…below the high water mark.
That’s how I generally describe our plans and how we make them. But sometimes it’s nice to actually KNOW what you will be doing, and it is also required to know when you are applying for things like visas and permits.
The Original Plan. Sort of.
Once upon a time, we had a plan which was “Sail to Australia and New Zealand before Will leaves us for college.” We mostly did that, Will went to college, and we were in Australia trying to redefine our plans for the future.
From Australia three things usually happen to cruisers. Some sail on West and continue around the world to complete a circumnavigation. These will often times go by way of South East Asia, and take some time cruising there before moving on. Some – a fair number – put the boat up for sale and “swallow the anchor” as we put it in the cruising community. Stop cruising and grow roots on land again. And a smaller group decides to cross the Pacific back the other way. The reason few do this is because it’s against the prevailing winds, currents, et.c
But that didn’t stop us from setting this as our goal. With our kids headed to the U.S. (one off to college in Pennsylvania, one now living and working full time as a yacht designer in Anacortes, WA), and our parents reaching the age where they will be making some life changes and maybe want our crap out of their basements, heading back towards the U.S. seems like a decent goal.
Not TO the U.S., but close enough to spend part of the year sailing in the states if we wanted to, and close enough to be withing a 6-8 hour flight that costs less than $1,000 instead of the current madness that is 3-4 times that in both time and money.
Back across the Pacific seemed most expedient. So we thought Australia to New Zealand, then NZ on to French Polynesia, Tahiti to Hawaii, and Hawaii to Alaska or the Pacific Northwest. Lot’s of sailing, lots of foul wind, but it would put us in striking range of annoying our children in a year or two.
Reality Intrudes
After a year or so of false starts and roughly seven months of traveling outside Australia and away from the boat, we finally got our act together and left Australia. The trip to New Zealand was slow but uneventful.
Things didn’t start going south until we got to New Zealand. First, a few things started breaking. While this is normal on a boat, it would be nice, for once, if they would all break at the same time like the Bluesmobile at the end of the Blues Brothers, rather than one failure after another, so as soon as you fix one thing something else stops you dead. Trying to move on with the agenda makes you look like Spongbob trying to run with his laces untied.
While I will not go into detail on this post, we’ve been dealing variously with problems with the batteries, the engine, also the engine, the rudder post, the watermaker, and the wind generator. Though two of those were somewhat self inflicted. Yes, there is another blog post on broken things coming.
But that wasn’t what actually untied our shoelaces before we started our sprint to French Polynesia. That was the French Embassy in Wellington.
Bureaucracy Rules
In order to spend more than three months in French Polynesia, an American must apply for a “Long Stay” visa. Since French Polynesia is roughly the size of western Europe with hundreds of islands and lots of water, and given the specifics about regional seasons and weather, three months is a really short time to spend there before moving on to Hawaii. It would have us sailing right into the north Pacific cyclone season. Largely considered an unwise move, by the way.
If one wants to apply for a long stay visa, you have to make an appointment with the French Embassy. They prefer it if you do this from your home country, but you can do it from another country under some conditions. If applying from the U.S. or Australia, you may not apply for the visa more than ninety days ahead of time. For us, this made applying from New Zealand the sensible thing to do, since we were hoping to sail from New Zealand in April, and would be leaving Australia in January. Since it can take four to eight weeks to process the visa, applying in January from Oz wasn’t going to work.
So we sailed to New Zealand, then made an appointment to apply for our visas at the earliest possible date. We booked a ferry from Picton, NZ to Wellington and planned to spend the night and havbe our appointments in the morning.
The Hitch
It wasn’t until I was talking to the woman at the French embassy that I learned that rules for their embassy were different. She told me I should have applied “six months ago” from Australia or the U.S. when we were there. But the important thing was that she would not process our visas until we could provide “proof of residence” (which I’d never be able to get) or at least, at a minimum, had been in New Zealand for three months.
She absolutely refused to accept our Visa applications, effectively destroying the plan we’d had in place for the past year in minutes.
Maybe it was For the Better
What a disaster. All of our plans up in smoke. After a year of working towards this plan, we were rudderless again (more on literal rudderlessness later) with no definite plan.
We’d taken on some crew with us for the passage to French Polynesia, and that plan was dashed. With our plans wrecked, we eventually ended up parting ways with the crew, for a lot of reasons I won’t get into. Suffice it to say that we weren’t able to deliver on what we promised once it became clear the boat needed some more repairs on top of the visa failure.
But as we spent more time in New Zealand, we also discovered a few things more wrong with the boat. Had we found these things en route to French Polynesia or once we got there it would have been much more difficult to sort.
In the middle of all this, Danielle was supposed to re-join us after the end of her first year in college. Fortunately, we found out about the French visas before we booked her travel and were able to send her to New Zealand instead of Tahiti.
What We Found
I’m going to summarize here. I could (and probably will) wax long, poetic and technical about the problems, the problems getting the problems fixed, and the eventual solutions in another post. But for now, I will list them.
- In Picton, I managed to short out my last good battery cell sensor. New ones were caught in customs for weeks. We could not charge the batteries safely during this time.
- While in Tauranga we decided to get the boat power washed before heading north to comply with Mediterranean Fan Worm protocols. On the way back from the short haul, we noticed water shooting out of the engine’s raw water pump. We also saw penguins on the trip, so that was kind of cool.
- Shortly after this, Kathy noticed water weeping in around the rudder post. This was potentially a Very Bad Thing. This also can not be fixed in the water.
It’s hard to make a case this isn’t worse than it looks. But it actually wasn’t. But it wasn’t good, either.
- We had an oil leak in the engine we knew about. It was getting worse so we decided to get it checked out while the boat was out of the water for the rudder.
- Turns out the Turbocharger was seized.
- As part of the turbo replacement, we had the aftercooler inspected. The core was no good, and the case was corroded through.
- In a completely unrelated series of events, the watermaker, which was wonky in Australia but worked when we tried to get it serviced, packed it in.
- Finally, I somehow managed to order the wrong set of replacement blades/upgrade kit for the wind generator when we were back in the states without realizing it. We’d taken it down for the haulout for the rudder and were planning to replace the bearings and install new carbon fiber blades that would offer quieter performance and better charging. But a part was missing from the order.
None of these things individually would stop us. But one of the troubles we’ve got is that with a twenty-two year old boat (and engine), large expensive parts like turbo chargers and aftercooler cores are not lying around in inventory. Not even in the U.S., never mind in New Zealand. The same applies for the rudder parts.
And am I the only one that things aftercooler core is something Scotty should be screaming about over the intercom to the bridge?
Aye Captain, but we’ve lost the aftercooler core with that last hit, if we can’t find another one she’s gonna blow!
So all of these projects needed parts, and all of them were expensive, and all of them needed to be imported. Our initial hope was to get the boat in and out of the water in four or five days. If the rudder parts hadn’t been caught in customs we might have been able to do that. But like the battery parts, there was a hangup. Then we had to wait for the engine parts to be shipped from Australia (turbo) and Belgium (aftercooler core).
In the end, we spent fifteen days on the hard while the work was being done. At the start of this decisions were made about crew, and departures were planned. We decided to spend the week waiting for parts touring around and seeing things, rather than moping in an AirBnB in Tauranga.
But now our crew is gone, for better or worse. And the boat is mostly fixed. We’ve hit a spate of less than pleasant winter weather that has slowed us down on a few things, and we’re still waiting on the “Clark Pump” for our watermaker to rebuilt.
Back to the Stick and the Wet Sand
After a year of being without a plan, then a year of having a plan, then seeing our plan wrecked in moments in Wellington, we’re back to three of us on board (until August) and no plan.
Tentatively, we’re headed to New Caledonia again. Then on to Vanuatu. Somewhere in all that, we have to stick Danielle on a plane to Auckland for her return flight to college.
And after that?
We’re still drawing lines.
