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Published: March 24th 2006
The best shot.
We love this photo, the colours were just wonderful and we felt really lucky to be able to see it from the sea.Ahoy there, shipmates! Last week we were beating to windward on a port tack and doing 8 knots when the waves came crashing over the bow. “A reef in the mainsail - and fast!” cried the captain of the “Maniac” - a recovering alcoholic complete with 16’’ liver transplant scar and a diabetic disorder that caused him to fall asleep at inappropriate and crucial moments. Our brave sailors had to clamp themselves to the jackstay to keep from going overboard as they toiled in rough seas to bring down the main and furl the jib. And still it kept coming - wave upon wave of….. well, waves, I suppose.
In case you at a loss to comprehend, we’ve been completing our RYA sailing training this week and can now claim to be Competent Crew - we got a certificate and everything! Also we put the first entry into our official Log Books, to say that we have now covered about 200 nautical miles around the top of the South Island of NZ. But it wasn’t all plain sailing - Oh, No!!! But we’ll come to that in a moment.
The course we undertook is a 5-day live-aboard affair and
Full moon no 1
It's so big and bright. When it popped up over the side of the mountain it looked like a big white ball perched on the hillside. as it happened the Eggs were the only people on board apart from our instructor. At first we thought this would be great - lots of time for us to get 1-to-1 attention from our ‘instructor’ and learn lots. However… the boat was much larger than anything we’d handled to date and this meant that all of the gear was heavier and generally it was a much harder ticket than we’d anticipated. We looked at each other with raised eyebrows on the first day, when the skipper announced that normally he prefers about a 4 man crew - putting sails up and down and lifting a huge metal anchor all day can be pretty tiring work.
When we arrived in Nelson (appropriate, huh?!) for our course we had a problem - we’d left one of the skylights up in Beryl and consequently had smashed it as we drove along the road at 80km per hour. So we needed to fix it before we left for 5 days in case it rained and we came back and found our sweet little new home had filled with water in our absence. We didn’t have time to find a new part before
2 fish in a bucket
One of these was chopped up for sushi. we left. But this is a country that is legendary for its resourceful populace and we managed to seal her crack using traditional Kiwi materials - beer packaging and duct tape. Tell you what though, it bloody well worked a treat - bonzer!
So, getting back to our Tale of life on the ocean waves…. As mentioned above, the course was a 5 day live aboard set up. We lasted 3 nights, and here’s why;
DAY 1: We left about an hour later than planned (1:30pm) and sailed north in a light breeze to a bay about 25 miles north of Nelson with view to catching a dinner of Blue Cod & Snapper. Now, here’s a bizarre thing for you - the skipper man (his name is John by the way) took us to the supermarket before we left and stocked up with enough food for approximately 10 people on a three week stint at sea. He bought the most enormous slab of uncut fillet steak, strings and strings of sausages, bacon, chicken kievs, cut shoulder steak for stewing, smoked salmon, 3 packs of cheese, jars of mayo and pickle, 12 nectarines, 6 lemons, 6 oranges, 3 big
Fiat Spider
This is our car. If we ever win the lottery then this is definitely what we are getting. loaves of bread, loads of mushrooms & onions, a bag of tatties, and oh so much more stuff that would take a week to list. We were actually wondering if he thought coz we are sitting on the chunkier side of the fence that maybe we are totally the greediest people in the world. Anyway - the point to all this explanation is that the last thing we needed to do was go fishing for our dinner, yeah? Regardless, that’s what we did, and spent so long doing it that it started getting dark, and the wind dropped down to a whisper. At this point John advised that we’d need to get a move on if we wanted to reach our planned destination for the evening - still some 15 miles away - like it was our idea to hang around for so long fishing when all we wanted to do was learn how to sail. He then disappeared downstairs to prepare the fish we’d caught, and left us at the helm, engine on and sails down, along with a sea chart and a couple of beers he’d produced from the freezer (no we couldn’t drink them as they were
Shaz looks for fish in the sea
With our instructor John in the background. He used to be a fisherman and we think this is why he was keen to take us fishing. pure ice). He appeared about 15 mins later with a plate of chopped up raw fish (we hauled in 5 in total ) and a few pairs of chopsticks and encouraged us to ‘eat, eat!’. Shaz wasn’t too keen but Alan got stuck in and enjoyed it enough, however John’s stint on deck didn’t last longer than 5 mins and he then bogged off back downstairs to do ‘other stuff’ and we chugged along in the pitch dark, not a clue where we were going. About 45 mins later, and after many calls downstairs to check if we needed to be doing anything other than going in a straight line, we were instructed to turn into a secluded bay and look for a white mooring buoy. Do you think we could find it? No we didn’t think so, and you’d be right. In fairness to ourselves though, we were steering by the glow of a full moon, not a flourescent strip light. Anyway - we ended up having to drop anchor in the bay, and by this time it was about 10pm. We stayed up to have our dinner of freshly caught roast snapper and cod with a couple of
Alan sorts out the bait..
