The calmness of our overnight refuge was treacherous at the very least. As soon as we had cleared the last corner of Roberton Island a stiff breeze out of the North blew at us through the interisland channels. There were a couple of quite tricky passages to be navigated while making our way out of the labyrinth of islands in the bay, and once we had mastered that successfully the going was really getting wet. We were practically beating into a Northerly and just to make things a bit more fun big rainsqualls came sailing in from across the sea and threatened to drench us while hopping over the swells. The ragged cliffs in our lee made for interesting sights.

We knew, of course, that the suffering was all going to be over soon. Cape Brett was inching closer and after less than an hour we squeezed Aluna through the quarter mile gap between Tiheru Island and Otuwhanga Island. What a change! Now with the wind behind us the going was swift and smooth. The white caps were wandering joyfully alongside us instead of angrily slapping our hull sides. A plethora of sculpted cliffs passed by to starboard and we sped by possible refuges, indentations in the coastline that provide shelter from the weather. Whangamumu Harbour, Bland Bay, Whangaruru Harbour, Mimiwhangata Bay, Whananaki Inlet and many more exotic sounding locations gingerly wandered astern. Towards mid afternoon we were approaching Tutukaka Head, which stuck out majestically in front of the gently sloping mountain ranges further inland. The next possibility to tuck in would have been Urquharts Bay at the entrance to the Whangarei Harbour, at least a couple sailing hours away. We decided to turn in for the night.

The entrance to Tutukaka Harbour is blocked off by a broad rock, which makes its basin free of most ocean swells, but also restricts the entrance to a small passage that needs to be navigated with caution. The northerly wind was wrapping around 80 meter high Tutukaka Head and provided some moments of suspense, but once inside the flat waters of the Bay everything seemed at peace, the battles won and forgotten and any wound healed. We dropped Aluna’s anchor just South of picturesque Phillip Island, which looks like waiting to model for a master Japanese black ink brush painter with its gnarled trees growing out of its steep walls on all sides.

There was ample time for some exploring our temporary home. Alunita splashed into the waters and we paddled her over to the gravel beach. A small stretch of public land allowed access to a road, which lead towards the village center along neatly manicured gardens behind impeccable fences. A sign informed us in a red circle about all the forbidden things in this land of plenty. We walked up the hill dodging oncoming cars and learning that there is not much room for pedestrians here. People with worried faces stared at us through glaring windscreens and a hint of suspicion emanated from the shiny metal cages the sped past us. We pretended not to be intimidated and ventured up on the ridge from where we overlooked the little harbor. Further up on the top of a rocky hill a cell phone tower iced the natural landscape with a jagged exclamation point. Many properties were being offered to affluent buyers while others warned of dire consequences for careless trespassers. A pair of brown horses grazed lazily against the setting sun at the bottom of a lush green valley. The setting sun? O yes! It was time to turn around and head for home!

The next morning we slid out through the needles eye at the harbor entrance and where soon bobbing along happily to a wind that had slightly backed to the West. The forecast had warned that it would continue to do so over the course of the day and turn towards the Southwest in the evening, which would put it on our nose. We therefore wanted to make as much way as possible early in the day. Mighty Bream Head with its little devil’s horns soon was sliding by on starboard, while the Hen and her Chicken, a picturesque island group just offshore, did the same on port. Mysterious sail rock showed its many faces as we slowly crept past this peculiar landmark. It’s amazing how our mind is wired to look for faces and human figures in patterns where there is all but the slightest configuration to conjure up such an interpretation!

As it always happens when your sailing time went by too fast and progress was painfully slow. The coast line had gone distant after passing Bream head, which sticks out like a fish hook to the North of the Whangarei Harbour entrance. Now there were two long crescent beaches of bright white sand stretched out vast and long below a thin strip of rolling hills. Gigantic dark grey rain bands rolled off those hills and came towards us, dragging thick curtains of rain along them out onto the water pushed before angry white cap raising gusts. By some heavenly magic those curtains parted, like struck by some invisible magic wand, just before reaching us. At the most two or three of them baptized us with a couple minutes of drizzle.

Cape Rodney started to emerge at the Southern end of the coastline and the dramatic weather overhead continued its crescendo of ever darkening clouds. The timing of our trip at the end of the day turned out to be just as perfect as we could have ever wished. No noticeable change had happened with the wind and after literally passing under a very brightly colored rainbow we pulled into Whangateau Harbour just when the setting sun was terminally swallowed by en all encompassing grey wall rolling down from the hills. The yellow mooring ball just inside the harbor entrance was safely attached to our spare anchor line and brought Aluna’s restlessness to a subtle standstill in the tidal current streaming off the vast mudflats. And then finally we did get our due dowsing of the day. But all it managed to do was sweeten the slumber of the tired travelers enough to nurture the desire to soon pitch a flimsy dwelling somewhere on terra firma in the land of the long white cloud and give some merited rest the wobbly limbs.

Towards midday of the fourth day the skies finally broke. Warm rays of sunshine broke through the thick clouds and quickly dried any weary tear of sadness. We had been eager to continue our way South. The friends we had met up in Tonga had invited us to come and stay at their home along Whangateau Harbor. According to the charts this was going to be a sail of a little over 70 miles. The weather forecast looked excellent for the next three days with the window closing fast after that. So it was time to move, now or never!

We sailed past the mass of sailboats once again and then out the Veronica channel towards the Bay of Islands. We did have to do a couple chores on land and by the time we were under way most of the afternoon had passed on to the nick of eternity. According to local guidebooks staying in the lee of Roberton Island just outside the channel entrance promised to put us into a good position to start the actual journey down the coast the following day. Aluna plowed gingerly through the brown waters full of silt washed slowly but steadily towards the sea. Heavy rainfalls like the ones we had just experienced continue to wash away much of the fertile soil after the land had been deforested by the careless settlers of many different generation, ethnicities and creeds that had come to this land before us in search of new and plentiful sustenance. Much of New Zealand’s dubious history was engendered right next to us in this very area: The arrival of the first legendary Maori canoes bringing settlers from their mystic homeland Hawaiki; the rowdy splurge of whalers who called into the little township of Russel to our right, which made much of its fortune catering to their lustful needs; the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi hinged on its brood of misunderstandings between opposing cultures a little further to our left.

