When we bought Galactic, our 45-foot cutter, it came with an 8-foot sailing dinghy that we called Little Dipper. During two crossings of the Pacific, that dinghy took our sons Elias and Eric zipping over turquoise water to pristine beaches and taught them how sailing could be a way to explore the world. And for Elias, who sailed Little Dipper from the age of 4 to 8, it was also the vehicle for a blossoming independence as he made the transition from passenger to captain of his own solo voyages. For years, we were in the habit of hanging our dinghies on halyards to make sure they didn’t go walkabout in the dark. But during our haulout in Chile, I noticed how scratched the topsides had become where the dinghy slid up and down, and I started leaving the dinghy in the water at night. And so one morning arrived, in the beautiful anchorage of Estero Pailad, on Isla Grande de Chiloe, when we went on deck and found only a neatly cut painter where Little Dipper had been.

In that moment, all of our darkest prejudices about the sailing life and people were confirmed. My wife, Alisa, and I came to the conclusion long ago that the challenges of being alone in a tough environment were nothing in comparison to the challenges of dealing with people when we travel. Our happiest moments have been at sea, and our loneliest on some strange shore where something has gone wrong because of what someone else has done. At Estero Pailad, it all became inescapably clear.

But in addition to confirming our dystopian view of land life, the theft of our dinghy was an operational problem. We were about to head south to Patagonia in the wintertime. Worry-free anchoring in Patagonia involves lines tied to stout trees. That means rowing a dinghy as fast as you can into a rocky shore adorned with sharp mussels and barnacles, chucking out an anchor and leaping onto land, leaving the dinghy to look after itself while you clamber up to the nearest suitable tree to make the line fast.

We really liked the idea of a robust hard dinghy for that application. And, given our plan to spend a year in Patagonia, we really liked the idea of having two ­dinghies on board. Patagonia just seemed like the place to have a backup.

When we returned to the town of Puerto Montt to make our final preparations for heading south, Alisa went into high gear, searching for a replacement. This wasn’t easy. Weeks of asking around gave Alisa only one lead, a sailing dinghy that was owned by the commodore of the Puerto Montt marina. But he was unwilling to sell.

And then Alisa noticed a motorcruiser at the dock, named Pelagic, just like our first cruising boat. On a custom-made cradle on this Pelagic rested a jaunty little rowing dinghy that looked like it might fit perfectly in the spot between our mast and forestay.

Alisa kept an eye on Pelagic, and eventually she met the owner — a Chilean named Fernando who made his fortune in the aquaculture business.

She asked Fernando about buying his dinghy — and couldn’t quite understand his reply. Eventually, I met up with Fernando, and with my slightly less bad Spanish, asked if he might be interested in selling his dinghy.

This question provoked a long answer from Fernando. Like, an answer longer than this story. Some Chileans, I found, were able to dumb down their Spanish to talk with me. Not so Fernando. He launched off into sentence after sentence of vernacular Chilean Spanish, speaking to me like he would to any other intelligent adult. Which, when speaking to me in Spanish, is not the correct approach.

But I thought I heard Fernando say he would just give us the dinghy. Later I talked it over with Alisa. Surely he wasn’t giving us the dinghy? And how could we possibly ask if that’s what he meant without sounding grasping?

Alisa continued to run into Fernando now and again in the marina. He seemed to be very apologetic about the dinghy for some reason. Was he apologizing because he couldn’t find the oars and the sailing rig? We didn’t care about that — we just wanted the boat. We’d gladly buy it from him. But he was on one schedule, and we were on another. His Pelagic was a pleasant diversion from his hectic life of business and family. For us, preparations for the cruise that we were about to make to Tierra del Fuego in the depths of winter were the focus of our world. The weather was holding fine, and we were eager to be going south. From our years in Alaska we knew how vitally important it was to get everything about our traveling set up as nearly perfect as possible before we set off. Alisa, in particular, was determined that we would sail south from Puerto Montt with a hard dinghy strapped to our deck.

Our breakthrough came when Fernando showed up at Galactic one evening with a young French traveler. The French guy had spent a year traveling by horseback in remote Patagonia. His Spanish and his English were quite good. And with his help, Fernando was able to explain that he was very happy to give us his dinghy, and to imagine our kids rowing it around during our trip through his country. And no, he was absolutely not interested in selling. He wanted to give it to us. For the boys’ sake. Alisa was the one who found the teachable moment for our boys. “We just saw the worst of people, in whoever stole our boat,” she said to them, “and now the best, in this man, Fernando, who just gave us his dinghy because he knew we could use it.”

Alisa was right. Time and again in our travels, we have been humbled by the generosity of people we have met by chance, known for a short time and then never seen again. And for all that we love about solitude, it is the moments spent with those better sort of people who have given us our very best memories of a decade of sailing.

When we set out from Puerto Montt, we left with a hard dinghy strapped to our deck.

And we called that boat Fernando.

Get in touch with Mike at thelifegalactic.blogspot.com.

The post A Tale of Two Dinghies appeared first on Cruising World.

We left South Georgia, and it wasn’t the ­perfect time to leave, but we knew that there wouldn’t be a ­perfect time.

At 54 degrees south, below the Antarctic Convergence in the Southern Ocean, South Georgia is a miracle of Antarctic wildlife and unforgettable scenery. Our family — myself and my wife, Alisa, and sons, Elias and Eric — had spent a miraculous month there.

