Hiva Oa and Hitchhiking for Yachtsmen

May 8

 

Casualties of Sea

 

 

Oh my.  I don’t know where to start or even where I am going in this.  I know I need to somehow describe my voyage, but maybe it is too close yet, because I still can’t see it or feel really what it means.

Often I think it is best to write early while the details are fresh and vital, and perhaps this is true, as a record.  But really the essence of the experience must be aged before it can be tapped.

This must be, because I have no idea whatsoever about the meaning of this passage of life, but I do have the sensation that it is a rite of some sort, some transition has been wrought, but I don’t think in the way I presumed.

 

I suspected (or hoped) for an epiphany (don’t we all).  I thought the sun would break through my veil of doubt and curiousity, would raise me to some new transcendent understanding, some esoteric power would come to me, a power to conquer self-doubt and enmity.

This has not happened.  Comically, quite the opposite.  Okay, not really the opposite, but an experience of the opposite.  I experience a wide breadth of emotion in the last month, including frustration, pity, doubt, anxiety—all the things I had naively conceive ridding myself of.

 

 

For the most part, the sailing aspect of the trip was straight forward.  I crept out of Cabo San Lucas at dawn with a breeze like a slow creeping glacier.  It was a anxious start, but as soon as I rounded the Arcos and had some sea room a westerly picked up with some gusto and Araby started to gallop southwestward over a sea of blue and white.

My god we made time!

For the first few days the wind stayed in front of us, to the west, before turning northward.  Araby flies on this point of sail, particularly off the beam.  These were our fasted days.  We logged 138 miles one day, an all-time best.  I didn’t know she could move like that.

Granted we worked for it.  It wasn’t comfortable and I pushed the rig.  We were healed over far to starboard.  Cooking was tough, but this was how it would be for weeks to come.  Nothing stayed put unless you had a hand on it.  Pots and pans were moving targets for minced onions.  Often I had to tie myself to the sink or the stove to stay in place.

But after four days the wind crept northward and astern.  When the wind comes from behind the boat it feels must softer and the boat doesn’t heel so violently, though she tends to roll side to side all the more.  But it is quieter; you don’t notice consciously, but you are aware of it all the same and relax in a fashion.

 

The first few days all I did was sleep, eat and keep a regualar watch.   As I drew away from land I slowly eased the vigilance of my watches.  I was tired and nauseous to start.  As I became more adapted I started reading and then that was all I did, maybe a dozen hours a day.  All day.

As the wind shifted north I played with the sails, trying to keep the mileage high and I succeeded well.  It was so exciting to be making good miles, knowing that I had friends in front whom I wished to gain on and Herbert and Til in the rear, maybe just hours behind, whom I wanted to beat.  I thought about it; I wanted speed.

So I played with the rig a bit, but often I was tired.  I was tired a lot and I don’t really know why.  Is it all the sitting around?   Is it the exertion of always having to hold yourself in place, like living in a rocking jungle-gym?  Is it from being regularly nauseous?   (I never fully acclimate to the sea.)  I don’t know I am tired, but whatever reason I suppose it is justified.

In the evening I would exercise a bit.  If the sea was light I’d go to the bow and stretch and breathe and do squats and push-ups and yoga.  Right at sunset was my favorite time.  Often I’d just go and stand in the shrouds and stare out at the sea.  I could stand there for over an hour sometimes.  These were my favorite moments, just standing there, rocking with the swell, dreaming, conjuring ideas and futures and sometimes reliving old times and smiling or laughing about them.  This was when I felt the most at sea.  This was the tranquility of the experience, the best of it.  I could never be bored watching the stars rise over the Pacific, slowly crawling southward toward the equator and beyond. 

Those times, standing on deck, those timeless times, are what I think I will take closest to the heart from this trip.

 

But alas.  There was also the cooking, the constant corrosion, the squalls and rain showers, the mysterious failures, the treasons—it is enough to drive a man mad!  I thought I would lose it sometimes.

The sea is such a rough, unforgiving environment; everyone knows it.  But I was pushed.  It seems everything failed.  I expect failure; you know it is part of the game of boats and the sea, but you expect that your experience and your eye will at least give you a bit of foresight into when or where.  I have spares and contingency plans, but in your heart you just want things to work.  We are a team here; let’s work together. 

