SV Bob The Cat

“I finished my letter to Santa”, said Lukie, holding out a piece of paper.

I glanced down.

Dear Santa. I wood lik a skwid. I wood lik a dragin. I wood also lik a hamstr. From Lukas.

“Well, that’s clear”, I said. “At least he knows what you want for Christmas. Now fold it up, and put it in tomorrow’s pocket on the calendar”.

Lukie carefully folded his letter and stuffed it into the calendar.

“Now Santa knows what to get me!” he beamed. “He may drop it off tonight – perhaps tomorrow we will find the presents on the deck.”

We were on day three of the sail from New Caledonia to Opua in New Zealand, and, it being the beginning of December, the frantic letter writing to Santa had commenced once again. Matias was writing endless enquiries into the mechanics of Santa getting on board with advent presents in the middle of the ocean, and had also branched out into asking all sorts of personal questions about Santa’s life in general, leaving carefully crafted boxes for multiple choice options and a pencil to make it easy for Santa to reply. Lukie just wrote long lists of what he wanted for Christmas, spurred on by the fact that the first request (a squid) had promptly landed on the deck the morning after he asked for it. Undeterred by my warnings that we were unlikely to be allowed to import a dragon or a hamster into New Zealand, the list got longer and longer, the requests more and more outrageous.

The trip to New Zealand is meant to be awful, with many cruisers meeting fierce winds and heavy seas, but our passage proved uneventful, no doubt thanks mainly to David’s extensive experience with weather forecasting. After five days with good winds and a relatively calm sea, we sighted land just before midnight on Thursday. At sunrise the wind was completely gone, and in a magic moment a welcoming pod of dolphins amused themselves in our bow wave, clicking and squeaking so loudly as they glided through the oily still waters that I could clearly make out the message.

Nau mai, haere mai ki Aotearoa.

 

We spent all of Friday slowly motoring along the rugged coastline with occasional showers and chilly air greeting us on our return to the land of the long white cloud. Finally, just after dinner on Friday evening, we pulled into Opua marina and tied up to the quarantine dock. We had made it, crossed the last bit of ocean, brought Bob home. We breathed out, had a celebratory drink and then went to bed, savouring our first blissfully uninterrupted sleep for six nights.

 

This voyage has been the most incredible adventure of our lives.

We have seen natural wonders and encountered creatures splendid beyond belief, at close hand in their natural environment. We have visited places of magical beauty and learned about culture and customs of which we knew nothing prior to setting out. Our children have run around free on deserted islands, frolicked in sand dunes, climbed coconut trees and swum in deep and shallow seas, in clear and murky waters. They have played with kids from tiny villages on remote islands with whom they shared no language, and met children on boats from all over the world. They have been to places dripping with history and have learned much about the links that join our ancestors to the forefathers of the people who inhabit the corners of the earth.

We come back with our souls enriched by the countless sunrises we’ve witnessed, and the special moments we’ve shared with people from faraway lands, whose daily lives became enmeshed with ours sometimes for short times, sometimes for longer. We have made fantastic friends and so many memories that our hearts are full and our heads overflowing.

If, in the end, life is reduced to a string of feelings, of memories, encounters and experiences, this year has provided enough to give texture to our lives for a long while. The oceans are vast and we are overjoyed that we were fortunate enough to be able to take some time and see first hand a big bit of water and some islands, and share the wonders and magic of nature and farflung destinations with our children.

Not really ready to leave the adventure behind, we will remain on Bob the Cat until after Christmas, but this blog will end here, with our safe arrival home. Kia ora, Aotearoa, it’s been a long time.

Matias?”, I said.

He swallowed a bite of food and faced me. “Yeah?”

“What is the thing you are most looking forward to when we get back to Raglan?”

He thought hard for a while. “Bob”, he said. “I miss Bob”.

Bob. The real cat. Who had probably forgotten all about us, happy as she was with the company of Thea, who was house sitting for us.

“Yeah”, I said. “I miss her too”.

“What about you, Lukie”, said David.

