Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
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The next day I puttered around with my gear and eventually sailed a few miles north to Motukahawa island.
I came from Waimate island the middle one in the distance in the photo.
It was blowing hard and I was beating into a short chop. I passed a solitary rock island.
People were fishing from the lee side of it. Spray from the breakers was blowing over the island.
Once I start sailing I usually like to get to all new horizons before stopping.
Then I keep sailing looking for just the perfect campsite until I'm sailing in the dark.
I'll be listening to the waves on the rocks to figure out what kind of beach I'm passing.
It turns into an ordeal. Today it was too rough to beat into easily. I wasn't making much headway.
I couldn't make it past this island without tacking again and it was blowing a gale anyway, so I ducked in behind it and landed.
Rough weather in a good boat does something good to you, and I was feeling like a part of the scenery.
I put down sticks like the islanders do to make an improvised marine railway and dragged the canoe above the high tide mark.
Don't get the idea I dragged it over those sharp volcanic rocks. It's sitting on sticks. It's very easy to drag a boat over wet sticks.
If I didn't have sticks or time to get them I'd roll up the sections of deck slats or lay them over the high rocks.
A lifejacket works too. Palm fronds are fabulous.
Very mushy or very hard wood are easiest on the hull. Sand, shells, and sharp rocks can get embedded in softwood and gouge the hull. Brambly branches make an unpleasant sound but are easy on the hull.
To carry the empty canoe any distance I'd tie a strap or two diagonally from hull to outrigger like suspenders to carry it with my back straight.
Quicker than  running back and forth with sticks and dragging. The main hull under my arm against my body. It's worth the trouble to make the  load right. It's easy to hurt your back with any kind of off-center load. A back that's bent or twisted.
Despite this wisdom I still sometimes get in such a hurry that I do everything wrong. I get dehydrated, work on something too low and POW!
Something pops in my spine and every pain nerve fires at once.
It turns out I don't have to do anything. Just lie there completely limp on a lake of pain and hope none of my muscle fibers moves and makes a wave. A hurt back really changes one's priorities. I used to think people with bad backs were whiny wimps with personality problems. Now I've hurt my back enough to know it's true for sure.


I explored the island a bit. Climbed this rock for a view. At top I found a rock perch with a fine view.
A little back from the edge was a flat spot under little trees. Just big enough for a tent.
I found the twist-top from a champagne bottle and had a vision of a romantic couple toasting the millenium here.


This cozy cave has a fire ring inside and a hole in the roof, perfect for the smoke to exit.
I gathered some oysters and went fishing off the rocks with a handline. I caught a little blue fish and almost died.
Here's how it happened: When I gathered oysters I slipped and got some frilly shards stuck in my foot just below the ankle.
As I ate the oysters I used the same knife to dig out the shards. That was unwise.
Oysters are filter-feeders and concentrate all sorts of odd bacteria.
Just because they're safe to eat doesn't mean it's safe to inject raw oyster into your blood, which is what I accidentally did.
Twenty minutes later, while fishing, my ankle suddenly felt like it was sprained.  I tried to remember how it happened. It started throbbing.
I looked at it, saw the swollen area around the cut and the rays of infection spreading out from it. I didn't know an infection could spread that fast.
Now the joint was swollen and I had a hard time walking. I looked out at the mainland.
A gale wind was blowing and outside the bay was a line of  whitecaps. I didn't know if I could handle the boat in that.
If I got to the coast I'd have to get to the road. I didn't know if it followed the coast here or if I'd have to cross rough country to get to it.
There wasn't much traffic on the road.  It's a two-lane road with a drop at the edge. It's so twisty a car won't see a hitchhiker in time to stop.
It would be night anyway by the time I got there.
I wasn't so confident in the National Character. Would they stop for a stranger at night? If not, what would I do?
Throw sticks and rocks on the road to stop traffic? Start a smoky fire? Lay in the road and pass out?
In Cambridge I lived near a homeless shelter for alcoholics. I saw people passed out in the road all the time. I didn't do anything.
That's because I'm a bad person. Bad people do bad things.
And then what if the hospitals were closed?

