I kind of pride myself on having a “feelings” kind of blog. You know, the kind that is more interested in how a place, or thing, or experience made me feel rather than (strictly speaking) a description of the place/thing/experience in question. Which is sort of by way of explaining why I’ve been a little short on blog posts lately.

The problem, in vague terms, is that I have been feeling the same thing over and over again. This whole chapter in my life can be summed up in one short word; WOW. I feel like I’ve been sailing, hiking, and bumming around in an ever increasing state of slack jawed amazement and revelry at the immense cultural and natural beauty. And while this is certainly no regrettable state to be in, it is a little overwhelming and, well, not entirely conducive to introspection.

So I am going to write a little about the details and leave the introspection for later.

Nuku Hiva has been, and this is quite a statement, the best all around island of our visit (for me). While it isn’t as friendly as Ua Pou, or as hauntingly magnificent as  Fatu Hiva, or as polished as Tahuata, it has had kids (lots and lots of kids) and super easy goods and services (woodworking, rappa coco, groceries, laundry, music…). It also has D’Anaho Bay, which I’ll get to.

We sailed to Taiohae on just our jib due to some blow outs. This made for a very slow crossing, but also let us be really amazed by the topography of Nuku Hiva. Entering Taiohae Bay I was swept away by the now expected but still amazing verdant mountains and cliffs dropping directly into deep ocean. These cliffs showed evidence of periodic waterfalls which we later got to see in action. The Bay was well enough protected while still being expansive enough to hold 50+ yachts including the enormous (179′) superyachts Marie and CV-9. We found a good anchor spot nestled in fairly close to the yacht’s quay. The holding is great but there is a crazy “waltz” that has boats moving 360º around their anchor and generally not pointing the same way.

In town we found every type of service including a woodworker named Kevin who not only filled our propane tanks (with butane) but also made a few things for Convivia that I had been wanting since Mexico. Within a few days we had re-provisioned (Vick has since promised that her “permanent” home will require a produce procuring option that doesn’t require a 4am wakeup call), fueled up, and reconnected ourselves with friends and family through expensive internet. We were ready to move on!

After considering our many options the crews of Wondertime and Convivia decided to head up to D’ Anaho Bay for a few days. Anaho is reputed to be the best, most beautiful, flattest anchorage in all of the Marquesas. I am here to tell you that it is all of that. It’s something else too that my travel numbed senses can’t quite put to words. I can say that that other thing is a feely sort of thing; a “I’m really lucky to be here, with these people” kind of feeling. It’s quiet and flat, and the mountains that surrounded us seemed to be alternately cast in warm oranges and cozy slanting fog.

On land we were welcomed to help ourselves to coconuts which I diligently shucked cracked and served to our friends and the family. Afterwards we took a walk down Main Street, a 2 person wide trail edged with banana and coconut palms, fruit trees, vegetable gardens and one of the most amazing flower gardens I’ve seen since California.

After the walk we joined the crew of Khaiulani for a pickup birthday party. Their son was turning 6. Between the three boats we had 6 kids under 8 years old. If you don’t have kids, or haven’t spent much time with them away from other kids let me tell you that this was like stumbling across a diamond the size of your fist on the beach. When we were invited to their gorgeous schooner for a potluck dinner on the following night  we eagerly accepted.

We are back in Taiohae now and all provisioned up for the new best thing (the Tuamotus). On Monday we will make our last stop in the Marquesas to see the waterfall at Daniel’s Bay and then we’ll make our 4 day passage to Kauehi Island. Maybe along the way I will get some of my feelings sorted out and put them into a post.

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I fear I may sound like a broken record if I continue to extol the many virtues and superlatives of these remote, exotic, and vibrant islands. So rather than continue along that path, I will just share a few photos of our time in Tahuata (where we got the tattoos) and Ua Pou (where live the friendliest people in the Marquesas). Hopefully these varied snapshots will capture the essence of our last 2 weeks in a way that words can’t.

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Well we have covered about 3000 miles since we left Mexico and as any passage maker can attest, stuff breaks. I was actually kind of surprised by what broke and, by and large, how quickly and easily it was repaired. Most of our damage was small, interior, and caused by our kids. I left a lot of the little stuff off this list because it was already getting long.  A few of the breaks were avoidable, and we have learned some good preventative maintenance lessons (like don’t let the sails flog at all). The remainder was either just old boat stuff, or general maintenance.