At the mouth of the channel rounding Tapeka Point the waters faded from brown to green to blue and a gentle swell rolling in the vast South Pacific ocean greeted us with a bit of commotion. A short downwind sail from there brought us to the rocky shore of Roberton Island, one of many in the aptly named Bay of Island. Along its Southeast coast the steep and whitewashed cliffs make way to a beautiful crescent beach with waters totally protected from the present weather. No swell whatsoever would rock our boat during the night, only a very gentle sloshing of shallow waves made for an elusive lullaby by rolling coarse gravel up and down the beach.

We arrived just in time for a little exploration on land. Climbing a well-catered path up the forest we arrived at an outlook on top of the island with splendid views of a sizeable chunk of the Bay. The sun had just set and the nightly symphony of colors started its subtle crescendo of reddish, orange, pink and then purple hues, all faithfully reflected on the rippled waters below and all the way around us, reminding us of great and true art is born almost out of itself with no need for a celebrated master, no refined brushes, slick pallets or expensive paint, just sacred, pure action that seems to simply stand there, absolutely still.

You’ve already briefly met Ted and over at his modified Piver catamaran “Sequester” while being served tea with delicious strawberries by his wife Karen, the conversation quickly turns to the fastest growing grass. He immediately declared that we would have to meet Peter. Peter the Potter that is, renowned clay artist par excellence, and why don’t we go and see him right away! So we run Ted’s dinghy over to the boatyard where Peter runs a workshop. Approaching the building Ted gestures to the parking lot: “The car of the artist!” A late 80’s Toyota hatchback is tucked in next to a giant construction crane, its body brightly painted in many colors like an impressionist pointillist still life set on wheels. We enter a glass door and pass through an office area into a high ceiling warehouse where in the middle of clay stained pottery wheels with freshly turned jars, heaps of all kinds of antique boat parts, an ancient wooden sailing dinghy hung overhead from the rafters, racks of pots and buckets full of all kinds of paint, varnish, lacquer and other practical and useful chemicals, stacks of timber, rolls of rope, reams of paper, boxes of tools and many other indescribable contraptions Peter the Potter stands in shaggy pants and a dusty dark green flannel shirt, holding firmly onto a supersized cup of tea with his big hands and it is quite obvious than apart from supreme pottery master he wears many other hats of creative and constructive trades.

Soon all the rest of us are also being sustained by cups of steaming tea, which is just as well, as the temperature here down under is outright chilly compared to what our tropically tanned bodies are used to. The conversation meanders from ‘have you ever met this guy on that boat’ to ‘this could also be done like that’ and then deviates for just a second to ‘do you remember when so and so did such and such in this or that movie’, but gravitational tugs magically have it spiraling slowly but steadily to the uses and abuses of the crab claw rig. Peter’s sparkling eyes of curiosity seem to delicately scan every square inch of our two recently landed aliens’ bodies and some wiggly radiolocation even tries to fathom the labyrinthine tunneling inside our practically thinking minds. He’s a skilled spinner of yarn, hopping through geographical remoteness and historical epochs like an untamed elf, engineering ingenuity on a precarious framework of humble humor and secret but sacredly obvious connections. Once firmly channeled on the bamboo theme he advocates against high-tech improvements to the astonishing structural robustness of the culms for construction purposes on land and on the sea. The natural, inborn protection if left intact should be enough to make bamboo last an year or two under the sun, after which, as long as you are in regions where bamboo is widely available, you simply replace the weathered sticks, his down-to-earth reasoning goes. I throw in my good friend Glenn Tieman’s recent experience with leaving the new set of bamboo spars for his non-compromising sailing vehicle Manu Lele soaking in the sea for too long, seeing them invaded by shipworms, tiny enemies past and present of many a brave and cowardly mariner alike. Then Peter swings the pendulum of human’s predominance over nature’s adversity towards the side where luck favors those of us who put our noses to the grindstone. “If you can’t resist the urge to apply some industrial efficiency to your project”, he muses while clinching his eyes with a good hint of irony, “a friend of mine in Myanmar simply applies some paint to the culms while they are still a bit green. This slows down the drying enough for them to lose their humidity slowly and avoid any cracking.”

Towards the end of our highly technical intermingling of ideas our “Would you want to come and have a look at our boat?” is quickly contested with a “Why don’t you come over to my place for diner?” and before we know it we’re back on Aluna under light drizzle with Peter on board, taking off the sail covers we had put on just a couple days back. The anchors come out of the mud, dragging enough of the yucky stuff all over the foredeck and here we are sailing away into a grey late afternoon. Half way across the inlet we manage to run aground in spite of all the local pilotage we’re hosting in our pilot house, coming to a gentle halt in the soft mud. Luckily the tide is coming in and it takes only half an hour of further animated conversation for Aluna to float off. Sailing straight through the vast sea of moored sailboats we arrive at the northern shore of the Waikare Inlet less than a mile away. Peter is all happy to see the simplicity of the crab claw rig in action and directs us into a small bay that is delimited by a wooded promontory towards the East where Peter’s dwelling is located. “No road access!”, he muses, “we had to bring in everything on the water. When we bought the property forty years ago we wanted to make sure that boating is not just a weekend hobby but a way of life!” He usually commutes to work and back on his skiff powered by a rare Chinese diesel outboard. Already from afar we had been able to see the giant stands of bamboo right next to a waterfront cabin. “That’s where my daughter lives with her hubby and kids”, Peter explains, “I live up in the woods!” He points up to the completely forested hill that crowns the little peninsula and stands in soothing contrast to the well-groomed cultured landscapes of the surrounding farmland.