       You Thought Hospitals Had Doctors?
Once in Minnesota I spent a night driving a man with a broken leg from hospital to hospital.
For some reason none of them had doctors or any way to get one. We went to the VA hospital. "Well, if it was alcohol or drug related, that would be different".
Finally we got to a hospital that could deal with a broken leg. The poor guy was shivering and talking funny even with the heater on full blast, going into shock.
He'd fallen in the parking lot at the ski hill and broken his leg. That's what happens when you're sober.
Drunks bomb the hill and ricochet through the grooming equipment and only get abrasions.
His big concern was that he had "two women on the line" and had to figure out how to keep them from meeting in the hospital.

Enough musing. What was I going to do? Damn that hurts.
Besides the pain I felt really stupid, thinking I'd Krakauered myself like one of his "Into The" books.
The books "Into Thin Air" and "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer relate the untimely demise of various outdoorsmen.


Looking out at the mainland and the barrier islands. There's a gale blowing and a lot of whitecaps.
It doesn't look like anything because still cameras do that.
The best way to make weather look convincing is video with a handheld camera while a top-heavy boat wallows and crashes around.
Rapids look most extreme when viewing the whitewater from above. Then you see the lenghth of the waves rather than the height.
Really hurting a lot. Hard to walk. Damn. The Griffiths and Katya insist you can't remember pain. Let's see if I remember this.
Me: "How about when you see something that reminds you of the pain and you sweat and feel like barfing?" They: "That's different."
I wondered how much time I had until I puffed up blue and stopped breathing. Or maybe hot, red, and panting. It was getting harder to think because of the pain.
I asked myself, "How exactly am I NOT going to die?"
So many ways to mess up and I keep finding new ones. There should be a book - "How to Make Mistakes".


I remembered I had some Cipro. Ciprofloxacin is this nasty crap that bombs out most of  the bacteria in your system.
It even sort of works on anthrax, but you've got to take a shitload of it for almost a year in that case.
Hence the cipro shortage when our military anthrax leaked into the postal system.
Every Federal bigwig needed to hoard a whole crate of it in the government bunker complex.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/01/then.now/
Bigwig  lives are very different from ours. For instance they've already gotten socialized medicine for themselves.
No wonder their policy objectives have nothing to do with the problems of your average single mom.

