Encouragment

I really can't thank all of you enough for your emails of encouragment in reply to "written from the heart". They have truly helped pull myself together. A huge thank you has to go to my family who I scare the hell out of & then disturb in the early hours of the morning with phone calls that don't connect once they pick up. Just managing to cope themselves they still find the energy to see me through the tough parts.

I appreciate the time & effort it takes from your busy days to write emails of support to boost my failing confidence. Some of you I have never met, but all your emails have had me close to tears (in a happy way!). To know you are all out there rooting for me leaves me speechless. The emails have all been saved onto my computer & will be reread should I find myself in a pickle again.

You will be pleased to know that our "time out" in Honiara, Solomon Islands has lifted both our spirits. Ice cold Sol beers have helped Bobby & huge ice creams have been my medication! Feeling stronger, I'm ready to put my best foot forward & get back in the saddle. For now though we are in no rush & thoroughly enjoying Honiara.

Hoping to make the next few trips in short hops to ease me back into things. Just keep your fingers crossed for good weather & calm seas!

Written from the Heart

This was a tough passage. Not because of the weather or the conditions, although they were far from fantastic but I have been through worse. This one was hard mentally. I collapsed in a total state. I was petrified, unnecessarily so. I was unable to keep things in perspective or draw from previous experience. The panic & fear may have been understandable if I had never been at sea before. A four day passage in my second year of cruising on Barraveigh that caused me to take such a nose dive has left me racking my brains & reflecting on what may have caused it.
I had been keen to leave Vanuatu & had been restless whilst we waited out bad weather looking for a good window to leave. Within the first 24 hours my melt down began, lying on the cockpit floor in floods of tears. A fear of the sea & scared that it was going to kill me had suddenly risen from inside. I have no idea where this suddenly sprung from & I know its from there that things got worse. Reflecting on it from the safety of an anchorage I wonder, have I suddenly hit a new stage in the grieving process & thoughts of loosing Sally, or is this more to do with the psychology of being at sea? Or is it just a bad mixture of everything? Which ever it is, it's serious & I need to overcome it. I made life dangerous for both myself & Bobby.

This life is not an easy one. There are many pleasures but a fair amount of hardships too. We are earning our adventures. Behaviours that never get a second thought in normal land life become huge issues on a boat at sea. It is those areas that I am trying to analyse to see what caused me to “system overload” & if they can be avoided in future passages.
If I'm totally honest I am so very very tried of the knocks & picking myself up again. I think I just ran out of energy to hold it together. I need a break. This isn't a lifestyle that is natural to me. I do it & may take it in my stride more than others but I too have my limits. I plan to give myself a day or two in a hotel to give myself the time & space to pull myself together. I have learnt two things about myself which do not blend well with life on board a boat; personal space & social isolation.
My personal space is a huge deal. At sea with the boat healed over there is little space on the boat to move about & with only one person able to be in the cockpit we were living in the cabin or on watch in the cockpit. I need to be able to walk around, get off the boat, spend time on land......I need space! But I need to find a way to deal with the lack of it while we are at sea. I'm also not good with social isolation. On passages with only my own company day after day, night after night, I begin to crave someone to talk to, play cards with, or just generally hang out with. Whilst at sea, Bobby & I continually take turns sleeping, or have time in the cabin away from the wet cockpit. This sends me a little potty as I think of family & home. Bobby on the other hand loves the alone time! I need people around me. Admittedly a cruisers lifestyle is very social, a good anchorage with loads of your friends around will be non stop sun downers, but that's only half the time, the rest is at sea & it is very isolated.

We made an emergency stop at Kirakira on Makira Island (south of the capital Honiara if you are looking at a map) after 4 days at sea. We were at our limits & needed to stop. On top of which we had problems on board. We ripped our head sail on day one (sailing 400 miles in three days with only a small main, shows you sailors out there how strong the winds were!). The head (toilet) overflowed, I shall let your imaginations run on that one, but just picture trying to deal with a horrible job at the best of times & especially horrible at a 45 degree angle! Further to that I'm now an expert at peeing into a bottle, handy for those times when I return to work & am stuck in a surveillance van! It rained nearly non stop, our foul weather gear just couldn't keep the wet out & our thermal gear underneath was soaked after each watch. It was a hunt for dry warm clothes & it seemed if I found some dry clothes & it wasn't raining a wave would break in the cockpit soaking me! Kinda hard to keep smiling when the gods seem to be against you!! Poor Barraveigh was soaked, water in all the bilges, everything was damp & wet clothes hung from everywhere possible or strewn on the floor as we heeled over. On top of everything else my sea legs have not yet returned. I found it a struggle to be below deck & certainly could not even think about using the galley.
All these things resulted in a bad diet, bad routine, lack of positivity & a bad mental state, unable and then unwilling to partake in the duties on board. I just hit that brick wall & wished there was a big emergency button I could hit to make it all stop. I had decided that was it, I was getting off as soon as we hit land. Life at work & in my flat was a life I wanted back.

I'm sitting in an anchorage from hell. The swell in here is so bad we are bouncing around as much as we were out at sea & the rain is non stop. But (& its a huge but), we are stationary. No sails or engine to think of, no navigation to stare at, just sleep, reading & watching some movie's (very hooked of the series Heroes). We have eaten proper meals, cleaned up the boat, emptied & dried the bilges & changed the head sail. Things feel better but I'm still apprehensive. I need to fix this or get off. It's too dangerous to be at sea in that state again. My hotel rest may however have to wait a week or so until we arrive at an island with a hotel worth staying at! Until then, we have a few shorter trips to do. I'm starting my list of ways to keep positive. I'm going to start with my Mums mantra “feeling down, bake something”, I'm off to make peach crumble & custard!

