Just one small boat project...right?!

 One simple project is never just one simple project...

An oil change, a thorough engine room clean, followed by a quick replacement of some rudder bits.  Easy peasy, done in just an hour or two.  Might even have time to do the second engine and rudder, yes?!

Hahaha...you would think after nearly 6 years living on a boat, we would know better.  After all D’s favourite saying is “everything is broken on a boat, we just don’t know it yet”.

We are pros at dropping the rudders having done it a number of times already both in and out of the water.  This is always one’s downfall...overly confident...because this time could we get the rudder to budge?!  Nope.  Hitting it with a mallet got us nowhere.  D trying to pull it down from under water.  Nope.  More hitting it with a mallet....finally it broke free and dropped out.  

What was the problem?!  The smallest amount of growth on the rudder post between the two rudder bearings.  Gah!?  How could such tiny sea creatures cause us hours of frustration?

Okay, beauty, scrape off the growth, replace rudder parts that started this whole mess and reinstalled.  Job well done...

But of course this is not the end to the story.  Mucking with the rudder means, water comes into the engine room and the now newly cleaned engine room is no longer clean and dry.  So just a quick clean, empty out the bilge and then done!  Yes?!  NO!!

Of course not...suddenly the bilge pump that worked just mere hours earlier with the first clean is not working.  Right.  

This is probably a good time to mention that when I say engine “room”, it is a bit misleading.  It is an area where the engine takes up the vast majority of the space with perhaps a foot of clearance around the perimeter of the engine.  This means trying to access anything on the bottom of this said engine “room”, involves D straddling the engine and basically lying on the engine with his head and shoulders upside down.

And of course any appropriately located bilge pump is in the deepest, darkest recesses possible.  D manages to remove the pump.  From my perspective, I swear he only waved the screwdriver over it and voila like the magician he is, we have a functioning bilge pump again.  Whew!  That is one spare we don’t have and to buy any spares here in French Polynesia basically requires the need to mortgage the boat. 

And for today?!  The second engine oil change and rudder will have to wait for the pain of yesterday to fade.  But not to worry, D did have to fix the outboard engine when it sputtered and died on the girls and I, so he did not get the day off of fixing broken stuff.

The Rollercoaster Ride Continues!

How does one make plans with the constant evolution that comes with a global pandemic?!  The saying used to be “sailors make plans at low tide”, but now making plans are only as good from one government announcement to the next.  As it has been for everyone, 2020 was one hell of a mind trip of trying to create Plans A through Z for us and so far 2021 is shaping up to be more of the same.

We thought our plans were iron-clad....yes, this was naive.  For the last few months our plan of going to Japan, followed by Alaska and ending in BC, has remain unchanged.  These countries have continued to be open to us.  We were merely weeks away from departing French Polynesia for our 5,400 mile, roughly six weeks non-stop at sea, journey to Japan’s shores.  And then....

....our friends start texting us saying “Did you hear....Japan has closed their borders to all foreigners?”  DAMN!!  The new strains of the virus have arrived in Japan and they responded as they needed for the safety of their population.  We immediately email the agent in Japan.  Does this end our “iron-clad” plans??  Apparently, all might not be lost...the take on the new announcement is that there is a loophole for sailboats.  Good news, yes?!

We are skeptical.  Really in a conundrum of what to do.  Once we set sail for a course to Japan, we have very few options where we could stop along the way if Japan announces further changes that would prevent us from entering.  Only Guam and Saipan currently would allow us to stop with a 14 day quarantine on board.  Of all those little island nations you can see on the map between French Poly and Japan, just TWO would allow us to stop.  And to be clear, we fully respect the sovereignty of these nations to do what they need to do to protect their people.

To put this distance in perspective.  If it were possible to sail straight across Canada from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast, we are planning to sail the equivalent of a round trip across Canada.  So the question remains, what the heck do we do?!  Do we leave on this long trip that does involve leaving during the cyclone season in the Southern Hemisphere to sail through where typhoons are born in the Northern Hemisphere to attempt to reach a country that is on the brink of a lockdown?!  

You would think the answer is obvious.  But it is not for us.  All four of us have absolutely fallen in love with the idea of sailing to Japan.  So we are back into the wait and see pattern 2020 gave us.  We will wait for early February to see how things evolve for Japan, see if a full lockdown is announced, before we make a final decision...or ultimately we wait to see if the decision is made for us.

In the meantime, we try to make the most of being caught in a spectacular part of the world.  All of us on Maple wish everyone a very Happy and Healthy New Year!

Ringing in the New Year hiking on Bora Bora.

 

When the Covid-19 Pandemic struck the impacts on people around the globe were immediate and significant. Economies ground to a crawl, people died by the hundreds, global travel stopped overnight with borders closing and countries imposing restrictions on internal movement. Cruising sailors were not immune to the impacts. To this day borders throughout the Pacific Islands remain closed to travel, a situation that has led to some in the sailing community crying wolf about a looming “humanitarian disaster”.

The so-called crisis that has been identified is the inability of yachts in French Polynesia to flee the cyclone zone and find weather refuge in New Zealand or Australia.

Sunken refugee boats in the Mediterranean; a real humanitarian crisis

Now, I know that the very idea of the plight of world sailors reaching the level of a humanitarian crisis is hard to wrap your head around so let us take a look at everything that is wrong with this argument.

French Polyneisan Anchorage - February 2020

The risk of being hit by a significant storm in French Polynesia is, in reality, low. The islands are known by cruisers to have a much lower risk of cyclone activity than other parts of the South Pacific, so much so that each year increasing numbers of cruisers apply for long-sta

y visas to allow them to remain beyond the typical 3 months and hundreds of vessels spend each cyclone season in the Marquesas, Tuamotus, and Society Islands. While remaining in the Tuamotus and Societies carries a somewhat greater risk, the Marquesan Islands are generally accepted to be free of risk from cyclones in all but the strongest El Nino years. See Livia Gilstrap's excellent article on the risks of cyclones in Ocean Navigator.

Image: NOAA Climate Prediction Center

In addition to the normally low risk of cyclones, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has said that the 2020/21 cyclone season has a 60% chance of being a La Nina year, due to ocean temperatures that are cooler than normal. This suggests that storms will be less frequent and less severe. In an article for the Blue Water Cruising Association - Panache and the South Pacific Cyclone Season - Price Powell crunched the numbers and of the 20 cyclones that even came close to French Polynesia in the last 48 years only 2 occurred in La Nina years.

While much is said of the risk of cyclones in French Polynesia, New Zealand is not necessarily the safe haven one might assume. Yes, it is technically not a tropical location so not subject to tropical storms like cyclones, but strangely enough cyclones don't know where the borders to their zones are and sometimes extend themselves into post-tropical storms. In fact, using the same data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as Price accessed, we can see that in the last 48 years a total of 18 storms tracked within 300km of Auckland just 2 fewer than approached Tahiti.

Image: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The plight of sailors on their boats in the South Pacific does not approach the level of humanitarian crisis, and any increased risk from remaining in French Polynesia is not significant enough to claim that life or limb is at risk.

Consider that as I write this, over 27 million people have contracted Covid-19 and nearly 900,000 have died. The Brookings Institute conservatively estimates that the number of people in the world living on less than $1.90 a day will increase by 50 million, and 2020 will mark the first year of this decade that the global number of people living in poverty has increased. In July, Oxfam estimated that over 12,000 people could die daily because of starvation caused by Covid-19 related economic disruption. The disease and its very real, very significant impact on the least fortunate in the world is the true disaster, and we would do well to remember it and respect the measures put in place to limit its spread and impact.