Our first night at anchor

I struggled to finish this blog last night when I sat down after dinner to write it.  Somehow, we just didn’t seem to have quite enough news to make it worth posting.  We had been living on the same boat, in the same spot in the same marina for over a week and had gone nowhere.  What on earth had we been doing for all this time?  I really couldn’t think.  We’d come to the other side of the world for an adventure, but were stuck in the usual cycle of normal life – cooking, clearing the table, washing up, putting things back where they belong, home-schooling, refereeing sibling squabbles, and then time for the next meal (again!).  It seemed hard to make any headway at all in terms of our boat preparation.  We have growing lists of jobs, checks, kit, supplies and spares that we need to work through, but our three little time-eating-offspring ensure that dawn slips seamlessly through to dusk, day after day, with every job taking three times as long as it should, and items appearing on the list faster than we can ever hope to cross them off.

Home schooling in the saloon - some degree of control at the start of the day

We shouldn’t be surprised that time management with children on a boat is difficult; it’s no different to life on shore in that respect.  It’s just that if a goal is a plan with a deadline, then all of our current plans are goals.  And that’s quite a difference from our normal version of life.  We need to be ready to head offshore by mid/late May, and be self-sufficient for the following six months.  Angus and I have long recognised that sailing as a family is essentially like sailing single-handed, only made more difficult due to a noisy and demanding audience.  Every now and again the kids surprise us and are hugely helpful, either on deck or below, or they miraculously manage to entertain themselves for long periods of time without getting hungry, hurting themselves or fighting, but generally the interruptions are frequent.

We have introduced the Ship's Rota to encourage crew participation

In terms of hurting themselves, it has been astonishing how perilous life has become, bearing in mind that we have been tied up alongside a perfectly still pontoon in the most sheltered marina imaginable.  Firstly, we have been lent scooters, which adds a whole new danger level to walking ashore to go to the loo.  I bet you haven’t seen many three-year-olds scooting at full speed wearing day-glo orange lifejackets!  Below deck, there have been several head injuries.  George sustained a sizeable bash to the bridge of his nose when he fell out of his bunk one night.  He was dreaming about a warship, fighting off some "baddies", and launched himself headfirst with such gusto that he cleared the just-in-case pile of pillows on the floor and landed face down on the wooden threshold to our cabin.  Angus and I have both cracked our heads hard, repeatedly, when walking through from the aft cabin to the saloon; there is an unexpected change in floor level and we both seem unable to absorb it.  And then someone – either Eloise or Angus, both blame the other – left the pump on in the loo and by the time we realised, water was flowing freely over the edge of the bowl.  Luckily, we noticed before we actually sank the boat..  

The biggest perceived danger of all – a fierce leopard seal – is apparently swimming around us in the marina.  Jack talks constantly about it, even dreams about it, and all the children are convinced that it lies somewhere beneath the surface.  We have never actually seen this leopard seal, but one particular pontoon has fresh pieces of seaweed on it each morning, and our friend Big George, aged six, on a neighbouring boat, is convinced this is firm evidence of its presence.  Several times, I have seen a huge seagull creating the mess on the pontoon in question; despite sharing this information, the leopard seal myth persists.  Unfortunately, it means the children are all a bit apprehensive about kayaking, although having seen the sizeable population of harbour blue snappers greedily devouring George’s leftover burger and chips the other day, I’m not entirely sure I blame them.  I hardly dare put a toe in the water; the snappers are clearly ravenous, and entirely unfussy about what they eat.  I hate to think what would happen if a child toppled in to the water anywhere near “snapper corner”.

This is after we'd spun the boat to leave the marina.  The 180 degree turn is in the distance.

Today, finally, we have bravely left the relative safety of our pontoon in Gulf Harbour, without taking Jim with us.  It has been a stunning day, with warm sunshine and a fresh south-westerly wind, and we sailed three hours north to reach Kawau Island.  Our pilot book suggested that the first anchorage, Mansion House Bay, was the best, but ten boats had got there before us and it looked a bit crowded, so we chose the next bay along, where it is just us.  Once we were anchored, I was contemplating a late afternoon swim, and raised the idea with Jack.  He looked very serious.  “No Mummy, you can’t go in the water, the leopard seal will bite you.”  I said not to worry, I hadn’t seen a leopard seal here, but he looked unconvinced.  Then he asked me where we were.  I wasn’t actually sure of the name of the bay, so we went to check the chart together.  Horror of horrors – we are anchored in none other than Shark Bay!  Jack looked at me as if to say, “Well, that’s lucky you didn’t go swimming then, Mummy.”  He keeps saying to himself, “There aren’t really any sharks here, it’s just a name..” but I still have no idea how we will persuade him to come ashore in the dinghy in the morning.

A fantastic downwind set-up - twin head sails, one poled out, and no main to worry about

Angus at the helm

Me on the foredeck

George looking for pirates!

