12 NZ outrigger sailing

Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
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weds 4-7-04
Tide high enough to get out over the rocks at the mouth of the bay. Wind okay from Pt. Rodney. Had to leave sometime. Water and oats gone. Sailed back around to Town of Leigh boat landing. Kathryn Galvin of Rodney Times interviewing a guy who used fish oil to keep seabirds from biting hooks. She interviewed me + took pix. Gave me a ride into town. NZ journalism students learn shorthand. Hire them! They'll get the quotes right.

Bought 2 bags 850g oats, brown sugar. Looked at menu at cafe but food names too long and prices high. Nothing spoke to me.
4 Million people and all Minneapolis styple yuppie restaurants. Filled water bottles at dock. Great. very un-ergonomic spigot, laying on edge of high dock, reaching over side down behind atm fuel booth. The future - convenience and exercise at the same time!

Rain and many squalls like sw storm system in US. Slow beating upwind, better in flat water. Decided pounding is problem. Never had to think about that before but maybe some of my sail problems were that. Nice surf wave at Mangawai. Big sand dune. Dark. Landed on beach before Te Arai point park. Dragged all up behind dune, slept with wet stuff under awning + sail in rain. Very miserable.

Next AM walked beach. Many shells but dug and found no clams. Signs at park about Maori history. Cooked + ate double oats = two peanutbutterjars 250g? +.7 liter water. Drank much tea. Tried to dry stuff, kept having to throw it under sail+ sit out rain in poncho backed into fir tree. Cold and stupid. Cut hole in nylon cover thing from trash to make arab pantaloons. Realized it's cold and I need gear. More. Sailed with those, pants, vest, lifejacket, poncho, fleece+mask, brimhat, sunscreen, sunglasses. Need greasy sweaters and foulies. Not shoes. Water is warm. Not nice sailing in so much spray and thinking about how important to be dry that night. Good sailing in flat water by shore. Saw scallop dredge. Horrible thing. A factory on a barge moving sideways down the coast just outside the breakers. Sucking up everything and screening out shellfish. Monstrous like Jawa sandcruiser.

Passed Bream tail and turned into the wind. Beating. Caught 3 fish! Kowai. or 4. Getting dark. Always landing in dark. Knowing it's wrong. Looking for the right spot with trees etc. Seeing houses and not liking it. Going too far and dark. Place turned out to have river. Breakers and bar. Houses with lights. Oh well.
Sat outside the breakers eyeing the way in. Got a pulse. Current out, standing waves, breakers coming in and standing up, breaking areas moving around with larger swells, more currents holding waves and then releasing them, reflections. I'd have to snap into character and remember a bunch of skills. I started stowing and tying stuff down. While busy with that I neglected my relationship with the sea and drifted into the bubbles.
Eyes up too late, here comes a big outside breaker to eat me, I'm standing up with a handfuls of gear and my legs in coils of sheet and anchor line.
Like the tree climbing lesson in my book "How to Live Like an Animal".

Step 1. Stand next to a tree.
Step 2. Have an assistant release the bears and wolves.
Step 3. You have just climbed a tree.

Suddenly my preparations were not a priority. I jumped back to the stern and frantically tried to pry the stern around with the steering oar. The wave hit and surfed the boat sideways while I turned it. The sail flapped and boomed from the impact. It felt like a car wreck but cold and the whitewater came through about waist high above the boat.
Ama up in air but I threw myself at the ama to sink it and threw the sheet at the sail to release it. Sail came up and the wave's white arched back kept going toward shore without me.
Water in the hull, bags puffed up floating above the gunwales, buckets banging around. Boat heavy and low. Sloshing waves in water in boat. Fish still with me.
I grabbed my wovewood salad bowl bailer and put my back into bailing. Like a dog after a woodchuck and a dustcloud in the air.
Too heavy for the next wave to take me with it and now there's really a lot of water in. Good thing there's air in the sealed bow and stern chambers.
Much bailing and more waves got in.
The last wave dropped me on the beach and I jumped out and ran around to the front with my wet pants falling and slapping around. Dragged it all up as the next waves lifted it.
Threw bags and gear above the driftwood between waves. I looked out at what my line through the breakers must have been. Hmm. Not what I'd have picked. I wouldn't have thought a tired fool could ride a boatload of water through that. I carry and drag it all over a tiny sandspit to the inside eddy. No line of sight to houses and water between us.

