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.

What is she thinking?

Ruby and I make it a habit to start and end each day watching the sunrise and set wherever we are.  We have been here in Fiji at Vuda Point marina since the end of August and I’ve been in full tilt work mode getting Learnativity all super ship shape for the next few years of remote sailing as we make our way west over into Indonesia.  So my daily sun worshiping provides welcome breaks and reminders of just how fortunate I am and what a charmed a life I live.

I like this first picture a lot with Ruby’s cute little head silhouetted by the setting sun which always prompts me to wonder “What is she thinking”?

 

We were last here in Fiji and at Vuda Pt. marina a year ago when we lived here for a full year doing the big repaint and refit on LTY, and since then the new marina management has put in the most wonderful addition of a small sloped patch of grass which is set right on the edge of the coral shoreline and looking straight out over some of the smaller of the over 360 Fijian islands to the west.  Which as you can see, makes it the perfect spot for our nightly sun downers.

I don’t know what motivated the marina to put this patch of grass in, but it is obviously someone’s pet project as the grass is some of the softest and most well cared for grass I’ve ever experienced.  It is absolutely perfect for me to sit on the sloped bank with my tired tush nestled into the slight hollow I found in the upper level of the grass which is also perfectly positioned in front of one of the big rocks they set in place with just the right hollow in it for me to rest my aching back against and enjoy the most amazing “hot rock massage” from the almost too hot to touch rock mass that has been storing up the sun’s heat all day.

Ruby LOVES grass, always has since she was a puppy and so she spends part of her time racing around in circles, her ears like mini wings that give her a flying “bat dog” look as races full tilt in long circuits from one end of the grass to the other.  Ian (seen in the silhouette here) enjoys throwing sticks and rocks which she races and pounces upon, does her duty of protecting us from these “killer” rocks and sticks by shaking the daylights out of them and then comes back and flops down beside us to enjoy chewing them.  She never quite returns them to either of us and any suggestions of “fetch” are met with a look that surely says “You talking to me?!!  What do you think I am, a DOG or something??”

 

And it all seems to be custom built just for Ruby and me as it is somewhat hidden and undiscovered by most others and so we are usually the only ones there each night.  We do welcome and invite others to join us though and now that Ruby’s “Uncle Ian” from mv Summer Spirit is back from his trip to Australia, the three of us have made this our nightly ritual. 

 

 

 

 

It has been awesome to watch the progression of the sun over the past two months as it moves a bit more south each day with the approach of summer down here in the southern hemisphere as it silently slides below the western horizon each night.  The foreground we have is equally perfect with a series of Fijian islands off shore from us which are bathed in the setting sun’s fiery glow and up above there is a new mélange of clouds which provide the perfect medium for the full pallet of colours from the sun long after it has disappeared below the watery horizon.  Again, pictures are SO much better than my meagre attempts to describe with words so I’ll let you browse through a few photos of some of the horizons from the past few weeks.

 

		Fijian Sunsets 2013 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Halloween 2013

I was feeling a bit melancholy this Halloween as it is the first time in 12 years that I wasn’t able to be back in Florida to be with my “second family” with John, Michelle, Kate, Jaci, Genna and Jack for pumpkin carving, dress up, makeup, parades and Trick or Treating.  This is partly because they are also now “liveaboards” and having a blast as you can see here on their catamaran “Discovery”.

So imagine my delight when Learnativity was honoured to be selected by the talented and energetic organizer Katja to be one of the boats in Vuda Point Marina to be called upon by six beautiful little Trick or Treaters and their Mum’s.  I’ll let the photos do all the explaining so you can see for yourself.

Unfortunately, the new paint on the decks of LTY was still wet so I wasn’t able to get Ruby’s Bat Dog costume for her but she had a great time with all these little girls as you can see.

		Halloween 2013 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

LTY UPDATE: Sunday, September 9th, 2012

LTY UPDATE: Sunday, September 9th, 2012
Uliveo Island, Vanuatu

LTY time: 17:35 (Vanuatu time = UTC +11)
Location: SW bay of Uliveo Island, part of Meskelyne Islands, Vanuatu
Position: 16 31.833 S, 167 49.716 E (you can cut & past this into Google Earth to see on map)
Wind: 5-12 knots (inside the bay)
Seas/Swell: flat
Air temp: 86 F 30C
Sea temp: 85 F 29.5 C
Barometer: 1020mm

LIVING LARGE in ULIVEO

I had a boisterous but fast sail from Port Villa to Uliveo on Tuesday night. Both the wind and seas were quite a bit more than forecast with winds at time over 35 knots and seas up to almost 5 meters at times. The wind was also almost directly behind me which makes it a bit tricky to sail as I’ve described before, but with the winds being so strong and the following seas so large I was able to sail at 6-8 knots with just the main sail up which worked out quite well. The seas were not quite directly behind me so they would roll dear Learnativity all the way from one side to the other, at times well over 45 degrees so it was a very “active” ride but not overly bothersome or problematic.

