MY GREAT BIG FAT LOUISIADES EXPERIENCE

As a 70^th birthday gift for Dean, I agreed (not all that graciously) to spend 2011 living on our boat, cruising the east coast of Australia, including an offshore adventure on the 2011 Louisiades Rally.  We have just returned from the Rally, having covered 1200 thrilling miles round trip between Australia and PNG, across the Coral Sea.

People ask me what the Rally was like. I produce sound bites. For foodies:  “We got heartily sick of fresh crayfish”.  For sailors: “Got hit by squalls and very rough seas in the Coral Sea.” For people stuck in cities; “It’s a pristine tropical paradise, untouched by western pollution.  Crystalline water, delicate coral, beautiful grass-hut villages.”  For academics, lefties and political economists: “Money is not the common currency. And it is sad to see malnourished, sometimes dying children and know that western medicine could save them,” 

The truth is that it was a great, big, fat, unmatchable experience. The six weeks tested body, equipment, expertise and stamina. There were assaults on our consciences and our understandings of how the world works. The seafood and the physical beauty of the islands and bays were superb. We participated in exotic sing-sings, mu-mus and regattas put on by the locals and received matchless camaraderie from fellow yachties.

A big commitment

The Rally was a big commitment for us. You can’t just book a Qantas jet to Pana Pompom or Nimowa. You need time, an ocean-going cruising yacht capable of withstanding an extended pounding by wave and wind, plus the knowhow for handling seas and weather, safety, communications and navigation equipment, provisioning food, water, fuel, spares and medical supplies and boat maintenance.  As late entrants to the cruising life, we spent 12 months on coast between Sydney and Cairns before the rally on a vertical learning curve, graduating from being mere sailors to being ready for ocean cruising.

In the week before departure, the rally fleet was hectored by Guy Chester, the multi-talented rally impresario and eco-sustainability warrior who is the moving force behind the rally. In the Louisiades, he warned, there are no shipwrights, no chandlers, no mechanics, no doctors, few nurses, no sea rescue services, no supermarkets or shops, no cafes, no pubs, no public transport, no phones, little water.  Tales of previous rallies, all apparently true, were laced with horror stories about shipwreck, unreliable charts and uncharted reefs, groundings, coral that eats boats, 50 knot squalls, infection and illness. (Thanks for that Guy). By the time we got the boat to the ‘starting line‘ at Yorkeys Knob, second thoughts sprouted. It was only pride and innate stubbornness that made me press on.

During the rally, as Guy had foretold, poor preparation was rewarded. It was heartbreaking to hear the piteous cries for help from Rally skippers fronting mutinous crews because their coffee ran out, or the champagne had been left on the dock, or the forward berth leaked, or their anchor chain was too short to escape the coral snags.

Also, diligent preparation aside, sometimes you are lucky in cruising and sometimes you are not.   On our first day in the Louisiades, bad luck targeted Moonraker, specifically aiming at the starter motor. Thank God (i.e. Guy) that we had somewhat petulantly packed a spare, despite our doubts that the starter motor was a big risk.

Additions to the crew: younger and browner than usual.

We had drawn the line, however, at packing a spare windlass. That decision resulted in four weeks of manually pulling the 60lb anchor on its heavy chain, usually from depths of 20m. Our three-person chain gang worked hard at every anchor lift, causing unkind merriment from the rest of the fleet. We cheated on a couple of occasions by hiring young village men to do it for us. It was a joy watching rippling brown muscles on our boat, which is crewed by older, paler persons. Still, no-one had a heart attack, and I have been known to pay gyms to lift weights like that.

A little help from our friends

There were 15 boats and 42 humans (plus the superhuman Guy) who made it to the Louisiades on the rally, The boats came in all shapes and sizes, multi- million dollar yachts, to small 30 year-old keelers and even a large luxury motor launch. The people came from all walks of life: rich, poor, young (8 years old, hi Della) and old (two 69 year-olds, no names), families, backpackers, singles, marrieds, business people, tradies and academics (hi Andy and Roger). There were experienced and novice sailors.