Want to read Bobbys version of events check www.barraveigh.com

Luganville

We stayed here for much longer than planned due to bad weather. We certainly had more rain than sun – nice to know there are other places in the world as wet as the UK! But it wasn't a bad place to be stuck. Moored outside a small resort on the island of Aore just across the channel from Luggenville. Aore was the Americans R&R base during the 2nd World War & Lugenville was the American base for the army, the channel between the two would have been filled with huge war ships in 1942. It certainly hits home looking at old photos & imaging all the men here. We scavenged the beach with Miles & Paulene (guests at the resort who were kind enough to share their shower facilities with us. With whom we had lots of fun & even celebrated Paulenes birthday on Barraveigh with sundowners & birthday cake!). Bobby & Miles digging with their “made in China” folding spades (all the shops here are owned by the Chinese). Paulene & I hunting for bottles in the shallows of the sea. We were proud of our of war treasure. Trash to everyone else but treasure to us! A collection of old coke bottles (with year of production on their sides from 1942-1944), glass bottles of varying sizes, bullets & shells, Bobby even found an old razor & part of an Old Spice bottle.

Manson (our friendly waiter with the widest smile) gave us a guided tour of the island, pointing out old American bunkers & educating us on the local fruits. Did you know that you could suck the fleshy seeds of the cocoa pod? Unfortunately it doesn't taste of chocolate but really sweet & refreshing. Bobby & Miles explained to Manson about the moon & sun & how they rotate around the earth. It will be one of those special memories; watching three men crouched down on the dirt road, drawing in the dust, caught in a private moment. I learnt later what they were doing & how Manson had suddenly asked why the moon is sometimes in the sky & sometimes its not. Reflecting on the incident afterwards it stuck me how lucky, we in Western countries, are. We have a right to a free education. We may bitch & grumble about our governments & taxes but seriously we are lucky. No matter what our parents earn we have the right to free schooling, which allows us to have a career & a decent way of life. In these counties parents have to pay school fees for each child. Sometimes its just not possible to send all the children to school. No education no chance for them to get a job. Just remember this next time you want to grumble about your country.

I was excited to dive the Coolidge. The biggest accessible wreck dive in the world. An American cruise ship converted into a war ship during WW2. It hit one of its own mines & sunk close to the coast of Luganville, so close in fact that you walk out from the beach to it. Its a deep dive in which you can penetrate many of the cargo holds & rooms of the ship. Being a new diver, my nerves got the better of me & I bottled it. I think I'll stick to the shallower dives with pretty fish until I've gained some experience! To all you keen divers out there this is meant to be one of the best dive sites, with groups of divers out here completing 3 dives a day for a week on the wreck. Word has it that the night dive is the highlight!
We snorkeled Million Dollar Point where the Americans dumped millions of dollars worth of equipment, vehicles & bottles of coke into the sea. The French had declined the offer of purchasing it knowing it would be too expensive for the Americans to take home. They were counting on it being left behind & they would have it all for free. The Americans sure did leave it all behind but not before building a jetty & driving it off the end into the sea! It was a weird sight to see mountains of tanks & trucks rusting underwater & prob one of the only places where a dump site is a tourist attraction.

This year 4th July celebrations were taken seriously on Barraveigh! No other Americans around but Bobby was not going to miss the opportunity to drink beer! Awake early to make pancakes & raise three huge American flags. I made a pot of tea for him to throw into the sea (for those Brits who have no idea what I'm talking about, google Boston tea party). We then headed into town to celebrate with beers & a lunch of burgers & chips! It was a fabulous sunny afternoon spent in the pool looking down on Lugenville where so many Americans were based during the war. I wondered how the American soldiers fighting here in WW2 would have celebrated July 4th if at all, & raised a beer to the memory of those men, their bravery & courage.

Prepared to leave we filled up on our duty free allowances. Bobby, officially allowed to open his sealed box of spirits purchased in Port Villa, immediately went nuts with the Southern Comfort & earned himself a nice hangover the following morning! Once he recovered we topped off the diesel jugs with duty free fuel. Trekking off to the fuel depot expecting to fill them up at the pump, but oh no this is not the western world. The guys rolled out a 200 litre drum of diesel. Opened it, put a tube into the drum allowing us to visually see the quality of the fuel, then inserted a pump which manually had to be turned with a handle to transfer the fuel into the jugs. Now heres a question for you? How many people do you think it took to complete this operation? Answer: 5, including the lady at reception who completed our paperwork. One guy to turn the handle, the other to hold the funnel & watch the fuel going into the jug, another man to oversee the operation (I'm guessing this was the boss), & another to wipe down the jug if any fuel got spilt! On a plus side at least everyone gets a job! It was one of those moments when you wish you hadn't left the camera on the boat!

my daily jog is becoming dangerous!

Is it safer to:

a. run in a coconut plantation (is it really true that more people get killed by falling coconuts than get struck by lightening?)
b. run through a herd of mad looking cows & bulls
c. run though the streets of Tottenham at night

c. is probably the safer option given that my present running route is a & b combined! Not much you can do about it on an Pacific island whose main export is copra (for coconut oil) & raises some of the best tasting cattle in the world. According to the travel books they massage the cows but I can assure you they don't look very relaxed & chilled out! Not sure my rape alarm is going to help me here Gilly!

On a separate note thank you to all those who are sending encouraging emails, they are appreciated & apologies for absent replies but once again internet is becoming scarce & expensive. Looking forward to cheap & high tech asia in Sept!