, was a single handed sailor herself and wondered how much Fiji had changed since.  So I wrote back a “slightly” longer response (never a sentence when a paragraph will do don’t you know?), and then she wrote back, and then I wrote back and then we Skyped and then we Skyped and then ……………………………………………..

Christine flew to Fiji on Dec. 19th so we could meet and our “first date” turned out to be almost a month while we sailed up from Fiji to the Marshall islands.  It seemed to work out rather well we have not been more than 50’ apart (length of Learnativity) ever since and I asked, and she said Yes! and we are now married, have two new grandchildren and five children between us.

If you’d like to read more about all this, check out previous posts on the Learnativity blog such as:

Wayne Finds His Blankie!

Wayne gets Entangled, Enchanted and Engaged with his Blankie!!

 

For now all I want to say is THANK YOU Barney, and Thank You Christine, for changing my life so profoundly and so completely.  I always thought I was very happy, and I was, but you have both taken that, along with Ruby the WonderDog and our kids and grand kids, to a whole new exponentially better level.  I LOVE YOU Christine Louise and Barney, I shall be forever in your debt!

Wayne gets Entangled, Enchanted and Engaged with his Blankie!!

NOTE:  For those of you who may have missed my previous post “Wayne Finds His Blankie” the above reference won’t make much sense so you may want to click on that link and read that post from the beginning of January before you read over this latest and most exciting update. 

For those of you who want the shortest possible refresher, I saw this posting Christine put up, or should I say that Barney her Yorkshire Terrier/Terror put up on her Write on the Water blog and thought it was very clever and perhaps I should create some like it with Ruby the Wonderdog.  So I sent a note to Christine asking her what software she had used to create this fun talking video.  She sent back a quick note to let me know she was extremely busy putting the finishing touches on her latest book “Dragon’s Triangle” (available for pre-order now, shipping June 1st) and and that she had used an app called “My Talking Pet”.  I sent back a short note to say Thanks, she sent a slightly longer note back because she says she almost never receives a Thank you note when she answers such Email requests and one Email response led to the next, which led to Skype calls, which led to Christine jumping on a plane to fly over and meet for our “first date” in Fiji, which turned into being a very special dinner on Christmas Eve, which turned into us making the 3 week, 2000+ nautical mile passage from Fiji up north of the equator to Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands.

For those of you who would appreciate the option of reading some well written accounts of our adventures for a change, you can read some of Christine’s post on her weekly postings to the Write on the Water blog such as:

What a difference a week makes!

Fijian Christmas

A rudderless life

More than making do with what’s on hand

Attitude adjustment

Since Christine flew out to Fiji back in December to join Ruby and I aboard Learnativity, we’ve been learning, loving and living life extremely well every day.  Both Christine and I enjoy living on what we refer to as “the no plan plan” in that we live with no expectations or plans and instead we have unbounded intentions and hopes.  After spending the first two weeks and Christmas in Fiji we spent the next three weeks sailing north to Majuro with one stop at the small island of Rotuma which you can read more about in the “Blankie” post I noted above. 

If you’ve got more time than good sense you can review ALL the other Learnativity Updates at http://learnativity.typepad.com for Dec 2013/Jan 2014 where you will find the daily updates from our three week passage north from Vuda Point Marina in Fiji north to Majuro in the Marshall Islands.  It was a phenomenal adventure for both of us as sailors and as a couple and in spite of some challenges along the way such as losing the use of our rudder we had a truly awemazing time throughout, I was finally able to swim across the equator and we sailed onto the mooring ball in Majuro sans rudder but avec the biggest grins you can imagine. 

For the more sane of you, let me start with a quick synopsis (remember who is writing this!)  of our adventures leading up to this latest development.

 

 

Once we arrived in Majuro we enjoyed the next few weeks introducing Christine to the fascinating atoll of Majuro, getting the rudder removed, welded and replaced (thanks Philip!), attending to lots of other boat jobs and took a small test run over to the idyllic islet of Eneko which is only about six nautical miles away from where we are normally moored.  Time flew by and it was soon mid February and time for us to transform ourselves into “land lubbers” for the next few months as we switched from sailing North at 5 knots to flying East at over 500.  After a quick hop through Honolulu our first stop was near LA to spend a few days with my amazing daughter Lia, hubby Brian AND our new baby/grand daughter to be!  Yes, that’s right folks Lia is expecting a little girl about the middle of July and so I’m about to become a Grand Dad for the first time!!!  I have not had as exciting a time with Lia & Brian since being the Father of the Bride at their wedding back in 2009 and lucky for you I’m not going to start gushing about my feelings about all this but do let me issue an early warning of upcoming prolific postings from a very proud Grand Dad come July. 