..but he'd better hurry, it's getting late! slices of bread and then headed off to bed after minimum conversation with John. Saying he’s not very talkative would be the understatement of the decade. Bed was a double triangular bunk at the bow of the yacht, and we got our sleeping bags out and shivered ourselves to sleep, aided slightly by the gentle lilt of the tide rocking against the keel. NOTE - boats are very cold at night. Admittedly there was a really funny bit that we both got the giggles at during the day. John was showing us the on board safety routines and at one point was talking us through what to do in the event of an electrical fire. The drill is that you are supposed to stand 2 metres away from the fire and aim the appropriate extinguisher at the base of the flames, but John said that we didn’t have 2 metres, and demonstrated what he would do, which was basically an impersonation of Jim Kerr from Simple Minds in concert when he crouches down and points/ waves his arm across the audience. ‘Don’t Yooo Forget About Mee’.
DAY 2: Up at 10am (yes, 10am!), had brekko of crunchy nut cornflakes
and diet coke (didn’t like the look of the plastic mugs on John’s boat & had death fear of drinking out of them). So, to the helm… ‘What we doing today John?’ No answer. Did he hear us? ‘ So, what we going to be doing today John?’ No answer. This went on about 4 times and eventually he made a kind of ‘hmmm’ noise and said that he wasn’t sure but that he thought we would probably sail over to Abel Tasman National park- some 40 miles across a choppy channel. We had just heard the weather announcement and knew there were gales in this stretch of water. And so the nightmare truly begins. Both Eggs were sick as pigs. John said that if we were going to throw up, then we should hang off the back of the boat. What he didn’t tell us was that he hadn’t properly secured the safety wires running across the stern, and during one of Shaz’ turns at the sick station, one of the wires broke away and she fell forwards to the frothy sea. Fortunately Alan was as sharp as a dart in his reflexes and caught the back of her
life jacket as she wooshed forwards to a ‘man overboard’ situation. This was not met with great mirth from Shaz’s perspective and as you can imagine she got the fright of her life. This wasn’t a good day. Fortunately however, we managed to make it across Tasman Bay in one piece, with John at the helm, not us (we had paid good money to learn about sailing, not talk to God on the big white telephone, so imagine our aggravation at this). Anyway - another day, another dinner at the end of it, lovingly prepared by Shaz this time, of beef stew and boiled tatters. When we went to bed, we were discussing the day and both agreed that John was a bit of a mare. What would tomorrow bring?
