Homeward Bound

Hello, semi-faithful readers. As some of you may know, I’ve been in La Cruz, Mexico for the past three months as we work to get the boat ready to sell. When we arrived here, I was incredibly excited about going home. I was ready to get the hell out of the tropics, and live up in rainy, grey Vancouver. Ah, bliss. Now, things are a little different. As I’ve gotten to know this season’s fleet, and made friends with all the kids, I’ve found myself wistfully looking at pictures of the South Pacific and dreaming about the smell of frangipanis and the taste of star-fruit.

These past few months in the same place have made me restless. I’ll be honest – right now, in this moment, I want to cross the Pacific again. But I know that by the time I’ve finished writing this blogpost I’ll be back to being excited about having a door again. So, instead of angsting about it, I’ll concentrate on the good things that have been happening. 

One of the cool things about La Cruz is that it has a Kids’ Club, which was just starting up when I was here six years ago. Over the past three months, we’ve volunteered at a local orphanage, worked at the spay and neuter clinic, started a tree nursery, run several local restaurants for a day, and tomorrow we’re planning a beach campout. 

Working at a local restaurant

Decapitating a pinata 

It’s a great program that concentrates on getting the kids in the marina out into the neighbourhood, and meeting locals instead of staying in the marina all the time

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Julia from S/V Pickles playing with one of the girls from the orphanage

I think my favourite activity was probably working at the spay and neuter clinic, where we helped the vets fix forty cats and dogs in the first day alone. Everyone pitched in, and dog slobber and cat pee aside, it was really fun. 

Me and a puppy at the clinic

It’s also been lovely meeting this year’s fleet of kid boats. There’s been a huge amount of them – at one point there were eight girls my age here, which is the most I’ve ever seen. 

Tacos!

And of course, my parents and I have been working hard, getting the boat ready to sell. We’ve been painting anything that doesn’t move, (actually, I think the cat got some paint on him) and sanding and gluing and varnishing and generally attempting to make the boat look like it hasn’t been lived on for eight years by a family with a very furry cat. 

Slightly dangerous Mexican fair

As I get ready to go home, I know it’s going to be hard to adjust. But I also know that I’m an adaptable person. And as much as I have my doubts and my worries, I think it’ll all be ok.

The Women's March on Washington (from Mexico)

On Saturday, I piled into a crowded taxi-van with fourteen other women and men to drive to San Pancho – a small touristy beach town near Porta Vallerta. We were all wearing bits of white, (which is very rare for cruisers.) My white t-shirt was a relic from South Africa, and I found it at the bottom of my clothing locker, covered in cat hair, with the tag still attached, smelling faintly of mould.

As we drove through the junglely landscape, we talked. We talked about a certain orange president with veerrry small hands, and how we were not going to let him ‘take America back’. For a while, the atmosphere was slightly angry. They took our country. They want to take our rights. But gradually, as we got closer to San Pancho, it shifted. They can’t take our country, because we’re not moving. It’s our country too. 

When we arrived, we found a soccer field filled with white. There were pink baseball caps with ears, (the summer version of the pussyhats) there were anatomically correct vagina posters declaring ‘THIS GRABS BACK’, there were flower crowns and rainbow makeup and hand painted ‘Love Trumps Hate’ signs. There were women with canes and girls clinging on to their mother’s leg. There were daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives… we were all there. 

I was handed a poster by an elderly woman in a flower crown and an embroidered dress who smiled at me. A group of young women asked me to take their photo in front of the crowd. The atmosphere was excited, joyful, and profoundly loving. 

As we walked through the streets with our signs, chanting ‘Mujars, mujars, arriva la mujars’ (The women, the women, the women have arrived), people popped out on their balcony with cameras, smiled at us from the sidewalks, and some even joined the crowd threading through the narrow streets to the town square. 

I talked to a woman who’d been going to protests since she was thirteen, I smiled at a man with a ‘Tweet me with respect’ poster, and I bemoaned the creation of the electoral college by Alexander Hamilton with an ex history teacher, (although we also talked about our love for the musical, Hamilton). 

