Victoria is ours at last! Boat kids and live-aboards

Jack, Eloise and George on their "pirate ship"

Victoria was craned back into the water last week – all 20 tons of her, with shiny paint work, fresh antifoul, and brand-new rigging – an impressive and slightly nerve-wracking spectacle.  The following day, we said goodbye to life on dry land and moved on board.  It was a momentous day for all of us, as not only were we beginning boat life, but our purchase was complete, and Victoria was finally ours!  That morning, we were so busy saying fond farewells to our hosts and their dogs, and packing up our many possessions, which were sprayed all around our Airbnb accommodation, that we completely forgot to acknowledge the final use of some land-based normalities.  Goodbye microwave, thanks for making our porridge so quickly.  Goodbye wonderful washing machine, on hand whenever we needed you.  Goodbye flat beds, where no rolling waves could disturb us.  And goodbye trusty loos which flush without a fuss; no water pumps, valves or flushing handles, no remembering not to put the loo roll down, and no wondering how long it might be until we are undoing the pipes to sort out a blockage..

We were all very sad to leave our Auckland accommodation.  Annette, Keith and their children took us in as if we were their own family – they lent us their car, allowed our children to adopt their dogs, invited us round to their house, lent Jack a train set to play with, took George on a trip to a neighbouring Alpaca farm, and Annette made an amazing pair of Harry Potter curtains for Eloise’s bunk.  The children were glum and silent as we drove up the steep drive for the final time.  The twenty-minute journey to Victoria began with a few tears, and was then punctuated with sad, wistful little voices from the back; “I miss Rufus,” (George), “Annette was sooo nice” (Eloise) and “I really, really want to go swimming” (Jack).  Angus and I felt slightly bad that we were dragging them away from the latest place they called home, and we hoped their period of mourning would be short.

Victoria on her way back into the water

Once at Half Moon Bay, where Victoria was now alongside in the marina, we emptied the car, loaded up a few trolleys with our kit, headed for the boat, and put it all on board.  Obviously, I’ve made that sound like a very quick and simple process.  If you can imagine the reality of our doggedly determined three-year-old, Jack, insisting on pulling his own trolley “like a horsie, Mummy..” down a very steep ramp, and then making painfully slow progress along the pontoon, and being unable to judge the 90 degree turns, so getting stuck on successive posts, and still loudly refusing any help, you get a more accurate picture.  I had spent a few child-free hours on board the previous afternoon stowing some of our kit, and clearing spare sails, ropes and lifejackets from the children’s bunks, so I could make them up with their chosen boat bed linen; Paw Patrol for Jack, Spiderman for George, and Harry Potter for Eloise (full set yet to arrive, courtesy of Aunt Reens – thank you!) .  Angus and I weren’t so concerned about the theme of our cabin, so our duvet cover is fairly generic, but anyway it was so deeply buried under an enormous pile of unruly bags on our maiden voyage that we couldn’t actually see it.

Jack in his bunk, with a large anchor stowed just above him..

Our task that day was to move Victoria 16 miles north, to Gulf Harbour, Whangaparaoa, where we will be based for the next few weeks while we begin to get the hang of things.  The forecast was windy; force 5-6, and blowing from the north, which was exactly where we were heading.  To make matters worse, we had timed the trip to have the tide with us, creating “wind against tide” conditions.  This brings the wave crests closer together, giving a nastier, choppier, less forgiving sea.  Jim was with us, which gave us the confidence we needed to set sail, and to see how Victoria handled in a bit of weather.  We were being blown hard into our space in the marina, so even just reversing out was a fairly tricky manoeuvre; we were at risk of being blown straight on to some nearby moored boats.  We plugged the children into a few electronic devices so that they didn’t distract us at the crucial moment, Jim confirmed that Angus’ departure plan was a good one, I managed the lines and fenders, and Angus did an amazing job reversing our new battleship out, without incident.  Goodbye Half Moon Bay and hello the Hauraki Gulf; a famous piece of sea for anyone who follows the America’s Cup.

Kindle to the rescue to distract Jack at the crucial moment!

There was a strong breeze on our way north; we saw 30 knots on the instruments several times.  Victoria handled the wind and waves without batting an eyelid.  She punched through the chop, taking it all in her stride, maintaining good boat speed, and giving us great confidence in her.  Angus and Jim mostly stayed on deck while I handled things down below; passing cups of tea and sandwiches up to the cockpit, whilst managing the children as they gradually worked their way through the day-one-sailing colour spectrum; from pink and chatty, to white and rather quiet, then slightly yellowish, followed by deepening hues of green.  Jack fell asleep at the white-and-quiet stage, which was lucky.  George became a code-green after a gung-ho ten minutes of “playing” in the front cabin, where the motion was like a rollercoaster, until I forced him up into the cockpit, clutching a bucket.  Eloise reached the yellow stage soon after, so she also made her way on deck and snuggled up next to George, trying to focus on the horizon so her sickness would pass.  I spent so much time messing around below deck with the children that I also began to feel decidedly queasy.  I have always prided myself on never being seasick, even during a whole year on the Clipper round the world race.  I believed I could do anything down below, from cooking to navigating, whatever the motion was like, so this extreme nausea came as a bit of a shock.  Thankfully, I managed to keep my lunch down, and before long we got some shelter from the land.  The sea flattened and the wind eased, we all returned rapidly to pink and chatty, and everyone felt well enough to tackle chocolate brownies for pudding.  Sails down, fenders out, into the marina, an exciting 180 degree turn followed by an excellent park by Angus, and we all hopped ashore, glad to be safely alongside.  I think it’s fair to say we need a few more practice trips before we head for Tonga…

Hide and seek - a great game while the lockers still have space in them!