We had reveled in that remote place, but now it was time to pay the price for venturing so far afield. We were starting the passage onward to South Africa: 3,000 miles of sailing through southern waters that are the native home of gales and icebergs, not of family cruising boats.

On the day we left, winds were tumbling off the mountains, and williwaws were raising great sheets of spray off the bays. A gale had just passed. Rather than waiting another day for the weather to settle down, we elected to get going so as to be as far north as possible when the next gale inevitably caught us. Once again, we were entering that different realm that is an inescapable part of the sailing life. For the umpteenth time in our nine years of full-time sailing, we were going on passage. As we came out of the lee of the island, the Southern Ocean swell began to sweep down on us, wave after wave lifting us up as it sped by. Galactic was knocking along with three reefs in the main and a scrap of jib. Elias is the only one of the family to be blessed with a cast-iron stomach, and the rest of us were immediately fighting off seasickness with various degrees of success. That night we hove-to, partly out of concern over hitting an iceberg in the dark, but largely because neither Alisa nor I were really fit to stand watch.

In the days that followed, it felt like we were being forced to take on a new mode of living. Alisa referred to it as “the animal state.” The niceties went by the wayside. Our meals became crude affairs, put together by a heroic cook who lost her ability to partake through the act of creating. Or meals were abandoned completely and replaced by repasts of saltine crackers washed down with juice. The stern cabin, normally the adults’ private refuge, became the gear locker, strewn with everyone’s manky rain gear and boots. Anyone not actively engaged in some job critical to boat or crew retreated to their bunk.

Although this crossing was an extreme example, it was different only in degree from our more-routine passages. We realized long ago that if we waited for perfect weather to start a crossing, we would likely not leave at all. And so we have plenty of memories of voyages that began rough. I could fill a whole page with examples.

So, you might ask, if going to sea is regularly so onerous, why do we continue? Certainly there is a large proportion of cruisers who think of passagemaking with distaste. For many sailors, being at sea for weeks at a time is, at best, the price they have to pay to experience the delightful shore that awaits on the other side. For others, passages get to be so taxing and unenjoyable that they decide to give up sailing altogether.

But for all the rough starts we’ve had, I can’t subscribe to a negative view of passagemaking. Sooner or later things get better. You find your sea legs and the rhythm of the trip, and there it is — that thing that made Joseph Conrad talk about the true peace of God beginning at any spot a thousand miles from land. There is no joy I know as sharp and enduring as a good day at sea in the company of my family. It has something to do with the magic of a well-found cruising boat and how it can so effortlessly cross off the miles with a fair wind. It has something else to do with how, after all the years of dreaming and countless hours of work that got us out traveling the world in our own boat, the actual doing of the thing can be so effortless. And there is the final consideration that all the troubles of the world, all the petty ­annoyances and trivial concerns, are safely far away. Sooner or later on passage, perspective — proper perspective — becomes inescapable.

The best sorts of these moments undoubtedly come in the trade winds. There’s something about living in your bathing suit and tasting the salt on your lips as the warm breeze ruffles your hair, and then looking for the green flash at sunset, all with a dependable wind that can easily see you not touching the sheets for days at a time, that turns a passage into something exalted. And at the same time, there is none of the moral sloth that comes from sitting in a tropical port, ­oversated with the easy pleasures of the shore. Being on passage is being active. You are literally steering your own ship on your own course through life. Passagemaking is being alive. In the trades, we usually hit a point where none of us wants the voyage to end.

On the crossing to South Africa, the bliss wasn’t quite so obvious. Even when we weren’t actually sailing around icebergs or hove-to for gales, I felt the weight of responsibility over tackling such a big crossing with young kids. The crease in my brow never quite eased.

But there did come a morning when I was alone at dawn at the end of a long night watch, the family still asleep below. The boat was sailing well, and I had nothing to do but listen to the endless splashing of our bow wave as I contemplated the world from the deck of our little ship. I realized that right at that moment, there was nothing more I wanted in life.

Then Elias came up in his harness and rain gear and went to the bow to help me watch for ice, and that particular feeling of peace did not at all go away for the fact that I was sharing it with him.

The post Two Sides to Passagemaking appeared first on Cruising World.

Sydney Harbor and Bridge at night.

Pelagic, our Crealock 37, drove down the very ­lowest reaches of the Clarence River, in New South Wales, Australia, with main and jib drawing. The ocean swell was reaching us, but Pelagic was still hemmed tight by the massive stone breakwaters on each side of the river — an odd place to be sailing our bluewater boat. Our son Elias, 2 years old and firmly strapped into his car seat under the dodger, felt none of the tension of the moment; young children go to sea without carrying their parents’ mental cargo of concern over what might go wrong. My wife, Alisa, and I did feel the nerves of leaving port. But we also felt the impending release.

We came to the moment of peak ­tension as we approached the entrance bar. The river bars of New South Wales can be nasty, and a prawn trawler had been rolled on this one just a few weeks before. But we had the leisure of picking the right tide on a perfect day, and we easily slid over the shallows and into deep water beyond.

The place we were leaving behind, the little beach town of Iluka, had found a special place in our hearts. It had given us a perfectly protected harbor, with coastal rainforest and miles of beach within easy walking distance. And it had offered us a group of like-minded Australians who, over an endless series of morning surf sessions and evening barbecues, could introduce us to the delights of being Australian.

