generosity – A Year and a Day

–by Caitlin

A quiet dawn turned into a brilliant and windy afternoon as we sailed through Canadian waters toward the border with Washington State. The enormous ferries that move people through the waterways of British Columbia crossed Debonair’s bow or overtook us. A mile from the border a Royal Canadian Mounted Police boat buzzed us.

We’d spent the last 18 days sailing from Alaska through British Columbia. We sailed through fjords, across straits, and through narrows that boiled with fast moving water, swirled into whirlpools, and rose into standing waves. While we’d anchored up each night, we weren’t allowed ashore due to Covid restrictions. We felt alone, but we also felt our completeness, our wholeness as a crew as we pushed south through the remote watery world of British Columbia.

So much fog.

So many logs.

“How you folks doing?” The Canadian police boat cruised alongside us as we shouted names and passport numbers into the wind. After ascertaining that we weren’t trying to sneak into Canada and offering us info about places we need to return to see, the police sped off, and we barreled across the border, sailing against a wicked current, but with the wind.

Just outside of Washington State’s Roche Harbor, we lowered our sails. We motored into the harbor to anchor among gleaming yachts. Sportfishing boats zipped by, and float planes took off and landed every hour. Ashore, we stretched our legs and tried to keep up with ice cream cones melting in the heat. We hadn’t been in contact with anyone while we were in Canada, so this busy vacation town felt overwhelming. I thought about posting a blog entry, but there was too much going on, too much still to process.

A few days and a few anchorages later we put Arlo on a bus in Anacortes—he was flying back to the Bay Area for pre-season cross country training. Before Arlo left, he asked me, “Mom, we had a five-year plan for our voyage, and we pretty much stuck to it, right?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said. “We always planned to end the voyage here in the Pacific Northwest.”

“So now what?” he said. “What’s next?” I don’t remember how I answered, but I know how we felt as Jason and Alma and I walked away from the bus depot without Arlo, back to the marina where Debonair was waiting. For so long we’d been a voyaging family, a crew of four, and now, as the three of us walked back to Debonair, we weren’t. We were aware that next time Arlo returned to Debonair, he would have graduated from high school, and the time he spent on board would become provisional.

A crew of four.

Our melancholy mood stemmed from more than an awareness of our shifting family dynamics. We were also coming closer and closer to the last days of this multi-year odyssey. Alma and Jason and I were about to bring Debonair home to her last port. For so long we’d been a voyaging family, and soon we’d be a family that had completed a voyage and returned.

Alma and Jason and I sailed to a little cove on the south side of Lopez Island where we hiked and picked blackberries and rode out a windy night. Another day’s sail brought us into a marina in Port Townsend where we spent a busy week preparing Debonair for winter. Then Alma and I flew home to join Arlo and to start school and work, while Jason stayed behind to haul Debonair out and do long-postponed maintenance work.

After sailing from Hawaii to Alaska in 2019, Debonair spent two years in harsh Alaska conditions. This fall, Jason spent almost a month on long overdue maintenance.

New topside paint and Debonair’s looking good!

In her winter berth, cover partly on.

Back in California now, one of us will sometimes look up from whatever we’re doing and pause. “You remember when?” we’ll say, and everyone else will look up too. Remember when we raised the staysail off the mizzen mast? Remember when Christian gave us the boeuf sauvage? And lobster hunting and freediving in Toau? Remember the huge seas in the Alenuihaha channel? Remember saving Pepita in the williwaws of the Kenai peninsula? And from this summer: remember floating Debonair free when we ran aground, remember hauling the big halibut aboard, remember anchoring among log booms. Remember the grizzlies and the crazy call of the sandhill cranes and that wolf on the beach and the whales. Remember how good it feels to be just us sailing, to be a crew, to be out in the weather all the time, to be out in the world.

When I think about what we’re taking with us from the voyage, I think about mountains and reefs and islands, about banyan trees and spruce trees and endless clouds. I think about how familiar anxiousness feels. And I think about newfound competence–and confidence. I think about desire and work and wonder. I think about Debonair, the beautiful vessel that kept us safe across oceans, the boat that sheltered us wherever we were and taught us to be voyaging sailors.