So now we are a family of live-aboards, which makes the children “boat kids”.  Boat kids are a notoriously feral bunch.  They run around with no shoes on, can’t remember when they last had a shower or where their hairbrush is, and are always on the look-out for other boat kids on more exciting boats with better snacks.  Having said that, the boat kids we have met here at Gulf Harbour are all at normal school, and there is nothing feral about them at all.  They are washed and clean, have very smart uniforms, and their families just happen to live on boats.  So maybe it’s just our crew who are becoming wild…  They seem to think that they are all pirates, and every spinnaker pole protruding from the deck of another boat is a cannon.  George greets Victoria with a loud, “Ahaaarrrrgh!  The good ship Vicky!” several times a day.  Eloise has brought a huge Y-shaped bit of tree on board, with a plan to make it into a giant catapult.  And Jack dreams the same dream every single night – that he is a pirate captain, in charge of his pirate ship and his pirate dolphins.  Their feet are filthy, their hair is becoming crazier, and we have almost run out of fresh clothes.  Tomorrow we really must scrub them all clean, find the boat hairbrush, and search for a local launderette.

Real pirate boat kids here...

Home schooling for us now takes place around the table in our saloon, and during our mid-morning break, we take handfuls of honey puff cereal (which it turns out that nobody likes), head along the pontoon, and visit “snapper corner”.  It’s a fish-feeding frenzy and the flashes of the snappers’ silvery-blue spots in the sunlight are mesmerising.  Every day we wonder what would happen if one of us put their toe in the water, but none of us has yet been brave enough to try.  We also have a new friend, a one-footed seagull, who Jack was the first to spot.  He always comes to see us when we go to feed the snappers, and he’s such a brave little birdie, hopping about on one foot and one leg stump as if there was nothing wrong with him at all.

Angus and I are trying to get used to Victoria and all her idiosyncrasies.  As you can imagine with a 30-year-old boat, there is a mish-mash of a few new and several very old systems on board.  We are finding our way around the many ancient water pumps, multiple new gas switches and her extensive electrics.  Some switches need a jiggle, some pumps need a little encouraging tap now and then; we are getting the hang of these, but it’s mother nature who keeps catching us out.  On our first night we were completely mystified by a loud and constant “tut-tut-tut” clicking noise beneath our bunk.  It wasn’t the ropes creaking, and it wasn’t the water lapping on the hull.  We established we were not sinking and that the gas was off, and we went to sleep.  Local knowledge subsequently revealed that it is small shrimps outside the hull making this sound.  Who would have thought of that?  This evening was even funnier.  Jack and I heard a “bird” chirping loudly on deck.  We crept around in the dark but saw nothing.  The chirping subsided and Jack went to bed.  Then it started up again; another fruitless search by me.  Finally, the noise was continuous, and I began to wonder if it was not a bird at all, but some kind of intermittent alarm.  Why had we ignored it for so long?..  Angus and I opened the gas locker; it wasn’t coming from there.  We opened a rope locker on deck – yes, it was in here! One by one, we removed buckets, bits of rope, lengths of chain, hosepipes…  The noise became gradually louder, but where on earth was this bird, or this alarm?  And then, in the corner of the locker, wedged in a little drainage hole, we saw a cricket type of creature, just a centimetre long. How could such a little creature be creating such a din?  With a chopstick and an empty houmous tub, we rescued our noisy “bird” and set him free in a bush on shore.  It just shows that we have a thing or two to learn about nature here in New Zealand.

The old owners and the new owners of the good ship Victoria

The other thing that really caught us out this week, in two ways, was mussels on the beach.  One minute, everyone was playing happily; Eloise was the explorer ant and George and Jack were the worker ants, following her trail.  Then they were “digging in the mud” at the waterline.  The next minute George was screaming, running up the beach towards me, with blood pouring from his knee and his hand.  Oh, we are silly, naïve Brits, with a lot to learn – he had discovered the hard way about New Zealand mussels; there are lots of them around, and they are razor sharp.  I washed the mud from the cuts at a nearby tap, and could see the knee one was pretty deep.  Unfortunately, Angus had gone on a car-retrieval journey, so I carried George back to the boat for first aid.  Having dug out our antiseptic wash, steri-strips, dressings etc, I felt pleased that I was so well prepared.  However, lots of these items are well past their use-by date, as they were given to us with the boat.  I had agonised long and hard about what to replace and what to keep.  What’s the worst that can happen to an out of date steri-strip or dressing, I thought?...  Well, the answer is that the steri-strips are so stuck to their backing paper that they don’t want to come off, and then once you’ve managed to close the wound and stick the dressing on top, the outer part disintegrates over the next few hours and remains a black gooey mess all over the knee two days later.  Thank goodness I had a test-run before we headed offshore with these slightly inadequate medical supplies.

We’ve had very exciting news from home this week – my brother, Will, and his girlfriend, Jules are engaged, which is fantastic!  Huge congratulations and we are toasting you from the other side of the world.  Sometimes it’s tough being away from friends and family at significant moments, but with the wonder of modern technology, internet phone calls are working well, at least while we’re here in New Zealand.  The children are starting to miss their friends a lot; we’ve been away just over a month now.  We are doing our best to set up calls for them, too, although the time difference makes tricky, as children all spend so many hours of the day sleeping!

Our tasks for the week ahead are to get all our safety kit up to speed, figure out how everything on the boat works, take her out for a sail or two by ourselves, and buy some new steri-strips, amongst  a hundred other things.

We could definitely use an extra pair of hands around here, so if Brexit gets too much, please do invite yourselves to come and join Wexit!

Xxx Family Watson