This last part was particularly important. When we had finished the year-and-a-half sail from our home in Alaska and cleared into the port of Bundaberg, we’d known little of Australia. But we were new­comers with a difference. Elias and I cleared in on our brand-new Australian passports, obtained just for the trip, and Alisa on an Australian spouse visa. Although I had never lived in Australia, I’d had the good fortune to be born there. And so we’d had a mission when we left Alaska on Pelagic: to sail to Australia to discover this country that we were a part of.

At first our exploration of Oz had revealed soulless vacation towns, the kind of places we clearly hadn’t left Alaska to see. But then we found Iluka, and it was there that we began to see what our Australia might look like.

Our planned two-week visit to Iluka had blown out to four months. But now it was time to move again, and we wanted to use the cyclone-free season to sail north in the tropics to Townsville, where I was born. Yet as any traveling sailor knows, the goal of a cruise is less important than how you get there. Our real hope was that the slow travel and out-of-the-way places that are the hallmarks of coastal cruising would be an ideal way to discover more of the country.

Elias woke me a little before dawn, calling out from his bunk, “I’m all done in here!” The family gathered in the cockpit for the sunrise, and we were reminded of the magic progression of dawn at sea. We watched the waves slowly change from leaden shapes to brilliant beaten metal as the light grew, and then we ate breakfast in the cockpit with the knowledge that we had ahead of us a whole day at sea to enjoy.

After just one night of sailing, Iluka seemed completely removed from us. We were falling back into the habits of being underway — habits that had been tough to learn during our first few months afloat, but which were now second nature after sailing across the Pacific.

When outsiders think of eastern Australia, they think of the Great Barrier Reef. But the reef isn’t part of the ­picture for sailors; it’s too far offshore, with few usable anchorages. Instead, the next few weeks found us exploring a low coastline of sandy straits and mud-­bottomed creeks with eucalyptus-fringed anchorages where kookaburras cackled and parrots screamed. The little towns we passed had bucolic names — Seventeen Seventy, Yeppoon — and the anchorages had a restrained beauty. My 41st birthday caught us at Pancake Creek, a little tidal estuary surrounded by low sandy banks on one side and a high point, Bustard Head, on the other, complete with walking paths and a lighthouse to visit — our kind of place.

Alisa produced a cake for the event, of course, and when it came time to make a wish, I thought to myself, “There’s nothing else I want.”

Most foreign yachts had left Oz for the cyclone-free ­season in the tropics, so we were without the company of other voyaging sailors, a group of people who are always surprising us with sudden good friendship. We missed the state of belonging to some sort of community, even if it was the ever-so-loose community of vagabonding sailors. So it was good that we had a goal for our travels: meeting our Iluka friends Miles Holmes and Melissa Beit, and their two kids, at the Whitsunday Islands. Of all the Australians we’d met so far, Miles and Melissa were most clearly our people — an anthropologist and a writer, respectively, who were happier to live the Australian dream in an out-of-the-way beach town than in one of the cities where most Australian cultural life takes place.

Miles and Melissa had wrangled­ ­special permission from the national park to camp on Haslewood Island, normally a no-­camping area. We had agreed to rendezvous at a bay that appeared on the chart to offer them a fine beach for camping and us a good anchorage for Pelagic. Sure enough, when we approached Haslewood and glassed the beach, there was their camp, right where a water taxi had left them.

After we had dropped the hook and shut down the engine, Alisa and I looked at the colors of the anchorage and realized, “Ah, we’re back in the tropics!” The Whitsundays are the premier tropical sailing destination in Australia, and like so many famous places, they suffer from the crowded anchorages to which our Alaskan sensibilities have never ­adapted. But Haslewood wasn’t on the must-see list, and it gave us a break from the crowds. Throughout our 10-day stay, we shared the bay with only one other boat and a handful of green sea turtles.

Our camping experience in Alaska was mostly of the winter variety, so it was a treat to compare how Australians camped in the sand with our memories of camping in the snow. Miles gave us lessons in aboriginal uses of plants on the island, and we felt a tiny bit of understanding of Australian ecosystems begin to dribble into our brains. We all took turns snorkeling the reef and watching the kids on the beach.

The stop at Haslewood was a nice break from our friends’ hectic routine of working and child-rearing in Iluka. At first it seemed like a vacation for us, too, a nice break from our routine — none of my biology work that pays our way, no boat jobs, no work on my book about the trip from Alaska. But then I thought about it, and I realized that these 10 days weren’t really a break from our routine; this was the sort of routine that we try to get into, the purest sort of cruising. We had lots of leisure time each day, in a fairly wonderful spot, and we were doing it with local friends whom we never would have met if we hadn’t chucked it all to go sailing.

After we said goodbye to Miles and Melissa, we continued north to Townsville. Instead of the southeast trades that we might reasonably have expected, we found northwesterlies that made the few anchorages along the coast unusable and kept us tacking back and forth day and night. We passed a humpback whale cow and calf that breached and slapped the water with their pectoral fins. We passed flocks of pied imperial pigeons, striking black-and-white birds, flying over the water on their migration south from New Guinea. We made a trip inland to see a platypus in the wild.

Townsville itself was the completion of a grand circle for me, of course, but it was also a muted homecoming. I had no family still in Townsville, and no ties to the place. We set aside a month to stay there while I worked on my book every day. Alisa took advantage of the chance to get swimming lessons for Elias, and to enjoy the great playgrounds that are the heart of public places in Australia.

