Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
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3-30-04 Pulled up for lunch on a  nice little island. Kayak guidebook says it's a sanctuary, day use only.
They're deforesting the island's high ground, must have been non-native trees there.
NZ is trying to get endangered species, mostly flightless birds and plants re-established.
The first step is to set up real native habitat in offshore islands, exterminate the rats and other exotic predators, and then release breeding pairs there.
This is apparently one such island.

Sailed off looking for a place to camp. Finally pulled up behind drift logs around point from  S.cove and coppermine ruins on Kawau Island. Bright blue oxide vein in roof of shaft. The first place I tried had signs:  "conservation area. no this. no that." What the hell? Doesn't look like a turtle nesting spot. Next one. New concrete drain, walkway edged with green (poisonous. pressure treated) lumber. Signs "this trail this way" "that trail that way". Jeezus. Fuckers think their job is to do something. If they want to put up street signs they should go home to Auckland. Lots of streets there need signs. Queen street for example is missing many. (wonder who stole those?) Anyway every fucking island I stopped at was off limits with signs for camping. The kayak book says "no camping on any of these islands." I'd sure leave less trace than the bozos "conserving" them. Love nature? Leave it alone! Anyway I needed to stop somewhere and that's where I was, so I compounded my felonies with a fire in the can stove to cook snails + oatmeal (separately). A nice lady in gumboots came and greeted me, concerned.
She: "Do you have a tent?"
Me: "A tarp."
She: "Charts?"
Me: "No place to put them, I've got a map."
She: "A chart of where you're going? Do you know where you're going?"  etc. "You're worse than my sons".
Me: "A tide chart? No, and no watch either to use one."
She told me about the tough tide at the north end of  the island, when tomorrow's tides were, and the forecast.
She: "Do you have food?"
Me: "Want a snail?"
She: "No, real food. tins."
Me: "I've got food, not very good food, or I'd never learn how to fish."
She: "Well, throw a line  off that point and you'll get  something. "
Me: "What do you use for bait?"
She: "Pippies"
Me: "What?" (Later in oz I learn about pippies. They're little clams you find with your feet in the sand. You must have magical powers to do this.)
She : Okay sign. "Whelks. find them on the  rocks."
Hmm. She must mean limpets. Good idea. I've eaten a thousand of them while sailing a canoe to alaska. I could have caught fish instead.
Sure enough, they're tough and stay on a hook well, easy to scrape out of the shell, and I have fish for lunch the next day.
I sent the surviving snails back to mother ocean.


A couple of these small flightless birds came grazing along the shore at twilight. Not Kiwis, some relative. They didn't seem to mind my company.

4-1-01
Just back from "Random Reflexology"TM a.k.a. walking barefoot on pebble beach. Signs "vessels must not anchor between cable markers" "private property" "wildlife sanctuary". Just like home. A "free" place where nothing is allowed. I needed to land though cuz I was shaky for lunch and had to land somewhere.
Dragged my lure through thrashing schools of fish and diving birds on the way over, but no bite. Lost a big one yesterday pulling it in fast like Bonito, fell off at boat. Caught a little one, put out line while unloading on shore, something big on. Not fast enough this time, slack line wrapped around underwater rock. Paddled back out with one hand, handline in other.


Big Snapper! Big to me anyway. Paddled back, one hand line, one paddle, parked canoe, pulled fish up pebble beach. That's how to do it. Let the little one go, the first one for Maui like I'm supposed to.


My "big fish" with my "jankar pachul" Indonesian-style "hoe anchor". When the rock is on the bottom the hoe part floats or is at least  light. When dragged over the bottom it tends to orient itself right and chop the hoe end into the bottom. A continued pull makes it plow in. It's a great anchor for a soft bottom. Some had an iron bit on the hoe blade. The rope attachment always looked like it had been fiddled with and lashed over with smaller string. Some of the ballast rocks looked like they'd been shaped. In a hard or rocky bottom a grapnel or variants of the fisherman anchor were more popular. I kept my eyes open for anchors all over Indonesia. There is a lot of variety. Welded or bent and lashed from re-rod, hybrids of various types. Canoes often used thin line like clothesline for the anchor line or even heavy monofilament.

 
I think the snappers are spawning in the area and this is probably snapper jizz that drifted away from the spawning beds.