We land our canoe at a small floating dock and walk past the cabin to the base of the bamboo stand. Impressive dark and healthy green culms shoot up into the air like streamers pulled up by a fleeting rocket ship and frozen in place by a nick in time. Some stalks where a good five inches wide at the bottom. Vertical height is always a little hard to gage, but there are definitely enough candidates standing in front of me to renew Aluna’s sailing vigor with a brand new set of spars for the big main sail. But Peter and I have not yet bonded enough to simply ask when we could start cutting down the bounty. The business of the day is simply to share a meal and interweave some of the many stories that have given texture to our lives. After all, Peter happens to be the first specimen of local non-feathery Kiwis we have the opportunity to examine at close range!

He takes us past a lush vegetable garden to a trail that leads up the steep slope of the hill. Steps are cut into the bare orange clay while weathered bamboo sticks make up a handrail that accompanies the serpentine path on its ascent. Towards the top of the hill we arrive at Peter’s little cabin, which quite frankly could fit perfectly into any of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm). There is no Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel nor Snow White anywhere in sight, but soon enough the rustic interior, its ceiling and walls blackened by years of wood fire smoke, warms up with another cup of tea, while outside the daylight quickly fades and the rain thickens. Peter’s life seems to have been a fairy tale all by itself. From arriving with his parents over forty years ago on a big ocean steamer that took six week to arrive from England, through bringing up a family in an enormous tent structure suspended amongst the trees on his property, to teaching pottery at night classes for the local community college and spicing up the Northland’s music scene in the mean time, it’s one wavy trail of intense excitement that seems to recreate itself bubbling out of freshly stirred remembrance and intelligently interspersed with snippets of clearly original takes on contemporary issues. All the while he’s stirring up a tasty rice on the wood stove with fresh greens from the herb garden just outside the by now steamed up windows.

Some more tender and passionate conversation flows back and forth to the glasses of Chilean red wine and the sweet semolina desert that topped it all off. A deep almost spiritual kinship reveals itself without being in any way obnoxious. A subtle feeling hovers in the little cozy room that, a sense that we’re part of the same tribe of human wanderers, eternally curious, passionately laborious, perpetually defenseless, diligently building bridges between the gaping cracks that separate one man from the other and make us enemies to ourselves. Words tend to get in the way of understanding and I will not remember the content of our conversation, but when it comes time to part there is no pain, no separation, no hypocrisy, no jealousy masked behind over joyous friendliness. With a simple “Go in peace” we’re on our way down the hill in the dark under the now pouring rain. The flicker of our flashlights dances gingerly with the raindrops and bounces off the wetted vegetation like loose stardust whirled around by cosmic winds. The floating dock has come to rest on the exposed mud for most of its length. At the very end of it is a little slither of water left. Just enough to float of our canoe, paddle back to our double hulled mobile dwelling on the water and then quickly fall asleep to dream extensively about human brotherhood and sistership.

Three other yachts were tied up to the dock when we arrived so we imagined there would be bit of a wait before we would be served with our very own dose of dedicated officialdom. The rain had stopped and an intense late morning sun was brurning down at us. We happily spread out our raingear to dry and went about preparing a hearty breakast. By the time we had munched ourselves to the end of that our turn had come. A clear sign that we had entered the realm of efficiency! Mr. Biosecurity opened up a big black and extra thick garbage bag in our galley and in went our treasured peppermint and aloe vera plants with a hearty: “You knew they would have to go!”; a full jar of honey with: “We’re very jalous with our bees. They have had some tough times”; bags of tasty beans of different colors accompanied by: “There are seed borne diseases, you know!”; our rice when it was discovered to harbour two tiny specks of crawling protein, “You don’t want to keep those in here. They go into everything!”; and finally, of course, our barely half full plastic bag of trash, which from now on we would have to call rubbish. Every disappearing item was duely noted on a clipboard and the buldging bag then lifted up the companionway. Mr. Biosecurities then wanted to know if we had any souveniers from the islands, like shells, necklaces etc. and wanted to see the interior of Aluna’s other hull. Beatriz bravely stood in his way and insisted that we had no such things in our possession. He then wanted to see our bicyles and clean them of any traces of foreign dirt. But when we explained that we would have to unload our tender to be able to get to the hatch under which they were stored, he gladly accepted our insurances that they had been carefully cleaned before stowing to meet the stringent requirements. Mr. Customs was next with a muscular, almost bear-like appearance. He was only interested in having a couple forms filled out and signed and was gone way before giving us a chance to start any kind of small talk. Lastly we were honored with the visit of Mrs. Immigration. Tall and slender in a manly uniform she sat down in our cockpit, didn’t want to know anything of tea nor coffee, stared transfixed at the forms we had diligently filled in, leafed through our passports and then extracted some rubber stamps from her briefcase. Those she smudged onto an empty page of our passports, decorated their marks with her serpentine signature, then stood up with the sigh of a soul drained of its spirit by a ruthless routine and was gone. Done! That was it! That was all! We were in!

Where to go from here? We were offered a slip in the marina, but even though it was tempting to have a couple days of lush luxury comfort, the horror of living squeezed in amongst fancy yachts and clonking aluminum masts sped us by that option pretty quickly. The rest of the vast and branched out inlet seemed to be filled to the rim with all kinds of boats anchored and on moorings as far as the eye could see. We were told that towards the bottom of the bay things would get a little more quiet and that sounded like exactly what we wanted: A place to sit peacefully and get some uninterrupted sleep for a couple of days before facing the fiery dragon of car and supermarket based living on land.