And during this time we began to answer some really big questions about our sailing future. A trip to the ultrasound lab gave us our first view of what we had long known to be the reason for Alisa’s recent vulner­ability to seasickness: A new cabin boy would be signing on the following April.

We needed to figure out how to handle this crew change. We wanted to stop somewhere in Australia for a year to let the new crew get to a certain age before we ­started traveling again. And we were rethinking the open-plan layout of dear old Pelagic for a family of four. We had years of sailing ahead of us, we hoped, and a kids cabin and an adult cabin seemed a good way to partition all the family togetherness that would entail. But where? Where would we park it for a year and contemplate that fearsome event, a boat swap?

People had often mentioned Hobart, Tasmania, as a jewel of Australia. I had been there only briefly 12 years before, and we knew no one there. More information would be welcome before we committed to a full year in the place. So when we found ourselves sharing the anchorage of Horseshoe Bay, on Magnetic Island, with Kukka, a smart-looking Malo 39 with Hobart as her hailing port, Alisa and Elias rowed over to say hello.

They came back an hour later with gold — a fresh stack of New Yorker magazines, unread by us, and news. Kukka, it turned out, belonged to Alex Nemeth and Diana Bagnall, and Hobart was merely a port of convenience; they were from Sydney. But Alisa had gone looking for news of Hobart and found something better: our people.

The crew of Kukka were on their first extended sail from home, with an eye toward longer trips in the future. Alex and Diana were both retired, he from being a pharmacist, she from journalism, and their children were young adults. Alisa and I were from the other side of the world, in the middle of our young-­family years, with very different professional backgrounds. Yet we all hit it off immediately. Alex and Diana were two more good friends we never would have met if we hadn’t left home. Kukka was soon off to pick up a ­visiting son at the Townsville Airport. But they left us with a warm invitation to visit them whenever we might find ourselves in Sydney.

Summer was on its way back in, and with it the cyclone season. It was time to find our way south, and to sail our way into the answers to all those questions about the future.

We had been cavalier about the chance of getting caught with a long sail against the southeast trades while getting out of the tropics, since we had mostly found northwesterlies on our way up the coast. But — you can see where this is going — the trades reasserted themselves once we turned around and pointed the bow south. Day after day, we got up at 0400 and sailed all through the sunlit hours at a 30-degree angle of heel, tacking back and forth into the wind, dodging spray in the cockpit, and sopping up water on the cabin sole, and at the end of each day, we found we had made 30 miles.

Sailing to windward is uncomfortable enough for the nonpregnant, but Alisa was approaching that part of her pregnancy where everything is uncomfortable. And Elias was 3 by this time, and didn’t necessarily understand why he had to sit next to us in the sloping cockpit for hour after hour, reading the same books and singing the same songs, and why he never got to go ashore.

Eventually we did make it out of the southeast trades back to Iluka. And all too soon we were gathering with our friends there for a farewell barbecue at the beach. It was fun to think of settling down in Iluka long enough to have the baby, and we considered it. But the horizon still called; we weren’t ready to give up our wandering ways just yet. The draw of one more new place was too strong to resist, and Tasmania was in the offing.

Sydney was conveniently on our path down to Tasmania. Two weeks of sailing along an unfamiliar coast took us to Pittwater, the massive natural harbor just north of Sydney, where we caught up with our friends Peter Addenbrooke and Vanessa Georgeson on Akimbo, a well-kept double-­ender that had carried them on years of adventures between Sydney and New Caledonia. They were some of our first Australian sailing friends. We had spent our first-ever Australian Christmas with them, and Peter had taken me for my first Australian surf. They now offered us the hospitality of a raft-up on their mooring in Pittwater, and the visit was perfectly timed for a second Australian Christmas in their company. We felt the beginnings of a ­tradition in this new country.

After a short sail down the coast, we had the pleasure of sailing into Sydney Harbour past the Opera House and under the Harbour Bridge. After San Francisco, this was the second great city of the world that we had sailed to on board Pelagic. Alex and Diana gave us more great ­hospitality, settling us into the visitors berth at the dock where they kept Kukka, handing us the keys to a car and their house, making us feel completely at home, and sharing the delights of the world-­famous New Year’s fireworks in Sydney Harbour. Then, after another too-short visit, it was time for us to head farther south if we ­wanted to meet our goal of crossing Bass Strait before Alisa’s third trimester began.

Tasmania would be new to us, but it would be a novelty within a larger pattern that was familiar. After more than a year in Australia, we felt comfortable in the place. Part of being at home in Oz was the result of our physical knowledge of the continent — all the exploring that had seen Pelagic up and down the 1,100 miles of coastline between Townsville and Sydney. But our real feeling for the place, the things we treasured and the bits that still confused us, had come from a hundred interactions with Australian friends: the barbecues and surf sessions, the anchorages shared with sailors, and the great pleasure of taking nonsailing companions for a sail. Pelagic had turned into our magic carpet for discovering this new country, the ­vessel that had shown us the out-of-the-way ­anchorages and that had put us in the path of these new friends who filled us in on what it meant to be Australian.

Cruising, like any travel, really is all about the people.

After a stay in South Africa, Mike Litzow and his family are currently crossing the South Atlantic and headed, very slowly, toward home in Alaska. You can follow along with the family’s travels on their blog (thelife galactic.blogspot.com).