I did have one nasty problem for a few hours when the outer cover on the main halyard wore through and jammed in the clutch. This is the line that goes up to a pulley at the very top aft side of the mast and pulls the main sail up so it is one of the more critical lines and the boat and takes some of the most stress and strain. In my usual “thrifty” ways I’ve been trying to eek out every last nautical mile from this now six year old line and over 30,000 nm, and I finally succeeded in doing so about midnight on Tuesday. However I’ve been planning on this event for some time and so I’ve had 200 feet of a new high tech halyard in my stores and all ready to go. Most of the lines we use have all their strength in the inner core and then are covered with a different material, usually poly based, woven covers that are better in your hands, protect the inner core from UV and take the wear and tear from the clutches (line holders) and winches. So what happened was that the common spot where the “teeth” of my clutch jaws clamp the halyard when the main sail is in the fully raised position, wore through in the high winds and stress they were experiencing on the sail on Tuesday night. This created two problems; one is that the inner line was now able to slip through the clutch so the main sail slid down the mast a few meters and then the outer cover material bunched up and jammed the clutch jaws. This in turn gave me two problems; a flopping main sail in a full down wind run and no ability to raise or lower it due to the jammed halyard. Both of these conspired to then have the upper part of the flopping main sail to tangle with the shrouds (stainless steel wire line that holds up the mast) and were threatening to tear the main sail.

With no other choice I could see, it was time for me to take a trip up the 70’ mast and free the main sail before it ripped on the shrouds. Fortunately I installed mast steps all the way up the mast shortly after I bought Learnativity for just these type of situations and so I’m used to climbing the mast. However doing so in 30-35 knot winds and with the boat rolling from side to side in the big seas did make it a bit more challenging. It took the better part of an exhausting hour to do so, but I was finally able to get the sail free though not before the batten, a fiberglass rod that slides inside a horizontal pocket on the sail about every 2 meters up the main sail to help keep its shape) snapped in two. Nothing much I could do about that in these conditions and if I could get the sail back under control it wouldn’t likely cut through the sail pocket material. I spent a good while then cutting about 4 meters of the outer cover of the halyard off and managing to tape the ends tightly to the inner core such that this jury rigged line would now be able to feed through the clutches and mast pulleys. With this all done I was then able to reef/drop the main to have less area in these higher winds and then tighten up the luff (edge that goes up the mast) and pull down the boom such that the sail was back to flying properly and we were soon back to sailing along at a good pace. This held just fine all the way into the bay at Uliveo island and the main sail all furled up into the boom just fine to my great delight as we pulled in just after noon time. Best of all, I was greeted by Philip on the VHF and he came out in his dinghy to be show me the way around some of the big bommies and corals here in this lovely little bay.

It has been a salubrious time tucked in here in the small and well protected little bay on the SW corner of Uliveo Island which is one of the small islands that make up the Meskelyne Island group on the SE tip of the large island of Malakula here in Vanuatu. Lots of factors contributing to this welcomed condition, primary amongst those being here with my dear friend Philip and his new mate Teri on their Outreemer catamaran “Blue Bie”. Philip and I first met over four years ago when we both happened to be making our entry into Ecuador at the same time and place and had to wait for several hours before the authorities could process us. We just seemed to hit it off immediately and our friendship has grown more and more with each year as we continue to find ways to meet up as we make our very different ways around the sea.

Best of all I managed to get here in time for Philip’s birthday on Friday which made the time even more special. We spent part of the day on a nearby beach with them enjoying the kite surfing, Ruby enjoying beach time and me learning the details of kite surfing, catching up with Philip and getting to know Teri.  I got some shots of Philip and Teri out kite boarding and one fun thing was the juxtaposition of old and new as some of the locals would paddle over in their dugout outrigger wood canoes and you’d get shots like the one on the right here with this centuries old canoe paddling beside 21st century kite boarding.

Then it was back to Blue Bie to celebrate with champagne and then we joined forces to make a fabulous birthday meal topped off with freshly ground coconut cake with Swiss chocolate icing and complete with a full set of Happy Birthday candles thanks to Teri’s great foresight and caring while they were in some shops in Port Villa a few weeks ago.

Over the past few days together we’ve had more kite surfing, beach walks, a trip with the locals to their giant clam farm and ashore for a Kustom dance and ceremony and mostly just lots of time spent being together. Unfortunately Teri’s time is almost up here in Vanuatu and her flight back to Maui is in a few days out of Port Villa so they sailed off yesterday (Saturday) afternoon heading for Port Villa and to be there in time for Teri’s birthday present to Philip of a scenic flight over the islands in a small sea plane. So we had one last late lunch together with hamburgers grilled on my BBQ a few last licks and cuddles with Ruby and they were off into the late afternoon sun heading south. Vanuatu turns out to have amazingly high quality beef, for reasons I’m not completely sure of and while I’m not a big beef eater the fillet mignon we had for Philip’s birthday (he is a BIG beef lover) and the hamburgers, were truly delicious.

The Vanuatu culture continues to be filled with lots of new learning for me and quite different that others I’ve experienced. For example they prefer to life in very small groups and so even on this small island of Uliveo there are at least four separate small villages rather than one large one. It is also quite common that each village will have its own language or dialect and in some cases these are so different that people on the same island don’t understand each other’s language. However they also all speak Bislama, a form of “pidgin English” as well as English so communicating amongst themselves and with us is not a problem. They are all very proud of their culture and traditions and quite anxious to have “show and tell” events referred to as Kustom ceremonies. “Chief Jim” of the nearby village invited us ashore for their such a ceremony on Thursday night after visiting the giant clams and it was most entertaining. This is the third one I’ve been to and the most informal of them all. The dancing was performed only by the men, which is more traditional but on Aneityum both women and children participated which is quite rare apparently.