 

 

Since then we have continued hopping our way mostly eastward with stops in the Orlando area just long enough to all too briefly meet up with Christine’s son Tim and his fiancé Ashley and some of Christine’s best friends in the Fort Lauderdale area and move Christine’s sailboat up to my land based home in New Smyrna Beach (thanks John & Michelle!).  Then we were back on the next flights over to St. Martin for a week of fun with my “second family” the Alonso clan on their fabulous PowerCat.  Ruby decided she would rather continue to be a boat dog and stay there where she had six new people to attend to her Princess needs, tropical climate preferences and join forces with their dog Amy and cat Calypso while Christine and I jumped on the next jet over to Europe for two months.  Primary purpose here is to do the fascinating style of what I’d best describe as “serendipitous research” which Christine does for her books and to also take advantage of the opportunity to visit with some dear friends and family we each have in various parts of Europe.  We initially flew into Malta as that is where Christine’s next thriller (as yet untitled) will begin and where the story I want to tell today also begins.

 

 

 

Neither of us had ever been to Malta before and it turned out to be truly magical with its stunning natural beauty and extraordinary history as well as providing the perfect setting for something I’d been waiting to find just the right moment for.  And so it was that on yet another stunning sunny Spring day we wandered our way over to the colourful and ancient medieval little fishing village of Marsaxlokk.  We spent the morning wandering through the Sunday market they are famous for that was filled as you can see in these pictures with stall after stall of every kind of fresh fish and seafood, veggies, fruit, nuts, candy, baked goodies and crafts.  As is our daily habit, along the way we picked up some still warm fresh bread, olives, cheese, dried meat and a bottle of wine and headed over for the hills out on the point we could see were blanketed in spring flowers and would give us a great view back into the circular little harbour the market rings. 

 

 

I think you might agree when you look at the picture to the left here, that we found just the right spot that was sheltered from the still cold wind in the midst of a rainbow of new flowers springing up all around us and also provided us with a panoramic view of both the little town harbour and all the boats out at sea behind us.  So we spread out all our treasures from the market, fresh bread, olives, cheeses, meats and I popped the cork and poured us each a glass of the latest bottle of Maltese wine we found.  If I had any doubts that this was going to be perfect “Goldilocks” moment where everything was just right, a flock of doves suddenly flew right over our heads and that was it!  NOW was the time. 

I was going to use a poem I’d been working on but I decided to just speak spontaneously from my heart instead.  As you might imagine Christine was by now very used to my verbosity but I asked her to let me get to the end of what I wanted to say as I told her how completely my perspectives on life and love have changed and been enriched since we serendipitously found each other.

Christine and I have both been fortunate enough to have had previous wonderful marriages so we have known the joys of a great loving relationship with a great spouse.  We have also both have the unbelievable loving experience of being parents; Christine has a son Tim (29) and I have Lia (29) and Skyler (27) so we know what that kind of love feels like.  As you can see then, I have lived a VERY full, rich and wonderful life and yet I was now 61 years young and experiencing all new highs and all new feelings of true LOVE every day.

A few days earlier I had managed to find the most exquisite little filigreed round box with a hinged lid that was locally hand made out of silver.  This is a special craft of a few villages in Malta which dates back to medieval times and Christine and I had both been entranced of some of the examples we had been seeing of the delicate and intricate patterns these artisans are able to create out of silver.  So when I finally found one little shop tucked away in a tiny alley of one of the towns we visited a few days ago that had this tiny jewel like box, I knew it was just right for what I had in mind.  We walked a few blocks further in the old fortified city and with the excuse of needing to go find a WC, I dashed back and bought the little silver box.

And so as I talked to Christine I pulled out this little box which I had carefully been carrying for the past few days, hidden away inside a little “secret pocket” in my jacket and presented it to Christine as I asked her if she would marry me. Inside the box I had previously placed the diamond I had been wearing in my left ear since I was in my twenties and which I explained can be inserted into the ring I am in the process of designing and making.

The way a proposal works for me is that I get to make my decision and ask the question when I’m ready to do so and then Christine gets to make her decision and answer when she is ready to do so.  It wasn’t a complete surprise as we had been talking along these lines for some time.  This is after all about THE most important decision and commitment two people can make!  So I reiterated all this to Christine as I handed her that little silver filigree box, that s he needed to be careful what she wished for or agreed to in this case as she just might get her wish and that there was no rush and she could take as much time as she wanted to respond to my proposal. 