This polyglot crew had a yachty attitude in common however: fierce independence, self-confidence, determination to be self-sufficient, and a can-do attitude that comes from facing down those eternal and infernal cruising contingencies such as gear breakage, bad weather and bad luck. And optimism that the world is a wonderful place.

The skippers and crew also had in common endless generosity to others. In Moonraker’s case, every boat in the fleet helped us in some way without hesitation and without expectation of reward. Attitude gave us about 10 hours of backbreaking labour from two skilled, lunatic work-a-holics (Alan and Dave) to fit our spare starter motor and bleed the engine.  Without that we would have sailed home on the first day in the Louisiades. Reliance (thanks Bill) lent us their beautiful big, specially-designed fuel polisher, without which we would not have had useable fuel. Finesse gave us 3 pawl springs for our anchor winch, together with the benefit of the presence of their two children as rally-slaves.  Leyla (thanks Mort) lent us a fridge when our compressor burned out. The Sanctuary crew fed us cheese, took us on the race at Nirvana, and critically, maintained the indefatigable Guy in apparently peak condition during the rally. Desire took our crew skindiving; Little One acted as our Lode Star, her nav. lights providing a cheerful reference point in the Palm Passage on a dark night when we had to steer by hand. Tinker supplied a canister of gas and an adapter when our gas ran low. Honeywind’s sharp look-out noticed that we were heading for a reef at Blue Lagoon. Mustang Sally supplied good humour, advice and encouragement when things were low and took over the scheds. when Sanctuary was in the marina. Rex topped up our water supply from their water maker and Greg kindly gave me a guided tour of his impressive propeller; Love of Gaia was always to the ready to relay messages, supply tools or labour. Boats towed each other, rescued each other’s dinghies, freed each other’s anchors from coral, supplied each other with spares, food and drink, advice… the giving went on and on. There were very few boats (perhaps none) that did not get a little help from their friends.

Getting there and back again

Passage-making on the Coral Sea was …. exciting.

For some of it, picture very rough seas, water crashing over the deck, the dodger and the bimini, the wind howling, lightening flashing, the bow carving its way through, over or under chaotic waves. Moonraker, the boat, loves it, but her crew feels like it is in a washing machine. The constant agitation and occasional rinse was physically tiring. Sea sickness struck. Bumps and bruises emerged. The three-hour- on three-off watch schedule was draining, especially for the first couple of days of the passage, before the body acclimatises (code for ‘becomes too numb to notice’).

We never felt alone, however, as each yacht called in on the twice-daily HF scheds, Guy The Cheerleader was relentlessly positive and managed to imply that this was a perfectly calm Coral Sea crossing.  As good as it gets, he said.  And, how to explain his determination to talk about rich food on the sched., undeterred by references from other skippers to the nutritional value of  dry biscuits and Quells?

On Moonraker, as on other boats, there were also periods of high adrenalin, the crew doing battle with the boat or the elements.  Reefing the main by head torch a bit too late for the 40 knot squall caused shouting and feats of daring-do. Fixing a sheered bolt in the auto helm at the height of a squall calls for ability to put hope over despair. Big ships converging on you from the Jomard Strait in the pitch black of a stormy night calls for sangfroid, screaming, or both, even with AIS. Fuel filters that gunk-up are spine chilling when you are approaching narrow coral-filled channels. Feeling the skin shred as the loaded spinnaker halyard rips through a hand caught against a jam cleat is, well…confronting. Thank God, (i.e. Guy Chester) for pressing us to get a fully stocked medical kit.

But, by and large, as yachties do, we accepted the drama as part of the fun. Probably it is character-building.  And even if it’s not, we knew that it would stop soon enough.  And, because we have done it all before, we knew that the ‘adventure’ part of cruising is like the pain of childbirth: eventually, you forget how awful it is and only remember the good bits.

And there were plenty of them.

Paradise Poster

Beautiful land, sea and people

Once we crossed the Coral Sea and began to island-hop in the Louisiades, we transformed from doughty sailors to bikini-clad (some of us anyway) poster people for tropical paradise.  Balmy weather, calm seas, cooling trade winds, white sails, waving palms, sparkling clear water, champagne at the ready, beach parties and lobster.  It was impossibly beautiful, remote, unspoiled.  No money, no shops, no pollution, no crowds, no electricity.

