Beach Haven Work Week

05. Feb. 2016
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New Zealand
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2 Comments

Author: Pete

Location: Beach Haven, New Zealand

With the job fair over and great teaching positions in our pockets, we had much to put us in the celebratory spirit. Our wedding anniversary had also sprung up, so it was decided that a fancy dinner adventure was in order. Some local friends told us about a neat restaurant accessible by boat up one of the tributaries inland of Beach Haven. Apparently it once was a seriously seedy tavern but has recently been gentrified. We zoomed up in faithful dinghy and found the place tucked into the trees overlooking the channel. Miranda donned her high heels on the dock and we waltzed up the stairs and gorged ourselves on ribs! Ripped back in the moonless night, navigating by iPad.

With the fun taken care of it was back to work! As always, there were a few tiny projects to do before heading back to sea. For starters, Tayrona’s coach deck got gussied up with new Lagoon stickers. The original ones had suffered fifteen years of sun and were as baked and faded as old hippies at a Woodstock reunion. We peeled them off with the help of a twelve-volt hair drier then smoothed the flashy new logos on either side of the coach deck. Bling!

Continuing the glamor work, we decided to polish up Tayrona’s shoes. After a couple weeks of hanging on a mooring in the muddy tributary her undersides took on the complexion of a clinical acne patient. Sailing with a hull full of barnacles and seaweed is such a drag. Instead of jumping into the the murky current with snorkel gear we took advantage of the significant tides and dried Tayrona out on the beach next to our mooring.

In a year and a half of sailing across the world it’s been our entire focus not to run the boat into things like land. It’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life for me. We woke just before four in the morning to catch the high tide and put ourselves as far up the beach as possible when the tide was full ebb. Not a ripple marred the water as we dropped our mooring lines and with bleary eyes drove the boat smack into the shore. Okay, it was much gentler than that. The previous day I had found the flattest, firmest piece of beach (does that sound inappropriate to you?) upon which to land, and as the wee hours of the morning unfurled we slowly inched Tayrona into the shallows. I asked Miranda to stand up at the bow with a light. I’m not sure why… what’s she going to say? “Beach! Yup, that’s the beach!” I watched the depth gauge drop to 0.7 meters before we came to a barely perceivable stop in the still and silence… “LAND HO!”

Lagoons are theoretically designed to sit balanced on their keels but we’ve never actually seen proof of this. We held our breath for the four hours it took for the tide to cede its buoyant support of her mass to the structural fin keels. Tayrona swayed a bit to find just the right spot and settled a few inches into the sand, but did refrain from rolling over to have her belly scratched. I dug pits under the rudders to make sure they weren’t taking weight, and then we started scraping barnacles!

We also took advantage of the exposed sail drives to replace the zinc anodes. Zincs are sacrificial metal pieces that are designed to corrode in the nauseatingly harsh marine environment so the rest of your boat doesn’t. You do have to replace them as they erode, however. For some reason, these zincs were engineered to sit behind the propellers, so I had to remove both in the replacement process. New zincs and clean props for Tay-Tay!

In our day of bottom-side buffing we were cheered along by local friends Rebecca, Angela, and Tanya, who lived around Beach Haven and were kind enough to share their beach with us!

London and the Great Job Search

02. Feb. 2016
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Life on Land, New Zealand
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9 Comments

Author: Pete

Location: London, UK

Miranda and I left our pretty girl on a safe mooring in Auckland and flew literally to the other side of the earth to the Search Associates job fair in London. No kidding, New Zealand and the UK are pretty much antipodes, diametrically opposed through the center of the globe. Two years of anticipation boiling down to one weekend of interview mayhem made it pretty much impossible to sleep on the airplane. Instead we watched a lot of junky movies in the thirty-six hours on the move through Melbourne and Dubai.

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Had a couple pre-fair interviews with schools in Dubai, London, and Beijing. It was a good warm-up, getting our brains back on track after the decay and rot that comes with watching Mission Impossible III through VII back to back on the plane. Ugh… That evening we had dinner with my siblings along with friends Sinziana and Robert who live in London.

Got back to the hotel in time to get some sleep, but our fancy built-in body clocks hadn’t synced to other-side-of-the-world-time yet, and woke Miranda and I up promptly at 3am. We didn’t fight it, and jumped into planning our educational attack. After a great English breakfast (what’s up with the tomato and beans?!) alongside other jittery teachers, we marched onto the conference center battleground, armor-clad in suits and shining shoes. It was novel to be wearing a suit not made of neoprene and any shoes at all! The horde of a few hundred teachers besieged the school administrators hunkered behind conference hall tables like well-tailored barbarians. Miranda and I signed up to interview with several schools, being declined by only one, and ourselves declining several schools’ invitations, like from the Intertribal School of Mogadishu, and the Very Excellent Democratically Elected Peoples’ Republican Academy of Pyongyang. Pass!

We interviewed with schools in Germany, Mongolia, and Switzerland, along with second interviews from Dubai, London, and Beijing. At the end of the day we had job offers from many of them, but not our top pick! We still had a second interview with Switzerland that we were holding out for. Job offers stand for about twenty-four hours, so one can’t wait too long to accept, but it gives you a chance to juggle some of the options in your head. Actually, juggling helps with focus and eases stress. Plus it fills out your resume!