If we were to retrace our voyage, we’d probably do it differently. But we know there’s no perfect voyage, for the unknowns and our imperfect responses to them are the essence of any voyage, and we feel so lucky to have been able to draw our imperfect wiggly wake across the ocean. We were scared sometimes, but we found we felt connected—to those we met, to the natural world, to Debonair, and to each other. We got to add this wiggly line to the beautiful tangle of our life.

I didn’t write a blog entry when we re-entered the US in Roche Harbor or when we tied Debonair up in Port Townsend or even when we came back to Alameda. I’ve postponed writing, I think, because it’s hard to acknowledge the end. We set out from San Francisco in January 2018. We sailed south to Mexico, then west for 26 days across the ocean to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, and on to the Tuamotu Islands and to the Society Islands. Sailing north from French Polynesia back across the equator to Hawaii, we encountered heavy weather. Completing the circle, we sailed North from Hawaii to Kodiak, Alaska. We’ve spent the last two summers working our way south from Kodiak. Our arrival in Washington two months ago marked the end of our planned 16,000 mile voyage.

While we’ll return to Debonair next summer to sail back into British Columbia and visit some of the places recommended by our friends from the Mounted Police, the trip will feel different, somehow–more summer expedition than a continuation of the longer voyage.

That longer voyage–that sometimes frightening, often exhilarating voyage–has come to an end. As is probably true for so many voyages, it was hard to go out and hard to come back. And we’re so glad for all of it.

Thank you all for your generosity along the way—for reading our words, for sharing yours with us, for your help and your enthusiasm and kindness. We’ll keep you posted.

A few more pictures from this last summer:

In the last village we visited in Alaska, we met the maker of this beautiful cedar bentwood box

This is a longer post—we need to put it up before we leave the internet here, so we didn’t edit as much—enjoy!

Look for Arlo’s green shirt, and Alma’s pink one.

A couple of days ago, Arlo and Alma were invited by the president of the local and championship va’a (outrigger canoe) club to join a middle school paddling class. After class, which took place largely in with a twin-hulled canoe, Arlo and Alma got individual coaching from the master paddler in individual canoes. I expect Arlo or Alma will write more about the experience, as va’a (outrigger canoes in Marquesan) fever seems to have infected them, and they are already is talking about how to get outrigger canoes on the Oakland estuary when we return home. They’ve continued to paddle here at the school each day.

Rataro (right) coaches Arlo in the three phases of the paddle stroke (attack, propulsion and return).

What I can’t emphasize enough is the ubiquitous generosity we are benefiting from so often. The paddling coach was the man who founded the Ecole Va’a here in Uo Pou. The school—the only of its kind in the Marquesas, now serves 390 students a week and produces champion paddlers at the big competitions in Tahiti (which, by the way, the coach said Arlo had the making of). The coach is also, we learned, a renowned singer and performer and a nurse at the hospital’s maternity ward, as well as the nurse that accompanies patients on inter-island transports. And he took the time to coach each of our kids using a mixture of English, French and a lot of modeling.

I hope the pictures show how far beyond gifts of fruit this generosity goes—though we do continue to be grateful recipients of bags of pamplemousse and bunches of bananas. We return the generosity as we can—with gifts we brought for the purpose, invitations to our boat, and of course, our enthusiasm. It doesn’t always feel enough.

We are still figuring out the relationship between the Marquesians and the colonizing French culture. The world over the colonial relationship is complex, and there is necessarily tragedy, old and new. Here, we see a powerful indigenous culture, but we also feel a shadow of sadness from 150 years of colonization. As in so many colonized places, contact with Europeans, which began in a big way about three hundred years ago, decimated the Marquesan population, reducing the roughly 150,000 inhabitants to about 8,000. There are stone foundations, paths, bridges, and tikis in all the valleys, testifying to this once-booming population. My French is not nearly good enough to have a sense for whether this shadow sadness is more in my eyes or how much it colors the lives of Marquesians. We are aware always of this uncomfortable history, we are grateful to be here, we are learning what we can and we are giving as we are able.

In addition to enjoying the hospitality of the Marquesan people, we’ve met with generosity by sailors on other boats—cruisers, as we’re called. Almost all sailboats crossing the Pacific each year stop at the Isles Marquises. And for good reason. The Marquesas are the first possible stop after leaving Mexico (about 3,000 nautical miles), the Galapagos (a similar passage), or Panama (an impressive 4,000 miles). For a boat like ours, those passages range from about 3 weeks to 7 weeks spent at sea. I’ve heard it estimated that about 500 sailboats arrive in French Polynesia each year.