The post Sailing Home to Australia appeared first on Cruising World.

As far as we know, the only other foreign yacht that is currently in South Africa but still planning on heading up the Atlantic this year is Kestrel, our friends and fellow South Georgia travelers.

The normal routine is to leave South Africa during the summer, so as to beat the hurricane season in the Caribbean. But being (as far as we know) the last yacht in South Georgia last season, as well as taking six weeks or so for me to catch up on science work once we arrived here, meant that we missed out on any chance of heading up the Atlantic before winter arrived.

But that’s ok – I’m nurturing a theory that leaving Cape Town must be a lot like leaving San Francisco, in that it’s possible in any month of the year, as long as you’re willing to wait for the right weather.

We Galactics, we’re very good at waiting for weather.

And even though we might have missed the choice season for leaving South Africa, hanging around has meant that we have set ourselves up for the prime season for overland travel.

While the Cape gets cold and rainy in the winter, in most of South Africa winter is the dry season. And as the seasonal water bodies disappear, the unbelievable megafauna of southern Africa is forced to congregate at the remaining water holes. Wildlife viewing gets very good indeed.

Which is why we have rented ourselves a four wheel drive pickup with a poptop camper, and why I am writing this far from Galactic, which remains tied to the dock in Simon’s Town while we take in some winter sights in inland southern Africa. Just now we’re in Kruger National Park, on the border with Mozambique and Zimbabwe. We’ll be heading onwards to the Kalahari desert, and then to northern Namibia.

We have never traveled overland from the yacht in the nearly nine years that we’ve been sailing, but this time we’re doing it with a vengeance. We don’t expect to be returning to southern Africa any time soon, after all. And Eric, at six, is just hitting the point where a trip like this is likely to be fun.

The post Winter on the Cape appeared first on Cruising World.

We get ashore somewhere, we start to meet non-sailing friends through the kids, and the question inevitably comes up: what about the weather? Haven’t you been out in terrible storms?

The answer is that we have been out in some sloppy weather, but we’ve had to go looking for it.

Get this: we sailed Pelagic from Kodiak, Alaska to Hobart, Tasmania. Then we sailed Galactic from San Francisco to Hobart. And in all the sailing that entailed, maybe 25,000 nautical miles, we never had a gale at sea.

Never had average wind speeds of 34 knots or more. Like, not once.

Even now, after we patently went looking for bad weather in Patagonia and the Southern Ocean, we’ve never seen storm-force winds – average (and I stress average, since that’s the definition) wind speeds of 48 knots or more.

And really, any well-found, well-handled boat, with sea room and no unusual issues like wind against current, should be able to wait out a gale without any drama.

OK – confession – I did break my ribs in a gale once…so I guess I shouldn’t downplay the drama part too much.

But my point is that while we watch the weather very carefully when we’re looking to make a passage, and we continue to be very humble about this undertaking of sailing the world in our own boat, we also have a certain amount of confidence with the issue of bad weather, confidence that’s naturally accrued over the nearly nine years that we’ve been out sailing.

But, when you’re starting out, or when you’re still in the dreaming/planning stage, the idea of bad weather at sea can be frightening enough to make you not want to go at all.

This should not be the case. There are techniques that can keep a boat safe in poor weather, and the habits of good seamanship will give you security against the unexpected…there’s a reason that “a lee shore” is the sailor’s answer to what she fears most in life.

But, when you are just starting out, you don’t know those techniques, and you don’t have those habits of good seamanship. So, how do you learn that stuff without going through the trouble of going out and making your own mistakes?

All this is a lead-in to mention Storm Proofing Your Boat Gear and Crew, by Fatty Goodlander. The book is just out. I haven’t had the chance to see it myself, but Fatty has been sailing the world since before dirt was invented – if I’m not mistaken, he and Carolyn are on their third circumnavigation. And Fatty has raised the very humble art of magazine writing to new heights in his monthly column for Cruising World. So all that bodes well for this effort. If you’re dreaming of the life afloat, or if you’re already on your boat, and wanting to pick up some cheap knowledge for dealing with “what-if’s” on bigger crossings, this book might be right up your alley.

The post What about the Weather? appeared first on Cruising World.

So, the time came to pull Galactic out of the water and give her a new coat of bottom paint. It had been a year and four months since we hauled out in Valdivia, Chile, and we were pretty sure we didn’t want to haul out in the Caribbean, which will be our next chance after South Africa.

I enquired at the boat yard here in Simon’s Town, and found out that in a week their lift would be going out of service for two months. They could get us out of the water. But we’d have to do it that very afternoon.

Well! Normally we plan our haulouts weeks in advance, giving us time to go through all the steps of locating the necessary supplies in a country where we know nothing, and then blocking out the time for me to do the work. (More and more, as Eric gets older, Alisa has also been able to help in the boatyard.) But just then, I was buried in science work. Haul out today? It seemed impossible.

But then – deus ex machina – there is the cost of unskilled labor in South Africa to consider. One side of this is a lesson about mastery that I am not keen for my sons to internalize: black people work on boats, white people sail them. Another side of this is that we could haul out Galactic and I could continue to work at my science obligations while someone else painted the boat for us.

This is a very common approach for some yachties. Really it is a cultural divide in the sailing world. Some people paint their own boats, others have them painted. This one bit of information about a boat owner is all that you need to make all sorts of inferences about their approach to the grand adventure of sailing the world. We are very much of the paint your own boat world. I like to think of Enki as our great friends from the other side of the divide.