But no.

The zipper failed on my jacket—I don’t have a backup zipper!  After almost an hour I fixed it with pliers.  My egg-timer alarm quite—fixed it with a screwdriver.  The clock—don’t know, I think it was battery corrosion.  Headlamp—corrosion on terminal.  Whisker pole chafed through its lashing—I saw this one coming and already had a second one in place (otherwise this would have been bad).

All this stuff is trivial, but it adds up; it is a drag on you when you’d rather be reading or doing nothing.  It felt like the world was imploding upon me.  But again these was the “small stuff.”

What really made my heart fall into my seat was when I was adjusting the windvane, without cause it started pulling hard to starboard. . . and we needed to go to port.  Why?  Looking carefully I notice that things that were supposed to be working together were moving independently.

This is terrible.  The windvane is fundamently to transoceanic cruising—and, as it were, the thing which I have nill parts for.  It wasn’t supposed to fail.  It was foolproof.  (Who is the fool?)

I hove-to to park the boat and investigated.  Sure enough, a pin that was supposedly “not removable” was moving about freely.  At least it didn’t go down the drink, I thought.  Out of several options, there was at least one that was obvious and safe—hammer it back in and see how it holds.

I did.  But from then on I had my eye on it; it was now on my list.

It was because of this pin that I noticed something much more significant.  A couple hundred miles from the Marquesas I notice that servo-pendulum, a big paddle that is in charge of the self-steering is acting like a drunk, wobbly and catawampus—just not right at all.

I cant tell you how low this took me.  I knew by looking at it that there was no simple “hammer it back in” resolution.  And so close to home.  Maybe I should ignore it.  Only two-hundred miles to go—we’ve made it twenty-four hundred thus far.  What’s two-hundred more?

I know better than to trust this logic—this is only the tiredness and frustration coming out.  I hove-to and sat and lingered on it.  I won’t go into the details; they wouldn’t make good sense.  At first I misjudged the problem, then understood it, then came up with a plan, but it wasn’t a fun plan.

I had to take off the pendulum—not fun in a swell—then drill a hole through six layers of stainless—not fun—with a cordless drill—again, not fun.  A tack weld had parted so I was going to bolt it all together then put it back on.  Putting it back would be the trickiest part.  It is very difficult to reach; normally you’d work on it from the dinghy tied astern.

And that’s not all.

Just as I was drilling out the hole with to ¼ inch the clutch jammed in the drill and it wouldn’t drop in gear.  I had to laugh.  It was  too much.  The last hole.  The drill has never failed me.  There was a storm bearing down on us—and now, now the drill dies.  So I had to put the windvane on hold, go in as the storm hit and start taking apart the drill.  Of course, two of the screws holding it together were corroded beyond recourse—so I brought out the hacksaw and cut the drill in half.

Oddly, this worked well.  I found the jammed clutch, oiled it, got it working, and put the drill back together—strangely, you’d never know that it had been sawed in the first.  I drilled the hole, placed the bolt, made some adjustments with the hacksaw and placed it back on the windvane with great effort and duress.

 

But it was done and it had to be done.  And it worked.  And this is what this trip was about.  So much failed, but one way or another I made them work.

 

Ironically, something I could not repair was something I never used.  I never used my engine, but a diesel needs to be run every week or two.  It occurred to me after three.  No big deal, right?  But it wouldn’t start.  I tried a few times.  It always starts (well….).  So I open up the valve cover.  You never expect to see anything when you do this.  There isn’t much to it—but what I saw was a sort of sacrilege, like opening the coffin of the long-dead.

The oil that was supposed to be protecting and lubing everything had become rank, a congealed mud-like blahhh.  I was baffled.  Had water gotten in??  Had the change in temperature dried it out; was it the wrong viscocity?

Only after changing the oil and probably ripping the piston from the driveshaft does it dawn on me that what must have happened was a clog in the raw-water cooling and the consequent over-heating of the engine, thus burning the oil to the sludge I know see.

I have no gauges; I didn’t know.

This is the death of the Farymann.  It will not see a repair.  It will be sent down to a watery grave somewhere.  Alas for my old friend, who was ever a great pain in the ass, but who taught me so much.