Damn. I was all nice, dry and proud til then. Now soaked and it's getting cold fast.
Walked and worried. Saw my breath. Frost. Pain.
Method acted from old group survival fantasy. "You, do this. Who's not cold? You do that." Gathered kindling and wood. Scaled and gutted fish. Got Tui grass stems like Pampas grass and puffy yellow heads. Available in Pier One stores worldwide. Very flammable. Made fire, chunked fish and boiled them. Admired fire. Dried pants and what I could. Cold. Water in bottle from canoe is so cold it hurts to drink it. A bad sign. Ate fish and worried if I could survive a night worse than last night. Shivered. A new skill.
Dressed up like a Russian Santa. Feet cold. Everything on.
Gathered more Tui grass straw. Old stems around the plant accumulate like a hay bale. Grab handfulls and fill poncho (still wet) with a huge load of straw for a mattress.
Propped up the canoe and built a little sleeping space up against it with sail, tarps, driftwood. Thick straw-poncho mattress. Open on side toward fire in hobostove. Heat reflector behind me, works pretty well. Fairly cozy. Enjoyed fire. Wolfed down fish for as long as I could.
Low forties when I stopped measuring and falling fast. Cold enough for a tired person. I've worn soaked and frozen clothing and it's a decent insulator.
That could happen. You can actually be a lot colder in air that's wet and heavy despite what the thermometer tells you.
Tonight's wind is dry and cold from the south. Good air but moving too much. Scraping my heat off.
Wind is a problem. Crawled into shelter with all layers working and slept pretty well. Kept waking from fear of cold, not that bad. Pissed to side onto sand. A joy of floorless camping.

Had dreams. I'm a labtech over optical table with a man+woman prof in white coats leaning over it from each side. I put my gadget on the table to test some interfero thingy but it seems to attract the laser beam. Left right left. The two profs lock glittering eyes "Johnson and Walker" yells one. "Walker and Johnson" yells the other. "Tim Anderson" I yell and run out the door with my gadget.
Replay the dream for a different ending. This time I yell, "Don't move! what do we do if it stops?" Too much like my real life.
The worst breakthrough I ever had was one I couldn't repeat. I had the formula and the procedure well documented, but just couldn't get the stuff to work.
There's no limit to how long you can spend trying to get something to work that you knew worked once.
Replay again. This time it's a hoax with pulleys, it stops working, and the profs are doomed to a life of frustration trying to make the phenomenon work again. but by this time it's not really a dream and I'm awake.

4-8-04
Slow day beating into chop. Slow to wake up. Waiting for sun. Didn't finish fish. Looked out and realized there was a breaker-free path over the bar. High tide had lifted the waves so they didn't feel bottom, or sandbar lenses had focused them elsewhere. Had to get out before it dropped. Waipu River.
Long day tacking toward and away from rocky scenery and long beaches. Got up to the mouth of Whangarei River. Gales and whitecaps in my face. Didn't want to sail around Bream head. A different one. Many points have this name. Saw nice cove and beach. Beat up into fierce gusts. Almost knocked down. Brutal gusts coming straight off point make it hard to get into the bay. Gale winds mean no way am I sailing around the point. I'm here, so this must be the place I'm going. Landed on crescent beach with dunes and steep hills all around. An oasis of warm sunshine out of the wind. Walked around and spread out my stuff to dry. Anne an Irish nurse came trotting up to see the view and convince herself she was doing the right thing moving here. I pondered the same thing. Thought about being cold and the ordeal. This is Smuggler's cove.

Irish nurse Anne sez:
Schnapper rock cafe - Nunguru.
Hokianga harbor is beautiful. Nothing happening.
Rowene "rowny" is a nice fishing village. Boat shed cafe - cafe there.
Opononi - Omapere - big dunes.
Kohokuku - old houses - boat from Rowene
Kaikohoe - 20 min from kerikeri - hotsprings. N Maori.
N. Manganui - famous fish and chips. Here it's pronounced "fush and chups".

Smuggler's cove seen from up the hill toward the parking lot. It's an old Maori site. The round hill was a Maori Pa (hill fort) and the nearer hill is a midden and house site. There are plaques explaining the history. Past the Pa is the Whangarei harbor entrance. Whangarei is pronounced "Fangaray". Blame a Maori-adapted alphabet. They don't have all the sounds we do, but some of our sounds are subdivided into extra ones for them and use up the left over characters.
I climb up to the Pa. The trail is a tunnel through scrub clinging to the bluff. Nice setting. I admire the view and finish my fish heads. Good!. It starts raining. I retreat.

Slept okay next to log. No rain. Woke a few times out of habit. Am I cold? Why am I awake? Are animals doing something?
Figured out a way to do handheld plotter with vangogo linkage. Diagram.

4-9-04 Good Friday 55 degrees am.
Shadow of hill and clouds. Late to wake. Fishing boat gone, freighter gone, yacht there.