The only slightly disappointing aspect of Vanuatu I’ve come across is that they have the most focus on charging fees and seeing us as a source of cash income of any of the places I’ve been so far. All quite understandable and reasonable I might add as they have increasing needs to buy thing such as gas for their outboard motors and their sources of income such as from copra (coconut oil) have dropped off precipitously in the last 20 years. Fiji was notable to me in part because some how they continue to avoid the “wanting” or lust for material goods and the deep contentment with other riches they have such as friends and family. Having been living in this culture for over two years I’d become accustomed to it, though always marveling at it and learning more about it, so the contrast here in Vanuatu no doubt seems stronger to me.

The other nice change is that the clouds have cleared off and I’m back to being spoiled once again by blue skies, sunshine, starry nights and increasingly warmer temperatures. From others I’ve talked to and what I’ve read this is an unseasonably cold and wet year so far and it may also be because I’ve dropped down to almost the limit of my preferred “20/20” living (between the two Tropics) zone. However I’m now headed in the “right” direction for my warm weather body, which is north towards the equator so I’m hoping this warming trend will continue as I go and I’ll soon be back to the heat and humidity I’ve strangely come to prefer these past few years. I don’t expect any “sympathy” from anyone but I have the luxury of living wherever I’d like to and I choose to live where neither sea nor air ever goes below 30 C and where I don’t need to wear socks, pants or much clothes at all thank you very much!

I’ve now got the new halyard reeved up inside the mast and through all the pulleys and clutches so that should be good for at least another six years I hope. I have a piece of new batten material that is too short to fully replace the batten I need but I’ve been able to fashion a repair that will hold me till I can get a new one in Majuro in a few months and so all is good to go for the next journey. I’m not quite decided just where that will be as there are lots of great spots and attractions in the many islands to the north and east of me and so I’ll probably just start doing some short day sails and hop scotch myself up north till I get to Luganville in the big island of Espiritu Santo where I will checkout of Fiji and either head up to Santa Cruz in the Solomon Islands or just start making my way on the long passage north to the Marshall Islands. I’ll keep you posted as the sailing goes and as with life, create the path behind me one nautical smile at a time.

Farewell Fiji; Hello Mother Ocean!

Well, the time has come to finally cut the dock lines, both literal and figurative and leave the country I’ve become SO fond of; Fiji.  On Friday (Aug 10), ELEVEN months and five days after I entered and with the help of some of the great friends I’ve made, I slipped the dock lines and motored out of Vuda Point marina.  This was the fabulous spot where I was able to do a complete “20 year” repaint and refit of Learnativity and spent almost the entire past year enjoying a very different kind of land based life with Learnativity out of the water for nine of those months and then tied to a dock for the remainder.

As seems to be the norm for me the whole thing was a serendipitous and phenomenal experience.  I originally thought I was going to be there for a few weeks and ended up being there almost a year, I met and got to know some wonderful people who are now dear friends, both fellow cruisers as well as the gift of getting to know many of the local people who I worked shoulder to shoulder with every day on Learnativity as well as several who worked at the marina.  I was invited into their homes and truly shared life with them for the past year.  What a rich and charmed life I lead!

As for Learnativity she is quite literally a whole new boat and I’ll simply let the before and after pictures tell the story for now.  Thanks to my friends Volker & Michaela on La Gitana, who have been in Vuda Point even longer than me, I have these before and after shots of Learnativity on the day she sailed into Vuda Point and then the one where she went back in the water.  Just a bit of difference as you can see!

 

And you are only seeing the outside!  In addition to sandblasting the whole exterior, which required removing EVERY part that wasn’t welded on and even a few which were, she now has all new solar protected triple thickened glass, new prop shaft, new solar panels, new nav system, and a very long list of other improvements and rebuilds.

While an immense task, it has been a labour of love and I’m VERY happy with my “new’ boat and looking forward to making the transition back to sailing and life on the water.  I have an equally long list of people to thank for making this all possible.  The truly wonderful team from Baobab Marine who worked with me every step of the way to get this all done and who did the lion share of the work.  My special thanks to Lorenzo for his constant supervision and assistance and to my “boys” especially Isikelly, Jim, Imran, Daven, Nadeem and the many others who worked with us at various stages.  I also received lots of help from other cruisers especially Volker and Michaela on La Gitana and who were instrumental in me coming to Vuda Point in the first place, and then a few special others who became friends along the way such as Terry & Christine on Teka Nova, Steve & Selena on Windward II and Tony & Carolyn on Tuaki.  I’m leaving out many, many others, so my apologies to all.  Just know that my time in Vuda Point was so special because of the people I met and befriended more than anything else.

Through it all Ruby the Wonderdog truly lived up to her name and became the social butterfly of the entire marina.  She was easily the best known entity in the marina and many people had no idea who I was other than “the guy” who was usually with Ruby.  Ruby is a great teacher on how to live life well as she simply assumes that every living creature she meets is there to play with her and to be loved.  And guess what?  They do! 

 

 

 

So Ruby had an even better time in Vuda Point and is leaving with at least as many memories as I am.  She particularly wants to thank Christine & Terry for her time being spoiled aboard Teka Nova with custom made gourmet meals, lots of snuggles and most of all for walks on the beach at low tide where she worked on her crab digging techniques. 