And that’s precisely what we found! Once past the hordes of shiny white floating boating contraptions the basin of the Kawakawa River spread apart into two long branches and a small third one was laying just to starboard. The anchor dropped into soft mud in very shallow water. Thinking about the considerable tides along New Zealand’s coastlines I quickly envisioned Aluna sitting on a slithery brown mud flat. Not that it mattered much. A Wharrram catamaran can do such things with no problems whatsoever! Why bother? It would all happen while we were sound asleep and the bobbing and throbbing of big waves was subtly turning into a woven tapestry of sweet and subtle memories.

It wasn’t until the next day that we dared to venture ashore. We paddled Aunita back through the flurry of moored sailboats. Most of them showed various degrees of decay. It went from grosse layers of slime-green marine growth along the waterline all the way to mastless tarp-covered windowless maritime corpses. One or two did show signs of inhabitants still clinging to life. A generator was rattling on one with a row of lush green tomato plants on the foredeck. Ted from the trimaran had visited us in the early morning and he seemed a good-natured fellow. We waved to him relieving one hand briefly from the duty of paddled propulsion. Then we passed a meticulously restored steamboat, which was moored to a small floating pontoon. It glistened in the bright sunlight and told a lonesome story of people’s nostalgic longing for the past while they are enthralled in a world of remote, virtual senselessness.

We tied Alunita to the dock at Ahby’s Boat Yard, since the welcoming lady at the Q Dock had advised us that they were friendlier there than at the marina’s, less keen to impose restrictions and limit the usage of their claimed property to those who have duly bled their dues. After crossing the bustling boatyard with dozens of boats standing tall on stilts waiting to have their barnicled bellies scraped and draped with biotoxic coats, there it was, undeniably all around us: a parking lot full of shiny cars that take you where you really don’t need to go, shops with expensive items that you can clearly do without, offices with people doing things that really don’t need to be done, people wishing for things they don’t want, claiming things you can’t have, and above all pretending to be what they most certainly aren’t. A big “Ah! What exactly did we come here to do?” rushed through my veins as I looked at all the busy people. Everything had business written all over it. Gone was the joyful generosity of tropical island life. A quick stint to the local store revealed exorbitant prices for immaculately packaged food items.

Meeting up with some friends we learned what we had forgotten: To do your shopping at reasonable rates you have to hop in a metal box with rubber wheels, burn a mug or two of petrol (which is the down under name for gas). This also burns a hole on your wallet and poisons the air we breathe. Then you push your shopping cart through aisles in a giant building, which quite ironically is called “Countdown”. There you will be able to admire colorful wares you can’t afford stacked high row upon row. Soon you’ll find yourself hunting for the special deals with the big bright red stickers on it and that’s what will be on your menu for the next couple days! You are now part of the fortunate few and are basking in a rare and spiritually fulfilling priviledge termed freedom of choice!

The surface of the water was so smooth we were tempted to step off the boat and go for a little walk on it. The color of the sky and even cloud patterns were reflected all around us, giving the impression that instead of floating on a plane we were suspended in midst of a delicate stain glass sphere. But just when I was ready to try floating off Aluna’s bows into mystic space a tiny puff of wind shattered the illusion gently and an oval patch of wripples wandered around us, through us actually, and then away from us towards the swaying horizon. Looking down the hatch in Aluna’s center deck where we pull up buckets of seawater whenever needed, I got aquainted with a little friend. A tiny, maybe thumb-sized fish had taken shelter between Aluna’s slender keels. Zebra striped and definitely cute it was darting back and forth from port to starboard and back. Every time it passed through the center it paused and twisted its head slightly as if it wanted to peek up at me. What is this little critter doing here in the middle of the vast ocean, totally comfortable and with no sign of fear? It stayed with us for two days. Whenever I opened the hatch it would come up and say hello. And look who is complaining about being lonely out there!

Like all things beautiful and peaceful our sweet pacific holiday slowly came to an end on the evening of its second day, day six of our journey. Suprisingly though the wind did not appear from the West, like it should if we had passed through the center of the high. When it picked up again it was right on the nose, blowing right from where we wanted to go. My tendency had been all along to err our course to the West, fearing a Westerly gale towards the end of our voyage that could blow us out into the wild expanses of the Southwest Pacific. Hence we slowly picked up speed again heading due West. But little by little the wind backed and before long it was smack again where it had been all along: Southwest, right on the beam and slowly but steadily increasing. Day seven saw a noon-to-noon total distance of 89 miles, day eight 84, day nine a straight and precise 100.

The calm spread had given me the chance to fiddle around with our little Sony short wave receiver and I was able to get weathermaps from New Zealand’s Metservice. The sound output of the radio is hooked up to the computer, where software then decodes the signal and creates visual maps of the present weather analysys and two and three day forecasts. What a luxury! It had never worked before and now all of a sudden we were elvated to a god’s eye view, from where we were able to see the location of high-pressure systems, lows, ridges and troughs and such. The forecasts all looked good except for a thin stationary front right in our path wedged in between the isobars further to the South of us. The isobars were widely spaced so I didn’t think any of this should be of major concern. When shortly after noon of day nine the wind started to pick up to the point of having to take down the big main once again, I did start to feel a couple butterflies rummaging around in my stomach. By late afternoon Aluna was doing seven knots steady and we were heading straight towards a big black wall of towering clouds that stretched East to West from horizon to horizon. After sunset a slim slither of a new moon was peeking through the clouds racing over our heads and I stretched out on the watchbunk a wee bit worried. What weather and wind corresponds to a stationnary front? I asked myself. What appears like a simple line on the weather forecaster’s map might in reality be one hundred miles wide! The worst about bad weather at sea is the incertainty. Will it get worse? If so, how much worse?