Fire in can stove, very easy to light but smoky. Needs another air intake at the bottom. Cleaned and scaled, steamed (boiled) in stainless mixing bowl I use for a pot. With wovewood saladbowl from trash ontop for a lid. Delicious and soup. Saved the fish's eye lenses to dry into "chinese pearls" to go with snaildoor "fake eyes" from yesterday. Then a big batch of oatmeal and darkbrown sugar then two teabags and many cups tea and much sugar Bedouin style. Read guidebooks+relaxed. No-one came to kick me off, write tickets, complain, or offer help. Just these hardworking signs, ever vigilant, and the Cable,  a 5" black pipe running right up and over this damn Sanctuary. Two green metal doghouse sized boxes sunk in concrete announce "Stick No Bills".

Just got bit by anopheles mosquito. The malaria carrier. Legs in air "like arrow" itchy bite. Slammed another in guidebook. Malaria? I'm the only recent immigrant in 100 meters. They aren't supposed to fly far in a night. There are outbreaks near airports now from mosquitoes in the landing gear and from biting the concentrations of recent travellers to the tropics. Malaria used to be common away from the tropics. The anopheles mosquito lives all over. In Illinois malaria was eliminated by putting screens on the windows. That way if a mosquito bit an infected person it sayed in the room with him, instead of flying out to bite other people. Also they made war on the swamps with fire, poison, drainage, pouring gasoline and oil on them to suffocate the larvae, etc, etc. But it was the window screens that really eliminated the disease according to some source I'm sure I couldn't find now.
There must be fresh water here somewhere for these mosquitoes, maybe just little pools in hollow trees and crotches of branches. Now dark - writing w/red led retrofit lifejacket beacon penlight. Not supposed to wreck night vision, but it's a bit bright. Shielding it with my hand from town, who knows what it might mean. They're on International Rules - flashing red means something. In US nav rules "Reagan Rules" it means "bicyclist".


Catamaran with kickup rudder on the island. Due to past mishaps I'm fascinated with rudder designs.

4-2-04 friday
Slept pretty well. Kept waking up and thinking  "Why am I awake? I'm not cold". Sasquatches and other monsters made an awful racket attacking and defending the Cable. Some mosquitoes buzzing. Lots of dreams. Thugs with guns decorated with plastic toys. A young queen Elizabeth throwing herself at me. John Waromi built a sailing race canoe with a tiny jib way in front.
Time for a bath. Do I have the nerve? Clean. Yes I do. Why so much writing? No one to talk to but myself. 62 degrees and a Northwest (warm) wind. A nice clear day and I haven't been rained on yet. I don't think it ever gets very warm in this country.

I had bibs on the brain. Was wishing I'd picked up those wetsuits out of the trash or that big sheet of neoprene foam and made a pair of insulated bibs like my cold-sailing gear back in Boston. That's all I'd need to be comfortable in any weather. Contact cement and a day hand stitching. Can I just buy something? Nothing on the market I like better than my own. And outrageously expensive.
Oh well. I'll just do the Ecuadorean plastic bag skirt. Just as warm, and I'm not walking around. Old kite bladders would be good. Iron melt them onto cloth to make really durable waterproof gear. Patch again with iron. Good for folding boat skin too.

Reworkable plastic melt stuff is good. Grass tree resin - world's best hot melt glue. Oz aborigines used a glob to stick a spearhead on the butt of a shaft, then killed animals with it. Modern science has created nothing as good as that.

Picked up a rock with hole in it, a "Maori sinker".


Sat 4-3-04
Camped on tiny rock beach just inside Cape Rodney on Leigh side. Sunny + puffy clouds. Behind sail for shade. Just cooked oatmeal. Lost a fish + 3 hooks +sinker. Too slow pulling in. Fish wrapped line around rocks + broke it. Very irritated last night. Trying to find a campsite where I wouldn't have to see houses. Trophy home disease seems to have reached this area. NZ settlement patterns are usually easier on the landscape. A beach house here is called a "bach" pronounced "batch". It's usually back behind the dunes and the beach is public. There's much talk on the radio about "foreshore rights". The Maori are guaranteed them in some treaty. Looks like the country is going to extend the same rights to all citizens.
Wet+slow. Going windward in chop. rudder too small.


Just ate a hundred cats-eye snails. Traditional Maori food. Some as big as a golf ball. Each has a pretty little "Satan's kneecap" door with a swirly pattern to close it into the shell. Don't like the name? rather have a pile of "angel patellas?" They look a bit like fake eyes for taxidermists. Sure felt like they were staring at me halfway into the second batch.