And for the past few months Ruby has spent more time aboard Summer Spirit that was docked beside us as she was adopted by Colleen and Ian.  Most days I barely saw her as she spent all her time with them including many “sleep overs”.  As you can see in just this one interior picture and the big black & white boat docked beside Learnativity in the other picture, Summer Spirit is a pretty fabulous boat to be on and Colleen and Ian became her favorite Aunt and Uncle.  So much so that they are now busy making arrangements to find a Spoodle pup in Australia that they can bring over and have a “Ruby” of their own.  I think Ruby should be a Spoodle ambassador as this is about the fifth time she has been the catalyst of others we’ve met getting their own Spoodle after falling under Ruby’s spell of pure unconditional love.  It was no easy task getting her back on board Learnativity with just me but Colleen did make up some treats for Ruby’s withdrawal (and some for me too!) so I think we’ll manage.

And so it was that I slipped the dock lines at Vuda Point marina on Friday after over ELEVEN months there and am now anchored off the Customs wharf in Lautoka, the western most check out spot in Fiji.  I’m finishing up the last bits of getting LTY all ship shape, shopping ashore for the last of my provisions for the next few months and using up all my internet time for uploads and downloads like these.  It is now Monday morning here and I’ll row ashore in a few minutes to do my official check out of Fiji.  Though I’m not supposed to, I may stop at one of my favorite little deserted islands west of here for one last night to say goodbye to Fiji.  Winds are forecast to be VERY light for today and tomorrow so waiting a day or two may help out.  In any case the islands of Vanuatu are calling my name the loudest so my first landfall will be Anelghowhat Bay on the SW corner of Aneityum island which is also sometimes called Anatom island.  It is about 450nm from here and also the southernmost island in Vanuatu and just became a PoE so I can check into Vanuatu there.  The bay there is supposed to be very nice and the check in is very easy as there is almost no one on the island and you get good personal service from the lonely customs guy!   My kind of spot! 

My overall plan is to just start island hopping making my way north up through the various islands of Vanuatu.  There are active volcano's on Tanna and Ambrym islands where you can hike up to the top of the cone, lay down on the edge and poke your head over to look down into the lava pools so of course I HAVE to go experience that! ;)  Will stop at the two big cities of Port Villa and Luganville to avail myself of some good French influenced supplies with the likes of great cheese, breads, cafés and WiFi.  Otherwise will just live and sail by whim and weather as usual and keep sailing north till about the first week of October when I will start my sail NNE to Majuro in the Marshall islands.  I can get duty free diesel when I check out of Vanuatu and so I’m going to run my tanks as low as I can by then and do my annual fill up with considerable savings before I sail up to the Marshalls.

I’ve decided that I WILL fly back to Canada and the USA see friends and family at the end of October.  On the one hand I can’t really afford it after blowing SO much of my overall “life” budget here in Fiji but on the other hand it is a no brainer as I need my annual “fix” of family and special friends.  Plus Ruby already has her Bat Dog costume (really!) and how can I break my 12 year record of Halloween of being in the US for Halloween?  Still making those arrangements but will most likely spend November and December in North America and fly back to Learnativity in Majuro about Xmas time.  I’ve decided that the Marshalls are by far the best option for me, both to leave LTY safely as I did before, plus take one last advantage of a good US Post Office there for any last rounds of boat stuff as well as easy flights in and out. 

When I was there in 2010 I didn’t get to see many of the outer islands of the Marshalls which are phenomenal and it puts me in a great spot geographically for the start of sailing season up north of the equator.  Never plans of course, but my sailing intentions from there are to explore some of the Marshalls as I make my way west over through Micronesia (Kosrae, Pohnpei, Yap, Palau) towards the Philippines but I also have Solomon’s and PNG calling my name louder and louder so I think I may head south from wherever I am in Micronesia about April and go spend the sailing season (April-Nov) down there and then head back north of the equator to pick up where I left off in Micronesia.  All WAY too far ahead for me, but fun to do this kind of what if scenario thinking.

COMMUNICATIONS:

I’ll put a full list of all the various ways of communicating with me at the bottom of this post and just remember that when I leave Fiji in a few hours I will mostly be relying on my satellite phone for my internet connection and therefore I’ll be back to just sending and receiving text based Emails.  Therefore if you are sending me Emails please copy me on both my [email protected] and [email protected] with any Emails you send.  I’ll likely find some WiFi or cellular connections from time to time in the larger ports in Vanuatu but I spend most of my time on small remote islands or at sea so I won’t be on FaceBook or Skype much for the next while.  However I will get back to doing daily blog postings on the sail over to Aneityum like I’ve done in the past and frequent updates on my experiences sailing north.  I have it set up so there are automated updates sent to FaceBook and Twitter each time I post to the Learnativity blog so you’ll see those as they happen and can follow us as much or as little as you like.  Note that I put in the lat/long coordinates for each update report and you can cut and paste these into Google Earth or Microsoft Bing to see where we are in those satellite photos.  It will be a lot of open blue water for the next week or so but once I’m in Vanuatu you can have some fun flying around the sat photos of the various islands and bays to get a feel for these spots I’m in.