 

Now I am truly engineless, both a liberation and a danger.

 

It was not to be fixed with a hammer or a drill—I had already hot-wired it.  The overheating is not its sole malidy.  This I worked on as I approached Atuona and my first landfall in twenty-three days.  Only at seeing it did I become anxious to reach it.  I didn’t like the cooking; I didn’t like the daily storms that accosted me every day since crossing the equator.

I have been constantly wet.  But I am clean and the rain water rinses the salt out of my clothes so they will at last dry in the sun.

 

For the most part I carried a smile and was at home and happy to be doing what ever this life is.  At some point though, the constant failures  wore me low and I gripped about my boat and how I will never manage to make it self-sustaining.  I thought of other boats.  I wondered whether this lifestyle was crap—but I knew that I can’t imagine anything else.  But I had gotten low and was thinking darkly even as I was aware of it.  So I’d laugh.

 

Even dropping anchor was a debacle.  I had no less than four Frenchmen come up in their dinghies and tell me that I had to be anchored behind some line delineated on the shore, and I was not behind that line.  They kept coming and telling me—what did they think the last Frenchman had told me?

But it was very hot, and I was tired of being in the sun all day.  It would wait.  I stowed sails and  prepared the dinghy.  I didn’t need their help.  My god it was hot.  And none of my friends were there.  They had moved on to the next island south of here before clearing in to the Gendarmerie.  Celebrating is not the same when you’re alone.

And it was Sunday and Atuona is very small and very rural.  There was not a restaurant open, not a bar, not a café, not a store—just some boys playing soccer, some locals listening to music on the beach, talking to girls.

 

The being on shore snapped me out of my nautical despair.  It was beautiful.  My problems weren’t so bad as they had seemed, not so daunting after all.  I’d start tomorrow. 

 

------

 

 

May 11

 

Since arriving to the Marquesas I’ve done some lounging, a bit ‘a boat work, a lot of waiting for Brian and Herb and Til.  But the last two days have blossomed forth two unexpected mini-adventures, both due to hitch-hiking.

 

Hitch-hiking episode 1:

 

I went for a run, it decayed into a walk, and then further decayed into a hitching sabbatical across the island (of Hiva Oa).

I set out innocently enough.  I hadn’t run in a month.  It was roughly two and I rowed to shore, donned my shoes and a pack with water and a tee-shirt and headed up hill.  The island is steep and lush, dripping with vegetation, something green for every niche and corner.  Imagine Kauai—there you go.

It is always in the nineties, rainstorms roll through almost daily (at least in my narrow experience).  So it is humid and muggy, but there is a bit of a breeze often times that is refreshing.

Fruit is everywhere; it seems to grow on every tree.  Lemons, bananas, coconuts—and tons of others that I haven’t yet identified.  Coconuts are the staple here.

 

Anyhow, the road I took wound around the southern coastline heading east.  It was steep and narrow, beautiful views the whole way, looking way down to the surf and cliffs and islands beyond.

After thirty-five minutes or so, at a point where as a runner I should turn and head on home—I was unwilling to so I started walking and figured I could walk a while and then run more, and downhill, all the way home.

I walked on and on, same ole for a few miles, in and out of the afternoon shadows.  It was like hiking through an Amazonian jungle—so thick and laden, so wet and lush and alive and green and exotic.  Venezuela is the only thing I’ve seen like it, but still not the same.

It occurred to me that the breeze on my face if I were sitting in the bed of a pickup would feel sublime, not to mention how much more I could see, and I’ve already got a good run in.

So I through my thumb out at the next Toyota to come by.  Everyone here stops for hitchers.  Marquesians are some of the most sincerely kind people.  To be in a foreign place and NOT  have the locals be after my dollars—it is such a joy.  People are nice for the sake of generousity.  People smile, wave, one guy shuck my hand as I walked by, or say, “Bonjour”.  Every woman in public wears a flower in her hair.  So delightful, so elegant.  And the Marquesians aren’t a narrow people; they are like the Samoans, a bit round, but theirs smiles are endearing and their faces charismatic.  Of course their skin is as lovely as any.

The first or second car stopped for me.  They asked me if I were going somewhere, something I couldn’t understand, I think it was a hotel or a pension or something.  I said no, that I didn’t know, or care, where I was going, that wherever they were going was fine.