“Erm. I’m looking forward to getting back to my lightsabre, you know, the one that pulls out, do you remember that one, Daddy?” Clutching an imaginary lightsabre with his two hands, Lukie hissed, fighting off an invisible Sith launching a surprise attack on our dinner table.

“What about you?” Matias asked. “What are you looking forward to, Mummy?”

I thought for a while. “Having a washing machine”, I said. “And an oven that works. And a fridge that is dry”. A bit sad, really, that it was all appliances, but when you spend all your days in a beautiful place doing wonderful things, handwashing and cooking in a campervan type kitchen remains the only things to be dissatisfied with.

 

“You know, we can easily get that on the boat”, David said. “I mean, we can just install a washing machine and a new fridge and oven – we don’t have to go home to get that”.

“I know”, I sighed. “I never said I wanted to go home…” I took another bite of my lunch.

“But I also do miss our friends, of course”, I added. “And the vacuum cleaner”. I rested back in my seat, imagining a vacuum cleaner, just sucking up the dirt, hair and sand. No more dustpan and dirty brush, hairs sticking to the bristles, crumbs hiding in the depths. I smiled.

“What about you?” I asked David. “What are you looking forward to?”

He leaned forward. “Internet”, he said without hesitation. “Unproblematic, instantaneous internet, available around the clock. So I can get weather, and news, and look up random stuff when I feel like it”.

So there it was, the luxuries of home, spinning their web to reel us back in from foreign shores. Given how much we loved life on the boat it was good that we each had something to look forward to, something to take the edge off the sadness of trading in a mobile life full of freedom and adventure for the daily grind of work and school.

 

We were back in Noumea after having a spent a few days in the southeastern end of Grande Terre on our way back from the Loyalty Islands. Where the islands of New Caledonia are light and sandy, surrounded by clear waters and sharp coral reefs, the mainland of Grande Terre is heavy and severe, steep slopes covered in verdant jungle rising from a mangrove fringed shoreline plunging into untold depths of muddy water. Little inlets carve up the coastline where rivers discharge their load into the sea, and on our way back we visited deeply carved riverbeds sporting dried out rapids in Anse Toupeti, Yate and the Bay of Prony, three large bays providing calm anchorages off dark sand beaches backed by steep jungle.

 

In the Bay of Prony we anchored off the idyllic Ilot Casy and explored the prehistoric Cycad forests growing there.

“Watch out, Lukie, there’s a dinosaur behind that tree”, shouted Matias, leaping over some enormous tree roots to get to a vantage point up the hillside.

“But I can’t, Matias”, cried Lukie. “I’m getting attacked by a giant dragonfly”. Grabbing a stick, he fought off an enormous flying predator.

“Weirdos”, said David.

I nodded in agreement. “But it is quite prehistoric”, I ventured, “I can understand where they got the idea from”.

A precursor to flowering plants, cycads are ancient. Resembling a cross between a fern and a palm tree, these prehistoric plants have survived unchanged for over 200 million years; it is thought that they were grazed by herbivorous dinosaurs once. Interspersed with tall araucaria pines and truly enormous pandanus trees whose thick knotted roots made walking difficult, the cycads fully completed this alien, beautiful forest, thriving just metres back from the white sand beach.

Stunning and vulnerable – about a third of the island was burned down when a yachtsman inadvertently left a fire unattended on the island twenty years ago. The damage is still clearly visible, providing an astounding change from the established forest, with the burned bit resembling a minesite, its unvegetated dirt mounds stretching from the sea to the hilltops. A sign said that the vegetation is expected to establish fully over time, and in the meantime visitors were reminded to mind their fires.

For a couple of days we frolicked in rivers and bays, lounged in natural hotpools and washed under cool waterfalls, and climbing hillsides and cooked fresh fish over open fire. But soon enough it was time to return to Noumea, to provision and tank up with diesel and water, before setting off for New Zealand.