In such a remote place, there’s a sense of being in it together—maybe not so far from the ethos of farmers in remote areas who know that they are the only ones available to lend a hand to a neighbor. Cruisers here make friends quickly and help each other before we have become friends. American boats are in the minority here. We’ve shared food and drink with folks from Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Belgium, France, New Zealand, South Africa and England, as well as sailors from the Bay Area. We’ve been loaned tools and jerry cans and books and we’ve been given a relay switch for our engine starter, as well as star fruit and grapefruit. One new friend taught us how to use some open source navigation software, another swam over and introduced himself and dove on our fouled anchor with Jason. Of course, we’ve tried to be generous with our resources as well.

There are all kinds of things about cruising that are uncomfortable (stuffy heat, dirty hair), scary (squalls in the middle of the night after a boat anchors too near you), and annoying (endless flies, cash machines not working for days), but these have been dwarfed so far by all the good things that fill our days—the natural and the cultural. Our debt to those we meet along the way grows deeper, adding to the debt we have to all of you who sent us on our way with your help and love and letters and gifts.

Below Jason writes about the talent and generosity of two woodworkers we spent a morning with a couple weeks ago. Thanks for reading. We love hearing from you all!

From Jason:

When we first met Pori and Axel a couple weeks ago, they were working in a yard alongside the road, cutting a massive tree up into boxy chunks. Caitlin spoke with them in French, and Arlo & Alma and I tried to follow along. Pori, the boss, is broad shouldered and solid. Axel, Pori’s junior and employee is built like a sumo wrestler, bald headed and heavily tattooed. When they heard we were interested in wood and carving, they were excited to try to explain about the tree they were working on (locally called Temanu), the carving tradition, and their work. It was difficult to communicate, so we arranged to come visit them at their shop. Before we parted ways, Axel held a board down with his plastic sandalled foot, and cut a slab off for us. It made me nervous, but he’d obviously been handling a chainsaw his whole life, and he still has all his toes.

We found Pori and Axel in their shop this morning, overlooking the bay up the hill from town. Pori showed us the ukareres (the local varient of the ukulele—flatter and higher pitched and with double or triple strings at each of the four string sizes) he makes. He uses all kinds of local woods, the Temanu he’d been cutting when we met him, breadfruit wood, mango wood, and other deeply and beautifully grained and colorful woods from the hills around his house. The shop is a broad shed attached to his house, full of blocks of beautiful wood, with some nice stationary tools (a thickness planer, a bandsaw) and hand tools and power tools and a carpet of wood chips over the dirt floor. A shop I wouldn’t have noticed from the road held so much beautiful wood and work. When I showed Pori the spoon I was carving from the Temanu they gave us, his eyes lit up and he took it to show Axel, who was working in back of the shop on a large carving. Axel was pretty amused at the idea of a wooden spoon, and found it even funnier when we said I might make a knife to go with it. A wooden knife? He and Pori were supportive of the idea of hair sticks though.

I showed them the knife and gouge I use, and Axel sharpened them both, and at my invitation, tried them out on the spoon I was working on. While we talked with Pori, Axel hollowed the bowl of the spoon and shaped its back. We checked with him a few times and he demonstrated the way that he uses both of his hands to hold the work and control the blade. He has a two handed technique where he levers both of his thumbs against the handle and back of the blade to apply a lot of pressure with a lot of control. He makes it look quite simple, but I’m going to have to work to get the feel for it. He’s even more deft with small carving tools than he is with the chainsaw. His carvings, in the traditional Marquesan style, bowls and tikis, are busy with exceptionally fine detail. Their shapes are graceful and the elegance and perfection of the carving are amazing.

We went back and forth with Pori and Axel, talking about wood and carving and Ukareres. Pori played his ukarere–a little, faster and higher pitched than the Ukulele music we’re used to. We talked about tools some more with Axel. We looked at more of Axel’s carvings. I didn’t want the visit to end, but they had given us a couple hours of their time, carving lessons, sharper knives, and a lot of patience already. We let them get back to work, and wandered down the hill to town, wondering at our fortune in finding these two woodworking masters at random out alongside the road, and at connecting with people over shared passions.

Tag: generosity

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