Aluna raced bravely through the night under darker and darker clouds. Still, every now and then a handful of stars managed to peek through the murk. The rigging took on a hum, the wind a howl, and the water a hiss. Then from time to time the deafening boom of a wave crashing into the port hullsides tore me out of the mesmerizing slumber where the notorious screeching of the autopilot had transformed into merciless screaming of people running down crowded city streets. I would then crawl out from under the warm bed cover, peek out through Aluna’s cat eyes and try to make out what was going on in the dark brawl out there. If the rain was not pouring down and do its percussive dance on the cockpit cover I mustered up enough courage to peel the cover back on one corner and sample the angry air above it. In the mélange of dark greys and the patchwork of somber blacks were racing dunes of considerable dimensions. They tossed Aluna up in the air and let her fall into the voids of long curved troughs. She did not seem to mind it at all and bravely danced to the dervish tunes as if that was all she had ever known. Filled with confidence and after having confirmed that we were the only miserable beings within the limited range of sight, I snapped the cover’s fasteners back on their stainless nipples and pulled myself back onto the watchbunk like regressing into a forever new and fertile mother’s womb. Before counting ten drenched sheep the screaming people had returned and continued their turqois carnival of human helplessness.

Light broke early the next morning. The days had grown considerably longer. We were by now at 33.5° southern latitude, and fast approaching the austral summer solstice. But the sunlight had to squeeze through crevices in the heaping clouds and only feeble bundles of rays reached the churned up waters. New Zealand’s North Island was also fast approaching. Our noon position fix on the GPS revealed an astonishing daily run of 170 nautical miles! It’s great to sail a cat… At that pace Aluna should make landfall at the Bay of Islands by the following morning.

With the end in sight any suffering becomes a good notch more bearable and the dancing on the waves took on an amusing dimension. By now our bodies were used to being tossed about and our stomachs had learned to digest in states of intermittent freefall. Conversations turned to our challenging tasks ahead on land, where we would have to transform our meager selves from poor penniless ocean wanderers into functional and productive members of the economically developed corner of the world without forgetting the lessons learned on our two and a half year long excursion into the very humbling and rewarding world of subtle subsistence.

The morning of December 1 the dark clouds had lifted. The sun was shining in a deep blue sky and flares of white cumulus heaps raced across above our heads. The breeze continued to be stiff and the going was good but jumpy and wet. Brown gannets and other smaller birds performed their acrobatic feats all around foaming Aluna, defying the girdle of gravity in sweeping arcs of acceleration and soaring tangents of centrifugal stringency. Free of all those complicated words my eyes at the time just delved in simple contemplation, the weariness from the voyage had finally drowned the many tortures of the intellect. But a minimum of intelligence had to be summoned back to manage to complications of landfall.

Sleep was light and sporadic during the last night of the trip. The vision of crashing Aluna into the rocky cliffs of the fastly approaching landmass pulled me out of the flimsy dreams every hour or so. The count down was on on the GPS and at three in the morning the lighthouse of Cape Brett at the Southwest extremity of the Bay of Islands started blinking reassuringly in the dark at fifteen seconds intervals. A short nap later another light to starboard joined in. I guessed it must be the Cape Karikari light becaused it sent three flashes every fifteen seconds out to us. Then after the next nap the twilight of dawn brought out jagged riffs of coastline. Now there was no more time for dozing off. The ten mile wide mouth of the famed Bay of Islands was about to swallow our ocean craft with the tight grip of solid land. Giant heaps of cumulus clouds came streaming off the ocean from the East and once they had to climb up the slopes of hills dark grey rain bands draped thick curtains over the landscape that were impenetrable to the human eye. At first the precipitation all passed politely in front of our path but each batch inched a little closer and before entering the four miles long Veronica Channel that leads up to Opua Harbor from the bottom of the bay, we got our first dousing welcome to the wet end of the austral spring of Aotearoa. A flurry of spirited sailboats whizzed around us in the early morning as we entered the realm of the economically fortunate and we made our way slowly to the quaranteen dock at the Opua marina to face the seriousness of officialdom and hopefully partake soon in gathering the crumbs of accumulated riches all around us.

And then we hadn’t been exactly idling. There was a new set of sails packed away in Aluna’s holds and she had been outfitted for all kinds of mind boggling worst case scenarios. Our first trip out of the mostly benign sailing grounds of the Tropics was strewn with tales of all kinds of natural disasters. Sudden gales with steep seas, wicked fronts and lousy low pressure systems were part of the line up of meterological monsters that peopled the soozing bed time stories of cruisers in the coconut thatched bars were they tend to congregate. Aluna had never seen gale force winds in her short but furious life and the equipment for such occasions was all still buried under other essential stuffs waiting to be installed somewhere. I therefore rigged a bridle of stretchy rope to her sterns to attach different contraptions to, should we find ourselves surrounded by heaping seas threatening to burry us in a watery grave. A spare tire makes perfect sense bolted to the rear door of a jeep, but many a guest aboard Aluna has asked me what I planned to use the two black tires for that lay on our decks. As a sea anchor! would be my usual response, and few ever ventured further along that thread of thought, like wondering how strange it was to think of anchoring in the sea! Anchoring almost by definition implies attaching yourself to something firm and steady, so how does one expect to attach oneself to a roiling and churned up sea? We do not have to venture too much into the realm of hydrodynamics to understand that adding speed to the mix the softness of water pretty quickly adquires a firmness that can break your bones and rip off the skin from your flagellated body. Those tires attached to a good bit of rode can slow a boat down and slide it magically from the doom of dangerously burrying its bows under a wave into the relative safety of riding the foamy crests.

Should, god or whoever else is in charge of things aloft forbid, the maritime situation deteriorate further and make those tires start to skid, figuratively speaking, I had yet another weapon up my dripping sleeves: A military surplus parachute manufactured to the rigorous engineering specifications of brutal all out war and designed to slow down a rocket falling out of the sky at supersonic speed. It was another fruit of eager internet merchandising and my scoring the web for treasure troves during the building of our vessel. The contraption was still in its original packaging, I had never even extracted it from its army green sleeve, where it was obviously and meticulously stored to be ripped out and deployed seamlessly. Looking at this cover a little more closely I realized that my thinking went astray as I portrayed it to you as the brave saviour of a rocket propelled grenade. Its more down to earth service must have been for airdrops of goods, where the sleeve was attached to the body of the aircraft while the payload was shoved out the hatch. No such spectacular deployment was needed on Aluna, so I extracted the danger orange dyed chute and attached its straps to a sturdy piece of rope that could simply be fastened to our standard anchor, then tossed over board and again attached to the bridle on our bows. That’s as far as my imagination dared to go into the tricky quicksands of disater preparedness!