There is so much to see in New Caledonia, so much diverse and wonderful nature, so many friendly people. But the weather is looking favourable for heading to New Zealand tomorrow, and so we will depart, even if there is still lots to see here. If the winds remain fair and we don’t stop in Norfolk Island we should be there in five to seven days; if we stop at Norfolk it may take us seven to nine.

“Expelliarmus”, shouted Lukie, pointing his finger at Matias, who promptly dropped onto the trampoline, clutching his chest.

“Expelliarmus bombus”, repeated Lukie. “You are injured now”.

Matias lifted a slim twig with shaky hands. “Intertrudent”, he croaked, and immediately Lukie began to slowly sink down, his face twisted in agony, until he was lying prostrate on the foredeck.

 

I continued scrubbing the deck around him. “What’s ‘intertrudent’?” I asked.

Lukie lifted his head off the deck. “It’s what you say to a person, or an animal, and they dissolve. If it hits a thing, then it just bounces back, but people disappear”.

“Who are you guys?”

“Matias is Harry Potter, and I’m a small animal called a Lython. It’s a scaly lizard that walks on two legs, like a snake but with legs”. He sat up and indicated a small creature with his hands. “I’m blue and grey, and have green eyes, with black dots”.

“I see. And what do you do, what do Lythons do?”

“Lythons save people and stuff, and I can even fight Voldemort, by kicking him in the face”, he said seriously, kicking in the air to demonstrate. “I don’t use a wand, I can use my hands, like Dobby the House Elf, but Matias has to use a wand. Hedwig is on my shoulder, she likes sitting on me”.

“So now that you have been ‘intertrudented’, how do you get back?”, I asked.

“You have to drink some of Matias’s potion. Then you come back to life”.

The potion was brewing in a large red cauldron on the back step – apparently it needed to steep for hours in the sun for all the ingredients to infuse correctly. Some older potions had already been decanted into glass bottles which stood waiting in the shade, ready solutions for a wizard in a fix.

We were in the Isle of Pines, an island 30 miles south east of Grande Terre in New Caledonia. The children were going through a Harry Potter craze as Matias was reading his way through the books and I was reading them out to Lukie, the two of us forever trying to catch up with Matias’s nightly progress. Since we’d been here, the kids had spent hours every day writing potion recipes and collecting the required ingredients, carefully adding them in the prescribed order, steeping, stirring and dissolving ashes and twigs, crab shells and feathers. No matter what the original ingredients, Matias’s potions invariably ended up an unpleasant dark yellow colour.
The Isle of Pines, or Kunie as it is known to the indigenous Kanaks, is a remarkable place. Named by Captain Cook for the tall araucaria pines which tower along the impressive coastline, the small island (17 km long, 14 km wide) is home to 8 Kanak clans who, when the Europeans arrived, were the only New Caledonians who could still sail, effortlessly navigating their 40-foot piroques (French name for the double outrigger canoes) using traditional melanesian techniques.

In 1872 the island became a convict settlement for political prisoners from the Paris Commune uprising in France, and later on Kanaks who had been involved with an uprising against the colonial powers were imprisoned there as well. The prison closed in 1911, after which the administration of the island was handed back to the Kunies.

We first arrived into the beautiful bay of Kuto, an idyllic aquamarine inlet framed by a long white beach, backed by majestic araucarias and the impressive Pic N’Ga, a 262 m peak. Little mushroom islets lined the edges of the bay, rock stacks that had been eroded away from the headlands forming dangerous looking overhangs that looked like they were only one erosive wave away from dislodging huge chunks of heavy rock into the sea.

After a couple of days swimming in the clear waters of Kuto Bay, playing soccer and rugby on deserted white sandy beaches and climbing the dusty hillside to reach Pic N’Ga we moved around the corner to Vao, the main settlement of Kunie.

The trip there was tense. The waters surrounding Kunie are shallow and sharp reefs lurk just below the water surface in the uncharted bay of Vao. Our cruising guide had a couple of waypoints which we followed tremulously, me stationed on the bow looking out over the turquoise expanse of shallow water, squinting through my polaroids for the deepest route through to the anchorage.

