For those of you who’ve been following the
story of Our Rose but have not spent
time aboard, I am here as a recent stowaway to tell you that Richard and Jen
are, in spite of all the sunny prognostications on their blog and the myriad
photos of smiling happy people in exotic foreign locales, truly suffering.
How
can that be, you’re all undoubtedly asking yourselves?
All we’ve ever heard
about is how fantastically outfitted the boat is, with every possible modern
convenience, from an unlimited supply of fresh water and state of the art
navigation system, a navigation system moreover that takes the boat from point
A to point B with nary a lifting of the proverbial finger, unless, of course,
that finger is Jen’s middle one, which she uses to great affect as various
speedboats cruise by her home at full throttle tossing up a terrific wake,
entirely oblivious of her finger or their own behaviour.
And as for Richard,
well, I don’t want to alarm those of you Kiwi’s out there who were smart enough
to stay home to watch the America’s Cup on TV, but Richard doesn’t even know
what day of the week it is half the time. His days are consumed by the number
of hours he’s counting down before he needs to service his generator or replace
the fuel filter on his dinghy. Sad. All terribly sad.
Thankfully, I came aboard
just in time to alert them as to how dire things had gotten and while I was
there we did manage to get out of the “house” for a few excursions.
We saw pigs
swimming in the ocean then shortly thereafter heard the following on the radio
from Staniel Cay in the Bahamas. “Attention boaters, it has come to our
attention that some visitors are allowing our beloved pigs to swim too far from
shore. We all love our swimming pigs and while they can swim, they are not Michael Phelps. Please stay close to shore
if you go there to feed them.” This is the kind of high sea’s adventure Richard
and Jen have gotten themselves into. Ten-dollar Bahamian loaves of bread and
warnings about swimming pigs getting too much exercise. Hardly Pirates of the Caribbean,
if you get my drift.
In spite of the many onerous responsibilities that come
with a lifestyle defined by bottomless glasses of Chardonnay and lobster on the
half shell, life aboard Our Rose is
at once more thrilling and more prosaic than one might imagine.
Rising at his
leisure, i.e., sometime around dawn, Richard typically spends his mornings poring
over nautical charts before cooking breakfast, a meal that veers between
cooked apples and yoghurt or canned spaghetti over raisin-bread toast with a
spoonful of jam on top. Yes! I know it’s shocking, but a dollop of jam atop
spaghetti on top of toast is apparently a New Zealand delicacy, alongside
French fries dipped in vanilla ice-cream! or so Jen and Richard told me.
But
what the hell do I know? I’m American and I was only in New Zealand once and
all I remember was the sheep and the nuclear powered sunshine.
After a typical
New Zealand breakfast we practiced our New Zealand vocabulary. Dick=Deck.
Sex=Seven minus One. Cuds=Children. Fitter-cheney=Type of Pasta. Once I figured
out what the hell Richard and Jen were saying to me, we generally discussed
what the dinner menu might be (Fush or Chuckin) and once those life and death
issues had been attended to Richard and I set off in the dinghy in search of
lobsters. (Free food being something sailors, rich or poor, seem unable to
resist.) Jen, meanwhile, spent most of her days depleting the world’s supply of
household cleansers and scrubbing every inch of Our Rose to a state that would be the envy of any Swiss-German.
Once the boat was sanitized and the laundry had been washed and hung out to
dry, Jen set about concocting the evenings repast, a meal staggering in its ambition
and execution.
Entertaining and figuring out how much or how little to drink
is, admittedly, the focus of life aboard any sailing vessel and Our Rose is no exception.
And so, after
12 days aboard Our Rose,
