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BEGINNING OF THE SAILING ADVENTURE!

What?, you say? I am confused? No, well, maybe?

I want to give a bit of background information on this page to try to set the stage for the rest of the stories. Below is a brief overview of some of the incidents that happened throughout the various passages during this Adventure.

You see, if we had paid more attention to the warning signs we were given, we would not have embarked on the mission to help this woman sail her boat back to Canada.

We discovered before we even left the docks that this woman would challenge our good natures & patience to the extreme.

Although she did not feel competent enough to embark on this journey on her own & had enlisted our help as crew, she still questioned just about everything we said or did..... from how to secure the dinghy on the deck, to stowing extra fuel & water, to tool storage, to computer operation to radio/Pactor operation & the list goes on & on....

She would ask a question & get an explanation & then come back with a statement that started with "but...."

After explaining something over & over again, Will would get quite frustrated with how to better explain or communicate something to her.

The frustration & exasperation of this woman not believing in our capabilities or knowledge ended up in several "raised voice" conversations with her throughout the passages. The Captain had told us on more than one occasion that her husband yelled at her all the time.

We thought to ourselves that that was not a very good way to communicate. Well, let me tell you, after our experiences with trying to communicate with the Captain in a normal manner, we realized that to get her to listen & make her realize that there were some things she really needed to pay attention to, the only way to accomplish this was to raise our voices & sometimes to yell!

The first incident came about as a result of the Captain destabilizing the boat in heavy seas. The second incident of raised voices was in Rarotonga when the Captain decided that we did not need to have a working water maker on board for the rest of the passages & that we should sell our extra anchor chain. And then a real major blowout when Will tried to explain the origin of the engine oil leak! And on & on the raised voices/yelling continued for the remainder of the passage.

Now, by this time, the pennies really started dropping! We could completely understand why her husband had to yell at her to get her to listen! Needless to say, this did not contribute to good relations between her & us.

Will & I had no problems with each other for the entire trip of having to live in such close quarters. That is probably due to the fact that we have lived full time in close quarters for the past 5 years in a motorhome & our own 36' sailboat.

You will discover as you read on through the rest of the passages how we were taken to our limits with attempting to live with this person who could not seem to believe in & rely on her crew for anything.

She did not believe or trust people or their capabilities. She tried to present a cool, calm manner, however, her constant snuffling, blinking rapidly, coughing & voraciously biting her finger nails kind of gave her away. Whenever an uncomfortable situation would arise she would exhibit some or all of the above gestures.

You see, she was pretty much on her own as far as the boat was concerned. Her husband had sailed with her as far as Mexico & then decided he did not want to go any further & bailed out. He wanted to ship the boat from Mexico back to Canada & sell it, but she did not want that. That is why she ended up getting crew & heading out into the South Pacific on her own. 

She left the boat in the Whangarei Town Basin after completing this half of her journey & went back home to Victoria, Canada for several months.

The Captain had enlisted a person to keep an eye on the boat for her while she went back to Victoria but the person left New Zealand, apparently without informing her, leaving the boat to the elements.

The Captain, in her wisdom, had decided to leave a port hole open with a tarp covering the deck & supposedly the port hole.  Well, wind & weather has a way of ripping tarps to shreds in short order resulting with the port hole exposed to the rains.  The end result was a totally filthy boat, inside as well as outside.

The Captain's husband was almost useless when it came to doing any work on or around the boat.  He didn't want to have anything to do with it or getting it ready to go offshore again.  He did only a few token chores, I believe, to try to appease his guilt while I was around.  He knew that Will would be coming & that Will's expertise would cover a lot of areas that needed addressing on the boat. I believe he relied very heavily on Will doing the greater majority of repairs that were necessary before heading offshore, and there were many, many repairs necessary, both before & during our passages.  Will discovered that most of the boats' systems needed some sort of repair or maintenance. In fact, while Will was aboard the boat, which was approximately 82 days, about 62 of those days were doing repairs, improvements to repairs that had only been half done or cleaning & organizing.

If Will hadn't been going to join me, I would have booked a flight back home. I was beginning to see that the Captain really did not have things under control very well at all & that she lacked knowledge of boats & systems that would be crucial to this adventure.

We bought provisions for our passage & Will & I stowed everything away while the Captain was gone.  She came back to the boat & looked around & could not believe her eyes.  We had stowed all the provisions & still had lots of space left for more storage.  She commented what a good job we had done.

I guess another clue that dealing with this woman could be less than easy would have been when I was talking to some of the other cruisers who were working on their boats in the same yard.