It was also exotic. Grass-hut villages and their friendly inhabitants are still living a subsistence life, getting necessities from gardens and the sea. Guy’s organisational and political brilliance netted us cultural displays from the athletic local warriors who danced welcome sing sings, and from the children’s choirs, which  moved some of us to tears with their church-music harmonies about their island homes. The horizon was always dotted with sailaus, and children in dugout canoes.  A highlight was the opportunity to make tourist-style trips from one island to another on the dramatic sailing canoes and on the local long boats.

How romantic can you get?

The other side of the coin

The Paradise Poster has another side.

You can see, if you choose, the malnourished, scabies-ridden children, the slight frames of the adults with rotten teeth from betel nut, the lack of water in many villages, the very low life expectancy, the decay of the traditional life style, the high maternal and neo-natal death rates, the despair arising from future uncertainty, the lack of employment opportunities for the young, and the poverty that precludes good education and even rudimentary health care.

The locals are very articulate about their
development challenges

The people are very polite, but also, if you want to listen, very articulate about their community development challenges.  

One reason they are pleased to see us is that traditional ways are being lost.  Community leaders grasp opportunities to keep the traditional culture alive for the kids. When the Fleet arrived in a number of villages, the whole community turned out for the sing-sing or regatta, school closed, gardens emptied and the ceremonies began. The locals have a whale of a time, singing and dancing and exercising their lively sense of the ridiculous. Occasionally a pig was killed in honour of our arrival and a mu mu (feast) was put on.

Their interest in the fleet has a practical side too, evident in the stream of canoes that visit each yacht in each anchorage.  Though they are principally subsistence farmers and still use shell ‘money’ for exchange of big items like brides and pigs, they seek donations of books and pens for the schools, medicine for the clinics and clothes for families. They want help with building or maintaining tanks for fresh rainwater catchment. They want to sell their handiworks and produce, sometime for money but often for items like fish hooks, tools or clothing.  Individuals beg donations to help defray education fees, as PNG does not yet have free universal education. They want the beche de mer fishing to start up again after it was closed due to over fishing and they worry about falling fish stocks.  They want to receive the government money that is supposed to trickle down from mining royalties from Port Moresby.  They want their children to get a modern education, in English, with associated economic opportunities, in their own island communities, so kids are not spirited away to western-style poverty and possibly crime elsewhere. 

Are you any judge of the quality of the grass skirt?

Sometimes proceedings challenged my western liberal sensibilities. At ceremonies, rally people sat on chairs in the shade, the locals stood in the sun. We ate first at mu-mus, the locals following after we had finished. We westerners constituted half the judging panel for the Miss Misima bare-breasted beauty pageant. One rally participant was shocked to see that the annual budget for schooling Nimowa elementary school’s 150 students equalled the sum he spend on fees for his son’s schooling each semester.

It is hard to untangle the contradictions, which became most evident in the pem-pewa ceremony. Each person on the rally came equipped with pre-packed gift bags for local women. They contained items such as  plastic cups and bowls, ropes, pegs, soap, tee shirts all stuffed into a Coles zip-up cold items bag. These bags were exchanged at a formal pem pewa (gift sharing) ceremony for a gift from a local woman, typically a stunning, carefully arrayed hamper of pawpaws, pineapples, passionfruit, citrus, often including handmade bowls or baskets. One woman had bought hers from her village a 4-hour bus trip away. The ceremony was valued by the locals, but to me it seemed unequal: a cornucopia of hand-grown produce and handmade crafts in exchange for some Chinese plastic frippery. It felt like theft.



Guy Chester with good for donation to Nimowa Clinic



Guy the Cultural Warrior had briefed us that the Rally, though not a charity, provides opportunities for yachties to help the communities we visit. And we did. This year, a few boats contributed tens of thousands of dollars each.  Others donated a range of items collected according to their means from their home communities and yet others contributed what they had on board to spare.

No-one on the rally could go away thinking anything else but that we are an obscenely wealthy group, and that we were privileged to participate in the lives of these communities.

Without a doubt I would suggest that anyone who can get their boat ready should go on the Louisiades rally. 

Call Guy today.