It was much bigger than I had expected. I thought maybe a few hundred people would show up, but there were over a thousand. 

And now, watching figures roll in from around the world of the attendees of all the marches, I feel energised. The past few weeks have been a numb parade of cabinet appointments and childish tweets from the president-elect, but now I feel ready. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to keep on our feet, and we’re all going to keep demanding our rights. 

Black, white, trans, cis, gay, straight, woman, man, atheist, Christian … we are strong, and brave, and we can do this. 

So thank you to everyone who marched, to everyone who opened their homes to marchers that they didn't know, to people who created beautiful posters, to people who post the patterns for their pussyhats online, to people who simply didn't vote Trump. Thank you for making this world a little more loving. 

Girl Afloat

Cat from Marina La Cruz recently asked my mum and I to give a talk to a group of sailing women about our experiences and thoughts on sailing. A few of them asked me to post my speech, so here it is!

As many of you know, I’ve been sailing around the world since I was little.

I’ve completed my circumnavigation, just a few days ago actually.

We left Vancouver, Canada when I was seven, and we’ve sailed 37000 nautical miles miles. I’ve spent over half my life on our catamaran, which isn’t exactly a normal childhood. But it is a great one. There are ups and downs, as there are in anything, and it’s taught me a lot about my self and the world.

Hopefully it’s made me a better person, and at the very least, it’s made me one with more exotic anecdotes than I might’ve had if we stayed on land.

                             

I was nine when I did the Puddlejump, and most of my time was spent doing school, reading, constructing elaborate desserts out of play-doh, and counting the flying fish that had ended up in our nets.

Now that I’m older, things are a little different.

I still do school and I still read, but now I listen to podcasts, cook, clean, take watches, binge watch TV when I’m feeling lazy and write stories when I’m feeling productive.

Passages are a chance to take a break from the outside world and do all the things you’ve been meaning to do but never got around to.

So write. Read. Play an instrument, paint a picture. If you have good balance, do some yoga. If you’re still in school, catch up on it. Fish. Make sushi if you catch a fish! I seldom catch fish.

Enjoy yourself and your time away from the world.   

You’re also away from the internet, which can be very, very hard. About three days out, I start getting twitchy.

What’s happening? What are my friends doing? What’s going on in the world?

But now I’ve begun to view my time away from the WiFi as a way to decompress, if you will. The internet is a marvellous tool but it can get stressful too. And another cool thing about crossing the Pacific Ocean is that you get serious bragging rights. That’s something you can bring up at parties and at school for the rest of your life.

Kids on boats. I’m sure you all get a lot of questions from people who don’t live on boats.

Are you just taking a break? Do you go to a new school everywhere you travel? How do you keep up with the world?

And at least with me, a more than a few people have assumed that I’m a maladjusted, anti-social weirdo because of my unconventional childhood.

But you know what; I think we’re pretty cool.

We’re seeing more of the world at this young age than many of our peers ever will.

Many of us make friends with people all over the world, and we learn more about the earth and its issues than you ever will by reading about it in a newspaper or a history book.

One of my favourite parts of cruising is the chance to meet women all over the world, from so many different backgrounds.

When I was in Fiji, we met the oldest female chief in the country and took part in a traditional sevu-sevu ceremony. She was in her nineties, and her skin was dark and worn from the sun. She smiled at me joyfully as I offered her the kava roots I held.

When I bought a sari in Sri Lanka, women would stop on the streets to offer their own ways of wrapping it and to tell me their stories of their first sari. A twenty year old plantation worker had helped me wrap it for the first time, busily folding and pleating the silk as she explained how most Sri Lankan girls would have a party to celebrate getting their first sari, similar to a Bat Mitzvah or a Quinceañera. I still have that sari, carefully tucked away and protected from damp. It still smells like fresh black tea, and I still remember practising wrapping it and folding it over and over again in the cockpit of my boat until I could do it in five minutes. The first time I tried it, it took about thirty minutes.   

