Guest Ross: An Oceanic Commute

It’s 07:30 and the Nautical Almanac says the tide turned a quarter of an hour ago, if I don’t catch the first of the ebb within 15 minutes my yacht will be stuck on the sand-bar that guards this estuary!

The seas are steep over the entrance, as the outgoing current meets the ocean swells, but I’m in the channel and it’s only a few minutes before the diesel’s switched off and the genoa is sheeted home.  The yacht heals over as it catches the gusty warm nor’wester that blows off Canterbury’s plains. “The wind on the Island” a poem by Naruda, is a sailors song to recite in the cockpit.

Wellington lies 165 sea miles to the north - a long way in a slow boat, 40 hours most likely. Not quite a commute in the normal sense, but I am going to work (managing a friends bookshop while he’s in the U.S.A.), and it’s how I like to travel, also my personal effects can come along for the voyage. With over 200 books on board it’s good to know I’ll not be lost for words.

Usually I have five or six titles on the go at any-time,  a bit like web-surfing before the web, some poems, a novel, bio’, history and a cookbook at least.

Set the self-steering, check the horizon and it’s time to refresh my memory of the various rocks and reefs that might sink an unwary sailor. The NZ Pilot flops open at the usual place, namely Cook Strait and I start to re-read the passages that warn mariners to take EXTREME CAUTION.

A fresh, chill, southerly blow should kick in behind this hot foehn wind, it’ll drive me through the Strait. At least I hope so, as the memories of bashing away the hours struggling into head-on northerly gales are not pleasant. One book I’ve got open is Reed’s “Treasury of Maori Folklore”, the pages on the Taniwha’s of Raukawa  (Cook Strait) are particularly interesting; one named Tuhirangi is apparently quite friendly. I’ll drink to him and Tangaroa and maybe the wind will be in my favour.

After the sea serpents some of James Boswell’s “London Journal” is good post meridian entertainment. He acquaints me with the bawdy sexual mores of 1760’s England. 2010 seems quite tame and discrete in comparison. But thank God (really Fleming) for penicillin!

So much to read so little time, after all there’s only 36 hours to go.

Captain Blacksmith is a husband, father, sailor, antiquarian book dealer and water colourist.