Maybe it was that Spring was so strongly in the air that day.  Or maybe it was another momentary lapse of her otherwise excellent good judgement, such as when she agreed to fly over to Fiji to go on a month long “first date” that included a non stop sailing passage with some crazy Canadian she had never met!  Or maybe it was that Maltese wine?  Whatever the reason, after only a slight pause and a long loving look, she quietly said YES!!! instantly making me the richest, happiest and most fortunate man in the cosmos!!!

It has taken me a few weeks to put this more public announcement together because we both wanted to talk to our kids and a few close family and friends and let them know first and a wee bit more personally.  And we both look forward to sharing this all with you in person when we are next able to meet up with you.  For as many who are living in Europe, the USA and Canada, we would hope that will be in the next few months of our land lubber adventures there.  We have already been able to meet with some of Christine’s special friends in France from when she was an exchange student there back in 1971/72 and with some of my family in Switzerland and dear friends in Antwerp.  In June we hope to meet with many more of you when Christine and I take a big west coast road trip driving up the Pacific Coast Highway 1 from Lia’s place in Chino CA to BC and back again in time for the birth of little “Baby B” about July 12th.  Watch for updates here and on FB as our travels proceed and we will do our best to be in touch as we get closer to you and know more.

As you can imagine, Christine and I couldn’t be happier and we both remain totally awemazed at the degree, depth and completeness of the love we have found buried away deeply within ourselves and each other.  I won’t go on and on about it now (lucky you!) just suffice it to say that I am truly in awe of finding someone who is such a “perfectly imperfect” match for me in seemingly every facet and who feels the same way too.  While life has taken us along extremely different routes to get here, Christine and I find ourselves to be so in synch in literally every way that matters; our outlook on life, our priorities, our sense of adventure, our perspectives and our attitudes.  Each and every step along the way of our each of our 60+ years of life’s experiences have somehow made us into these two very unique snowflakes who awemazingly happen to mesh and fit together perfectly. 

By far the best illustration of how this “perfectly imperfect” complete meshing feels to both Christine and me, click on the illustration you see here on the left. (it is too long to fit here)  While this may be just a metaphorical illustration, this IS exactly how it feels to both of us to have so unexpectedly and serendipitously found our perfectly imperfect match.  When we put Christine’s perfectly imperfect individual self together with mine, it is just like when you find the two halves of a ceramic plate that broke in half; they fit so perfectly together that the crack disappears completely and it becomes one new whole.  In our case that new whole is called “WE”.

The best way I can synthesize my situation is that I am hoping to be one of the rarest of all men, one who gets to have loved two awemazing women and two great romantic marriages in his lifetime.  The first one with Diana was the greatest love of my life for thirty years and we were blessed with the two best gifts a couple could have ever imagined; Lia and Skyler.  For a long time I thought that having one great love in your life was all one could hope for, but a few years ago I came to see this wasn’t necessarily true and opened myself up to the possibility knowing full well that finding just the right “perfectly imperfect” woman a second time and much later in life was very rare.  Add in my unusual single handed and remote lifestyle and it was in fact extremely improbable.  However since Christine and I so serendipitously found each other last year it has become clearer to me each day that by trusting in serendipity and synchronicity I have stumbled upon the perfect matching woman and person for the man and person I’ve become at 61.  And so with Christine’s enthusiastic “Yes!” to my proposal it would seem that I have somehow managed to become the rarest, richest and most fortunate of men upon receiving her gift of “Yes!” and becoming husband and wife and being the last great love of each of our lives.

I’m sure you have lots of questions and right now we don’t have many answers.  We don’t know just when or where or how we will get married other than sooner rather than later and in some very special and memorable way.  With our respective friends and family spread literally around the world it would be a challenge for the majority to get to the same place at the same time.  PLUS, we have two other events coming up that are even more important to both of us; Christine’s son Tim is engaged to a wonderful woman and he and Ashley are going to be getting married in the Fort Lauderdale area on March 1st next year and Lia and Brian are expecting “Baby B” to arrive about July 12th and she will be the first of the Hodgins grandchildren!  Suddenly there seems to be a lot of plans in our “no plan plan” life! 

However, Christine and I are great problem solvers and we will figure out something creative, romantic and innovative for our wedding and let you know as we do.  In any case, these are all just fun details for us really as we have already made our loving commitments to each other and that’s what matters most to us.  What I DO know is that all of Wayne loves all of Christine.  I love every facet of her more deeply and more completely than I ever knew possible.  Best of all she says she feels exactly the same! 

I’ll leave it at that for now and look forward to sharing our happiness with you in person when we next get to be with you in person.