 

Despite the breathtaking beauty of the place, there was only a handful of boats in Kuto, and no other boats visited Vao while we where there.

“Maybe sensible people stay away from uncharted waters full of reefs”, I reflected to David once we had safely anchored.

“How boring”, he said.

Vao is home to a fresh fruit and vegetable market and a nice little church, as well as several rowdy puppies and curious children that followed up enthusiastically up the road. Across from the town is a little headland with a few caves and lots of dead crabs and seasnake skins, cherished ingredients for seasoned potion makers, as well as a couple of araucarias which yielded valuable pine tree sap, perfect for fashioning stoppers for potion bottles.

After a day there, David cast his gaze north, towards the fabled bays of Gadji, where a group of idyllic islands sit just off the northernmost point of Kunie island.

“We can do this. Nothing like a bit of a challenge”, he said merrily. Glancing over his shoulder at the cruising guide I read the comment highlighted in red next to the route north:

DANGER – THE DEPTHS ON THIS PHOTOCHART ARE THE DEPTHS BETWEEN THE CORAL READS. MANY ISOLATED CORAL HEADS SCATTERED ALONG THIS ROUTE ARE NEARLY AWASH AT LOW TIDE. MAKE THIS PASSAGE ONLY WITH GOOD LIGHT AND GOING AGAINST THE CURRENT WITHIN 3 HOURS OF HIGH TIDE AND STEER TO AVOID THE REEFS.

So it looked like it was going to be a tricky passage to get up north as well. Back to the bow for me, and there I remained as we hugged the rugged coastline, marvelling at the mushroom stacks popping up all over the place, admiring the tall outline of the pines on the many narrow headlands, and shouting loudly whenever we neared the opaque turquoise waters indicating dangerously shallow sandy flats or the browny yellow stretches suggesting that a coral reef was just below the surface.

Just north of Kuto a wildfire was raging in the hinterland, and as we sailed slowly past we witnessed the sole helicopter tasked with putting out the fire as it came out to sea to fill the enormous bucket hanging off it with seawater, disappeared back into the dense smoke only to reappear minutes later as a small yellow fleck growing gradually in size, coming back to the sea for a refill. It seemed a hopeless task, a huge fire raging on a dry hillside densely clad in tall pinetrees, and only one little yellow helicopter to put it out. As we passed, we watched it refill six times, but we saw no discernible reduction in the size of the fire.

The smoke darkened the sky behind us as we rounded the corner and entered the most beautiful anchorage in the world at Gadji, a shallow, serenely aquamarine bay surrounded by small limestone islands covered in dense dark green vegetation, the requisite mushroom islets trailing obligingly into the bay after each headland.

 

Our friends Bruce and Lynne were at Gadji too, and we spent our days with them, diving and snorkelling in the clear waters, spotting turtles and sharks hovering over beds of pristine corals full of fish. Out of the water we visited white beaches and climbed dark jagged limestone rocks, watched slender herons on expansive intertidal flats of silty white sand and spotted peregrine falcons perched atop tall trees. The kids continued their hunt for ingredients, recipe in hand, and brewed more and more elaborate potions, Lukie’s final effort requiring a staggering 9 billion crab eyeballs (which we eventually had to substitute for sand grains – should work).

“Lynne, I’ve made you a potion”, said Matias, proudly proffering a bottle filled with a cloudy yellow-brown liquid to Lynne as her and Bruce came over to our boat one evening for a sundowner.

“Great”, she said, holding the bottle out with two fingers and eyeing the solution nervously. “What does it do?”

“It’s for bravery, if you drink a tiny drop, you’ll become braver than anyone else in the world”.

“That is a great thing to put in a potion. Thank you so much”, she said graciously. “I’ll drink a drop whenever I need to be brave”.

She would need bravery to drink it, based as it was on salt water and decomposing twigs, but I guess superpowers come at a price.