And with that I’ll bid you and Fiji a fond farewell for now.  Learnativity is in GREAT shape (better be!) so no known issues yet and everything is working well so far!  Should only be about 4-5 days passage over to Aneityum so a nice easy sail to get started and let me remember how to sail (or at least my version of it) again after being away from it for almost a year now.

Hope you will join Ruby and I as we set sail for our next round of adventures in life and that you too are living, loving and learning every moment of this grand experience called life and enjoying the gift of the present.

Vinaka Fiji and friends!

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog,
aboard the good ship Learnativity
currently anchored near Lautoka, Fiji
17 36.061 S, 177 26.442 E

Regular Email:    [email protected]
Email when @ sea or remote via sat phone:    [email protected]  (Yes! This is the correct spelling OCENS)
I typically retrieve and answer Emails to this account via our satellite phone at least once every 24 hours.  You can send as much text as you like but are asked not to send any attachments such as photos.

FaceBook page:        www.facebook.com/wayne.hodgins
Learnativity blog:    www.learnativity.typepad.com
Off Course – On Target blog:   http://waynehodgins.typepad.com

World Phone Voicemail:        +1-501-492-9634   (has voice mail that is forwarded to me via Email)
Text Messages:  (to my sat phone)
send short 140 character Text msgs via Email to:  [email protected]

Other contact info:
Skype:    Whodgins
Twitter:        WWWayne

Talk about Exponential Learning Density! Year #5 Begins

Joined by my son Skyler, seen in the photo on our earlier 4am departure from Bodega Bay) and Ruby the Wonderdog, I sailed out under the Golden Gate bridge on March 3, 2008 so I’m now starting year number five of this grand adventure and Wow! what a ride, what a life, what a privilege it has been every day since! 

NOTE:  I’ll put a photo album at the end with some additional pictures and note that if you click on any of the pictures here you will get the full size view.

 

 

 

If you will indulge me I’ll do a bit of reflecting on these past four years of truly living life large.  Sailing from one great experience to the next have taught an incredible number of lessons and created a life which for me is nothing short of awemazing. Each day has been filed with more adventures, experiences, living, loving and learning than I thought was possible for one person to experience in a full lifetime never mind just four years. 

I continue to be struck by what I wrote about a two years ago when I was in New Zealand reflecting on the start of my third year at the time and trying to comprehend how I could have experienced so much in just two years.  I eventually made some sense out of it and what I called “Exponential Learning Density” or ELD.  In the coming weeks and months I’ll write more about that and some of the other major lessons I’ve learned in the last four years and over 25,000 nautical “smiles” as I like to call them.  As I’ve recounted these lessons to others via Email, visits and even some pubic presentations many people have confirmed that these are lessons in life that completely transcend their origins in sailing and I get a lot of requests to write these up and share them online so more people can access them and I’ll do my best to try and articulate these as best I can and share them with you here.

First let me set the scene with a quick overview of how this all came to be. 

I named the boat Learnativity, a word I had created about twenty years ago when I couldn’t seem to find a word to describe something I think we do all the time. We have words such as learning, working, creating, inventing, discovering and I use them all a lot.  But these individual words suggest that they are discrete and independent activities on our part whereas my sense has always been that we do these all simultaneously as we go about our daily lives solving problems, making choices and just living. Do we really stop learning and start working and vice versa? Not in my experience and so I came up with Learnativity as an amalgam of all these and focal point for what I wanted to explore, talk about, experience and grow.

Sailing is something completely new to me.  I grew up living all over Canada and Europe as my Dad was a chef in the Canadian army.  No nautical background in my history or my family tree.  No life long childhood dream of going to sea.  I just happened to serendipitously stumble over sailing about ten years ago on a family vacation in Polynesia, where thanks to Diana’s great planning we chartered a sailboat (WITH a captain I might stress), for a week.  I didn’t really know it then but as I reflect back now I think that is when the sailing bug first bit me. Over the next five years I became more and more curious and fascinated by sailing, read lots, had more charted boat vacations with my dear friends John and Michelle and soon reached a familiar conclusion for me that the only way to learn more was through the experiential learning of doing it myself. I particularly relish diving head first into the deep end of my many pools of ignorance and so I figured what I really needed to do was go sailing long term, indefinitely in fact.  No destination in particular, rather a journey of grand adventure through the world’s oceans in general.  Yea right, that’s the plan, my favorite kind; the no plan plan!

And so the search for my first boat began and spent almost two years figuring out what I wanted and needed in a boat by scouring the worldwide used boat market, going to boat shows, reading and talking with anyone who would put up with my incessant questions.  Then one day in early 2005 I found just the right boat for me in Sidney BC, just outside Victoria, the one town where my parents retired and I had finished high school and started university. She is a 52’ steel monohull sailboat built from 1992-94 by Kristen Yachts and after several visits and much discussion I bought her from the original owner and took possession in July 2005 in Friday Harbour.  Yikes!

She was in good shape overall having not been sailed much at all but was lived in and used by the owner and sometimes his young family as he used it as an office for his geographical plotting work of sea bottoms.  However as I learned more and more, she was not set up for open ocean or blue water sailing but for short day sails and certainly not possible to be sailed single handed around the world.  I didn’t know a thing about boats really and somehow I missed the memo that you can’t sail a boat this size by yourself so I just jumped in with my usual ignorant bliss and got going with what would turn out to be a two year refit to get her ready to set sail on this grand adventure.  While I didn’t know anything about boats, I’m pretty handy and I can figure most things out and I’m a good problem solver and more than anything I LOVE learning by doing. 

