January 17, 2009

The grand plan has changed.
I haven’t written an email for weeks now, at least partly because I couldn’t sit up at the keyboard for more than 5 minutes. Most of you probably know that in my mis-spent youth I focused pretty heavily on repairing, modifying, riding, and eventually racing motorcycles. Fewer of you know that before I took up roadracing, at which I was pretty good, I tried off road competition, at which I was not a star. In the summer of ’73 I ended my participation in dirt riding when I crashed, and had to hobble out of a Florida swamp to catch a ride to the Titusville hospital. There I found out that I had broken two ribs and two vertebrae, and the staff were quite adamant that I was not to get up again for 6 weeks. I was a poor patient, failed to follow instructions (3 weeks lying down was my limit), but still have managed to lead an active, physical life for 36 more years. A regular program of exercise, stretches, and yoga have minimized the episodes of debilitating back pain. Life has been far, far better than I have deserved.
As we worked up to the vet clinic week, my spinal scoliosis became more pronounced, probably aggravated from a lot of walking and standing. The clinic started up, and immediately went to 12 plus hours a day…standing and walking. After an hour up, the spine would pinch a nerve, my abdominal muscles would start to cramp, and my left leg felt like it was hooked up to an electrical socket. I got a hacking cough, which worked like a switch on that leg nerve…cough and the leg tries to collapse. I didn’t make it to the clinic for the last day. I was taking anti-inflammatory and anti- convulsant pills. I started spending a lot more time lying down than standing. Finally after weeks, it’s improving marginally. It’s never been this bad, or this hard to control. I have to accept that the years are adding up on the damage.
Until I started to feel some improvement I couldn’t really evaluate our options, but now I’m pretty sure that if I baby the back for a couple of months, I’ll have one more ocean passage in me. If there’s only one left, it needs to end in New Zealand. There we have access to real medical care, and to work that would be more academic rather than physical. We think I need to be about done with boat repair.
The best time to make a run south from here is considered to be early May, after the Southern typhoon season, and before the bad winter storms start their steady march east from Australia. With our passage record, I don’t hold much hope of doing 3000 miles without getting hammered, but we can try it. If serious weather threatens, at least we’ll probably get warning from the radio. If that happens there’s a fair chance we could divert to Tuvalu or Vanuatu to wait for a window of opportunity. So the upshot of all this is that we expect to sail south on or near May first, bound for Opua, NZ. I need to give the boat a good going over, but at least the lagoon racing we’ve done here means that things haven’t been too badly neglected. Most of the improvement projects are off the table now, as we concentrate on seaworthiness for one passage.
I had entertained hopes of helping to improve the work boat situation here in the Marshalls, either consulting on construction of a fleet of inter atoll ferries, or developing a small, inexpensive to build plywood outrigger canoe. I’m near admitting defeat there. No matter how simple I make the construction, it’s no good if the prospective builders have NO money, can’t read instructions, and aren’t much inclined to follow instructions anyway. It’s pretty clear now that they will cut corners, using steel nails, not enough glue, and no fiberglass over the cheap plywood to save about half of the construction costs. The resulting boat will last about one year. Done my way, with a little care, their sons would inherit them. I built my canoe this way in 1996. But $350 and 100 hours labor is more than these people can justify for a 2 man canoe. At a few atolls there are builders who turn out highly functional plywood versions of the traditional Micronesian outrigger. They keep them well painted, take them out of the water each night, and get about 4 years before a major rebuild. I talked to an Ailuk builder about using screws and fiberglass. He knew it would be better, but said nobody would pay. They buy on up-front price. I’m out of time here, and can’t build them a demonstration boat now. Maybe it’s just as well. Sometimes it seems we meddle too much in other people’s lives.
Karen is in her third year of hormonal hot flashes, and we both suspect that has a lot to do with how much she is looking forward to a temperate climate. Since we’ve been in the islands she’s thrown herself into volunteer work in both the local and the yachting communities with as much commitment as I’ve ever seen from her. I think part of that has been her freedom from a regular scheduled job, but part has also been the relative ease here of seeing something that needs doing, and getting permission to do it. It’s a small enough community to allow someone to distinguish themselves more easily than among the millions who have surrounded us for most of our lives. Even with a few fumbles we’ve been able to distinguish ourselves a few times among these tolerant and friendly people. We’ve learned from them too, about both the basic skills of subsistence living and the big picture characteristics that define human nature. I’d like to think that we will find that knowledge useful wherever we live out our later years. There are attractions here in the remote Pacific. But Karen and I are fundamentally children of the first world, nurtured on levels of intellectual stimulation and physical comfort that are rare indeed here. We are spoiled. We’re unwilling to allow the convergence of time and accumulated damage to trap us here for the duration. It’s been an amazing ride. We’re lining up for the run down the home stretch. Ted