Micro Contributions = Macro Results

With thanks to fellow Canadian Behan on s/v Totem for highlighting this in her EXCLELLENT blog* “Sailing with Totem” I wanted to recommend that you check out this fascinating use of social media and technology that enables everyone and anyone, yes YOU TOO, to very easily make a significant contribution to the world at large.  Behan cites a great example of how this has been most recently used in the wake of the devastation from Typhoon Haiyan.

 

* NOTE: Behan’s “Sailing with Totem” blog is well worth following as she chronicles her adventures out sailing the world as a family of 5

The meta model is the use of crowdsourcing (enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet) to tag or add metadata info about a post or photo, to huge numbers of social media posts such as tweets and pictures so that a large scale map and synthesis of data, in this case for emergency response and disaster relief, can be put together in almost real time and at a truly global scale. 

MicroMapping, MicroTasking and “Micromappers” is one of the best examples and there is a good overview and explanation of “MicroMappers: Microtasking for Disaster Response” on iRevolution.net so I’ll let you read that to get more of the details. 

Over on CrowdCrafting.org you can sign up for one example of a “clicker” called “TweetClicker” which helps to identify tweets that are relevant to disaster relief.

I realise that these examples are obviously very relevant to my life, literally and figuratively as I am out here sailing the world, but I also find the whole notion of “clickers” to be very fascinating for the immense variety of purposes they can serve.  I would urge all of you to check out some of the links and examples above and see where YOUR imagination goes with other examples and context for putting these kinds of applications to work?!

IMHO it is well worth following MicroMapping, MicroTasking and “clickers” and learning about them the best way of all, experientially by using them yourself, to better understand and utilize this truly practical and profound use of technology and social media. 

For those who seem to harbour such disdain for the likes of FaceBook, Twitter and other social media, perhaps these examples will serve to show that there are also some extremely positive uses for this technology and these social trents.  Once again it all comes down to us and our choices.  For me, techologies greatest promise and use is in how it enables all of us to be ever more human and humanitarian.

Check it out and see what YOU think?

LTY Weekend Update: Feb. 19, 2012

The weather cooperated much better this week with only a few days with rain so we made lots of good progress with the sanding, filling and painting this past week.  We finished all the first stage of sanding and filling and sprayed the first coat of sandable primer on Friday so Learnativity is now all white again! Not that this will last for long as tomorrow we’ll start sanding and filling again to get it all flat and smooth in preparation for the final colour coats. I’ll let the before and after pictures show you the difference and the progress.  These two above are of the cockpit area and it has been a particularly big job to get into all those storage areas inside those holes as there was lots of rust in there and as you can see they are difficult to get at.  You’ll also notice that Commodore Ruby is on the job at all times and keeping a very close eye on all the work being done to make sure it is up to her standards.

 Not sure how many times we will need to respray all the surfaces to get them right but probably about 2-3 more coats. The deck will also take quite a bit longer as we will spray it all with the final gloss white coats and then I’ll need to spend several weeks putting back all the fittings, tracks, pulleys and fixtures and then I’ll mask around all of these and we’ll spray on the non skid coating. To create the non skid surfaces we’ll put down a heavy coat of white paint, immediately sprinkle it with a sand like grit and then spray more white on top of that to lock it all in. This non skid paint will cover all areas you walk on so pretty much all the horizontal deck surfaces other than those right around fixtures, tracks, etc. I need to have a VERY sure footing on the deck when I’m at sea and they are all wet and even when on anchor when you are coming in and out of the water and usually have wet bare feet. That will be at least a month away I’d guess and I’ll update you as it happens. 

These two shots above are taken from the bow (front) looking back towards the salon and pilot house and the ones below are taken from the Starboard side of the pilot house looking forward.

I’m getting lots of other “little” jobs done as I make my way through the seemingly endless “To Do” list I make as I find things needing attention over the past year as well as cleaning and rebuilding all the parts I’ve taken off for the paint job so they are all clean and ready to reinstall. Contrary to popular opinion it isn’t all sitting back watching sunrises and sunsets but it is a very small price to pay for this incredible life of total freedom and awemazing experiences.

Weather wise things continue to look good with no TD’s (Tropical Depressions) or cyclones in the forecast but we’ve got several months more of cyclone season which usually lasts till May or so and March is historically the month with the most rainfall in this rainy season so we’ll just have to wait and see what Mother Nature has in store and work around it as best we can.

Ruby is aging a bit faster than usual as she too has a good coat of the white primer all over her making her gray much before her time, but I’ll look after that with a good clipping once we finish spraying. Otherwise she Is enjoying our daily walks and being the talk of the marina where everyone is on a first name basis with her.