In Madagascar women dance all the time. In bars, on beaches, at soccer games – it’s part of their life. I cannot, for the life of me, describe how they move. Imagine paint shakers – and then imagine those paint shakers strapped to their hips. That’s something like it. One day, at an impromptu soccer game in a tiny village, someone hooked up the speakers and a tall, black haired woman seized my hands and tried to show me how to wiggle my hips in the way she was. 

Meeting all these women in the countries I visit is wonderful. And of course, meeting other women sailors. They are all so brave.

However, despite all these great things, there are challenges.

I haven’t seen kids my own age in a year, (which is unusual – we were just going a route that doesn’t see many people. Across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, there were loads of kids. Don’t worry). The internet’s been expensive, meaning it’s hard to keep in touch with people, and I haven’t always been able to get new episodes of Game of Thrones, which is torturous.

You get homesick and you get pretty damn sick of using a little wee boat to drive everywhere. Your clothes get damp and salty when you drive to shore, and you have to bail out your dinghy in the pouring rain.

I’ve never heard of anyone having to bail their car.

Sometimes it’s dangerous.

A few days out from the Marquesas, we lost one of our rudders. We’ve know many people whose boats have gone up on reefs, or developed catastrophic leaks.

I’m sure many of you have also heard the concerns voiced by family members or friends.

You’re going sailing? With kids? Are you crazy?

I’ve had quite a few friends ask me anxiously about pirates, or inform me that a hurricane was headed right at us and MAIA YOU MIGHT DIE.

But most of us are pretty careful.                                

Another thing that boats make tricky – making friends and having privacy.

I don’t actually have a door. I’ve had friends over, and we’re sitting in my room, talking, and my friend mentions a school project or something and my mum chimes in from the other hull because you can hear everything on my boat.

And sometimes, there are simply no friends to be had. My advice for boat kids just setting off – if there’s a person roughly around your age, just make friends with them. You never know when you’re going to see another.

Throw away worries about age differences, gender, interests, whatever. Chances are, they’re just as eager for a friend as you are.

One of my first boat friends was a thirteen year old girl. I met her when I was eight.

We talked so much when we first met, that we both had sore throats the next day. Boat kids are some of the most interesting, engaged people I’ve ever met, and I think we’ll all grow up to be pretty interesting adults too.

I’ve also made amazing online friends that are as dear to me as my ‘real’ friends.

We’ve connected over shared political views, loving the same book series, or learning languages.

This past year, they kept me from being impossibly lonely.

I think I got Facebook when I was nine, just so I could keep in touch with friends. I know some cruising families steer away from the internet and advocate the off-the-grid path, and that’s fine as well, but for me, an only child, the internet is awesome.

I’ve known many of my internet friends for a few years and they’re all wonderful people who’re kind, supportive and smart.   

Cruising life is not perfect. It’s not some lovely fantasy filled with golden beaches and days filled with swimming. It’s hard.

But it’s also wonderful.

It gives you the very best and the very worst of the world, and for me at least, that’s where I’m most happy.

It challenges me, and my beliefs, and it reaffirms my faith in humanity.

In Sri Lanka – I hiked up Adam’s Peak, or Sri Pada, at 3am, along with thousands of religious pilgrims. I was hiking to see the sunrise. In Sri Lanka, it’s believed that Adam’s Peak is where Adam first set foot on earth. From above, the 7400 feet mountain looks a bit like a giant foot print. About halfway up, my injured ankle gave way and an elderly couple took me into their tiny teahouse that doubled as their home.

The woman’s sister lived with them in this tiny, freezing shack, and at night they shared a communal bed. In their few words of English and some dedicated miming on my part, they told me about their daughter who had moved to Canada. They wondered if I knew her. I was wearing cut off denim shorts and it was 12 degrees Celsius, (that’s 54 Fahrenheit for you crazy Americans), so they gave me a blanket and sat me down in their bed.