On Sunday the winds started backing and promised to be East of Southeast for the following day. A last walk ashore around tiny Pangaimotu Island was the highlight of the day, running our bare toes through the lukewarm waters and looking up at the slender coconutpalms intensely, being well aware that we would not see them for a good long time while shivering down under in the cold. A good night of sound sleep was now the only thing missing to prepare us fully for the trip.

The breeze was stiff in the morning and for once it was just as promised a little East of Southeast. It always takes a good bit of nerve to put up the big main sail with its fickle bamboos when it’s blowing a fair bit. But the thought of a good headstart had clearly more traction than any worry, so up goes the bundle, ready to deploy. Then it’s cardio time. Pull and pull and then pull some more on the anchor rode, and don’t forget to breathe! Just before I reached anerobic exhaustion the anchor came up with a good bundle of seagrass on it. And this is where it always gets quite hectic. Aluna was now adrift and we were at the windward end of a crowded anchorage. Losen the brailing lines and pull in the sheets! Thank goodness Aluna had fallen off the wind to the correct side and soon we shot downwind across the wide harbor of Nuku’alofa doing seven knots, heading for the Egeria Channel to the Northwest where a zigzag line will lead us out through the reefs into the open sea.

Once there the first stretch of our journey was in the lee of Tongatapu Island for a couple miles. One more nostalgic look left the palmfronds in the tropics for good. The gleaming white sandy beach became thiner and thiner, Duff Reef and its crashing waves slid aft of the beam to the North and before we knew it the trade winds hit us with their full might. The top of the main sail spars started to buckle and twist and gave clear signals that there would be no peace of mind if we left it up. After two years of trials and errors we have the routine of changing the foresail down pretty good. Unlash the small mainsail from the chocks on the outsides of the hulls and bring it close to the mast; turn Aluna’s nose into the wind a bit; release the sheets and pull hard on the pair of brailing lines until the sail is bundled up and usually fluttering wildly in the wind; unlash the foot of the sail then slowly release the halyard while Beatriz pulls on the sheets to lower the tip between the shrouds of the mizzen mast; once the sail rests on deck unclip the sheets, the vang and the halyard; move the big main sail over to the side and clip sheets, vang and halyard onto the small main sail; up that one goes by pulling with your full weight on the halyards; tighten the vang and attach the sail’s foot to the bottom of the mast; let go the brailing lines and pull in the sheets; bring Aluna back on course; stow the downed sail on the sides of the starboard hull; and done! If that all sounds like quite a bit of exercise to you, it is! Done on a rocking and rolling platform ads a couple more calories to the burning list. But now Aluna is set up for her journey. That small mainsail can take up to gale force winds, but before that the mizzen would have to come down and be replaced by a smaller storm mizzen. So far we have had to do that only once back on our strenuous trip from Hawai’i to the Marquesas. With the twenty to twentyfive knot winds streaming over our beams here there’s no chance of that happening and the sails pulled us comfortably along at close to 6 knots. By noon the next day we had put behind us over 130 nautical miles of the 1,050 needed for our passage.

Once again out at sea with its physical misery, the lightheadedness, the tranquility, the splendid loneliness, life suspended in immeasurable vastness, the mind racing helplessly through all kinds of nonsense, unable to grab hold of anything reasonable, like feverishly trying to erect a house of cards on a wildly swaying swing, to thread a piece of yarn through a tiny needle eye while being punched by a dozen boxing gloves, constantly stumbling, permanently unbalanced and eternally condemned to uselessness. Once my tumurous self is sufficiently soaked and dehusked the transcendental calm of not belonging anywhere allows my dazed gaze to follow the albatross in its superb glide through the long troughs between waves and its majestic sweep steep up into the winds from where with movements of flight control invisibly small it slingshots back down at supersonic speed, hidden from sight while in the next trough and then reemerging more elegantly than ever but slowly fading away in the distance, that peculiar distance over the moving water where far can be much closer than right at your side. Smaller birds, just as agile flyers, also graze the wavy surface in search for sustenance in their watery world. Brave, resilient, self-contained life’s amazing reach flares potently breaching impossibilities where thought screaches to a sudden stop and dematerializes with no fuzz or rusty remnants. Pure, raw being.

It’s a sad scene I had had to whitness in many of the Pacific Islands along Aluna’s route of travel like a sweet dream turned nightmarish at the blink of an eye. Somewhere along the waterfront of the main population center there stands a shed harboring a derelict historical canoe of usually quite sizeable proportions. It is clearly abandoned and in a state of total disrepair, transpires an air of absolute despair and exemplifies albeit passively and irrevocably how spiritually lost we modern denizens are, Western and Eastern alike, cosmopolitan and indigenous alike, locals and cruisers of all sorts alike, intellectuals and sentimentalists alike.

At the threshold of the new millennium a lofty wave of enthusiasm swept across the Pacific Isles, churned up by the crazed but very determined and deeply passionate progenitors of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawai’i and their martial crew on the mighty ship Hokule’a. All of a sudden and quite literally out of the blue, every island nation found it necessessary to build a traditional canoe, replicating in modern materials ancient shapes and hoping fiercely that by some supernatural magic things like national self-esteem and ethnic pride would be generated en masse along the way. Profound connections to a long forgotten ancestry were drafted, mounds of mightily modern money was raised, some bureaucratic hurdles were bravely breached while others were hauled on board the newly built vessels to serve as ballast stones. Some of those awe inspiring crafts made it across the treacherous waters of the Pacific and anchored center stage at massive events where ancient gods were worshiped and much of modernity vociferously dispised. Others floundered shortly after being ceremoniously sprinkled with coconut water and tossed into the wet with many a transcendental chant.