With lots of help along the way of my great friend John and his dad Juan on several occasions, as well as too many other friends old and new to mention, I spent the first six months visiting the boat up in Victoria/Sidney and then later moved her over to Port Townsend for more extensive work in the boatyard there as they specialized in steel (and wooden) boats.  During the winter months in Port Townsend we sandblasted the bottom of the hull back to bare steel and put on new epoxy primer, sealer and anti foul paint, installed a new bow thruster, cleaned fuel tanks and put in a complete new fuel line system, pumps and filters, new AutoProp propeller and many other renovations. 

Joined by my good friend Steve we even managed to take her on a trial run back over to Vancouver Island and docked right in front of the Empress Hotel!  One of the things that grabbed me very early on in my research into sailing was the fact that you can legally anchor your boat in the middle of almost any harbour in the world!  As long as you aren’t blocking any shipping or sea plane lanes, the world is quite literally your oyster.  How kewl is that?!  I can anchor in front of hotels that are costing their guests thousands of dollars a night, have a view to die for and sleep in my own bed for “free”!  How can you not go for that?!

 

The Port of Port Townsend (had to say that for you Skyler!) was a great marina to work on a steel boat but it was way too far away for me to get there as often as I wanted and needed to.  My home and workshop were down in Petaluma, about 50 miles north of San Francisco so I was anxious to move the boat down close to there as soon as weather would permit.  Bodega Bay, which is just north of SF Bay proved to be a great spot that was less than 20 minute drive from my home and workshop and where I ended up working on her for almost two years to get her ship shape for single handed blue water sailing.

There were many attempts to get Learnativity down south to Bodega Bay that were thwarted by weather windows that suddenly snapped shut.  Even my friend Robin from England (seen on the right) flew in for one of these aborted attempts and my dear friend Erik from Antwerp had a memorable flight into Port Angeles to lend a helping hand.   Erik had an even more memorable experience the next day when he woke up and came up on deck to find himself swinging from a Travel Lift carrying the boat over to its final resting spot on the hard stands!

But finally, joined by a brave crew of John and his Dad Juan from Florida and two of my Autodesk colleagues and friends Dave and JohnH (the mermaid and the shark declined to join us) we finally set out for Bodega Bay on May 6, 2006.  As we were to learn, the west coast of North America, in fact every continent, is not very friendly to sailors with few points of entry and all of them difficult. 

 

 

 

The weather is also still very iffy this time of year and we ran into a severe storm about 60nm off the Oregon coast and made the call to head for Crescent City on the Oregon/California border to seek shelter from the worsening conditions that kept increasing to over 50 knot winds and 5 meter seas all the while the forecasts were calling for mild conditions.  The entry into Crescent City was even more challenging as none of us had ever entered it before, it was a challenging entry at the best times and we were doing it at night in storm conditions!  But we made it in just fine and were soon all sleeping soundly down below, snuggly tied up to the docks.  Now THAT is experiential learning!

I needed to change the name of the boat as it was the name of the original owner’s business and so began my search for just the right name. Almost as important as naming your children I knew this was a name that would be with me for a long, long time, one I would be saying on the VHF radio every day as I called others or was being hailed, on every document I filled out as I checked in and out of each new port around the world and so I gave it great thought and deliberation. I wanted a name that would be unique and capture the essence of what this ship was all about for me and the great unknown adventures which lay ahead. Not finding any existing names or words that seemed to fit I was soon trying to create my own word by putting together bits and pieces of others such as my kids names and trying these out on everyone who would lend an ear. It was my two great kids who nailed it though when they just looked at me, with those wonderfully quizzical looks teenage children give their Dad when they are so puzzled at your apparent blindness and ignorance, and said “You’re kidding right Dad? You already have the perfect name for this boat; Learnativity!” Duh! Smack! Of course! If there was one single explanation for this otherwise insanity of buying my first boat and sailing it around the world, it was my love of learning. I love jumping into the deep end of my pools of ignorance, and trust me those ends are VERY deep and numerous!  Though I had no inkling of the depths of this connection, I was pretty sure that I would be learning, working, inventing, discovering and a whole lot more every day I owned and sailed this ship. So Learnativity it was and she has lived up to that name every single day since then in more ways and depth than I could have ever imagined.

OK, enough of my nostalgic reflections for now.  Thanks to every one of you who have helped me so generously and kindly in so many ways to be out on this grand adventure.  I could not possibly be leading this charmed and full life without each and every one of you.  I’ll be back with more stories of some of the bigger lessons I’ve learned along the way.

 

		s/v Learnativity: the Adventure Begins! VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Kava & the Simple Joys from Nothingness

Friday night I had an extremely special experience when Isikelli one of the guys on my Fiji paint crew from Baobab Marine (left front behind Ruby in this photo) invited me to his home for a visit and some kava.  Kava as you may know from my previous posts over the past two year’s I’ve been in Fiji, is the ceremonial drink here in Fiji and many of the other Southern Pacific islands.

This Kava drink is made from the dried and aged roots of the Kava tree which are then pounded or ground into a fine powder and mixed it with fresh water. Kava is part of a ceremony and historic cultural tradition called “Sevusevu” which is what I experience each time I first anchor off shore from one of the small inhabited islands here in Fiji. 