The following morning we pulled anchor, ready for the overnight sail to Ouvea, the northernmost of the Loyalty Islands, a group of islands 40 nautical miles to the east of Grande Terre. As we sailed out of the anchorage, the wildfire was still raging on the mainland behind us. Now on its sixth day, the thick black smoke was still rising, effortlessly transforming into dark grey clouds slowly trailing their way north in the light winds, overhanging the anchorage and blocking out the sun. The water in the anchorage was covered in burnt pine fragments which fell out of the sky, and as we motored north David got out the deck hose, cleaning them off as we broke away from the clouds and into the sunshine.

Playing with the bubbles when David is scuba diving with some friends below…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“These buggers are probably losing us at least a knot”, David said, holding up a huge tuft of brown-green slime. He took off his mask and climbed on board. “We’ve gotta find a better way to clean it”, he sighed.

He had just surfaced from scrubbing the hull of the boat – he had been at it for about an hour, and there was still plenty of cleaning left. The state of Bob’s biofouling had progressively worsened over the course of this trip, and she now needs trimming rather regularly.

 

When we first bought the boat it had been newly antifouled, but it was a dodgy job done for the sale: she had just been lifted out and painted without scraping off the old antifouling, and the result was a terribly knobbly surface, rather like a house-owner neglecting to clean the walls prior to painting, choosing instead to paint over old peeling wallpaper and dustballs, embedding underlying imperfections firmly into a new layer of sticky paint.
Antifouling works by providing a smooth, clean surface containing compounds that are toxic to marine life, and acts to prevent the settlement of organisms and to retard the growth of those that do settle. But on our Bob you could see patches of flaky layers of old antifouling underneath the top coat, and on occasion they had even painted over barnacles, the result a roughened surface perfect for new organisms to attach themselves to. We knew all of this when we bought her, the survey report having pointed out that the antifouling was a job that needed redoing.

Fouling on boats is a problem because it aids the dispersal of marine organisms around the world; marine invasive species spread mainly via boat hulls and the ballast water that large ships take on board when they are empty of cargo and which they discharge again upon reaching a port where they are to pick up goods. And having tons of marine organisms attached to your hull also slows you down immensely by increasing the weight and drag of the boat through the water, changing the hull from hydrodynamically smooth to bulky and rough, like going from a shining race car to a combivan with weed and washing hanging out the windows.

Properly applied antifouling works a treat, although the toxic compounds contained in the paint do leach into the water, causing environmental problems in areas where there are lots of boats, or where boats are being cleaned.

 

When we pulled the boat out in St Martin around Christmas last year, we knew that we should really get the job done again, and properly this time – stripping back to the gel coat and re-applying new antifouling on a nice, smooth surface. But that would have taken a week at least, and cost us about $10,000, so we decided to make do with the patchy job – it was only a couple of months old, by then, and there was no growth on it yet, after all.

Predictably, the state of growth changed over time, each week of sea time adding more growth, as our antifouling gradually wore off every timed we cleaned the boat. In preparing for entering the Galapagos Islands the cleaning grew decidedly frantic: the Galapagos Biosecurity officials dive on each boat that enter their waters, and if you have any growth at all on your hull, you’re sent 40 nautical miles offshore and told to clean it off before re-entering. So on the west side of Panama we cleaned and scrubbed, and on the passage to the Galapagos we stopped at intervals to scrub some more, with the result that when we entered the Galapagos the hull was spotless, but sadly also completely devoid of antifouling.

With no antifouling left, organisms attached with increasing ease, and over time it is taking more and more effort to get them off. When we first started this trip we would clean the hull with a light scrub with a cloth or a soft sponge. Now we scrub with an industrial strength Scotch-Brite, scrape with old credit cards and scour with heavy duty plastic bristled brushes creating new scratches for organisms to attach within with every clean. Cleaning the boat used to take fifteen minutes, an effort we’d have to repeat every fortnight; nowadays it takes hours and by the time we’ve finished the growth has begun back at the start and we could start again if we had the energy.