Thanks to all of you who asked about my knee injury from stepping into the empty hatch hole a few weeks ago and happy to report that it is much better.  Walking is pretty much pain free and I only feel it when I twist it a certain way so all seems to be healing fine and will be good as new soon.

So that’s the update from here on the good ship Learnativity.  Hope all is well on your end and that you are making great progress with all your projects too.

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog

LTY Weekend Update: Feb. 12, 2012

It’s been a rainy week and we were only able to get in about 2 days of work on the exterior paint projects but it gave me a chance to work on internal projects like putting in a new transducer for depth and speed.  This is actually a second depth transducer, the sender mounted in the bottom of hull that sends and receives the sonar signals as I wanted to have a backup for this critical information.  Here in Fiji and in many of the places I most like to sail there are lots of shallow areas and coral reefs so having an accurate depth reading is very useful.  However this usually just augments the visual navigation I do in such situations and is why I make sure to time my entrance into new harbours and areas to be when the sun is high in the sky and I can see the various depths clearly based on their different colours. 

The overall weather continues to be quite good given that we had two named tropical cyclones, Jasmine and Cyril, form last week.  They both gave Fiji a miss thankfully but Jasmine is quite large and slow moving now sitting down south of us and is kicking up some of the rainy weather and also pulling the SPCZ (South Pacific Convergence Zone) down on top of us and bringing its wind, rain and clouds with it.  Things look better for the week to come with no new TD’s forming and so the cyclone potential is essentially zero for now.

This past weekend (it is Sunday evening here) has also been very wet but the forecast is looking much better for the week ahead and I’m hoping for several dry hot days so we can start to spray the decks and topsides with the high build primer/filler paint.  You could think of this as liquid filler that fills in the low spots and then we start sanding and sanding this all down to level it off and spray on another coat.  You repeat this process until the surfaces are all very smooth and flat and then you’re ready for the final top coat of glossy colour paint.  That day is still a ways off but we are making good progress.

I had a bit of a setback last weekend when I tripped while carrying some parts up on deck and when I put my other foot forward to catch myself it landed right on top of one of the hatch openings and so I fell right through with my other knee crashed down onto the deck with my full weight.  Ouch!!  Wrenched my knee pretty bad and tweaked my hip and back so I’ve been taking it much slower and easier this week and all is on the mend.  Still a bit painful to walk and move around but I’m able to get around fine and I’m sure I’ll be back to full strength later this week.

Otherwise all is well over re in Fiji and on the good ship Learnativity and I hope the same is true for you and your world.

 

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog

LTY Weekend Update #5: Feb. 3, 2012

Well it is only Friday afternoon here but it’s pouring outside for the last hour and so work is done for this week and many of you have been asking for a weather update so thought I’d make the most of the situation and post this now.

** NOTE: Click on any blog picture to see the full size version and more details.

WEATHER UPDATE:

In spite of the current downpour, the weather update is very good.  Neither of the two TD’s (Topical Depressions) that were headed our way earlier this week made it this far and neither of them turned into TC’s (Tropical Cyclones and when they get named) so that is pretty great news as you can imagine. 

All things considered the weather was quite good this week with rain every day but no major or long lasting amounts and relatively low winds.  Some of the local people ashore are suffering as a result of the flooding that happened 2 weeks ago as the weather since hasn’t let things dry out and some have only just started to get their tap water turned back on but the roads are open and there hasn’t been any more flooding or mud slides that I’m aware of.  Here in Vuda Point marina the ground does an amazing job of draining away all the water and while there are puddles and its a bit soggy in places Ruby and I are able to get out for walks at least once a day without much trouble.

 

The big picture weather pattern, which I believe is common this time of year and I see in the large scale weather maps I download like the one on the left here, is that there is a very large clockwise swirling weather pattern that goes from part way over the west coast of Australia to east of Tonga and from just north of the equator  down to about 30 degrees south.  Where I’m at in Fiji is about 17 degrees south and just left of center in this map on the left.  You can make out the west side of Australia on the far left of this map and the north end of New Zealand is down at the bottom.  This map is showing what is predicted for next Wednesday and if you look closely you’ll see the outline of the two big islands of Fiji inside that nasty looking set of tight circular lines which would probably be a cyclone in the forming.  We obviously hope this forecast is wrong, as all the others have been to date and this is five days out which is a long way in weather forecasts and makes the accuracy very low.  This is what I keep my eye on as these maps and models are updated once or twice each day and makes for great entertainment and learning!