        Back to digressions from the Cipro digression:
I once contracted drug-resistant giardia on Majuro Atoll.
Giardia is a free-swimming protozoan that lives in fresh water, including such polluted rivers as the human intestine.
I sweated and shit out all my salt and my arms went numb. Majuro hospital gave me "oral hydration salts" which fixed my arms.
I started eating cooked oatmeal, which was gummy enough to keep the critters from swimming. I gained a little weight back.
I knew I had something but didn't know what it was.
I thought maybe it was Anisakis, "sushi worms" because I'd found little white worms in a tuna I'd been eating raw.
In case you ever wondered why it's safe to eat sushi and sashimi, it's not. No safer than sex anyway. Your bliss has been ignorance.
There's an epidemic of anisakis worms in Japan from the eating of raw fish. Despite the customary countermeasures. The wasabi (horseradish) and shoyu (soy sauce) which garnish the dish are chemical weapons against little enemies you might eat. Another ritualized precaution is slicing the fish thin on a backlit cutting board. That will make some encysted worms visible to an alert chef. The chef gets training to spot this stuff. Some do anyway.
Others are self taught and go through the motions without seeing the little bumps and dots in the meat.
I was already sick and getting used to it when I ate that fish though. Lack of electrolytes makes raw fish into magic ambrosia.
I froze the worms in a styrofoam sarcophagus to bring them back with me. If I got hassles from a doctor I could rip open the coffin and start waving the worms around.
When I got back to Boston I went to the best hospital in the world.
The stupid American doctor looked at me and said, "You don't look like you have parasites" and made an appointment for me a few days later.
I walked out thinking "What just happened?" I'd forgotten to bring my frozen pets. I was lightheaded, absentminded, and easily persuaded. Anxious.
The days elapsed. I begged for tests and finally got the doctor to agree.
The nurse: "Now just take this jar home with you and..."
Me: "Where's the toilet? Can't I just do it here?"
She: "You can do that? Most people can't."
Me: "Most people don't have parasites."
Ease of crapping is a symptom of the condition. I also wanted a tuberculosis test because I'd been in so many airplanes.
One person coughing on an airplane can infect everyone because they recirculate the air. All stewardesses have been exposed.
TB tests are free because there's an epidemic. The nurse didn't want to give me one.
"Did you get tested?" I asked.
She: "Sure, of course."
Me: "I want one for the same reasons you want one."
Eventually she broke down, pulled out her test kit and wasted five minutes of her time on the hysterical patient.
They take special classes in ethics where they learn the dangers of "unnecessary testing".
There's a certain chance of them dropping you down a stairwell, stabbing you with a dirty needle, or scaring you so much you'll kill yourself.
So it's better for them not to test you for unusual conditions.
A few days later a phone call: "You're absolutely right mr. anderson, you have a parasite. It's called Gee-ardee-yah."
She wrote me a prescription for Cipro, which didn't work. We repeated our first interaction. Three weeks had elapsed.
She wrote me a prescription for a larger dose of cipro for a longer time. It didn't work. We repeated our interaction again. Me: "I'm still sick." She: "You look pretty good" Hmm. Now I wonder if she had a crush on me. Studies show that doctor's families get the worst possible medical care. I did indeed look good, skinny with muscles showing. There's nothing like gut bugs for getting ripped.
In our epidemic of the diseases of wealth we forget that the ability to gain weight is a sign of health.
Two months had elapsed.
Now a couple of rounds of Flagyl a.k.a. Metronidazole. A yet larger dose, yet longer time. Ack.
Six months or more of the damn parasites, and the damn drugs are worse.
I had the nasty metallic taste of the stuff in my mouth all the time. I was having all kinds of side effects.
My arms were weak, my hair was falling out, I couldn't stand sunlight, my joints were making noises, etc. etc.
Finally she said "Let's try something different." and wrote me an Rx for Albendazole. No taste, no side effects, two pills and I was cured in a day. After being sick with parasites and bad medicine for almost a year. I asked her why she didn't think of that one sooner.
She said "We like to try the least effective treatment first." That's another sophisticated public health principle.
Unlike pigs and chickens, which get the most effective drugs mixed with their feed all the time, we get the useless old crap with bad side effects first.
For ethical reasons. Then when we get sick from our livestock the good drugs won't work anymore.
The folks who cooked up this system are geniuses, every one of them, and they spent their formative decades in the best schools at others' expense.
Genius level intelligence isn't as useful as you'd think. Actual knowledge and a little humility is a lot better.
Next time you get sick with a real disease go to the Mormons or SDA or some missionary church.
Not cuz you'll have the faith to get cured by religion, but because these people travel to places with no chlorine in the water and no screens on the windows.
They've seen and been sick people before, unlike your average American doctor, whose main source of diversion from heart disease and depression is rare genetic diseases.
My Jehovah's Witness landlords in Majuro told me once in conversation: "We usually do a round of Albendazole for parasites every six months or so. Albendazole. Not Metronidazole. The one with the shorter name is much better." I should have listened. It would have saved me a lot of aggravation and some scars on my organs.
That was then. Back to the present.
I'm trapped on a tiny island trying not to die.

I took 2 - 500mg cipro. I was going to do a round of that anyway in case I was carrying typhus or typhoid or whatnot.
Those were my current candidates.
www.wrongdiagnosis.com has a really braindead (no booleans) symptom lookup that's the best thing I know of. Please improve it or recommend something better.