My parents weren’t with me on that trip. Another thing that cruising has taught me is the importance of creating your own goals.

Cruising was never my dream, just like hiking up Sri Pada was never my parents’. But cruising has given me the platform to pursue my own goals.

I’ve become a published author, writing about my travels, and I’ve also developed my love of writing fiction. I don’t know if I would’ve done these things if I stayed on land.  

Some of the things you see in the world are amazing – or horrifying.

Or both!

In the Maldives, which is a collection of remote coral atolls, the seas are rising and the islands are really low so the fear is that they’ll be covered by the ocean soon.

But also in the Maldives, I met the marine biologist who was creating coral nurseries so that they could replant damaged sections of the reef.

In Borneo, Bruite Galdikas, one of ‘Leaky’s Ladies’ created several sanctuaries for orang-utans where the rangers are knowledgeable and fiercely protective of the orang-utans and their palm forest habitat.

In St Helena, the resident marine biologist has created a program monitoring the whale sharks that visit, as well as the endemic species. She was also involved in making sure that tourists don’t adversely affect any of the sea life.

Things like that are inspiring and amazing to see.

But as much as I’ve loved this life, it can be important to take breaks, too.  

I went to school in Australia for three years, half way through our circumnavigation and I think that was a really important time for me.

It gave me a little break from cruising and I got to be a normal kid. It let me learn about my peers that were living a more traditional life and it let me engage with the world that they were living in.

I learned about pop culture! I went to malls with my friends! I got fro-yo! It was fantastic, and I’m really glad that I had that time.

Schooling on boats can be different for everyone. Some families go the unschooling path – letting their kids learn what they will. Others order stacks of textbooks and keep in constant contact with a teacher on shore, and use official homeschooling programs. I buy textbooks at my level and just work through them and that works pretty well for me.

But the great thing about this life is that you’re learning all the time.

I took ukulele lessons in Tahiti from a professional teacher and musician.

A friend on another boat taught me the style of jewellery making that was passed down from her grandmother.

A French woman taught me the traditional brioche recipe that an old man in her village had been making for decades.

I learned to scuba dive in Fiji and I went on hikes with biologists who waxed poetic about the diverse flora and fauna of the region.

Never pass up an opportunity to learn. Ask questions. Listen to everyone.

In conclusion boat life can be really hard.

Actually, it should be hard.

You get scared.

You get lonely.

You get homesick.

And you overcome them all.

You learn that having a bit of your boat fall off isn’t actually the end of the world; you realize that while feeling seasick is awful in the moment, it does end, and you discover that your boat becomes your home.

And there are new friends and new experiences in every harbour.

I’ll be going home in a few months – back to normal school and extracurricular activities.

Weekend trips to the mall and visiting with family that I haven’t seen in years.

I’m excited beyond belief, and I’m also sad to be leaving cruising.

It’s been some of the best years of my life.

Full Circle

It’s been six years since we left the docks of La Cruz to cross the Pacific. I remember waving to friends in the hot sun, and watching as they ran along the breakwater for a final goodbye. One friend called me over the radio once we were ten minutes out, and I began to cry. 

Now we’re back. It was early morning, and the decks were wet with dew. We pulled up a long string of flags – from all the places we’ve been – and we blasted ‘Land Ho’ by Supertramp, our traditional coming-into-harbour song. It was silent in the marina, and I spotted a few little kids on their scooters, zooming down the wide flat docks. It was like a weird time warp. 

Everything was the same, but so different. The shop where I used to get palatas is still across the town square, but the iguana tree that housed the large lizards has been cut down and the iguanas have moved elsewhere. Our favourite taco restaurant is still here, and the tacos are just as good as I remember, but just up the street is a health food café painted in avocado green. That did not use to be here. For everything that stayed the same, there is one subtle change and each one throws me a bit off balance. 