We now have an amazing array of organisms attached to the hull, a thriving ecosystem hanging off our bottom, trailing in the seas behind us. Within this ecosystem are many niches, filled with an astonishing variety of life. On the outside of the hulls, where sunlight abounds, the environment is optimal for algae. Right at the waterline, where the sun is strongest, grows green algae, long filaments of which hang down in a Rapunzel-like curtain. A sub-niche has appeared just below the toilet outflows where increased nutrient levels have boosted growth rates, resulting in foot-long filaments floating elegantly away from the boat. Below the shiny green locks comes the brown tufty algae, the holdfasts of which are near impossible to get off no matter how hard we scrub, their tiny slimy protrusions emanating from every single one of the many grooves and cracks in the numerous layers of hull paint now exposed. Further down still, where light levels are lower, goose-neck barnacles cling on, along with tiny oysters which have embedded themselves on the surface with the result that they are near impossible to prise off, even with a screwdriver.

On the inside of the hulls, the fouling is dominated by a film of tiny translucent hydroids and stalked bryozoans which can be wiped off relatively easily, but settle back almost immediately. In between these are a smattering of white encrusting worms, sponges and ordinary barnacles, all happily filter-feeding in the warm, nutrient rich environment surrounding Bob the Cat on an average day. Whenever we’re at anchor surgeon fish will come and start grazing on our keel, nipping algae off with their sharp little teeth, the grazing sound transferring through the hull, a rasping, scraping sound accompanying our every move on board, lulling us to sleep at night.

By far the largest organisms we carry are the remora, who attach themselves for a couple of days to feed off scraps and other outfall or to hitch a ride to more lucrative destinations. Up to a metre in length they cling on by the base of the keel with the strange sucker at the top of their heads (meant for attaching to sharks or manta rays), eyeing us cautiously as we clean around them, only bothering to move when we dislodge a particularly succulent looking goose barnacle which they rush over to gulp up with relish.

Sadly, we haven’t discovered any edible organisms yet – if only a few paua (abelone) would attach we would happily provide them substrate until they reached harvestable size – hell, we’d handfeed them, carefully proffering nutritious strands of algae for them to gorge on. Ditto for any pearl oysters that might happen to attach. But so far no valuable organisms have joined us.

Biosecurity New Zealand had a stall at the Musket Cove Regatta in Fiji, where they warned us that the boat has got to be spotless to get into New Zealand. When I mentioned that that might be, er, a bit of a problem, the friendly lady conceded that ‘a light algal film’ would be acceptable.
“But absolutely no animals”, she said, fixing me with her gaze from under her khaki Biosecurity NZ cap. “We don’t want barnacles, or any shellfish, or any other animals”.

We’ll definitely have to get rid of the remora, then.

I’m not sure what to do about all the hydroids either, as they seem to come back the moment we stop scrubbing. They’re quite persistent animals, and we’ve even found them growing happily within our toilet bowls, filterfeeding happily away until we go stymy their attack with a dose of vinegar and the lethal twist of a toilet brush. I guess we’ll have to attack both hulls and toilets with a vengeance before departing from New Caledonia, armed with screwdrivers, chisels and brillo pads, and then sail as fast as we can to New Zealand, hoping that no organisms manage to attach themselves on the way. David will be happy, finally an excuse to go as fast as we can…

“Look, mummy!” shouted Matias.

I looked back at him from my spot on the bow where I, the gong-spotter was perched, vigilantly looking out from my station. Matias was standing by the cockpit, pointing excitedly out to sea.

“What is it, did you see a gong?” I called, walking back towards him.

We’d been looking out for ‘gongs’ for days now, hoping to spot one of the many dugongs that call the New Caledonian lagoon their home. David had seen several when kite surfing over seagrass beds, and the kids and I were keeping a keen out, hoping to see a friendly ‘gong’ off in the distance as we sailed past.

 

There are an estimated 1000 dugongs in New Caledonia, all of them lying about in the shallow lagoon waters, lazily chewing vast quantities of seagrass, protected from the coldish water by their thick layer of blubber. They used to be hunted here (“taste like veal”, said the man at the marina office), and the population is still considered fragile. Large and docile, dugongs take ages to reach sexual maturity, and in the sixty-odd year lifespan of a female she will give birth to only five or six young. They are vulnerable to boat strikes, and to degradation of seagrass beds, seagrass being their only food source.