So, after a flurry of quick strategic thinking, it was on. We would come out on the tide, with only four hours’ notice.

We came out. The tractor pulled us up the ramp. I climbed down the ladder to look at Galactic’s underbody, exposed to view. And I was a little dismayed at what I saw…

I will pause here to note that there is another divide in the sailing world – between those who haul out regularly, and other people, like the wonderful crew of Mollymawk, who, if I have it right, last hauled out seven years ago.

Once again, there are all sorts of inferences that you can make about someone’s approach, and their budget, based on which side of the divide they fall on.

We are on the regular haul out side of the divide. But this time we took it too far.

It turned out that the one patch of bottom paint that we had assessed from the dock when wondering if we should haul out or not – peering down into the water from the dock at the side of the bow in the sun – that one patch turned out to be by far the worst bit of growth on the whole hull. And it wasn’t bad at all. The bottom paint looked fine. We could have gone another year without hauling out, no problem.

Later, I had the leisure to reflect that this is exactly what we should have done. But we were out of the water now, and the boat was being set down, and we let the momentum carry us along. If nothing else, we reasoned, we would be resetting the clock with a fresh paint job.

Someone else painted the boat while I was working on my laptop. It turns out that I didn’t really like having someone else do the job. I found the painters about to make one big mistake, and from that point on I was torn between needing to keep an eye on things and not wanting to seem like I was always looking over their shoulders. (As an interesting tidbit, it was in the yard that I learned about immigrant labor in South Africa. The workers I asked were all from Zimbabwe or the DRC.)

When the job was done, we went back in the water, wondering if we were any better of than when we came out.

One of the things I love about people sailing the world on a shoestring is how tough they are about money, how resourceful they can be about not opening their wallets to get things done. In this instance, we rushed ourselves into spending money needlessly, and I’m sure we would’ve acted differently if I wasn’t working, and we didn’t have money coming in.

So all our friends on the cheaper side of the spectrum can reassure themselves with our experience. There’s one more reason not to like work – it makes you spend money!

I, meanwhile, have resolved to be a more savvy yachtie. I’ve got to be able to hold my head up the next time we see Mollymawk or (God forbid!) Ganesh.

The side story is that the timing worked out that we were on the hard for Eric’s sixth(!) birthday. There were three other foreign boats in the marina, none of whom we knew very well at the time. They all rose to the occasion. I don’t know which one of them heard that it was Eric’s birthday, but the word spread and they all came by with presents. Meant the world to little fella. And reminded me, yet again, of how much I like your average traveling sailor.

That’s a dassie (“duhssie”) on his cake. Closest living relative of the elephant, size of an outstanding guinea pig. They’ve been our favorite African mammal so far.

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We’ve left Cape Town behind and have shifted around to Simon’s Town on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope. This little town is a much better setting for the city-challenged Galactics, and we expect it to be our base for much of our time in South Africa.

Cape Town is of course one of the great ports of the world, and very much on the regular route for high-latitude sailors in the Southern Hemisphere. Now that we’ve left Cape Town, we’ve left behind our last contacts with the Southern Ocean sailing community.

As we’re unplugging from that world, I wanted to take a moment to note how much we’ve enjoyed rubbing elbows with that group of sailors who aim their boats at the far South.

The standards of seamanship in that world are just incredibly high. For the last year or so we’ve been hanging out with people who routinely demonstrate just how much you can pull off in relatively small boats in the biggest waters in the world. And we’ve found the sailors that we meet in Puerto Natales or Puerto Williams or Stanley or Grytviken to also be impressively warm and open and free of artifice. It’s just like the the Alaskan commercial fishing world, where Alisa and I found that the most capable people tended to be the most humble and low-key.

Nearly without exception, we’ve found that even people who have been sailing down South for decades assume that we are from the same tribe as them once we show up somewhere. If you sail your own boat into one of those ports, especially in the winter, you are immediately in the club.

And of course there is the intense connection between people relying on their own devices in a setting where you have to accept whatever the sea deals you. We met Pierre and Olivier in the photo above briefly in Grytviken. But when we saw them again in Cape Town we were much more than casual acquaintances. There is a commonality of outlook and shared experience that cuts through so much social deadwood, and makes for a real feeling of warmth, a real brotherhood, among people who know each other hardly at all.

Finally, I want to note that sailing the Southern Ocean might be the last great adventure that is left to our age. The mountains of the world are desperately crowded, with the great problems solved generations ago, and contemporary climbers are reduced to paltry achievements like setting speed records on classic routes.

But the oceans are what they always were. True, communications and weather forecasting have made setting out on a big passage much less daunting than it used to be, and places like South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula have lost the solitude that is the essential ingredient of adventure. But the long passages in the far South – I’m thinking here of Pierre and Olivier heading off non-stop for New Caledonia, or the Canadian yacht that left a day later, bound for New Zealand – these undertakings in mere boats are still the grand adventures they always were.

There is an irreducible challenge to sailing these waters.

And now we’ve been meeting some very nice folks who have come to South Africa via the low-latitude route through the Indian Ocean, and who are on the tail end of the migration of yachts from South Africa up through the Atlantic. We Galactics have had our year of adventure down south, and we are very glad to be relaxing back into tropical passagemaking, where we properly belong.