At first light a fisherman strides through my camp with huge kingfish in frame backpack. He got up in the dark, came and caught it off the rocks at high tide. Brought an empty backpack cuz he knew he'd get one. Good planning. Two guys already left in the dark with headlamps. Took forever to cook double dose of oatmeal in wind.
An east indian couple from fiji came for fishing. I help them a bit, they get a couple little snappers. They're engineers. Job market not great. Pay is lower than states. Certificates and degrees very important.

Tried to figure out how to keep sailing and how not to. Decided to pack boat away and hitch into town for the day. I drag the canoe behind dune and tie it down. No-one will mistake it for abandoned.
More Hindu fishermen and chance of a ride made it a do-now thing. I walked out and caught rides with two lolly salesmen back from
a day kayak capsize, swim and buddy tow in the rough. Stopped to see some views and stumps with them.
More walking and no rides. Stole old newspaper from mailbox. Looked faded but it was from one day of rain and UV. Got a ride from an art student coming back from climbing the mountain with the towers. Nice summit.

Email at Emporer game place 16 John St. by Dick Smith. "Emporer" as in "One who runs an emporium". Chinese run, fifty identical computers on tables and the boxes piled at one end of the room. They could pack up and try another town any time. I first tried a couple of email places run by anglos. Can't make it work due to computers disabled with security features. It seems I can only check my email on Chinese owned computers.
Fifty mostly Maori boys playing networked virtual shooting game and much cursing. Email and followed links 3.5 hours and shopped for hostel. Called $.20 from there and "Bunkdown Lodge" lady picked me up. She suggested we stop so I can get groceries. My brain has turned off from being taken care of.
I point my eyes at the shelves but can't figure out what I'm looking at or what the prices are. A million dollars? Five pennies?
So I just start grabbing stuff. Dozen eggs, tomato can, tubes of cookies.
Budget "choc chippie" good tube cookies $1.70 Milk and yogurt for culture after the cipro. Speaking of which it hadn't made me sick like before so maybe it's stale.

Axel emailed me link to German Tim - missing since Nov in Prijon tandem kayak with 2 outriggers and little square sail. Trying to cross Atlantic in 80 days which is reasonable from Canaries to Barbados - Steve Flanagan in rubber raft drifted that in 76 days with ballast bags hanging for much drag. Sad to see and last pictures of him taken from deck of yacht out at sea somewhere. "I'm doing...fine!" I imagine him yelling at the yachties. Could have been me. Now he's irreversibly dead due to the unexpected but not surprising.

Mother ocean digesting his molecules and returning them to us with each breath. The ocean is big and doesn't rest. It makes cliffs into sand.
Whole yachts and ships disappear constantly. Two thousand shipping containers a year wash off the deck in storms and even the ones that float never reach land again. They're low in the current, and current avoids land. Air crosses land so if something is light enough it'll end up on a beach very quickly. Even without the intelligence of an adventurer to guide it. Three or four months later your park bench or glass net float from Japan is among the driftwood in Oregon. But gigantic things like "Team Phillips" 120 foot mega-catamaran break in half, are abandoned and never seen again. It's made of composites so it can't sink. Where did it go? The same place a tiny German boy can go with a tiny kayak. Your lungs and drinking water among others.

Staying in Bunkdown Lodge Whangarei. Nice place. first bed in 11 days. it seemed longer. Not bad. I'm hungry for humans and want to talk a lot but the kids here have been travelling a long time and see people all the time in these hostels. They want to watch american TV shows. I go to other end of building where the europeans are. They also don't want to talk. Maybe there's something strange in my eyes from some narrow escapes and miserable nights. I write and enjoy their company while they talk about nothing to each other and cook.

Hot Bread Shop!!! You saw it here first and it's about time. The only thing better than hot bread is the smell of hot bread.
In Cambridge there's a bakery "Panini" where they can't sell the bread until they count it. So they fill the place with hot bread on shelves and in bags all over the floor. The guy who counts it comes in later, so there you are in a sauna full of hot bread smell and they won't sell you any.
There's another one "Carberry's" that does the more usual thing, which is the bakers have no life and no love, which suits some people.
They get up in the dark and bake the bread so early that by the time the first customers come in it's cold and dead already.
In Palestine they bake the pita bread all day. When it comes out it's all puffed up and hot, a bag-bong just bursting with the most intense hot-bread vapors on earth.
The next time I need a million bucks I'll start selling that stuff.

NZ used to have gigantic eagles that would carry small children away.
These giant chunks of broken glass will prevent them from perching here and crapping on people's heads if they come back.