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I’ve been lucky to have a number of encouraging and reassuring people cross my path, people who have confirmed that what I was after was the right thing for me, and a couple of years ago I met someone who had such confidence and assuredness about his sailboat and his cruising plans that I couldn’t help but admire him . As we became friends he repeated his mantra, “it’s okay” about any worries I had about living aboard, fixing up Convivia, and sailing away. He even called us just before we untied the dock lines to remind us that everything would be just fine. I’ve tried to remember /just/ the tone of his believable voice and though I’ve repeated his words a million times, I’ve been searching for my own authentic, “it’s okay.”

Felix Fii, known as Fati, but who actually has a name much longer than either of those, is the Tahuatan tattooist we agreed to meet at seven on Sunday morning. I’ve been old enough to get a tattoo for half my life and I’ve wanted one for longer than that, but first I needed a story good enough to tell in permanent ink on my skin. I love the fact that Marquesan tattoos mark rites of passage and my Pacific crossing is certainly worthy of a mark.

Tucker went first. Fati drew with pen carefully on his arm and then moved onto inking it in. I watched Tucker’s face the moment the first buzz of the needle met his shoulder. He didn’t flinch. Marquesan men are supposed to endure the pain without a flinch. Tucker did so for several hours. When it was my turn Tucker suggested I “observe [the sensation] without judgement.” I practiced not judging the pain of my mosquito bites, sprayed myself with additional bug spray, and downed a few more drops of Rescue Remedy. It was my turn.

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Fati showed me a little sketch of two elements of my tattoo we had talked about the day before. With my approval he held my arm firmly and drew. His concentration and his hands were steady and strong. It wasn’t long before I was lying on my back on his hard plywood table, my tranquil face displaying my assent as I heard the first buzz of the tattoo tool. I breathed deeply and felt without judging. At first it seemed like my blue ceramic knife tracing designs into my skin. In my mind I changed it to a burning feeling, and then to the sharp point of an ink pen.

Within a minute or two I found my comfort. Fati’s confident hand holding my arm was part of it. I am sure his potent “mana” is something like the reiki energy I am used to. He felt powerful and trustworthy and I knew that whatever mana he offered me was safe. I knew for sure that my tattoo would be perfect.

For a couple of hours at least I lay on the table, alternately staring up at the torn ceiling in his studio/shack, looking at the poster on the wall of a man heavily tattooed on half his body (including his face), and daydreaming. I was totally comfortable, peaceful, even smiling. When Tucker asked me how I was doing my, “I’m okay,” was confident and true. My, “I’m okay,” applied to my arm, the ink, my family, my boat, my voyage, and my life. And so it was that on that day, when I marked forever my passage with the sun the sea and my two children on my arm, I found my, “It’s Okay.”

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Posted from Taiohae, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Four days after making landfall on Hiva Oa we sailed into Baie Hanavave on Fatu Hiva, the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It is the most beautiful place I can even imagine. The hills are high and covered with a hundred colors of green. Palm trees lean toward the ocean cliffs. The grassy areas are dotted with mountain goats. The sky is a dark blue, heavy with mist, and threatens to explode into a squall or a rainbow. I wonder if rainbows are overlooked here. I can’t find a local person that can tell me what they’re called in French or Marquesan.

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The people on shore are as generous as they are eager to trade. They have pamplemousse, limes, bananas, and coconuts and they ask for resin, sandals, perfume, tee shirts, bras, and cigarettes. We gather children’s clothes from our boat the next time we head to shore.

With hushed whispers two men ask us if we have guns. They instruct us not to tell but if we have them we should kill goats. Or perhaps they wanted to kill goats. We don’t have a gun, and we also avoid an offer a man named Stefan made to come to our boat to cook one for us. We hope to have a chance to eat chevre au coco (goat meat with coconut milk) or poissoin cru (raw fish marinated in lime juice and covered in coconut milk) but with so few people visiting Fatu Hiva we feel like inviting someone aboard would expose us to uncomfortable begging for what we have. Our boat is the simplest, smallest, and oldest in the harbor, but the amount and variety of food we’ve stashed under our cushions is greater than the entire supply in town. One man looked closely at me and offered pamplemousse for my Oakleys. I wondered just how many pamplemousse I could eat before they spoiled and hung on tightly to my sunglasses.