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From the mountain summit we looked down at Galactic, the 45-foot cutter that is my family’s home, and at the 35-foot catamaran Take It Easy, our only neighbor in the anchorage far below. From this perch we could see all the places that were familiar to us from studying the chart of Port Davey, the grand cruising destination of southwest Tasmania. But instead of the two-dimensional shapes on the chart, the bays and narrows of the inland waters were revealed as part of a three-dimensional landscape, surrounded and partitioned by ancient, folded mountains. Not far off we could see the open sea, where the Indian and Pacific oceans meet in the Roaring 40s.

It was a clear, windy day, and 40-something-knot gusts had the two boats dancing around the anchorage. Wade and Chris, the Australian owners of Take It Easy, shared my uneasy feeling — it was time to get back to the boat. So we started down. And then things got weird. It began as a dark cloud. Which was odd, as it was a clear day. The cloud got darker, and lower. And it was red-brown, not cloud-gray. Wade and Chris confirmed what I’d started to suspect.

“Bushfire,” said Wade. We picked up speed. Whatever was about to happen would be best appreciated from our boats.

Our cruise to Tasmania’s Port Davey was my family’s final voyage in Australia, and it was fitting to end our time Down Under with a bushfire. I mean, why not? Our first taste of these Australian waters four years earlier was a shark attacking our boat. At night. A hundred miles offshore.

What a continent.

When we first sailed to the island state of Tasmania, we were a crew of three: me; my wife, Alisa, six months pregnant; and our 3-year-old son, Elias. We were looking for a place to base ourselves for two big transitions coming our way: the birth of our second son, Eric, and a boat swap, from Pelagic, our dear old Crealock 37, to a new ride for a family of four. Pelagic had an open plan below, and after three years of sailing the Pacific with a toddler while paying our way by doing scientific research on my laptop, I was dreaming of an adult cabin and a children’s cabin, as far apart in the boat as possible.

“Doors,” I said to Alisa. “This family needs doors.”

So when we arrived in Hobart, our expectations were high — we were hoping to use the city as our base for a year. We’d never been there and knew no one.

Mainland Australia is friendly, but Tasmania is in a different league. In our first week, we had people over to the boat for dinner or went out to someone’s house five of the seven nights. Two couples threw a barbecue so we could meet all their friends and start to feel at home. After the dust settled on that first week, we knew we’d landed in the right place. When we bought Galactic in California a year later, we spent three months getting her ready, then put 10,000 happy miles under our keel wandering back to Hobart.

We spent another year in Tasmania, giving Elias, now 5, the chance to attend school. During his vacations we explored the sailing delights of southeast Tasmania. Hobart, we found, is surrounded by world-class coastal cruising. While there is a rich history of sailing there, the anchorages remain uncrowded today.

The area is beautiful and unique, and we had good friends with boats and young kids to share our adventures. For all these reasons, we fell in love with Tasmania, and even thought about staying.

But in our hearts we knew that we hadn’t sailed away from Alaska to settle down in Hobart. We began to make plans to leave. And before we left, we knew that we had to visit Port  Davey.

Wherever sailors are knocking around on boats, there’s some mythical, distant destination people talk about — the place that’s hardest to get to and more beautiful than anywhere else. In Tasmania, that place is Port Davey.

It’s definitely hard to get to; there are no roads in southwest Tasmania, and sailing there means braving the rugged south coast and the westerlies of the Roaring 40s. We’d heard it was beautiful too, and that it had an attractive history in the recent pioneering past of Tasmania. Who wouldn’t want to go?

On the day after Christmas we found ourselves raising the anchor in Recherche Bay, the ­jumping-off point for Port Davey. The forecast was for a one-day break in the west winds, and we were ­underway at 0400 to make the 70-mile passage.

As the day dawned, the rugged south coast of Tasmania was slowly revealed to us. In the distance we saw two other boats headed toward Port Davey — Take It Easy and our friends John and De on Silver Air. As we traveled farther west, the coastline got rockier and took on a delightful chalk-white color, thanks to quartzite in the cliff faces. Elias played, I read aloud, and Alisa baked bread to go with the leftovers from our holiday feast. Everyone was happy.

Well, nearly everyone. The little wind and swell we did have were dead on the bow. It was too much for Eric, who drew the short straw when it comes to seasickness. He settled into being miserable in his mother’s lap for the afternoon, toughing the day out until it was done.

We made the turn around South West Cape, the very southwest corner of Tasmania. The cliffs grew whiter and the sky got bluer — that peerless blue of the ocean-rich Southern Hemisphere. Meanwhile the treeless hills had an ocher-green color emblematic of the Southern Hemisphere’s ­higher latitudes — a color out of the 1950s National Geographics I used to read at my grandparents’ house, and which I only now recognized as I saw it with my own eyes.

As we dropped the anchor in Bond Bay, in the north arm of Port Davey, the silence was perfect. There was no evidence that there was anyone within 10 miles of us. We had that blessed feeling of having one of the finest corners of the world to ourselves. It’s times like this that have kept us sailing the Pacific year after year.

We explored the outer waters for two days, but when the weather deteriorated, we decided it was time to move to the place that makes Port Davey famous: the inland waters of Bathurst Channel and Bathurst Harbour. We moved on a leaden day with a rising wind, suitably dramatic conditions for entering such a spectacular waterway. At first I saw a continuous wall of mountains where the channel was meant to be. Then we came around the Breaksea Islands, and a gap appeared in the shore — by all obvious signs, a shallow cove in the coast. As we got closer the cove opened up, and suddenly we were looking down a narrow slot, a passage back into the interior, which promised secret delights to be explored. Only 600 yards of water separated the mountains on each side, but we had a fortune of water under our keel, 14 fathoms or more.

