Home is the Sailor from the Sea

Courtesy of Steve Callahan

After eight hard days at sea, a quiet dawn reveals the rugged tip of Bream Head, the entry to our home bay in New Zealand.

Bluewater sailors will wax poetic on the beauty, grace and power of the Sea. With a misty eye we will confess our deep devotion to her and pledge eternal love. In that sense we are a pathetic lot for it is an unrequited love. The Sea is as cold as she is deep, as fickle as she is wide. When we venture out upon her, she may usher us on our way with balmy breezes and lap gently upon our hull; or she may thwart us with frustrating headwinds and mountainous waves bent on bashing us to pieces.

Being 3 1/2 years out and on the last leg of our challenging Pacific Rim voyage, and with Diana already in New Zealand ahead of me, perhaps I was a little too anxious to put the last 1,100 of those 22,000 nautical miles behind me. From the moment my nephew, Stephen, and I left the pass south of Lautoka in western Fiji the winds blew contrary from the South Southeast ranging from fresh to near gale. The seas were steep and slammed our 36 foot steel cutter, the Roger Henry, with an unnerving repetition.

A prudent sailor's first inclination would be to slow down and fall off, but I was not in a prudent mood. Slowing the boat down would have prevented us from flying off the back off steep waves and plummeting into the steep troths behind. Falling off would put us not only on a gentler point of sail but on the recommended course towards the tip of the New Zealand's North Island. The theory is that by sailing well west of the rumb line, the boat will be set up for a starboard tack back down the coast of the North Island when the inevitable Southwesterly buster comes rolling out of the Tasman Sea.  

But for as vague and differing as their opinions often are, all the meteorological pundits agreed that this was a La Nina year. This means that the established high pressure systems would hover over Australian and New Zealand waters pushing the low pressure systems coming across the Tasman to the south. If we positioned ourselves well to the west and the prevailing winds held from the easterly quadrant, we would find ourselves slogging back against both contrary winds and currents too near the swallowing New Zealand coast.

You can't know what the right thing to do is. You have to follow your instinct then stick to the plan, for the worst thing to do is zigzag around an empty ocean in indecision.