I knew I had something. Putting off the pills cuz I'd be in the sun. I waited. Ankle felt better in a few hours and I could sleep.
Cozy with the little awning collapsed on me. Some animal - flesh-eating parrots? possums? rats? walking back and forth over the top all night.
Fish and some oysters hanging overhead in a bucket. Food in dry bag by my feet. I'm worried the critter will rip into the bag and what trouble that will be.
Too lazy to get up and do something, still can't sleep. It's hard to sleep with unknown animals walking on you in the dark. Everything has teeth.
Other than that, warm and  fairly cozy. Less condensation than wrapped in poncho. Used an airline blanket as a pillow.


This AM woke in dark, couldn't tell if I needed to pee. Lay around. I hadn't died in the night. Ate granola+peanut butter, another Cipro. Made fire in perfect little cave with smoke hole in roof.  Fish was stiff and gray but smelled okay and you can't waste food. Threw fish on top of fire. Fish very good. Saw clouds blowing west but it was a trick. Higher clouds going one way, low clouds the other.

Eventually I felt better. The wind dropped and turned. I sailed 16 miles across Hauraki gulf.
Then I turned west behind some big islands and north along the coast toward Auckland.

Behind the islands the canoe and wind were  perfect for a fast carefree sail. The balance was right on.
I tied off the sheet and put a couple turns of innertube around the tiller. 
Put my feet up and entered an "envy my cool boat and talent for relaxing" contest. Steered by nudging the tiller with my shoulder when necessary.
Surpassed all other boats  in the channel. Blessed them with my raised thumb.
Scenery slid past me. Islands with tree farms on them. The Monterey Pine aka Radiata grows an inch in diameter in a year here.
Ten times faster than it does in Monterey.  Harvard U. endowment fund bought NZ tree farms.
China needs to buy all the world's trees for their building boom. They don't cut their own trees anymore. They remember what happened last time.
The "great leap forward" involved very aggressive logging. The resulting flooding and landslides wiped out whole cities and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
So now they're buying lumber from NZ as fast as it'll grow, which is phenomenally fast.
Harvard made tons more money and wasn't hurt by the dotcom panic. New Zealanders all got a bit more prosperous but the lumber didn't get cheap for them, cuz it's all exported. Just like their superabundance of sheep doesn't put a free leg of mutton in everyone's hand or a sweater on their back.
Everything is exported, nothing is cheap, and all prosper in a small way.

I couldn't expose my skin to the sun of course without getting burned, but I was soaking up the shine like a Saudi first wife.
Man did the rays feel fine on my Burqa.


Conor Welts with his toy sailboat at Maraetai.

I landed and walked up the beach town strip looking for food. New Zealand doesn't really have that.
I looked into a couple of cafes with pastel menu chalkboards and felt bewildered by the cute decor, long names of the dishes and the large number of metric dollars it took to acquire each edible artwork. Most of the businesses along the strip were closed. Summer must be over.
Other than the strip this was a little town with no town in it, just a bunch of little houses like an American suburb rendered by builders who hadn't heard about trophy homes.
I approached a maiden of the tribe. "Where is the real food?" I asked. Her beautiful eyes filled with fear and compassion. "Yonder o stranger is the full extent of our village" she said. "Try Conical Icecreamsville. They have hamburgers." And fled. Sure enough there I found a badly run convenience store with tables in front.
There was something wrong with me. The blue of the sun was hurting my eyes and it was very unlikely I would die here. I felt really lonely.
My loneliness made me shy. I wanted to run away.
I better not try to talk to anyone. I'll freak them out. "Three hamburgers please, and ketchup", I said to the cash register. I felt shaky.
I was in a parallel universe where nothing was familiar and I couldn't be charming.
The human behind the counter gave me some money back and I sat out at a table. I realized I'd somehow entered a timewarp of 1950's Britain.
Something was wrong. There was something totally missing. Something American. In its absence was something else.
Contentment? Could that be it? How dare they!?
The light was very blue and bright.  Fit elderly couples at the next table sang a contented spoken word duet about their friends.
I eavesdropped on their language. I'd never heard anything like it. It was full of effortless crypticisms and the melodic echoes of norse migration.
A parade of disheveled youngsters and dysfunctional couples drove up in tiny cars to feed cards to the payphone and buy lottery tickets.
New Zealand has the most expensive cellphone service in the world.
If you call a cellphone from a payphone you need a specific type of card to be able to talk long enough to say anything.
With the regular kind there are some clicks and the robot lady says "your ten bux are gone, sucka!"
When my litter of burgers were born and swaddled in a newspaper I had something to read.
A whole page of  ads for "discreet massage with special release" and enjoyed the music of human language from my neighbors.