They laughed and we headed out.  We went and went.  They lived way out east on the road I had followed.  We dropped through a valley then headed higher and higher.  The air cooled and the vegetation changed to pine trees.  I felt like I was on the Yellowstone plateau with all the lodgepoles.

We eventually came to a  fork in the road and the truck came to a stop.  They explained to me that they lived down in the valley yonder but there probably wouldn’t be any more cars coming that way for the night.

I thanked them and started walking back the way we’d come.  It was getting later and I was a good ways from home—a bit more than walking and running would manage.  But man did I feel great.  Finally I was getting out and seeing this new world.  This is how it is supposed to be.  It’s just sometimes I forget how.  Sometimes it’s just easier to sit around the boat and stare contentedly out at the water.

Yet always when I stick my neck out a little farther into the wind do I feel all the better for it.  Once I get going I gain momentum.  I here I was in the boonies of Hiva Oa and I was taking it all in in deep draughts.

It wasn’t long before another pickup came by and a hailed it down.  There were a bunch of girls in the back so I didn’t expect them to stop—which, of course, they did.  I looked and didn’t know where I would get in.

They were all young people—two young families I’d say.  Two guys, mid-twenties, two girls the same and three small kids.  It seemed they were coming back from the beach, guys topless, coolers, chairs, towels, boombox.

It was the driver who got out and shuffled around the boombox to make room.  “You want coke?” he said.    “Sure, ny’a pax du  quais” which is my best French attempt at “thank you.”

I used to try and refuse hospitality (especially if you think they eventually want something for their kindness).  Often I don’t like ‘taking’ from others, but I think I’ve learned that it is kinder to accept; it brings you closer; it is a sort of bond.

So I piled in, cracked my orange soda—which was damn cold—a real treat and hit the road again.  The driver spoke broken English, explained he wasn’t going straight to Atuona, but if I didn’t mind waiting for a bit, they were headed home, but maybe he could take me in a bit.

Even better I thought.  I had nowhere to be.  We rolled up a steep clay driveway to a little place on a high knoll—incredible ridgeline view over a broad northern valley.  There was an elderly lady in a green house with hundreds of potted flowers.  A man was tending three little fires, burning slash, I think.

We all unloaded and didn’t really go anywhere.  We hung out around the truck; me and the driver making jokes about music; I asked if he had a wife, kids the whole schpeal.  He introduced me, and these was his parent’s home.

“You want food?  You eat some fish?”

But of course.  He opened up the cooler and forked out shreds of meat right of the fish, which looked like it had been thrown right on a fire.  Rice came out of a big Tupperware.  Then he held up a squeeze bottle with some sort of creamy stuff in it.   “Coco milk.  You like?”

“Sure”  He squeezed it on and oh man let me tell ya.  It was the flame, the love, what ever your epithet for greatness may be, this coconut milk was it.  Thick, heavy, chunks of coco-meat in the mix.

I stood there in my little heaven.  I knew it.  These are my moments, those little fleeting times where things are as they should be.  I was eating with a bunch of Marquesians, laughing, comfortable, sun going down over the valley to the north.  A fine moment to be sure.

 

We all loaded up again, in two cars this time, and headed down, down, down to Atuona.  They took me to the quay and said our partings, and they went to drink scotch.

 

 

Hitch-hiking episode 2

 

Encouraged by my success the day before, I actually sought out to do similarly once again.

I did some boat work in the morning, with some pancakes thrown in the mix and then lazed through midday.  It is too hot in the middle of the day to do anything at all, really.  So two-ish I packed a light bag, water, camera, hat, a snack, a few francs and road to the boat ramp were I pull my dink ashore.

There is a high spigot there for the washing of  outrigger canoes and the like and it is the perfect shower.  Powerful.  It is sad though; I noticed I’ve lost my tan.  Turns out it was just dirt.

From the shower to the road I’m already dry except for my britches.  I walk a quarter mile to a fork in the road.  My goal was to find a way up the mountain just above town.  It is a beautiful, symmetrical towering peak, lush and green, capped with clouds, but steep and scalloped.  The southern ridge looks incredible, but too cliffed-out to be realistic. Also I don’t know how to get to it.  So I had to find a way.