I replenished my body's precious stores of bile for sure. I started feeling silly but in a good way and a bit dizzy. Ate some more oatmeal in case they had negative calories or somesuch. My recipe? Make a hobo stove from a tall can. Feed it from the top so it smokes a lot. Cut more air intakes in the bottom til it doesn't smoke so much. Gather 120 snails from a country with not much poison in the water. Put them in a stainless mixing bowl with a bit of water and a wovewood salad bowl ontop for a lid. Cook the hell out of them, stirring once.
Break a tine off a tiny fork so it's narrow enough to pry them out of the shell. Save the water! It's bitter, thus it will prevent  malaria in Indonesia and induce shamanic visions in South America. Twist out the snail to get the whole thing. The little green blob in the middle is the bile mongoose. Both ends taste better than it does. If you don't see it, the snail will taste good all the way. I was having all sorts of funny ideas, like what kind of news show I'd like to see, and Mother Theresa and Gandhi getting in my way trying to take pictures of a motorcycle accident.

I took a break to climb the hill and look at the coast to come. The gully is very thick with Maori flax. A little creek cuts a tunnel through it. It runs out under the stones I'm sitting on now, so isn't visible. A little pool where it hits the driftwood above the stone beach. That's where the mosquitos come from, 20ft from my bed of driftwood boards. A little further, the decomposing body of a sheep laying in the creek. Fleece, skin, and bones poking out. So that was the "sickly sweet odor of a corpse" I'd been smelling. Should have recognized it from reading murder mysteries. Good thing I hadn't been drinking the water.


Those bones on the beach? Sheep not deer. And either someone likes throwing dead sheep down here or there's a dangerous section ahead. Aren't sheep surefooted like goats? Sure enough, sloping sides, slippery dirt, a cliff with crumbling rock. Skeletons of two more sheep moving down the sides of the the gully, helped by gravity and night animals. Five sheep total, maybe more in the weeds, unless they'd been two headed. Then they'd have been taken better care of. Did the farmer notice them missing? Had they jumped? Grown despondent in the days prior, left notes? Or were the deaths unexplained tragedies?
If I die before I'm 70, it's definitely foul play, and I want justice! My ghost will help you find the murderers and bring them to justice.
Up at the top, stupid houses, so I didn't bother looking for the view. I'd have been in someone's front yard. When I got back I looked again at erosion patterns. Maybe sheep had just broken legs and caused some of this erosion eating grass and trying to get back up. Maybe they're sick from madcow, liverfluke, blind staggers, anthrax, some disease that makes them stupid and prone to stumble off a cliff. I finished my 120th snail. Dum de dum de dum. Why are these snails so huge? Maybe the creek full of drippings from the sheep trap feeds them. Dammit!!!

Dammit. Snails are a lifecycle step for a bunch of sheep parasites. Maybe they host other diseases as well. Why can't I go a week without almost dying?
Oh well. don't feel sick yet. Good thing I'm not squeamish. fiddled with rig and canoe, slept in same spot. Woke in dark, snails trying to escape. Scooped dirt, ashes in bucket, crapped in that. My people do it that way. Ashes or lime in the chamber pot and there's no smell.  Piss separately. Deal with it later when I canoe out. 68 degrees, cloudy, west wind. Low tide.

One of my pastimes on a trip is to re-live my regrets. I dwell on and regret my catalog of every inept or hurtful thing I ever did. After a few hours my guilt gland, jaw clench, and shudder muscles are milked out for the day. I feel lousy and melancholy. I remember my childhood thoughts that such mistakes are only possible with other people around.
Running away only gets you so far.
I wonder what military doctrine could be adapted to this problem and what "acceptable losses" in human relations should be. Maybe the wrong metaphor. "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly" would be a more cheerful slogan.

I  imagine some inventions. A sleeping bag cut on the bias would stretch right, be more comfortable. I'm relying on blankets on this trip. Partly inspired by Ray Jardine, partly a retro thing to try it like it was. I think it would be better if I had some "blanket pins", big safety pins once used to to make babies cozy or make a blanket more like a sleeping bag. I conclude that an actual sleeping bag would be even better. Score one for modern conventions. I console myself that Inuit invented the sleeping bag.