“No, I think it was a turtle”, said Matias. “But it was big”.

 

I slumped and headed back to my station. We’d just left Noumea, where we’d spent a couple of days doing stuff on the boat, provisioning, and hanging with some fellow cruising families who were now headed back to Australia. We were going to the southern lagoon to see for ourselves the beautiful pristine waters and deserted island that lie within the southern end of the barrier reef that surrounds New Caledonia.

 

When Vida and her family had left four days earlier, Matias had asked when the next visitors was going to come, and we had told him that this was it, nobody else was coming. Our trip was coming to an end, New Caledonia was our last stop before New Zealand, and in a month or so we would start looking for a suitable weather window for going back home.

 

“But I don’t want to go home”, he said. “I want to stay on the boat”.

“I know”, said David.

We all felt that way, a sadness that our year away was about to end. Ridiculous, given that we still had more time left exploring New Caledonia than most families get for their holiday in a whole year, followed by some nice cruising time in the north of New Zealand before throwing ourselves back into work in the new year.

“But it will be fun, seeing Bob again. She’ll be missing us. And going back to school”, I said feebly. “Riding on the bus with Lukie, playing with your old friends in Raglan.”

“Also, don’t forget, we’ve still got another month here in New Caledonia before we head back to New Zealand, and then a month sailing around there before we go back”, David added. “Let’s make sure we enjoy our last while here”.

And there certainly was a lot to enjoy in this calm, windless week full of endless sunshine. The barrier reef surrounding New Caledonia is huge, second in size only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, teeming with a stunning variety of marine life. There are only a few islands in the southern lagoon, each of them chockers with seabirds and seasnakes, and surrounded by pristine coral reef teeming with turtles and sharks.

Our first point of call was Ilot Amedee, a small islet that we had first visited three years ago. A popular day-trip from Noumea, Ilot Amedee is a tiny island sporting an impressive, gleaming white lighthouse, 56 m tall, provided by the government of his Grace Napoleon III, Emperor of France, to help ships laden with French convicts navigate their way safely to Noumea.

When we arrived, Amedee was heaving with visitors. About a hundred tourists were packed onto the tiny island – some lying on sunloungers on the beach, some snorkelling the shallow seagrass covered bay, and some eating icecream on the shaded terrace overlooking the beach.

 

We anchored at about 2:30 pm and had just made it ashore when the ferry boat hooted, proclaiming its imminent departure, and the sun reddened visitors all queued up reluctantly to go back onboard, back to Noumea. By 3 o’clock they were all gone, and we had the island and the stunning calm bay all to ourselves, that is if you don’t count the seasnakes and the keen remora which soon sucked onto our hull, deciding that we were a place worth hanging onto.

Despite the huge numbers of boats in Noumea, there were few yachts in the southern lagoon. We left Amedee the morning after, our keen remora hanging on for the ride, and sailed on to Ilot Kouare, the islet furthest south within the charted part of the lagoon.

There were two other boats there when we arrived.

“What are they looking at?” said David.

He was sitting on the back step on the boat, putting on his snorkelling gear, ready to jump into the water. On our trip to Ilot Kouare he had noticed that the port rudder was behaving a bit funny, and now that we were anchored he wanted to jump in and have a quick look at it.

“I’m not sure”, I said. “They’re all pointing into the water”.

David watched them for a while longer, shrugged, and then jumped in. He took a deep breath and dived down under the port side hull.

I kept watching the other yacht. One of the guys walked towards the bow of the boat, lifting his hand above his head, waving at me. When he was sure he had my attention, he placed his right hand on top of his head, a fin, the universal sign for a shark.

Oh.

 

“David”, I called. “David, get out, there’s a shark!”

“Shark”, the guy from the other boat called. “Big shark”.