I imagined that the northern ridge was doable and lead right down to a road on the mesa / ridge above town.  This may be disappointly easy.  Whatever! This day would hopefully enlighten me one way or other.  Then maybe when Brian or Herb and Tila get here we can all go up.

 

As I walk down the road I here a car coming and through out my thumb.  I look back and notice it ain’t a pickup, but a Suzuki Samarii—a Japanese CJ.  I wouldn’t normally try to hitch with one of these, but, again, they stopped.  And again they looked a bit full, at least there was a kid in the back.  But these opened up the door and told me to climb in.

I had no idea what I was about to get in for.

They didn’t speak much English, but a little.  I said I was going into town and they showed me on a map where they were going.  It was a little spot above town.  I thought maybe this could be a clue to my mountain so I asked if I could go that way.

“Yes, sure.  Of course.”

It was a great steep, steep road.  It was hard to tell the difference between the road and driveways.  There was a cemetery up there.  We found it and looked at a few famous graves.  It turns out that the people I hitched with were tourists from Tahiti and they had rented the little Suzuki to drive around and see the island.

They said I was more than welcome to join them…..

 

This was just great, I thought.  Here I am with a funny Frenchman and his Tahitian wife and kid (who was born in Tunisia somehow) and we’re gonna drive around this island, places I could never get to by foot.

On their little tourist map were marked several archeological sites and the like and we headed back down the hill to go find some.

This was an interesting fact about the Marquesas: as there are tourists and things geared for tourists, we never saw another tourist while there, not another soul.  We stopped at an old church, very simple and quaint and traditional.  I liked it.  Then we started the off-roading.

We followed this steep muddy road up into the hills to find some ceremonial place where the ancients used to sacrifice people to the gods (and then eat them, I am told?).  I thought Michael was a bold driver, here with his family, no tools, no four-wheel drive and road tires.  And we were getting after it. 

Again the views of the coast were exquisite.

 

The last place we wanted to see was a site that had petraglyphs, but it was a long hike or horseride.  You couldn’t drive it or so said the map.  But we’d go and scope it out. 

We see the sign and turn off the road into a dirt/mud track and we were off.  Again, I looked at Michael and was impressed.  Firstly, he wasn’t a slouch of an off-road driver; and secondly, we were getting farther and farther in; it was getting knarlier and knarlier.  At times it was like driving on an ice-rink. 

It was awesome.  There were a few spots I thought we were doomed and still we went.  We drove that damned Samara across a sizable creek.  I was laughing and howling and kept a hand on the ceiling least I hit my head and crack my neck.  The kid was loving it to.

The wife was constantly saying, “faster…faster……..faster”—or, at least I think that’s what she was saying.  She didn’t want to get stuck and figured speed was for the best.

What a riot.  We eventually reached a muddy switch-back that was beyond our ability.

And we tried, by Jove.  But we failed.

It was funny because just after we turned off the faithful Suzuki we heard a cracking and a big tree collapsed across the road—not fifty yards ahead of us.

We sat there and stared quietly, then busrst out laughing.  “That is NOT normal,” I said and laughed some more.

 

We walked up a ways, around the tree, and found our path to the petroglyphs.  What a strange thing!  There was a sign—the first we’d seen—but we couldn’t find a trail, not a thing.  There was nothing there.  I’m sure there was; there was a sign, but no directions.  A bulldozer had recently made a big fiasco there—maybe it buried the petroglyphs, or at least the passage there.

Typical Marquesas.  Not only do you not see other tourists—you can’t even find the destination.  (I did find some more ruins in the jungle, but I didn’t see any petroglyphs on them.)

 

The ride back down may have been more exciting.  We hauled ass—no holds barred.  They took me to the quay and hung out for a bit and Michael smoked a cigarette.  It was a jovial parting.  The lady said, ‘you did not know we was crazy, ah??”

 

Thank God they were.  What a ruckus of a time.  We saw tons and they were a real pleasure to be around.

 

 

So I earned my dinner: rice, beans and a peanut-curry sauce.  I now I’m writing about it.  I’m still waiting on my friends.  Don’t know what’s taking them so long.  But now at least I’m living well; I’m seeing this place and meeting people and participating.  Ah this is good.