As soon as I have my anchor down and inspected so I know Learnativity is secure, I put the dingy in the water and row ashore to meet with the chief and ask for his blessings and permission to be there. When I arrive ashore I am usually greeted by a gaggle of giggling children and seek out an adult to ask to take me to their chief.  I bring with me about a pound or half kilo of kava roots which I have purchased previously in one of the bigger city vegetable markets and keep a stock of onboard.  Usually my adult guide takes the kava from me and talks with me as we walk to get a bit of background on me, where I’m from, where I have just sailed from, how long in Fiji, and so on.  They introduce me to the chief and give him a summary of from this conversation and I am then invited to sit across from the chief sitting on a large hand woven mat.  I present the chief with the kava and he places it in front of him as we sit cross legged he then says a prayer in Fijian, we clap three times when he has done so and the then welcomes me to his island and we chat for a bit more before I take my leave and return to the boat. More informally, Kava is also the traditional drink that Fijian men usually have at the end of the day when they get home from work and is similar to having a beer or wine after work.  Several times while anchored for longer times off one of these islands I've been invited ashore to join them which has been a great gift and treasured experience.

On Friday however I had a whole new and even more intense experience with kava and the Fijian people and their way of life when one of my regular Fijian paint crew and friend Isikeli invited me to join him at his home for such a drink of kava. I was not sure what I could bring as a gift of thanks and appreciation but I remembered that I had about 2lbs/1kg of kava root still on board in my stores from sailing here last year and so I wrapped this up with ribbon into a bouquet like form that is the tradition here and took that along with me. Moreover, he had expressly invited Ruby to come along as he had been telling his daughters about Ruby the Wonderdog for months and she is also a "gift" for most people we meet. 

 

 

 

Isikeli lives with his two daughters Vani (2) and Marica (4) and his wife Salome who unfortunately was not able to join us as she works nights at the neighboring First Landing resort which is next to the Vuda Point Marina where I’ve been since September.  They live only a kilometer or two away and he and his oldest daughter, Marica (Fijian for Martha), met me at the marina and we walked over to their home. They recently moved into a new rental property that is situated in the middle of a large set of sugar cane fields and it was a perfect evening and just starting to cool off as the sun was starting to set (about 6:30pm).  Their home is an adjoining half of the landlord's home and he joined us for the last half of the walk to the house where Ruby and I were introduced to the kids playing in the houses and yard and Isikeli's sister in law. 

The kava roots need to be pulverized into powder and they fetched a large tall cast iron or steel urn that they used for this purpose. It needed to be cleaned out of rust and water so they wiped it all out and then lit some newspaper on fire inside it to burn off the remainder, wiped it clean and it was ready to use.  Isikeli, his older son and the man who owns the houses where they live all took turns in pounding the kava with a long heavy steel rod that was about 4cm in diameter and 2.5m long until the kava roots were transformed into a fine powder.

 

 

My offers to assist were politely declined as the men took turns raising the rod high overhead and then bringing it down as hard as possible onto the kava roots inside the urn.  This process took quite some time, almost an hour or so by the time it was fully pulverized and was a significant and sweaty effort in the hot humid night air.  All the while I was invited to sit on the woven grass mat, enjoy a tea and some biscuits as Ruby and I played with the 3 young girls who came and went from inside the house to the covered porch we were sitting on, and the yard.

 

 

As has been surprisingly common, the kids and even many adult men are quite fearful of Ruby at first as they have never seen anything like her. There are LOTS of dogs here but they are mostly roaming free and not in very good health as the concept of having domestic pets is not common in Fiji. With her strange curly black hair and small size many think she is some kind of wind up or electric toy! It took a while for the little girls to get closer and closer to Ruby, reach out and touch her and finally end up sitting with her, petting her and their initial wary squeals were transformed into that joyous giggling of little girls.

 

Kava has a very distinctive smell that is hard to describe but has a very earthy, spicy smell much like you might expect from a root. They were very pleased with the kava I brought as apparently it was very good quality and this was a very large quantity for them as it made enough kava powder for several months of drinking. Isikeli then brought out his kava bowl and his son put a few heaping tablespoons full of kava powder into a cloth bag which he then kneaded in the large bowl of fresh water. It is a bit like making drip coffee or tea in that you do not want the kava powder itself to be in the water you just want to extract all the flavour out of the powder into the water. Isikeli continued to knead the bag in the water for about 10 minutes to extract all the flavour from the powered kava.

 

Once it was all mixed to his satisfaction, Isikeli brought out the traditional kava “cups” which are hollowed out halves of a coconut shell and offered me the first drink. You accept the bowl with both hands and while the other guests toast you and clap three times you then drink the kava in one steady go and when you are done they all clap three more times and you pass the bowl back to the “chief” of the ceremony. In our case it was just Isikeli and myself and once we had both had a cup Isikeli would place the lid back on the big bowl and we would talk some more and then he would serve another round about every 15-20 minutes.  Kava is apparently mildly intoxicating but I have never had enough to feel any such effect and it just makes your lips, tongue and throat a bit numb. The bowl is then filled and passed amongst all the guests and then you usually sit around, chat for a while, and then repeat the whole process. It is a very old tradition and very special to be a part of.