We watched the scenery spool by, a fairyland of miniature mountains given scale and gravitas by the way trees struggle to grow over most of this wind-dominated landscape. We also considered the weather; in Tasmania, you must always consider the weather. An approaching front promised hard northwesterlies going to harder southwesterlies, with associated gloom and rain. We pulled into little Casilda Cove, the banner bad-weather anchorage in the area. The coming winds were meant to barely reach gale strength, so we could anchor most anywhere, but there was something attractive about the cove, where you tie to the shore and let the winds whip overhead, Patagonia-style. Port Davey is beautiful unto itself, a delightful little corner of the world, but it’s also ­something of a theme park for Southern Ocean sailing. The mountains are small, the anchorages are close together and secure, and everything is on a miniature scale when compared to someplace like the Chilean fjords. The wind blew like stink, but the protection was so perfect that we tied stern-to as a diversion rather than a survival strategy.

Silver Air was already tied in, and De gave Alisa a hand getting our lines up the high bank and tied to trees. Take It Easy motored in and tied in farther up the inlet. The break in the westerlies had lasted only for the one day that we three boats had transited the south coast, and anyone who was in ­Recherche after that would likely wait weeks for the next break. For the foreseeable future, Port Davey would be a private wonderland for our three crews.

The next day saw rain on deck and cold below. But the boys had their Christmas presents to play with, and Alisa and I generally like rainy, windy anchorages. It must be the Alaskans in us. We reveled in the condensation on the portlights, the way the stern lines went taught in the gusts, and the cups of hot chocolate all around. We had all we wanted.

When the weather improved, Elias and I made our first-ever father-son mountain climb up Balmoral Hill, a perfect little Matterhorn of a peak. Then, after exploring the local beaches and tide pools, we cast off the stern lines and motored ­toward Bathurst Narrows. The lens of fresh water resting on top of the salt water was giving our sounder the fits, and the tannin-rich waters from the surrounding buttongrass plains were impossible to see through. There were few dangers and the chart was excellent, but the mystery of not knowing exactly what was going on beneath the surface kept me on alert.

We threaded the narrows beneath the rocky outcrops of Mount Rugby. To starboard were gentler slopes, promising good family walking. Before we explored those, though, we pulled into the shallow bowl of Bathurst Harbour and then around the corner, literally, to the anchorage at Clayton’s Corner.

We chucked out the hook, then dressed Galactic in fenders. We were expecting company.

On schedule, a tour boat came roaring out from the airstrip at Melaleuca Inlet, bearing day-tripper tourists on a whirlwind visit to Bathurst before they flew back to Hobart. The boat pulled alongside, and our friend Mary-Anne Lea stepped aboard to stay with us for a few days. Mary-Anne is a biologist with a keen appreciation for the natural history of Tasmania, and her visit enlivened our experience. Together we enjoyed the cycle of weather that came to dominate our visit. At first the days were fine, and we hopped from anchorage to anchorage and hiked the hills. When the weather made the inevitable turn, it was conveniently New Year’s Eve, and we celebrated belowdecks with homemade paper crowns and Alisa’s famous boat pizza while Galactic tugged against the anchor chain.

By the time I got back to Galactic, the sky was apocalyptic.

All too soon Wade and Chris were kindly ferrying the entire Galactic crew up the glorified ditch of Melaleuca Inlet aboard Take It Easy, to the airstrip for Mary-Anne’s flight back to Hobart. The cruising guide suggested that we would have likely been able to get Galactic‘s 6-foot draft up the twisting inlet, but I was happy not to try.

Back on Galactic, we started to make our way back toward the coast — our time was drawing down. But we stopped for family hikes along the way, and Wade, Chris and I took a day to hike up Mount Rugby. That’s when the fire made itself known.

Elias and I stood on the bow, watching waves of smoke cresting and pulsing overhead and holding out our hands to catch bits of drifting ash. It was a dry day, with the wind still gusting above 40 knots. Silver Air, having been defeated in the search for a secure anchorage out near the entrance, steamed back to join us. No harm came to us, but the fires burned day after day, and the smoke was with us for the rest of the trip, the amount varying only with the direction of the wind. At night we saw sullen flames on the distant hills.

After eking out one final hike to the spectacular outer-coast beach of Stephens Bay, we found ourselves again rounding South West Cape, this time heading east, back to Hobart.

Suddenly four years of our lives had gone by, in Hobart and the intervening year of sailing back from California. Elias now speaks with a discernible Australian accent, courtesy of his school year in Hobart. For the rest of his life, Eric will say “Tasmania” when anyone asks him where he was born. We’ll always have a unique connection to this place. We’d been lucky, as travelers, to find it. But traveler’s luck only holds if you keep moving.

While our voyaging friends migrated onward to the ­Indian Ocean, our delicious fate seemed to be staying in the Pacific. Since we’d run out of Pacific in this direction, it was time to turn around and see what the temperate southern latitudes had to offer us. In a few weeks we headed still farther east, across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand and the sub-Antarctic islands.

New places forever wait.

Mike Litzow is the author of South from Alaska: Sailing to Australia with a Baby for Crew.

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