We’ve sailed over 37, 000 nautical miles, and we’ve circumnavigated the world. I don’t know how to feel about this. For months, I’ve been thrilled about being so close to home. We’ve been moving past and jumping from harbour to harbour. And now that I’m here – doing yoga on the docks in the cool morning, walking up to get a stack of hot fresh tortillas before the sun heats up the sleepy town, waving at the cats on all the various boats – I don’t know what I want. I’m fairly sure I want to go home. 

But it will be hard. I think leaving this life will be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Humans are adaptable creatures, and I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but I’ll miss watching the sun come up from my cockpit while I drink tea, I’ll miss lying around in my pyjamas to do school – hell, I’ll even miss baking cakes in my tiny kitchen and tinier oven. 

I’ll go back to the same life that most people live, and I think I’m ok with that. Actually it really annoys me when people tell me that boat kids are ‘superior’ to land kids, that we’re going to have better lives than them simply cause our parents stuck us on a boat. I don’t think that’s true. I have immense respect for the people who are living more traditional lives, because in a way it’s much harder. We don’t have to put down roots. We flit from town to city to island to country. But now I’ll be going home, I’ll have the same backyard every day, I won’t wake up wondering what country I’m in. I’m trying to come to terms with that. 

I wonder if this life has changed me in some way, if I’ll have to keep moving to be happy. I hope not. But I’m not sure. What I’m trying to say, is that now a bit of the giddiness has worn off, and I’m realizing that this trip is over. I’m realizing that boat-to-land isn’t going to be a smooth transition. I’m scared. I’m worried. The excitement hasn’t kicked in yet because I’m still mourning the last leg of the journey.

Last Christmas

Christmas is always bittersweet – it’s an ending and a beginning and this year is especially difficult. By next Christmas, we’ll be land-based, I’ll be going to school, my parents will be working, and our boat will be gone. 

This is my eighth and last Christmas on the boat and December feels like it’s passed very quickly. We’ve visited three countries this month alone – we left Panama on December 1^st, the day my advent calendar went up and sailed to Costa Rica. From Costa Rica we arrived in Mexico, and we’ve been here for the past week. 

I’m a person who likes traditions and adapts to new ones rather reluctantly. Every December 1^st, the hand-made advent calendar that my godmother made goes up on the wall, and I leap into the frenzy of Christmas baking. But sometimes it’s a bit tricky to keep to your beloved traditions when you don’t know where you’ll be tomorrow. 

When we decorate, we have to make sure that our ornaments are placed in such a way that they don’t fall over when we’re at sea.  I experiment with icings and sweets that won’t melt when I decorate cookies, and it turns out that sticking snowflake stickers to the windows when we’re sailing isn’t such a stellar idea. In a house, that wouldn’t be a problem because you don’t need to see where you’re heading! 

Anyways, Christmas is also never perfect, which is part of the joy of it. You get strange local sweets in your stockings, your tortierre plans go out the window when you can’t find ground pork, and on Christmas Eve you end up watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special with new Australian friends who reminisce about old Doctor Who. 

You can’t find eggnog in the stores so you make your own or try a strange local version called Rompope (it’s bright yellow, and laced with rum). Firecrackers bought from local markets end up in stockings along with the more traditional candy canes, and your gingerbread house collapses in a glorious sticky pile from the humidity. 

In the future, I won’t remember the bad parts of my strange Christmases – being away from family, having no snow, missing home – I’ll remember the strange, wonderful parts that made my Christmases so special. 

I’ll remember going to sing Happy Birthday to Jesus with a bunch of cruisers in Mexico on Christmas Eve. I’ll remember the Australian family Christmas pageants (complete with tarty elves!). I’ll remember going to a stranger’s house in South Africa for Christmas dinner and being immediately absorbed by the huge extended family. 

I’ll remember all the things that made my Christmases so special and unique, and I’ll look forward to all future Christmases and the new memories that they’ll bring.

So Merry Christmas everyone. Have a very happy day.