“Cheers!” smiles Jenny, raising her glass of champagne.
“Cheers!” we say, placing back down on the table our crackers with fresh lobster to lift our glasses as we gaze out over the orange, pink, purple and red potpourri of sunset horizon. There is no sight of land in any direction, but if we squint we can just make out the foamy line of surf reflecting the vivid colours of the plummeting sun. The distant breaking waves provide a gentle background roar over which we hear the kids’ animated voices from inside the boat.
I sigh contentedly and lean my sore head back, savouring the cool evening breeze. It would be a perfect day if I didn’t feel so awful. All day I’ve been sneezing and blowing my nose, fighting to clear my thoughts through a fog of headache. It’s a bad head cold which has been working its way through the family since Lukie first caught it in Vanuatu. After two weeks of incredibly snotty kids I finally caught it, just as we’ve run completely out of Kleenex and I started rationing toilet paper for nose wiping. It is a long-winded snotty cold and our toilet paper supplies are dwindling by the hour, a serious worry in the middle of the ocean.
Spread before us on the table is a veritable feast – lobster drizzled with lemon with a side of home-made mayonnaise, Jenny’s special lobster dip made from cream cheese, parmesan and lobster, oven-baked ham, scalloped potatoes and crunchy fresh cabbage salad with raisins and nuts.
We’re at Indispensable Reef, celebrating with SV So What, a Canadian family from Ottowa who are going to Indonesia the same way as us. Tonight they graciously invited us over to share a ham and we all savour every bite – there is no knowing when we’ll be able to buy ham on the bone next.
We had a fine passage to Indispensable Reefs, three nights and four days of light winds. The passage night watches were endless and tiring, but clear, moonless skies made for amazing star gazing – the bright stars mirrored in the phosphorescence in the water which trailed behind the boat like a wake of sparklies alighting momentarily as we passed through. Overhead, familiar constellations emerged from the thick blanket of the Milky Way spread out above our heads, the millions of pinpricks from billions of light years away putting our existence into perspective.
The night sky is always humbling, inducing the mind to ponder existential questions. The profusion of stars shining patiently through the eons is a reminder of how small we are in the universe, how all the superficial things that we imagine matter when we’re caught up in the busyness of our normal lives really are only egotistical indulgences, important in the blink of an eye to only one being in this vast universe. Out here on the foredeck at night as we travel across a deep and dark ocean looking up at a sky illuminated so brightly that one could almost read by starlight, it is hard to take the worries of normal life (whether lived on shore or on a boat) seriously. Out here, it is obvious that very little matters in an absolute sense, and that we must choose carefully what we allow to be important our lives, what we allocate energy to, and how we pass the time we have in these so fleetingly short lives played out against the backdrop of the endless universe.
It’s a feeling amplified by travelling. On a trip like this we are exposed to a whole lot of new things and we meet people of a multitude of backgrounds holding dear a variety of values – and spending time with them puts into perspective our own choices, highlighting the options we don’t even consider because cultural and societal blinkers narrow our field of view.
At the same time, it is amazing how much we do have in common with the people we meet. With the locals we share the basic stuff of humanity: the love we feel for our places and people and our fears and worries about their well-being and long-term future. With yachties, we share our lust for adventure, of discovering new places, of exploring the world slowly, one nautical mile at the time. And no matter where they’re from, the yachting families we meet all have a desire to spend more time with their children than their normal life at home allows, and to educate them hands-on about the big, wide, exciting place that is our ocean planet. Where back home our trip may seem adventurous and inspirational, or irresponsible and reckless (depending on the eye of the beholder), out here it is nothing special: all the families we meet are in the same boat.
At Indispensable Reef we are alone with SV So What. There are no locals. Technically, the reef belongs to the Solomon Islands, and apparently they do fish here, but we don’t meet anyone during our stay. It is a huge reef system, encompassing three large lagoons stretching more than 100 nautical miles. We’re anchored in the middle lagoon which is about 25 nautical miles long and 10 miles wide.
Arriving at landless reefs in the middle of the ocean is always incredible. Approaching the reef, the depth rises sharply from thousands of metres to coral just about breaking the surface, and we enter through a 200 m wide pass to the inside lagoon, an oasis of quiet calm in the middle of turbulent seas. The water depth inside the lagoon is 30-50 m but along the reef edges the sand banks shallow, and now our two little boats are bopping up and down gently, anchored as they are just adjacent to the windward reef.
On this day we’ve been snorkelling in the crystal-clear waters of the reef edge. Coral bommies protruded from the shallow seabed and great schools of large fish swam languidly about, not seemingly scared of us. David and Greg collected large tropical rock lobsters from under rocky ledges, and the kids dived and swam through underwater arches, marvelling at the rays, the sharks, and the largest groupers and sweetlips we’ve ever seen. Due to local fishing pressure, large fish are normally scarce in the South Pacific but in this remote lagoon the fish life is amazing, although the coral is rather wrecked, probably wave damage from two years ago when a large cyclone passed over the area.
Relaxing on the boat I sip my champagne, sigh contentedly and blow my nose again, reflecting that I should probably go back to our boat and try to sleep off the cold. Maybe tomorrow I can fashion some old t-shirts into handkerchiefs to see us through the cold without running out of toilet paper. Now that we’re on anchor where there will be no night watches and sleep deprivation for a little while I have time to sew and to sleep off the cold.
SV Bob The Cat 