So, today we have had a wonderful sail in the Good Ship Vicky, and tonight is our first night at anchor; it's a momentous day for us all.  The weather is calm and I think we’ll sleep well, hopefully without too many anxiety dreams making us get up and check that we haven’t moved.  The children are so relaxed here that they all went to sleep on deck, snuggled up together under a duvet, watching the stars.  With luck, we’ll all get a better night’s sleep than at the weekend in the marina.  The local kiwis around us became nocturnal, with the males calling and singing loudly through the night – and I’m not referring to the native birds.  As I type, here in the anchorage, there are no kiwis calling, but I can still hear the familiar cracking and snapping of the ridiculously noisy little shrimps just outside the hull; it was so strange to us only a week ago, and now is just part of our background soundscape.  We have all got used to life on board, and Eloise, George and Jack have probably adapted to boat life even faster than us; it was a delight to hear them giving our very first guest an almost perfect boat familiarisation briefing.

Eloise, Jack and George sleeping in their "nest" on deck

Thanks Aunt Reens for our towels, footballs and bedding - we love it all!

A great old friend of Angus’ from Canada, Brett Norris, is travelling in New Zealand, and he has bravely joined our salty crew for a week.  He hadn’t read any of the blogs, so had no idea what he was in for, and actually I think he may have had a sneaky search for a local hotel after his first night with us…  Luckily, he had no joy, so he’s still on board, and says he’s extremely comfortable in our very grand aft cabin. Brett is a very practical person, an absolutely fantastic cook (who has barely left the galley since he arrived), and he’s brilliant with the children too, so it couldn’t matter less that he knows little about boats.  I’m not sure quite how we’ll manage when he leaves, but Jack assures me we’ll be OK.  Brett arrived just as Angus and I were very carefully winching our enormously heavy outboard engine from the dinghy up on to the deck, so the children took him under their wing and gave him a thorough tour, starting at the bow and working backwards.  Eloise gave most of the instructions, and these are just a few snippets, to illustrate the most important aspects of life below decks.

One very important aspect of life below decks for Wattie is his tabasco supply.. which is running low..

“This is the loo.  But we don’t call it the loo, we call it the heads.  You can flush it with salt water or fresh water.  You twist this red handle for salt, or this blue one for fresh.  You need to make sure you turn it off afterwards, otherwise the boat will fill up with water.  That happened to Daddy yesterday.  We almost sank.  (hysterical giggles ensue).  You pump this black handle to empty the bowl, but don’t pump the handle with the seat down, otherwise the seat gets sucked closed and you can’t open it.  That happened to George last week...  This bag is to put the paper in, you mustn’t put it down the loo or it might get blocked.  And we can only do wees in the marina.  If you want to go to the shore loo, you need to take the key fob on the chart table, to get back through the gate…”  Brett, by this stage, was probably looking quite bemused, but Eloise was just warming up.

“Now we’re in the main saloon, and here’s our table where we eat.  I wonder where you would like to sit?..  Will you sit next to Jack, or next to Daddy?.. These are our bamboo water cups from Jersey Zoo – George is the cheetah and I’m the crocodile, Mummy’s the tiger and Jack used to be the monkey but now he has changed to the shark, so Daddy has to be the monkey but he doesn’t really like being the monkey at all.  I suppose you’ll just have to have one of our anchor cups...  To turn the gas on, first we press this black button on the chart table, and you’ll see this red light go on, then walk through the galley and turn that handle on the yellow pipe up there, and then you can light the cooker, but you have to hold the knob in for about five seconds or it goes out..”  For a non-boatie, it was quite a rapid-fire tour, and a lot of information to take in.  For us, it was impressive to realise how much the junior crew understood about the boat.

Although we had shown Brett how to turn the gas on and off, it is hard to instil the deep paranoia of gas safety in someone new to the boat.  Angus and I always shut off the gas when it’s not in use, one little gas leak can be the cause of a catastrophic explosion.  If we don’t see a kettle or saucepan simmering on the hob, we shut off the gas supply with the yellow handle, and turn off the solenoid switch, almost without realising we’ve done it.  This caused Brett quite some issues when he was trying to cook us chicken cacciatore in the oven.  The recipe required three hours; an unheard of amount of gas for boat cooking, and not something we would usually do.  Every time Brett went to check how the chicken was doing, he was mystified as to how the oven had gone out again; meanwhile every time Angus or I walked past the gas, we wondered how it had been left on, and switched it off.  In the end, all was OK.  Brett finally stood guard so we physically couldn’t turn the gas off, and the chicken cacciatore was delicious; it turned out much better than our “safe-gas” chocolate chip cake..  I accidentally shut off the gas when the kettle boiled, just 10 minutes after we'd put the cake in the oven.  By the time we realised, it was too late to rescue the cake, but the kids seemed happy enough to eat the gooey mess straight from the tin with spoons.

The long-awaited chicken cacciatore (with a photobomb by George)

So, assuming we make it through the night without incident from kiwis, leopard seals, warships, gas alarms or falling out of bed, then we’ll have had a peaceful first night at anchor.  We'll head ashore in the morning and go and explore the native forests on this beautiful island.  There are reportedly some stunning footpaths.  As long as the forecast holds, we’ll spend a second night at anchor tomorrow, and head back to Gulf Harbour for the rest of the week, where we need to start facing up to stocking up on food and spares for the trip offshore.  Brett is flying home to Canada on Friday; we are still trying to persuade him to stay.

I hope everyone is well back home.

Lots of love from the family Watson, and Brett, in Shark Bay, Kawau Island. Xxx

yet another "simple" job which took me forever to complete

One extra pic - sunrise after our first night at anchor