Here behind the cyclone fence and under the standard corrugated iron roof I saw two probably a good seventy feet long hulls of a replica kalia, the most recent type of traditional Tongan double canoe that had seen the incorporation of Fijian lines and construction methods. We’re talking late 18^th century, maybe until the beginning of the 19^th, after which they all but diappeard. The missionaries prohibited interisland voyages amongst their newly found flock! The two hulls were lying upside down blocked up on the grass and one had its entire bottom missing. Weathered hull segments were strewn along the sides, where there were also long pieces of tree trunks stored under black plastic sheets. Those would have clearly served to complete all the necessary repairs and make this maritime marvel seaworthy again. But there was no sign of any kind of recent activiy. The funds for the lofty projects had long dried out and the Tongans of nowadays are too busty thumbing around on their newest cell phone to worry much about the catastrophic loss of their vast and mystic lore of traditional heritage. The wave of national pride and newly found access to ancient rituals had ebbed and spent its shortsighted splurge.

What those projects were quite obviously lacking was a practical component. The splendidly built canoes did not fullfil a real purpose. Most of them had germinated from the meager spirit of envy and imitation. No tangible community need was addressed. Once the hype of launch and luster had waned, and the photo ops had withered, what had been so carefully constructed was soon abandoned and left to rot under the tropical sun. No motivation for maintenance was generated. The buzzword of sustainability had not yet been spun into the media frenzy of the Western world.

That very word was prominently featured on a poster inside the palmleaf thatched guest hall of Big Mama’s resort on Pangaimotu Island, in front of which we had been anchored for the last couple of weeks. Big Mama is the sizeable owner of the place and originary from Niutoputapu, a tiny island up in the Niua’s, the most Northerly and remote of Tonga’s four island groups. She oversees a local nonprofit organization that collects schoolbooks and other goods here in the capital to be shipped up to the tiny outpost, where a couple hundred sturdy inhabitants edge out a living far away from the flirt with consumer craze of the kingdom’s capital. The shipping is precisely the sticky point in all her operations. It costs way more to transport the donated wares than all the effort needed to collect them. Extremely expensive and highly sporadic might be the crowning attributes of any means of transportation to and from the islands, by sea or by air. The poster therefore promotes the building of a modern cargo/passenger trimaran that would operate under sail and create a sustainable line of traffic up and down the island chain.

The brain behind the project is Big Mama’s uncle Dr. Sitiveni Halapua, prodigal son who has returned to the homeland after studies and a successful carreer in the States. He is now a member of Parlament and came out to the resort one night to entice the yachties to his proposed journey of sustainability. “When I went back to my people”, he muses, “they told me: You have Western Education. You should be able to solve our problems!” Having gotten tired of teaching the blatant lies of standard economics he set out to design a grassoots organization growing from the needs of his community and involving them in every step. Clearly post-capuitalist in his approach the project is steaming ahead, you can read more about it, and hopefully follow its progress, at talanoa.org.

“Hi, I’m Stephen!”, he introduced himself when visiting us aboard Aluna the morning of our departure to New Zealand. Big Mama had also rolled herself on deck and over coffee we went through the challenges ahead, extrapolated some lofty discussions about contemporary man’s dilema and made great effort to keep them well grounded in the sea. Dr. Sitiveni had not much more than a chuckle left over when I sidetracked the conversation to the ruins of the kalia under the rusty shed across the Bay in Nuku’alofa. Apart from sighing: “This was a very expensive ship!” he enlightened us with some truly disheartening gossip about its short and furious lifespan.

Apparently, while there were expert carpenters employed for the building, the same attention had not been paid to selecting a proper master of the ship. Once triumphantly launched under the ever-vigilant eyes of his at that time still highness King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV, father to the present King George Tupou V, the sails were hoisted without the proper knowledge of how to handle them. The mighty vessel spread its wings immediately, shot out of the harbor at high speed and calls were coming back on the radio that the crew was incapable of stopping the ship. As soon as the debacle was evident, true to his duty as protector of his people, the king dispatched the one and only ship of Tonga’s impressive naval forces. The warship promptly set out to sea in pursuit and the proud canoe with its flabbergasted crew was towed back to its homeport. Such was the only maritime adventure of the historical reconstruction. Its intended stimulation of the Tongan national self-esteem must have suffered similar lack of diligent control. May Dr. Sitiveni’s project be blessed with the benevolent effect of those painful lessons learned from the misshaps of the past!

As usual there are a couple more reports in the pipeline from Tonga and then we’ll tell you all about our latest ventures back into the grinding guts of civilization!

They ended up in the place where I always thought I should never place them. The first thing that comes to mind looking at them at their present location is when are you going to knock them off at a dock or a pier? Well, the fact is we have been at a dock or pier twice during our two-year journey and do not plan to do it more often in the future. So I finally took heart in hand, collected some sturdy members of the feather-light Fau wood that are lying around on any beach here. The locals use the bark for making mats and other woven trinkets. Individual branches are cut and then soaked in the sea for a couple weeks. Then the bark can be stripped off easily and the sticks are discarded. No wonder you can find plenty of them on any beach, where they are easily seen from afar because of their bright white appearance. In spite of being light and easy to work with, once the sticks are over an inch or so thick they are amazingly stiff and the epoxy treatment should keep them in shape for a long time. Now the panels are nicely out of the way and I’m not sure if you agree, but I think I managed to conserve Aluna’s decadent pseudo-ethnic look!