Viking-style quick release used on longships. What's it called? Wish I could find that source again. diagram. sheep rib is just the right curve for the hook part, tuck the end under loop of rope. Longships are overcanvassed, sail always ready to cut away. Vulnerable to backwind.

Sewed a sun mask + modified fleece skimask from thriftstore for another. Mulled a book about masks and veils. Interviewing people about theirs. "So, Mr. "The Jackal", it was summer. Olympics. Why ski masks?"
"Sub-commandante Marcos. I hear many women have fallen in love with you althought they think you're disfigured. Like Phantom of opera. How do you feel about this?"
"And where are the masks made? There's no skiing in Mexico."
I really wished I knew more about veils. Very blue light here and much UV. I needed one. No sunscreen was good enough for all day on the water. Indonesian Jillbobs don't cover the face. That pattern book for islamic garb was nifty. And being women, there are of course ways to make one veil more sexy than another. Men aren't in charge of designing these things. It's not like in France. I bet bellydance books/sites show how to make one that won't come off, obstruct breathing or fog glasses. Ok, in the states they wear contact lenses while bellydancing.
Other masks - intifada kids, hawaiian fishermen, swat teams. Why them? What a weird custom. Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman + superheroes.
I imagined interviewing the actor who played batman.
"Mr. Adam West, skin cancer is a huge problem in the southern hemisphere due to ozone loss and UV exposure. You wore a mask as batman and even after all that exposure to the bright movie lights, your face is still as smooth as a baby's butt. You look great. Did you wear one type of mask or several? Can you recommend yours to Australians and New Zealanders for everyday use? Was it comfortable? Were there any features you wished it had? Were the bat ears like chimneys for convection cooling? Were they important?"

Mon 4-5-04
Still here. And. I got a hankering for snails again. Of all things. Oh well. After mulling I decided saltwater snails weren't hosts for any disease I knew of, and every critter's got to eat something rotten one way or another. Everything is decaying and that's what makes a rich region. Gathered some real whoppers.

I was carrying a hatchet head I'd picked up from a trash pile. A gift from Garbage Santa. Used my Japanese stick drill (a stick with a metal point like a funny nail) to drill out the old broken hadle and drove out the chunks with a stick and rock.
Carpenters in Japan use this ancient tool constantly. It's especially good for the cedar they prefer as a building material.
Made a handle for the hatchet out of a teak floorboard from the driftwood pile. Tried my Ambai island adze made by Jayapura blacksmith Albert Sembai, 70 years old. Good for tropical wood with weird interlocking grain. I had a little filet knife I'd bought in a thrift store for a dollar. I cut a chunk of black polyethylene pipe and flattened it with a rock to make a sheath. It's perfect. Good ventilation and small to carry in a pocket. You need airflow in a knife sheath or even a stainless blade will rust in salt water.

Drizzly - put up sail as awning. Water gone - collected rain off sail.


Just ate 80 more snails and another day has gone by. What if I never get the urge to leave? Yesterday tried to make lime from a seashell. Put it in the fire a long time. It cracked + turned grey. It wasn't lime. When it cooled I put water on it. It didn't hiss +  get hot.  Ground it with stones, it wasn't white. Used bamboo wedges to spread new handle in hatchet head. Bamboo is the hardest wood washed up in these driftwood piles. Too many sheep and not enough trees here. Maori called sheep "land lice". Southern beech is nice, but haven't seen much good wood here. I guess I've learned that pine can be used for boatbuilding, spars and all.

Very nice place here. Water, rocks, and trees. As pretty as any place could be when the sky is blue. Just big enough for one and it's accessible at high tide. Now colder. 59 degrees S. wind. Last night +this am cooked up hot sand in pot. Tried to melt+bend sunglass earpieces to fit my head better. Not hot enough, then plastic foamed up +sand stuck to them. needs thermostat.

Tues 4-6-04, 52 degrees
Still on Cape Rodney. Sleeping facing east is indeed the right thing. The sun wakes me up at the right time.
The "scissors" on the leatherman tool are no good for cutting hair and pretty irritating on cloth. Sharpening doesn't seem to help.
The pliers are pretty good. The wire cutters are terrible. They bend the wire. "Lineman" or "nipper" style are better. Harmen agrees.
The can opener leaves a sharp lip around the inside, doesn't finish the cut and is hard to use left-handed.
People! It's 2004! Don't invent new can-openers! Use one that works!

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