The other side of the peninsula from Smuggler's Bay. The rocks atop that mountain have a colorful name which I forget.
I compared a map and a calendar and saw that it was time to turn around. When I got back to the canoe I put down sticks, dragged it to the water, loaded it up and sailed south.
Good wind and nice conditions. Puffy clouds. Passed some majestic stone islands offshore. "Ship Rock" and others.
Birds in the distance chasing fish. I throw a lure in the water and try to catch them. They're moving fast. It takes a long time.
Sometimes I get close and can see the fish hitting the surface while the birds dive at them. I get a pulse and do all I can to get speed from the sail.
The school turns and heads away. I tack to follow but can't keep up in that direction.
Suddenly they're all around me, thousands of birds hitting the water. Unbelievable. Where did they come from?
Fish hitting the surface all around me. A jerk on the line. I pull in too fast and it goes slack.
I start counting out loud and reciting nursery rhymes so my hands will know how fast to move. Another bite, this time a hard one.
I've got sheet, tiller, fish line, and a bunch of other stuff to tend to. I throw the sheet at the sail, turn into the wind and sit on the tiller while I pull the fish in hand-over-hand
Marshallese style "The line is your friend- you put it down next to you. The fish is your enemy - you lift it up in the air."
The metaphor has something to do with a Marshallese style of wrestling I think.
A nice big Kawai. It flopped around in the bottom of the boat. I put my foot on it and got the lure out. Threw out the lure and watched the line disappear as I sailed
through the birds and fish. Another bite. What a sport. Sailing and chasing birds, and now actually catching fish. Out here in the scenery. What could be better.
I had four of them before I started feeling like I'd overdone it and headed toward land to camp and feast, leaving the fish and birds to their frenzy of feeding.
Either I took no pictures of the fish or I've lost them, but they were nice looking animals, like a fat speckled trout.

I headed toward this little bay.

It turned out to be a perfect little beach sheltered by bluffs.

The cliffs are composed of hexagonal stone beams. Some kind of slowly-cooled lava formation.

It was such a nice place I thought I'd get extremely comfortable.
As my fish cooked to soup over the hobo stove and it got dark I walked out on the beach and gave myself a haircut.
I've been cutting my own hair for a long time or asking friends to do it. It's surprising how many haircuts a person can recieve without learning to do it themselves. I can cut your hair if you want, you might have to stand behind me to get a really good one, cuz I mostly just cut my own and the gestures are habitual. As I snick snick snicked away with the scissors I noticed an animal approaching. It looked like a large cat or small raccoon. I shone my flashlight on it and it bobbed its head left and right, sniffing.
A Possum! The famous invader from Australia. They have bushy tails unlike the American variety, which look more like giant rats.
There are more of these in NZ than sheep, people, or anything else. They were introduced for their fur and took over.
In Oz they're just another animal, but in NZ some predator or disease is lacking. There was a huge population explosion and they ate so much of the local flora it became an environmental disaster. Wherever I went there were signs of this or that poisoning program and dead ones flattened in the road. I heard stories of how you could shine a light into the trees and see hundreds of them, the light reflecting from their eyes. I didn't have a flashlight good enough to do that, or maybe I'd only been in places where the eradication programs had been successful. I kicked sand at it and it scampered away. I went back to snick snick snicking and here it came again.
I guess the sound of scissors is some kind of possum call.

I slept in this nifty cave under a southern beech tree.
Why is the bag hanging? Well it happened like this: It had gotten dark and I was feasting on Kawai soup, wearing a red LED penlight innertubed to the side of my head as a headlamp. I don't like a lot of light at night because I enjoy my night vision. The red LED is supposed to preserve that.
A digression:
I see very well in low light, but need sunglasses more than most in sunlight because my eyes always seem excessively dilated. Perhaps that is related to my body temperature always being a little higher than normal. In case a doctor is reading this, my superhero vulnerabilities also include scars on my eardrums from endless sneezing during ragweed season growing up in Minnesota. So although my hearing is unusually acute, beyond the limits of the military testing machine anyway, I can't tune out loud sounds and find them very painful. I can't socialize well in restaurants or bars because I can't hear what anyone is saying. It's just like my head is in a garbage can and someone is beating on it.
I feel like I'm being physically attacked. I say to the hostess "Can you turn down the music? It's bothering my hearing aid" and point to my ear.
They are loath to do this even though I'm the customer and supposedly I'm always right. Every public place has amplified music in an attempt to force people to have a good time.
The staff is subject to constant humiliations and are not having a good time. Their one joy is loud music that makes it unnecessary to hear what the customers are saying.
I hear much better with earplugs in, especially my left ear. I'm right handed and have been taking out the right earplug first for long enough to lose more hearing in that ear. Sometimes someone asks "Why are you wearing one earplug?" and I say "I'm saving that one for my wife".