I had my pocket camera with me and the girls were all quite intrigued with it and wanting to see pictures of themselves so that along with Ruby provided lots of fun for all of us throughout the evening as the girls got closer and closer to Ruby, petted her and worked up their courage with this very strange creature. 

Isikeli had even brought out a small can of tuna and some crackers for Ruby which Vani (the brave one of the two) served to her as you can see in this photo.  I also used several bites of soda crackers to entice Ruby to perform her full repertoire of entertaining tricks like standing on her hind legs, sit, down, dancing and giving High Fives all the accompanying music of giggles and laughs from the girls. 

 

And so this most wondrous and simple time passed with Isikeli and I talking, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with his two girls and older son.  Fijian families usually speak Fijian in their homes and with their kids and then they learn English “immersion” style once they start school, which is usually when they are about five years old and start half day Kindergarten classes.  So the young girls don’t speak much English yet but as usual it was no problem to communicate these simple pleasures of looking at pictures and playing with Ruby.  The time passed in that oxymoronic way where it is all luxuriously slow and peaceful and yet in the end seems to go by in a blink.

 

We stayed until almost 9 o’clock, which is quite late here, and then walked back to the boat. Isikeli and Marica walked us out to the end of the sugar cane fields and then Ruby and I walked the last km back to the boat under a beautiful starry sky. The moon is rising and setting very early now so it was not in the sky at all so the sky was even darker and the stars shining even brighter than usual.  It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and find my way along the dirt roads but the road is quite wide and not a problem to walk along as we made our way back to our little nest in the trees.  I was not sure if we would be eating as part of this visit and I had been so busy with all the painting that I had not eaten since breakfast so I made up a quick snack back on the boat and was soon nodding off on the settee as I was pooped from a hard hot week of painting. I awoke a few hours later and stumbled my way into the aft cabin and was soon fast asleep in bed with Ruby curled up at my side and we were off to dream land here in this magical land called Fiji.

While it fails miserably to capture the magic of the evening, I have done my best here to describe what this evening was like.  As with all experiential learning, this is not something that can be explained well in words and as the saying goes, "You really had to be there".  It may sound to many like a very simple and even "boring" evening where “nothing” happened.  Yet for me it was truly magical and memorable time.  To be invited into the home and lives of these simply beautiful people, to have even just a few hours to become part of this moment in time was such a deeply authentic and Oh so real moment for me.  I seem to be blessed with gifts like these all the time out here on this grand sailing life adventure and you can see why I say that I lead a truly charmed life.

Many of you ask what the heck I do with all my time out here “doing nothing”.  It is a very reasonable question and one can fully understand as I often wonder myself where all the time has gone.  But as you read more and more of my stories perhaps you can begin to understand just how full my time “doing nothing” is!  I’m actually fascinated by the whole concept of “nothingness” and is why I have been devouring books like Stephen Hawking’s “Universe in a Nutshell” and Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe from Nothing” that I am reading now.  Turns out that as best these physicists and cosmologists can figure out, everything from our very selves to the entire cosmos around us has been created from "nothing” and how over 90 percent of the energy in the cosmos exists in the “nothing” that is left when you remove every atom, electron, proton and quark of visible matter.

In a similar way, I live a life of profound joy that seems to be similarly created out of “nothingness” with the eclectic range of activities that include sailing from one magical destination to the next, experiencing the wonders of Mother Nature, endless boat repairs and maintenance juxtaposed between equally endless sunrises and sunsets, and then truly living IN life’s moments when snorkeling or laying under a full night sky or sitting with some of the local people I meet along the way.  To badly paraphrase Al Green’s “Use me” song, If this is what it feels like to do nothing, then nothing me up please!

It’s SO great to be Blue!

Yes folks, the big day finally arrive today. Tuesday March 13th here and a very lucky day it was indeed.  After months and months of work the great crew from Baobab Marine and I were finally ready to spray on the new Arista blue paint on Learnativity’s topsides! 

 

The weather looked to be perfect with another wondrous start to the day with brilliant blue skies and sun pouring through the tree branches as it rose this morning.  The crew arrived just after eight and we did the final inspection, fine sanded a few small spots and then wiped the entire surfaces down with thinner and rags to get rid of any last traces of dust or grit.

 

 

 

Ron, the new painter for Baobab who has been working with us steadily for the past 3 weeks was all suited up and started spraying at 10am.  You can see him here with the very first hit of the spray gun as the new Aristo Blue starts to replace the formerly all white Learnativity.  He works his way down one side and back up the other and then starts over again to put on each coat.  All in all we put on 5 coats, 20 liters of polyurethane in all so Learnativity is VERY well covered!

Here is my whole paint crew for you to see.  In the photo on the left Lorenzo, the overall supervisor who I work with for the whole renovation is on the far right and then he came and took the picture on the right so I could stand in with them.  They are SUCH a great group of guys to work with and it has been such an big bonus of doing all this work here to get to know them and learn so much more about the people, cultures and attitudes of the beautiful people of this country.  Thanks guys!  Now let’s get back to work on those decks!! <g>

 

 

I think I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves to show you more about the whole paint job today and give you a little album here to look through at your leisure.  Suffice it to say that it turned out GREAT and I am VERY happy.  The Aristo Blue colour changes just like I had hoped in the different lighting from shade to direct sun and I hope some of that comes through in the photos.  Enjoy looking at my shiny new blue boat!  I sure am!

		Learnativity turns Blue! VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL