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Published: December 11th 2003
The past three weeks of sailing were incredible! Veronica and I left the Alvei today and watching it sail off without us was like watching our house and family drift away. But the money has run out and it's time to work.
I'll miss everything about sailing, including getting up at 4:00am for watch, eating Fritjof's "kerosene pie" (this was a veggie pie gone very wrong), the dolphins that swim along side the boat (at night they are just glowing outlines because of the bioluminescence in the water), listening to Jared (the first mate) tell stories about his tattoos and his jail time, singalongs and jamming out in the saloon. I won't miss weighing anchor actually. That's just a pain in the butt. The achor is a ton and the chain probably more than that. And we crank that baby up out of the water by hand.
We had a five day stop in Mount Maunganui which was good fun, a very pretty little beach town, a peninsula actually, so there's beach on both sides of the town and a mountain at the tip. I climbed it one day, very tiring but rewarding. The most charming thing about the
Party with the Crew!
Dirk, Rachel, Vero, Jennie, Jared, Seth, Fritjofmountain is that it's covered in sheep 😊 Mount M was also where 6 of the 12 Alvei crew members got tattoos (including myself). We also had a big party and invited every backpacker in town to try to recruit new crew. About 15 people turned up and we had a great time, but only gained one new person - Janine aka J-9 from England.
A few more days at sea - the wind was almost non existant so the going was slow. We passed the time by sunning ourselves on the deck, playing Risk (addictive game!), playing backgammon, and building a rope swing to jump overboard with! Jared gave me some lessons in celestial navigation and I learned how to use a sextant. There's a heck of a lot of math involved, I didn't really get it all. Did some fishing as well, I caught only a couple small fish but Fritjof caught two tuna!! He absolutely flipped out he was so excited about it. We had fresh tuna steaks and tuna fillets for a couple days!
One evening we saw
pilot whales! And there were reports from other crew members of penguins swimming around but I was
Singalong
Jared and Fritjof rock out in the below deck. asleep and missed them. Poops. Speaking of sleep, I have never slept better in my life than I do on this boat. The gentle rocking and relaxing sloshing sounds of the water on the hull just knock me right out.
When we arrived in Napier we were all feeling a bit deprived of modern conveniences so it was off to the movie theatres and bars and *hot showers*! Last night we had a "talent show" which basically consisted of Jared, Fritjof and Jill singing a song they wrote all about our adventures. It was quite good! Veronica, Jennie and I had prepared a dance number for the occassion but before we had the chance to perform it, we all spontaneously decided to go out drinking.
I'm really gonna miss this gang!!!!
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