Then I sailed up the coast to look for Harmen Hielkema, my next contact. Waiheke island on my right  and Motutapu, a volcanic cone.
Motutapu means "sacred island" in any Polynesian language. The volcano erupted a few hundred years ago and killed all the inhabitants.
It was left as a sort of memorial park ever since.
It remains one now. It got dark and the wind shifted. It got cold and the spray was chilly.
I put on all my gear, wished for more, and kept heading north beating through the whitecaps. "All my gear" at that point consisted of lifejacket, polyester fleece sweatshirt,
fleece felt hat ontop a thinner fleece stockingcap, lifejacket, nylon poncho belted with a bicycle innertube.
I wanted a proper set of foulies, but this is what I had. The idea that it's colder in the south still gives me trouble.
I crossed tacks with a couple of yachts, hull down beating as well, or motoring straight to harbor in the west, marker lights moving against the lights of Auckland, the great city.
When I crossed the harbor mouth there was a nice train of steep waves coming out, heading toward Motutapu. 
I headed northwest toward land for some flat water. Just out of the channel were some reflections.
"Clapotic waves" like hands clapping, coming out of the water to smack me and shower me with spray.
"Waves and Beaches" is an entertaining book about the interactions between air, water, land, and the scientists who plan amphibious landings.
I counted bays until I thought I was at Milford, dragged the canoe up the beach, and tested my legs.
I'd sailed 43 miles in the day including the major zigzag around the islands. Not counting the many little zigzags tacking and so on.
35 beeline miles between start and finish points.

The land under my feet felt as solid as it appeared, and though it was heavier than water it didn't sink. Someday I must figure out how this mystery works.
I was at Narrowneck beach. A wedding party was happening in the clubhouse just past  the boatramp.
I went looking for a payphone. Progress in the form of automobiles, suburbs and cellphones have nearly exterminated this device.
I let my legs carry me around for a while. I was tired and my brain weak, but my legs wanted to walk around after being cooped up on the boat all day, so the rest of me went along for the ride. I talked to the caterers for a bit, Cook Islanders. "Do you sail a canoe?" I ask. Unfortunately not, but they were friendly and invited me to sit and make myself comfortable while they packed up the tables and chairs that had been cleared away for the dancing.

             Where is my ancestral skill?
Despite my northsea ancestry I myself lack whole bodies of  seagoing knowledge hard-earned for patrimony.
A Swedish acquaintance told a story about sailing with a grumpy old salt.
The guy took on a whole lot of water on one wave, did a trick with the sail and dumped it all out on the next.
My only clearly norse heritage is a reluctance to express my feelings. And a fascination with axes.
Elsewhere in this site are the stories about how this stuff gets passed on.
My grandfather's untimely death, my sister almost dying the same way, my grandmother chopping the end off one of her fingers. The manner of her death.
The sort of stories that went into a book when it took a whole flock of sheep to make the skin parchment pages. And a tribe owned only a single book.
"Bible" means exactly "book" in all our related languages.
In many places and times there was no other book and each family recorded births, marriages and deaths in the end pages.
Just as the original had been written.
The nomads carried it from place to place and having no tombstones to record the passage of their beloved,
wrote it on parchment and carried that with them, their holiest object.