Where was I? Oh yes. Gorging on fish in the dark like our favorite character from that New Zealand movie. A possom approached. Its eyes gleamed from my red LED headlamp. It looked right at me as if I were invisible. I got a pulse. It kept coming. What the hell. It was four feet away. It stuck its head into my red food bag and started rooting around. I reached for a stick from my fuel pile. It looked up at the noise, and stared right at me, like it knew I was there but couldn't see me. I guess they're blind to 635nm light or whatever my LED's were making. I took a swing at it but missed. It jumped back and scampered about 20 feet away. Again it approached as if nothing had happened. I really had a pulse now, and a bigger stick. It was my duty as a tree-hugging hippy to murder this cute fuzzy animal with sharp teeth. As its head entered the tee-off zone I swung for the outfield. Those metaphors really do go together. There's a league game called "tee-ball" for boys too young for softball. This critter had impressive reflexes. It managed to jump and spin before I connected. I tagged it but not on the skull bone. It kept going when it hit the ground and ran up the hill at top speed til it was over the top. An impressive athlete. It was a 40 degree slope or so covered with beeches and dry leaves. I couldn't have done that. Not even if a proportional 4 thousand pound monster was behind me. Especially if it had just clubbed some part of my anatomy while I was trying to eat dinner.

A big dune.

I sailed south and up the Pukapuka river to visit Jefferson Chapple in Warkworth. Here's his Kiribati-style proa "Te Hau".
He tortured (forced over a compound curve) the plywood enough to plank it with full sheets. It's light like a floating guitar.
There are Hei-tiki figureheads at the stems. There are drawings and explanations of this boat in Multihulls magazine jan/feb 2000 issue.
This link is the table of contents of the issue: http://www.multihullsmag.com/magazine/OldMags/jan-feb-2000.htm

The mast sockets and the wedge that holds the akas (main crossbeams to the outriggers) in place.
Stepping the mast in one socket or another rakes the sail fore and aft to adjust the balance of air and water forces.
Our language is evolving. In Hawaiian the plural of "aka" is "kiato". The Ikiribas (Gilbertese) have another name for it I don't know.
Proper usage is difficult. This canoe has a varied ancestry.
The outrigger attachments are an East African style introduced to Polynesia through the Marquesas Islands.

Jefferson made this accurate replica of a toy sailing canoe from Kiribati.
It's a "sinker" in windsurfing parlance, and needs to be sort of thrown at the water to launch it.

More pictures of the contraption.

Jefferson spent time in Indonesia. He's got a collection of interesting artifacts and stories from those days.
He's documented his own canoe in good detail and a number of other canoes. Contact him for details.
He can be reached at: staysail(at. don't spam him)xtra(dot)co.nz

Jefferson says:
Hi Tim,
The island of the blacksmiths is SABU to the northwest of timor, small and
just east I think of SUMBA. They were the stone toolmakers for at least the
eastern part of Indonesia and simply changed materials when metal came
along. Other islands in the region doing tools though include YAPIN, a long
skinny island above Sabu, and AMBAI which is a dot just below Yapin.
My memory is that my 3 adzes came from Island of ROTI off SW end of Timor,
made by a man about 65 yrs who had lived on Roti for about 40-50 yrs but
still felt and regarded himself to be Sabunese. Toyota truck springs were
raw material, trucks being only form of transport on Roti apart from 50cc
mopeds. Island roads and climate rotting trucks out faster than you can
blink. I didn't see his tools or watch him working. All I saw was him
kicking the lukewarm ashes of a small open fire maybe 600mm diameter, with
his feet in rubber thongs/sandals to expose several of these exquisitely
formed adze heads. We spoke thru a local interpreter with good english
skill. I traced a hafted adze full size so I could make my own handles
correctly.
My notes indicate the following data may be from you April 2004.Two
informants were Albertus Sembai from Ambai address Jalan Kangkung No 13
Hamadi Jayapura Salatan Indonesia 99922, and John Waromi, Jalan Bayam Hamadi
III 15/5486 Jayapura Salatan Indonesia 99922.
I assume the ancient canoe project is Bob Hobman's notion to sail east
upwind from Solomons/Sant Cruz across the 1600 mile ditch to Fiji being the
major !0,000 yr impediment to Pacific migration. Don't know either project
name or canoe name I'm sorry.

Keep me posted please,
Cheers Jefferson.