Lows seem to form over on the west side of the big circular pattern over the west parts of Australia and then start making their way clockwise towards us and if conditions are right they turn into TD’s and if it continues into TC’s. 

 

New lows can form at any time and there are two new ones that just showed up over to the west and are forecast to become at least TD’s by Saturday or so and the first one is forecast to be approaching us about Tuesday.  So that’s what I’ll be keeping my eyes on and hoping that the pattern of the past few weeks continues and these also turn SE and miss us and that neither of them become full blown cyclones and hurt anyone else. 

As I type this out it all sounds more dramatic than it really is and so no cause for alarm and no one I know of here is loosing much sleep over it.  Not to be flip about it and it could become very serious but right now it is just something you keep your eye on and are prepared to deal with if they turn into TC’s and if they are going to come ashore here.

 

BOAT WORK UPDATE:

Unfortunately though we have not seen the sun this week so we didn’t get anything done with the paint work projects but we were able to get started at installing the new prop shaft the past few days as this is all mechanical work and we when working under the bottom of the hull the boat keeps most of the rain off.  So I’ve had two great guys here for the past 2 days and we removed the two old cutlass bearings which hold the 3.5 meter/yard long shaft in place and keep it spinning smoothly.

 

 

 

 

Today, carefully supervised by Commodore Ruby, we pressed the two new cutlass bearings into their respective housings in the hull and then they trucked the newly machined shaft down from the shop and it slid nicely into place about an hour ago and just before the rain started in earnest.  We should be able to finish the installation early next week which involves pushing the shaft into its final position, attaching the shaft to the transmission with a nice new flexible coupling, installing a new dripless shaft seal system I’ve purchased and remounting the shaft disc brake that keeps the propeller shaft from spinning while sailing as this can damage the hydraulic transmission.  Then I need to rebuild and mount the big auto feathering AutoProp and Learnativity will finally have her drive train all ready to go for many more sailing seasons to come.

 

And so ends another wet and productive week here in beautiful Fiji.  The wet weather looks it will continue for most of next week but one never knows and we’ll get back to more paint work as soon as Mother Nature allows.  Enjoy your weekend!

 

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog

Weather update from Fiji: Tuesday Jan. 31, 2012

Thanks for all your concern and notes about the recent weather conditions here in Fiji and the potential for the TD’s or Tropical Depressions TD7F to develop into named Tropical Cyclones which is rated as “High” as I reported on yesterday. 

The bad news is that we now have a new TD9F located just south of TD7F between the islands of Vanuatu and New Caledonia and is also rated as having a High potential to develop into a TC within the next 24-48 hours.  The good news is that today’s update from the Fiji Meteorological Service ** shows things currently trending much better for those of us here in Fiji as TD7F has done an about face and is heading West towards Australia and the newer TD9F is projected to move SW and also miss us.

** For my more avid followers and weather worriers you can go to this site and click on “3 day Tropical Cyclone Outlook” to get an update anytime you’d like.

Many of you appreciated the link to the graphical mapping of these TD’s and here is the link to today’s updated version so you can see the changes I outlined above.

Last night and today it has been rainy with a few brief downpours and very low winds so far and we’re obviously hoping that will continue.  Higher winds with gusts up to 35 knots and heavier rainfall are forecast for tonight through Thursday.

Concern remains high as there are many other Low systems swirling clockwise between us and the west coast of Australia so we remain vigilant but so far the trends and Mother Nature have been favouring us and we will be quite happy for this to continue for the next few months.

Most years the cyclone season in this area runs from about November through May with the highest likelihood in the middle of that range Jan-March so none of this is too unusual or surprising and a calculated risk one takes to keep your boat here at this time of year. 

So it is another inside play day here on the good ship Learnativity with brief forays out to the main office to get mail, refill my cell phone minutes and chat with some of the other liveaboards.  Mostly though it gives me a good chance to catch up on things online and off with more reading and writing and some inside boat jobs.  Ruby, being the master Zen teacher of adaptation is taking full advantage of having more snooze and snuggle times and the chance to chase more birds and frogs when we venture out in the rain.

I’ll let you know if things change significantly and otherwise hope that your weather is much less concerning.

 

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog

Time to batten down the hatches! Ooops I don’t have any!

Well it’s official now (Monday morning here) that Tropical Depression TD07F has developed over Vanuatu islands which are directly west of us and the chance of this turning into a named cyclone in the next 24-48 hours is rated as moderate to high as it moves E and SE right towards the west coast of Fiji where I’m at.  You can see a 3 day forecast map here if you’d like to get a better visual of all this.