Eventually I got up the nerve to ask revellers for a telephone, but their pockets were empty.
Since I myself had no phone, I should understand why others would lack them. I mentally listed reasons to lack a phone.
To dance better. To not spoil the lines of the garment. To not disrupt the festivities. Because having one costs money and using one costs a lot more.
In the States the contract is full of lies and tricks like an Indian treaty and requires many hours and years of schooling to understand, not to mention it refers to thick binders of subsidiary agreements and regulatory language that aren't available at the time of signing.
Many people don't like cellphones. Perhaps they become friends and are all invited to the same wedding party.
The Amish won't have a landline in their house, but they've found a way to use cellphones that doesn't conflict with their way of life.
Silent ringer and voicemail so they never have to ignore the person in front of them to talk to their hand.
They pay cash and don't sign contracts. The Amish should send peacecorps workers to teach us how to get away with stuff like this.
They aren't required to pay social security and they don't need it because they take care of each other.
They aren't drafted bcause they're all conscientious objectors. The men's odd neck beard once had an obvious meaning.
When they fled Europe to escape the incessant wars a mustache was the mark and pride of an officer.
Shaving the mustache means "I ain't gonna fight".
They came to Pennsylvania, William Penn's Quaker colony, because it was a pacifist country in a world that had none other.

Harmen writes: "When you landed at narrow neck beach don't overlook the fact that the
first person you spoke to on the beach who took you home from where you
called me was my colleague who shared my office at that time, Megan
Simmons and her Husband.
You seem to have a knack for running down the very people you need when
you need them. That's part of the art of navigation brother. Stay in
the flow."

And so it was. I went back to the canoe to put on some dry clothes and make sure it was above the tide.
Some people out for a stroll greeted me. I asked if they knew Harmen, and sure enough they did.
They didn't have a phone with them but invited me home to try their copper.
There they plied me with hospitality and conversation. I was pretty tired by that time so who knows what odd things I said.
Probably a lot of apologizing for my vicious government and the superstitious ants who serve and direct its gigantic machinations.
Their son had just gotten back from a couple years travelling around the world.
An impressive young man blessed with a calm mind and a set of compatible friends, enjoying a weekend prior to restarting school.

I called Harmen, who was tied up and unable to escape as my mom's people would say, but he'd already made arrangements for me.
I had a contact and could dock at the Museum, and he'd arranged hospitality with friends of his at a marina across the harbor from the museum.
The Simmons offered me sleep, but I was worried about the canoe in an unfamiliar town and wasn't comfortable leaving it at the mercy of the people in tuxedos.
When I was too tired to make sense anymore I begged my hosts farewell and stumbled back down the hill to Narrowneck.

I paddled out into the little bay and dropped my "jankar pachul" stick and rock Indonesian "hoe anchor".
Deep enough that the waves didn't feel bottom and stand up to rock me excessively, but not so far that a passing boat could hit me without a detour.
I slid the roll-top style slats out to complete the deck, spread my bedding on that, and slept under the sail. I wore all my fuzzy stuff, hat, airline blanket, and blue fleece blanket.
I was on the main hull or rather sort of in it, resting on this platform of seats and slats a few inches below the gunwales.
I had to move a bit carefully to keep from shifting some piece of blanket off into the water, but got used to it.
It was a bit chilly that night, but convenience rather than comfort is the priority of those who aspire to live like animals.
The next day I hoisted sail and cruised south to see the famous maritime museum in Auckland.

Under the bridge white flocks of sails raced. Droves of boats passed, fishing, cruising, and seeking diversion on the water.
Several skippers pulled their boats close to greet me and my craft's ancient style.


Auckland Maritime Museum at the yacht harbor. They sawed an America's cup yacht down the sternum and affixed it to their facade.
I think the other half of it is on the street side.
According to my memory the vicinity is full of ships on poles and other monuments pointing the youth to greatness in sailing.
The city retains jubilation from having "The Cup", the giant silver bowl that had never left the States before.


Ulua lashed up to the dock, lifejacket used to pad the ama.


Reconstructed voyaging canoe used by youth sailing program.


Gary Dierking built this gorgeous Tahitian style double canoe.


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