With vague directions we hiked to the waterfall, plucked limes from trees, and found a petroglyph in the forest. We bought a machete at the Magasin and followed the store owner to his house for a half a dozen coconuts. He shucked them and shook them and cracked them open with our machete, tossing some to his pig and chickens and offering us the foamy cotton candy insides of a sprouted coconut. We carried our heavy load home to Convivia.

I baked bread, did sink loads of dishes, and hung clean laundry on the lifelines while staring at the most stunning view ever. I sailed to Fatu Hiva, one of the most isolated islands on the planet, and hiked to the waterfall with my children. I am so grateful these things will always be part of my history.

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Posted from Taiohae, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Our culture kind of falls flat on celebrations of personal success and accomplishment. The Marquesans however—and in fact Polynesians in general—have a long standing tradition of recording rights of passage and personal achievement in the skin. These tattoos become a living visual history of each inked individual.


Victoria and I had long known that we would participate in this tradition upon the completion of our first major ocean passage. It seemed congruous in so many ways. The adoption of this beautiful tradition, the telling of our story, and the celebration of this voyage which follows (in some small way) the spirit of Marquesan exploration.

Meeting Felix “Fati” Fii was not unlike meeting a shaman, he held his space with a kind but somehow simultaneously fierce power. The “Imagining” (as Fati put it) was executed in mixed French, English, and drawing. My feeble stick figure was warmly rejected. Fati drew an oval (outlining the area on my shoulder that he would fill with ink) and instructed me to use my imagination. I felt proud when he looked at my drawing and smiled, “Yeah, Je pense, I will recreate this in Marquesan Motifs. Come back tomorrow.”

When I returned at 7am, belly empty and mind clear, Fati presented his drawing. It was exquisite. I couldn’t wait to have it become a part of me. Hours later when he washed the left over ink off my shoulder and held the mirror up I felt different. In investing my skin with this story it seemed that Fati had invested something else. He called it Mana, and I am disinclined to define it differently.


We have tens of thousands of sea miles ahead of us and countless achievements to celebrate. I can’t say for sure that I will continue to write this history on my body in the Polynesian way, but I can’t say that I wont either. Regardless I will have a powerful permanent reminder that these accomplishments deserve, perhaps even demand to be celebrated.

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I thought this might be interesting for some. These are our 24hr waypoints for the whole trip. What isn’t shown is the track (our actual path of travel) witch , more often than not, zig-zagged across the almost straight line described here.

Cruisers familiar with this passage will almost certainly understand what is going on around day 10 . This is where we decided that the ITCZ crossing would be much better a few degrees west. As it turns out those demoralizing days of heading west instead of south, were well worth it. We never really saw the ITCZ. Big thanks to my buddy Krister for keeping us informed of weather and routing us expertly through this area of turmoil.

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Posted from Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

I was stunned I think, when Ruby asked me why the days were so short. We were on our boat, sailing across the Pacific, from Mexico to the Marquesas, a passage that takes around three weeks (24 nights out for us) and my almost eight year old couldn’t find enough time in the day for everything she wanted to do. “The days were so much longer in La Cruz. Why are they going by so fast on passage?”

Our time in La Cruz may have been a little bit vacation like for us, especially as Ruby and Miles filled their days with friends and play and excitement, and Tucker and I did too, all the way through many evenings with cocktails and long into the night conversations. We ate at taquerias and dropped off our laundry. The living was easy.  If I look back through my crossed out to do lists and check lists and provisioning lists I know we worked hard too. And here I was on passage finding that I didn’t have enough time either.

I found myself in the galley for many hours a day, cooking and baking and doing the dishes while bracing myself for the 15 degree heel and the rocking swell. I felt like I was always working on a meal or a snack or planning the next one. I swept the sole over and over and wondered why we had so much dirt still even though we were 1500 miles from shore.  I plunged laundry in a bucket, mostly rags and towels from cleaning up jobs, and hung it on the windward lifelines and hoped for the salt water spray to not reach that high.

I scribbled positions in the log book, read a few pages of my own book here and there, and  chapter after chapter of children’s books until my voice was weak, played games with the kids, helped them find the next pieces for the puzzles they were solving, sewed a flag, turned the eggs, tidied up, and scanned the horizon again and again for ships.

Tucker adjusted the sails, many more times than I did, and spent his days fixing and fixing the little things that broke. We are very fortunate that our big loss was our spinnaker overboard and not our rudder or standing rigging or mast. The sea was gentle to us. However those two happy kids cooped up on our boat may have been responsible for the broken toilet seat, the broken salt water hand pump, and the broken hanging locker door knob. Tucker found solutions for most of that and spent far too much time scraping up his knuckles searching for the never ending fresh pressure water system leaks.