According to the latest forecast we may take a direct hit if this cyclone forms and moves more west than south.  Hopefully it will miss us and all we will see is high winds, possibly +100mph but more likely +50 and lots of rain.  So we are all busy doing our best to prep for the worst and be ready for whatever comes our way Tuesday through Thursday.  Right now it has just been raining since last night and not too heavily but the wind and rain will pick up as the week goes on.  Unfortunately all the severe rain and floods we had last weekend has everything quite saturated and the two towns north and south of me, Lautoka and Nadi are still recovering from that so it is not a good forecast for land or sea dwellers.

 

This morning we took down all the large canvas tarps that we had draped around the boat to keep all the dust from sandblasting and painting contained and were being supported by lots of bamboo poles.  These two pictures will show you the before (on a much nicer day) and after shots.

 

 

 

My big challenge is that I have all the hatches and the six side salon windows out while we are painting and so I have the tented up the top of the boat to keep most of the rain out of all these openings.  The openings are covered up with black plastic but won’t withstand these kinds of winds of course.  So for now I’m going to leave the heavy duty plastic tarps up and have spent the last few hours tying them all down so that the wind can’t get under them quite as easily.  If we do get hit with sustained high winds I’ll do my best to monitor the situation and either take them down if they are being lifted too much or the wind will do that for me and then I’ll just have try to keep the openings all covered up and the water out as best I can.

Obviously we aren’t going to get any of the exterior paint or metal work done this week with all the rain and wind so I’ll be focusing on inside jobs and keeping the boat as dry as possible.

Wish me luck!  I’ll post updates along the way as things develop and change.

Wayne

LTY Weekend Update #4: Jan 29, 2012

Hard to believe that the first month of 2012 is almost gone already!  However it has been a very productive month and a great start to the new year aboard the good ship Learnativity. 

As you may recall from the previous updates this month, it was a bit of a rough start with the new rust problems that “surfaced” on the bottom of the hull and added significantly to the already large size projects of redoing all the exterior paint.  But I’m delighted to report that as of this week we now have all the rusted steel cut out and replaced with all new 6mm steel plate. Additionally as I described in the previous post I decided to do my “turn a bug into a feature” routine and so while we were at it with the steel and the welding we added in a second layer of 6mm steel along the entire forward bow section and along the entire aft section of the hull from part way along the aft of the keel all the way back to the rudder.

 

You can see this quite clearly in some of the photos now that we have filled in all the welds with epoxy filler to blend them smoothly into the hull shape. I’m not at all sure that I’ll do it but this extra layer of steel makes Learnativity particularly well suited to doing extreme latitude sailing adventures one day, which is sailing close to the two poles of the earth where the ability to withstand being frozen in place or coming into contact with ice is a very real possibility. However even here in the tropics where the only ice is in your glass, I’ll be smiling even more than usual (if that’s even possible) knowing that I now have a hull that is twice as thick and better than new to keep me safely sailing for many many more nautical smiles.

 

This past week we were only able to work for the last half of the week as we had huge rains that started last Saturday (21st) and didn’t let up until Tuesday night.  Even though it is the rainy season here in Fiji, we received an unusual amount of rain and the main/only road to the towns in both directions from here at Vuda Point marina were washed out and closed for several days.  Living aboard LTY we kept fairly dry with only one intrusion when some of the bamboo poles we used to hold up all the tarps broke under the weight of water that formed large pools in some parts of the tarps.  When it rains heavy like that I need to be up once or twice in the night to empty these out and try to stretch the tarps tight enough that they don’t sag and allow the rain water to pool.  Always amazing to be reminded just how heavy water is!  In order to do a proper repaint job of the deck areas I’ve had to remove literally EVERY single thing that isn’t welded in place and LTY is more like a big piece of Swiss cheese with all the holes left from bolts, hatches, fittings and the like but I do my best to go around every night after we finish working and tape these all up if it looks like we are going to get any rain.  It’s working well so far and sure makes me appreciate how nice it is going to be to have all these fittings, windows and hatches all back in place and have a watertight boat once again and even more so than ever.

And those rainy days came with great synchronicity with my birthday (23rd) as they enforced a bit of a break from boat work so I took two days off (I’m on this side of the dateline so I get TWO days for my birthday!) to stay inside and catch up on some reading, writing and online ordering. 