We are now standing once again at the doorsteps of so-called civilzation, a short, maybe ten day journey away from a nation that calls it self developed, proud to be part of the first world, highly complex in its structure but at the same time very simply part of the global network of greed. I cannot help but look back to the humble beginnings of this journey. It now seems so remote, but at the same time just like yesterday. We set out with high hopes of finding answers to the burning questions of human self-distruction. We expected to witness in the remoteness of the vast ocean people living in harmony with themselves and their environment. We wholeheartedly wished to learn a bit of the ancient ways that had allowed man to people this fragile planet successfully if not always peacefully for millenniums with integration and integrity, so that we might jump ahead of this clearly very short period of collective madness, where man wthin decades has managed to eliminate his intimate connection to life, create castles of splendid isolation and networks of tremendous fears, and completely lost its capability to simply see and listen. Instead we saw ourself forced to understand that modernity with its rigid scientific rational, which serves controlled hyperinflated economic growth that then purpotrates the absurdely concentrated wealth of a very small bunch of very sick individuals, has all but devoured every little speck of land, corroded each and every human soul, assassinated all hope of health, girdled every pocket of love and completely mesmerized the very last of the noble savages with trinkets of shiny comfort and mental emptiness. And in an uncontrollable urge for honesty I must add that all the above is nothing but a blatent understatement of the facts!

The mighty Kingdom of Tonga, that sounded so mysterious in the many pages of the human encyclopedia, is unfortunately no exception to this sad state of affairs. The deeply feudal structure of its society, like a remnant of the Middle Ages with a small clan clung to kingship secured by a circle of nobles who hold a firm grip on power and priviledges make everybody else an obedient army of mere slaves with fickle dreams of freedom. The white business people of Naiafu call the locals nice and beautiful because they don’t dare to rebel against their systemic exploitation. It has been hard for us to learn anything about them at all. Their proud Polynesian spirit is all but extinct, buried under a silent veil of devotion to the gods of their opressors. From the earliest European explorers who thirsted for knowledge as a foundation for control, eventually establishing an empire of colonization removing tangible riches at their fancy, through the raids of the blackbirders who kidnapped most all able bodied males to work as slaves in the silver mines of Peru, through the just as imperialistic forces of the US market, which gladly absorbed the losses of the royal gamble in the dot com bubble, and in the present times to the blood sucking and merciless wringing of the last little penny from the Pacific islanders by the frenetic and unscrupulous race of the emerging global giant China, the history of the Kingdom reads like a cataclism of the worst of humankind.

An eire emptiness reins embedded in the singular geographical beauty of the region, not only here in the dusty capital on Tongatapu Island, but everywhere up the island chain, all the way to the protected inland waters of tourist serving Vava’u, which in spite of it all prouds itself as being the most traditional region of the kingdom. According to self-proclaimed Big Mama, sizeable owner of the little tourist resort here at the anchorage off Pangaimotu Island, Tonga is asleep. I couldn’t agree more, the shy and slender movements of its people posses a haunting hint of sleepwalking, as if stumbling through a dreamworld that is not theirs, staring transfixed into an abyss of self-inflicted emptiness. There are pockets of friendliness strewn in abandonment throughout the Friendly Islands, that is if you look hard enough. There can be no doubt about it. The few simple and generous folks are however resigned to a noxious state of numbing obedience where accepting oppression is celebrated as a humble virtue and questioning the obnoxious authority can only be imagined as a distant devil’s dream. Once again the brain drain is maddening. With the excuse of receiving an education abroad anybody who has a trace of reasoning powers jumps the desolate ship and clings to the closest fringes of the first world within reach. Definitely all the brood of nobility is being educated under the vigilant eye of solid capitalism in Auckland, Sydney or San Jose. The Mormon Church provides opportunities with similar hidden agendas to the less fortunate in exchange for a reign of lifelong intellectual torture.

The consequences of all this are drastic, to say the least. We can no longer dream of a better world somewhere in the wilderness. We have to face the madness we have created and resolve it. First we understand our actions in the minutest detail, then we observe them in real time, while we are perpetrating them. This is a wake up call of the utmost urgency. Looking the other way is at this stage clearly complicity with the conglomerate of exploitation. Every drop of gas you put in your tank should burn under your fingernail before it explodes under the hood and leaves an asfixiating trail behind your comfortable transportation addiction. When you pay for it at the pump you are enhancing the mercenaries’ quality of life. And the petrol pandemonium is only one little note in the symphony of destruction. Every way you look you see us going in the wrong direction. Our ways of thinking are absurdly contorted, twisted irreversibly in a way that does not allow is to see with clarity, to speak with honesty, to touch with confidence, to play it straight, to sing in tune, to live lovingly and to listen carefully. Then there is the fear. The enormous fountain of fear underneath it all that spoils our silent wish for freedom and crashes our bonds of brotherhood. So much fear, so much fear!

Back to the Tongan Tango! A battered car sits idle, parked on the side of the main road along the waterfront of Nuku’alofa. The windows are down, maybe broken. The upholstery is torn. The paint is faded and chipping away. The driver’s seat is reclined and a man in his early thirties sleeps in utter exhaustion, mouth agape, eyes set deep in their sockets. A stone throw away from the car a woman, a slight bit younger than him but of similarly desperate appearance, wades through the shallow water, her head bowed, her gaze transfixed as if searching for something important, clearly oblivious to her surroundings. On the front passenger seat a baby boy crawls impulsively back and forth then lifts himself up and now two big dark eyes stare out of the window in total openness, in absolute oneness. They lock onto my face as it is walking by the car on the way to yet another meeting with officialdom. Life is about to begin in a moment. A little phoenix is rising out of an enormous sea of ashes. The little hand at the end of his slender arm gyrates in an awkward circle, the meaning of which I know but cannot tell. The round, innocent face etches itself in my library of lived emotions. There is no smile on his face. There are no tears in his eyes. But it is full of life. The future of mankind is looking at me in person, fearless, confident, fragile, ready to stand up to its very own portion of turbid torture.