The kids, though they had some jobs like throwing food scraps overboard, sweeping, drying and putting away dishes, chasing down mildew, and checking for ships and squalls, found enough things to do for months, never mind weeks. Ruby insisted on teaching Miles to write all of his letters, which is pretty remarkable, given his history of only wanting to draw bombs and cannons, and draw the letter X  (marks the spot). He did it in a day. Miles completed all the mazes in one book and started on a fresh maze book I had stashed away.  Ruby read to herself and to her brother. She spent hours of concentration trying to solve a very difficult nine piece puzzle that they got as an equator crossing present from our friends on s/v Windarra. She drew and drew and drew and when she got frustrated I gave her a new drawing book to help her along and she drew some more. They both played Lego and dress up, and endless pretend games. They listened to audiobooks and watched movies, watched sunrises and sunsets, looked for phosphoresce and shooting stars, and counted the seconds after the lightning.

Only when we had been out three weeks did Ruby start mentioning that she really wanted to go for a walk and play with friends. She never once asked, “are we there yet?” or “how much longer?” though she could just check the charts on her own for the answer. At the beginning, Miles asked, “Is today the day we get to our destination?” After a few days he switched to, “Tell me the day that we’re going to be at our destination.”  Of course we’ll tell!

So for twenty four nights, the four of us spent every minute on our forty three foot boat (we used the v-berth for storage so even smaller space). We didn’t go to the store to pick up groceries, didn’t get a glimpse of what was happening in the world via the Internet, and didn’t get to run out to tacos for dinner. Instead, we proved  our self sufficiency and our cooperation and our harmony.

When our French Polynesian agent (that helps us with our bond exemption, paperwork, and duty free fuel) asked me if it was difficult to travel with children, at first I said yes, but the traveling part is absolutely easy. The preparation was very difficult, and we were lucky in La Cruz to have a whole bunch of wonderful kids and parents that helped take care of Ruby and Miles, especially in the last week, but once we were gone (even with unchecked things on the lists), it was all good. While I’m envious of sailing couples that get to soak in sunsets together and read countless novels, it certainly isn’t worth waiting for the kids to grow up! We don’t have to choose between  kids or adventure. Though we wont get a chance to hike the highest hills for the views, and maybe  will only get to see as much of the world as a four and a half year old can handle, we are definitely seeing more stunning amazing beauty than most people ever even wish for.

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Posted from Papeete, Windward Islands, French Polynesia.

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Posted from Papeete, Windward Islands, French Polynesia.

When we left Mexico we were headed to Nuku Hiva, one of the northern Marquesan islands, with an easy anchorage in a town that allowed us to clear in to French Polynesia. About a week into our passage we opened the Charlie’s Charts and our Lonely Planet guide books and decided to head for Hiva Oa, the largest southern Marquesan island.  We don’t want to miss the nearby islands of Fatu Hiva and Tahuata. We are anchored now in Baie Tahuku near the town of Atuona.

Land Ho! We saw land around 4pm, boat time (we weren’t ever exactly right on our time zones, and changed the clock back 2.5 hours when we got in). We knew we couldn’t make landfall before dark, so we plotted a course for a night time scenic route through the islands and sailed north of Fatu Hiva and between Tahuata and Motane on our way to Hiva Oa. The sky was clear and the moon was fairly bright so we had pretty clear silhouettes of the islands in view through our last night. As the sun came up we were headed straight for Hiva Oa with a giant rainbow framing Tahuata!

The Tahuku anchorage is crowded and was difficult to find a spot to fit our bow and stern anchors. At first we found an out of the way spot and just bow anchored, second we dropped the hooks in too shallow of a spot, and finally we took the spot of a friend’s boat when they departed. The anchorage is framed by high hills, mountain views, palm trees, and a dark sand beach. It’s absolutely stunning.

We found our way to shore in the afternoon for a shower, which turned out to be a faucet, higher than our heads, with a cement surrounding, lower than our shoulders, with only cold water. Our shower time turned into play time for the kids when we found a seven year old French girl ashore. The kids missed their shower (last one being almost a month ago) and came back dirtier than before. The days on passage went so quickly, and I know that the days ashore might pass even faster!

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Posted from Papeete, Windward Islands, French Polynesia.