I would tell them that I had just flown over from Canada to be crew on the Rosa Nutkana & they would give me a strange sort of look & then not want to talk about anything to do with the boat or its Captain. It seemed a bit strange at the time but I didn't pay much attention to their lack of willingness to share much with me.

Another incident was when Will overheard the person who had inspected and delivered our life raft to the work yard. He was talking to Monis the Shipwright, and called our captain a "piece of work". This title was bestowed upon the Captain after having only a few short dealings with her.

You must realize that the Cruising Community is not that large so lots of stories get passed around - probably some true & some not so true. However, I believe the stories have to start with a measure of truth from somewhere.

The little bit of information I did glean from various people was that the Rosa Nutkana was not the best boat to be on & that the Captain did not seem to have a very good reputation. We were undaunted - we thought they must be all mistaken!

In hindsight, we should have investigated the information a bit further. We just thought that it couldn't be that bad.

We were so looking forward to a taste of the off shore cruising life that we are preparing for in our own retirement that we ignored all the tidbits of information. 

During our passage from New Zealand to Hawaii we had almost every system on board the boat fail.  We discovered that a lot of the systems had not been calibrated, including the depth sounder, wind indicator & battery charging system.

I only discovered as we were trying to anchor in the lagoon of Suvarov Island that the depth gauge was reading about 4 - 5 feet & our keel was 6' 8".  Alarmed, I told the Captain, who was at the helm, what the depth was.  She told me not to worry about it, that the depth gauge was not accurate!!  She had omitted to inform us of this "little detail."  What a time to find out!  A shallow lagoon with coral heads scattered throughout.  Ok, I won't worry!?  It's your boat & you are at the helm!

This was just one more "less than intelligent" communications involving the Captain  during our passages.

Only after we were at sea would we learn that the boat had had engine problems on more than one occasion during its previous passage from Mexico to New Zealand. The Captain neglected to tell us about the previous engine problem.

After troubleshooting the diesel engine several times with the onboard tools, Will determined as best he could that the engine could not be repaired while at sea.

By the time we left Suvarov to head to Hawaii we had an engine that had no power to push us along in the water. It would only run long enough to charge batteries. By the time we got to Hawaii the engine would not even run 20 minutes. Not much battery charging or water making could be done that way.

And speaking of engines...the Captain ran into a coral head in crystal clear waters of the lagoon of Suvarov & broke the shaft off the motor we used for the dinghy. We were then completely dead in the water, save for the wind to move us along. And God help us if we needed to get out of a situation in a hurry!

Every pump on board the boat which numbered about six, broke down & were repaired numerous times, but by the end of the journey into Hawaii none of the pumps were working. None of the spare pumps on board were new. They had already been used at some point & were only good enough to use for spare parts. Some of these pumps should have been thrown out & not left on board for parts. There are only so many times that something can be repaired with old & corroded parts. This fresh water pump problem would never get solved because it is mounted close to the bilge & is constantly getting covered in salt water with the motion of the boat.

The water maker malfunctioned from the first time we tried to use it, which was about one week into our first passage. Will took it apart & put it back together so many times by the end of the trip he could do it with his eyes closed! The Captain wanted us to go the next half of the passage, which would be about 2000 nautical miles, without a working water maker. This ended up with Will stating several times that we would not go any further with her without a guaranteed water supply. She argued & argued that other people had done it & we could also. Based on the amount of water that we went through on the first passage we had just completed, we would not be able to survive on what we had on board.

• Wind vane was not properly mounted & out of alignment

• Compass had a large air bubble, was not calibrated & light was corroded, rendering the compass useless for nighttime navigation

• Auto pilot failure

• Steering wheel out of alignment with rudder

• Broken/non functioning navigation, cabin & deck lights

• Leaking hatches (wet boat syndrome)

• Email & weather faxing electronics (Pactor & HF Radio) did not work properly. As a result the Captain did not get weather faxes & current weather information before we left the docks. Had we had this information before we left the dock, we probably would have delayed our departure by a few days to avoid being slammed by our first major storm (typhoon) only two days out to sea! This just goes to show the very real importance of weather information while undertaking passages.

• Broken gear shift

• Wind instrument out of calibration

• Knot log broken

• Furling drum cracked

• Safety rails have rivets that are popped & corroded (unsafe)

• The list goes on & on ...........

"Cruising Down the River" on a sunny afternoon got new meaning the day we left!  Our Adventures had already started on dry dock - what was to come in the months ahead?

An unbelievable, but true, Adventure of a Lifetime!

READ ON for the day to day details of our passage.