DAY 3: Started off well. Very well in fact. John was in better form and was teaching us things, including tacking and gybing (turning the boat using the sails) and how to put reefs in the sails, and use the ropes properly. We also practiced making knots, and he was actually pretty good at teaching this - we’re now quite good at it. Competent, even. In the afternoon, we
did an exercise which involved using the dinghy, complete with attaching an outboard motor to it, and headed ashore to Abel Tasman at Sandfly Bay. We went for a river cruise using the motor & oars, and this was good fun in addition to us learning new things. We were happy. We got back to Maniac (which is actually called Manaia, but we like to say it our way) to find that the inboard engine had packed in. This was a bit of a disaster because a boat of this size (36 foot) really does need it’s engine to be working properly. Plus, part of our course is that we need to know how to retrieve a ‘man overboard’ using the engine, so this wasn’t very good at all. We must mention also at this point that this is not the only thing that was wrong with Maniac. Some of the clutches (things that hold the sail ropes in place) were knackered, the spray cover ( a hood to stop you getting wet when waves spalsh over the side) was burst in a couple of places, the water heater didn’t work so there was no hot water to have a
proper wash or shower, and to top it all the screws came out the windlass (metal turner which pulls the anchor up) while we were using it, which meant that Alan had to pull up the anchor several times without the aid of anything mechanical to bear the weight. He was knackered poor soul. Anyway - the engine didn’t get repaired and John was unforthcoming about what his thoughts were about reviving our situation.
DAY 4: We’ve actually missed out a number of irritations as we could be here all week, however today was the day that Shaz threw her rattle well and truly straight over the side of the boat. We’d gone through the whole rigmarole again about what are we doing today? ‘hmmmmm’ Are we going back to Nelson to get the engine fixed? ‘hhhmmmmmm’ What are going to learn today? What exercises will we be able to do without the engine? ‘hhmmmmmmm’. Forget it. Shaz went to sit upstairs on deck with a stormy brow, while Alan was patience personified and made breakfast with a cheery smile. After breakfast we faffed about a bit sailing round this lovely island called Adele Island, however, John was pretty
Maniac
See the blue thing at the front - well that's the splash guard. If we bumped our nappers on this once, we did it a hundred times when going down into the cabin. absent again down below, having asked us to do certain things that were new to us and then not being available to see if we were doing it right. Not conducive to the provision of a feel good factor. Enough was enough when John A) suggested we take the dinghy out again and go for a walk on the beach, then B) took it upon himself to have a pee over the side of the boat while we were at the helm. We agreed between the three of us at that point that it would be best if we headed back to Nelson that afternoon, then John could get his engine fixed, and we could have a break for a couple of days and resume our lessons the following week. We were truly scunnered. Thus, we headed back, sailing at a great speed of 8 knots across the channel to Nelson with Alan at the tiller for most of the way. We arrived in Nelson at about 4pm and headed to a campsite near town, bemoaning our circumstances all the way!
The following Monday we headed back to the port for our final lesson, and the strangest thing was
Lovely sunset no 2
The sun dipped right behind the mountain and made it look like a volcano with lava pouring into the sea. Don't know how well this will translate on your PC screen, but on ours it looks amazing. that John was like a different person. He was sharp, alert and totally on the ball. We had a great lesson and learned loads about docking the boat and tying her up, finding and attaching ourselves to moorings, and retrieving items from the sea. It was really really good. The saddest thing is that we felt the whole trip should have been like this. Nevertheless - we have not been put off. We still plan to buy a big sexy boat if we ever win the lottery, and maybe we’ll get another chance to get some practice in while we are away by offering to do some ‘crewing’ here in NZ or maybe in Aus when we go back.
Most of the photos on this blog were taken the night we did the fishing. There was the most amazing sunset and full moon and we were really pleased to be able to experience that. Before we returned to finish our course we had the pleasure of St Patrick’s day on 17th which we celebrated in Nelson while watching a U2 tribute band (and a few pints of the black stuff, and a fabbo trip to the WOW museum in
Nelson. WOW stands for World Of Wearable art, and also has a superb collection of vintage cars. We both want the red & black Fiat Spider.
Catcha later with more tales of our adventures, Me Hearties!
Alan & Shaz. xxx
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Marina - Shaz's pal from Schuh
non-member comment
oh what a comfy seat you have
I remember the wrought iron chair incident however can't remember the pub in Edinburgh where we aquired it? I do remeber managing to get it into the taxi though and sitting on it on the way home, glad to hear youv'e still got it!! taxi man must thought we were mad!!!