The paint crew and I focused on preparing the topsides (the vertical sides of the hull from the waterline up to the deck) this week as we had found some patches where the original paint was not well adhered to the original primer.  We took advantage of this latest run of dry hot weather and brought in the sandblaster unit and stripped all these areas back down to bare steel and then primed with epoxy.  For some reason these areas were all on the port side with one large section about 2 square meters/yards just aft of the bow and then a few other smaller patches further back and we were able to sand blast and prime all these by the end of the day on Friday and even got on the first coat of filler.  So the topsides are now looking like the same patchwork quilt of colours as the deck as we make our way around and around this large surface sanding, filling and priming.  Over the course of the next few weeks we will start spraying the entire surface of the topsides and deck with a high build epoxy primer/filler rather than just the spot spraying we’ve been doing and then the big job of sanding all these surfaces begins as we work to get these surfaces more and more smooth.  It is a long laborious process and looks to many like a real mess of all the different colours of primer and filler showing through but we use different colours on purpose so it is easier to see the high and low spots and know where we need to do more sanding and filling.  In the eyes of a painter this is all quite beautiful for as we know good paint jobs are all based on how well you do the preparation and end up with a perfectly flat and smooth surface to apply the final colour coats to.  To my eyes then, Learnativity is already a VERY beautiful boat!

During the rainy times I’m busy getting the hundreds of parts and pieces all ready to be put back on once we have finished all the final painting.  This week that involved cleaning, rebuilding and polishing all the running rigging which is the blocks and pulleys that all the lines (ropes to you) run through.  I have a LOT of these as I re rigged the whole boat after I bought her in 2006 for long distance blue water and single handed sailing and part of this involved installing lots of blocks and pulleys to run all the lines back into the cockpit.  It works great as I can control the entire boat under both motor and sail from inside the well protected cockpit and never have to go out on deck.  However it does mean that I have a LOT of blocks and pulleys on the deck and these all need to be serviced and maintained.  So the rainy days were perfect for me to spend up in that same cockpit with tubs of soapy water and lots of metal polishing paste as I got all the not so stainless stainless steel cleaned up and then rebuilt all the bearings in the pulleys.  Next rainy days I’ll get to rebuilding all the winches.  And along the way of course I come up with parts that are broken or need replacing as well as lots of stainless fasteners, nuts and bolts I need to acquire and add to my shopping list of things I need to try to find here or else order and have shipped over.

And so the first month back here in Fiji has zoomed by amazingly quickly with each day filled with boat projects, cooking, cleaning and life in general.  Along the way I continue to enjoy this amazing location and Ruby and I take walks along the beach and around the marina most mornings and evenings and still manage to see the sun rise and set whenever the clouds allow us to see the sun.  Weather wise we have more cyclones potentially forming and this time one off to the west of Fiji whereas all the others to date were looking to form off to the East of Tonga.  Fortunately none of these cyclones have actually formed and what I’m referring to is that conditions are such that these are forecast to possibly be forming based on current conditions and historical weather data.  Obviously I keep a close eye on these conditions and even if a cyclone does start to form we would have several days to watch it more closely and see what path it is most likely to take, how close it is and might get to us and do our best to prepare for it if it hits.  For now it has just meant that we get some of these big rain storms and higher winds at times so here’s hoping it stays that way for the rest of the cyclone season which is typically until about May sometime.  Right now it looks like next week we will get hit with some more large rain and wind storms that today are forecast to happen starting about Tuesday but we’ll just have to wait and see as the weather changes quickly and significantly here in this tropical paradise. 

Today is Sunday and its another dry hot day so I took advantage of this and no work crews to hire my buddy Abdul to drive me into Nadi (pronounced NaNdi) one of the neighbouring towns to do some grocery shopping.  Nandi is about 15km south of where I’m at in Vuda Point marina and Lautoka, the 2nd or 3rd largest town in Fiji is about the same distance north.  The main international airport is just a bit north of Nadi so this is a very central location and yet the marina here is very isolated and the only thing at the end of its side road so its very quiet and peaceful here.  With the fridge and shelves well stocked I looked after a few small boat jobs and I then took the rest of the day off to treat Ruby to a long walk (run for her) on the beach and then stopped in at the pool to cool off and do some writing and reading so that’s where we are sitting now to type out this update for you.  The pool is part of the First Landing resort which isn’t part of the marina per se but is only 100m from where Learnativity is sitting in the yard and they usually let me come here to swim and relax.  This is only the 2nd time I’ve made it over to the pool and (note to self) I should really try to make it more of a regular habit to take advantage of such a great situation and location.

Hope your first month of 2012 has gone equally as well and you have the year off to a great start.  I’ll be back next weekend with another update for you on the latest progress.  Thanks for tuning in and for all your comments, Emails and calls.

 

Wayne &  Ruby the Wonderdog