My body clock realized it blew the previous night’s wake-up call, helpfully tried a different hour, and woke me up at 1am. Fabulous. I read in bed for an hour, savoring the comfort of a real mattress, then eventually got restless and took to the darkened streets of London to walk off my jittery insomnia. In three hours of ambling, I found the river Thames and watched the current rip under the bridge, soaking up the calm before the storm. Water seems to have a certain magnetism for me. I always feel drawn to it. Not sure if I’d spearfish in the Thames though.

With a handful of good job offers already in our pockets we cleared our schedule for the following day to focus on the second interview with the International School of Zug and Luzern. We met with the administration team and spoke with them for over an hour about pedagogy, educational philosophy, and work history, before they offered us the two math positions we were coveting. It’s customary for schools to give you time to think over an offer, so we thanked them and walked cooly out, turned the corner, and did a good deal of silent fist-pumping and jumping around excitedly. We signed contracts with them an hour later.

That evening we went out with the crew to celebrate. Our friends Robin and Erwin (and their beautiful girlfriends) were in from Belgium and joined in the evening’s reveling. Sunday, we all spent the day wandering through the British Museum and traipsing about London. As is commonly known, no other method of perambulation is as British as traipsing.

The variety of transportation to get us back to Tayrona was laughable. We dragged our bags through the London streets to the ‘tube’ which took us to an overground train bound for Heathrow, before catching airplanes to Dubai, Melbourne, then Auckland, where we hopped a bus to the main city docks and caught a ferry boat out to the bay where Tayrona was moored. Then after forty hours of travel I swam out to the boat and got the dinghy to pick up Miranda! Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? That’s all you got, John Candy? Phooey and pshaw!

The International School of Zug and Luzern is an excellent school in Lucerne, Switzerland, just south of Zurich. The middle school and high school where Miranda and I will be teaching respectively are on separate campuses, a few kilometers apart. After two years of never being more than thirty-eight feet from each other, the distance might be a good thing for our marriage. This isn’t our shot, but it gives you the idea of what Lucerne looks like.

We are so excited about teaching in Switzerland! At the moment, I think we’re too tired for it to really sink in. For now, we’ll sink into our berths to recover from this ridiculous horse race.

“And there’s the gun! The schools come charging out the gates, London and Dubai making a early break; Ulaanbaatar puts on the speed but then falters as Beijing surges past on the straightaway. Beijing overtaking Germany, now fighting for position on the inside, neck and neck; WHAT’S THIS!? Round the final bend, Switzerland comes out of nowhere! Germany and Beijing trying to keep pace as Switzerland takes the lead! Switzerland breaking from the pack! Pulling away from Beijing and Germany! Switzerland! Opening the gap on the final straightaway! It’s Switzerland! Over the finish line! SWITZERLAND! IT’S SWITZERLAND!! There you are, folks! Switzerland takes the gold at the 2016 Pashouwer/Gorkiewicz London Fair Derby!

Great Barrier Island and Auckland

31. Jan. 2016
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New Zealand
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1 Comment

Author: Pete

Location: Great Barrier Island and Auckland, NZ

After a few rainy days in Kiarara Bay we sailed north, out of Port Fitzroy around a jutting headland to Katherine Bay. Ashore, just inland of a quiet, sandy beach we found a parthenon of massive tree trunks arching out of the ground, thick branches full of air rooting plants. A dozen rope swings fabricated from heavy ship line hung like . Didn’t take much coercion to get us launching off branches, stretching climbing muscles that have been dormant for some time.

Katherine Bay was beautiful but rolled all night, and not in the good way. The next morning we sailed fast under twenty knots of wind back around the headland, returning to Kiarara. The short, costal hops between bays and islands have been enjoyable. Most sailors start their sailing careers in costal waters. We missed that part and went straight offshore. I’m seeing the error in our ways. The next day we hiked Mt. Hobson, a six hundred meter peak, four hours uphill BOTH WAYS! At least that’s how it felt to our coddled legs. The trail was stunning, crossing rivers and gorgeous, and winding through rain forests where the few remaining Kauri behemoths strained to seed offspring and repopulate the area after the huge logging boom of the 1800’s. The view from the top was breathtaking. We could even see our little boat! Sometimes that’s disconcerting; if you see it floating away there’s a four-hour downhill slog to go get it.

Sailing south along Great Barrier Island, we staged for our jump back to Auckland and were escorted by a pod of dolphins. Later, anchored in Bowling Alley Bay, another pod showed up, cavorting and jumping. We donned wetsuits and joined them. The cloudy water made for a spooky experience with our streamline mammalian cousins. They were obscured in the occluding murk until they were close enough to almost touch, then they’d veer off, laughing at our aquatic immobility. Let’s see who’s laughing when you’re on the beach, Flipper!

Sailed eight hours back across the Hauraki Gulf. Miranda and I wrestled a Kingfish aboard part way through the trip. I already had some fillets in the refrigerator from spearfishing in Bowling Alley Bay, so we let him go.

Parked the boat in front of Auckland. The anchorage is exposed and a little choppy from the ferry wakes, but it’s got the best view in town. On the rainy days in Port Fitzroy, I designed a part for the engine control panels on SketchUp and 3D printed them at the public library. They worked out so well and cost nothing to print that my brain has been constantly thinking up new things to design and build for the boat! They created a monster!

Found a safe spot up river to leave our baby for a couple days when we go to the job fair. Had one last good sail to stretch her legs before a week of lounging on a mooring off the Beach Haven wharf. Sit, stay, good Tayrona! No parties while we’re away!