David surfaced next to the boat. “Eh?”

“Shark”, I said. “Get out. The guy saw a shark”.

He climbed out, wiping down his dripping hair.

“Well, there’s nothing obviously wrong with it”, he said, his mind still on the rudder.

 

Once he was safely on board, the boys and I dinghied over to the other boat, a French registered monohull full of Australians.

“It was big, 5-6 feet”, the man said. “Brown. I reckon it was a bull shark, or a bronzie”.

“Well, thanks for shouting out”, I said. “My husband was in the water, checking out our rudder”.

In May this year, a snorkeller had been killed by a bull shark at this island. Perhaps the shark was still hanging around. No more water fun for us in this location.

We stayed for a night at the island, kayaking over the colourful reef surrounding the small ilot, walking on the bright white sandy beach, spotting turtles and reef sharks in the shallow from the safety of the beach. Back on the boat we sat sweating in the sun, eyeing our remora enviously as it swam and glided through the turqouise waters, blissfully unaware of the lurking predators circling the anchorage.

 

The next morning we upped anchor and left for the lower half of the southern lagoon. Because so few boats venture down there, the lagoon south of Kouare is not well charted, so I kept to my lookout post at the bow of the boat, looking out for the treacherous subsurface reefs that dot the lagoon. Resembling tiny pancakes against the background of a dark blue dinner plate, these circular reefs rise abruptly from the 30 or so metres of the lagoon to just under the surface. Fortunately they are easily spotted in calm weather by their bright green-yellowy colours, a stark contrast to the deep blue colours of the deeper waters, and we reached Ilot N’da without running aground.

Like all the islets in the southern lagoon, Ilot N’da was devoid of humans but home to scores of seasnakes slithering happily along on the beach, heating up in the warm sun, swimming merrily in the shallows and snaking along in the deeper water under the boat. On the beach were large, angry crabs striking a threatening pose as we came close, eyes raised on stalks, claws in the air, their black underbodies exposed as they bravely chased our shadows. Ospreys nested on the far side of the island and hundreds of black noddys roosted in the trees in the midday heat, only to head out to sea again for an afternoon feed.

We spent three days at Ilot N’da, enjoying the spectacular snorkelling of two nearby pancake reefs, playing rugby on the beach blissfully unaware of the results from the Rugby World Cup final, and cooking our dinners on a camp-fire at the edge of the snake-grass. Every night at sunset the black noddies would swarm back to the island in their hundreds, the birds elegantly silhouetted against the spectacular sunsets.

Under the boat, our remora was joined by Trev, a giant trevally who discovered us as a good food source and did laps between the reef and the boat, coming back to check whether there was any new food with astonishingly regularity.

When the wind changed to the east we headed to the very southern end of the lagoon, anchoring for the day in the light blue-green waters. The water was clear and the nearby reef full of giant clams, which, although legal, we refrained from eating out of respect for their slow growth rates and heavily fished status.

 

In the evening we headed back to a suitable night anchorage off Ilot Koko, a bird reserve closed for landing. Ilot Koko is one of only two islands in New Caledonia which is the home of the extremely threatened Fou Ra Pieds Rouge seabird (‘crazy bird with red feet’). From the boat we watched the swarms of birds rising from the dry branches in the centre of the small islet, and imagined the noise they would make. On the anchorage the boat was soon swarmed by boobies and frigate birds coming to check us out, the boobies trying to attack the wind vane on top of the mast in between swooping down low to take a closer look at the carcass of the dead tuna which was lying on the back step. Rarely have we seen so many birds, and never have they shown so much interest in us.

We didn’t get to see a ‘gong’, but with all that other interesting life around we hardly missed it. What an incredible place the southern lagoon is, packed with boobies and snakes, turtles and sharks, clownfish and corals.

“I want boobie, I want boobie”, said Alec, approaching Gabe as she sat on the beach.

“Oh, look Alec, Daddy is coming back”, said Gabe, pointing to two small kites on the horizon quickly gaining in size.

I shaded my eyes and looked out over the dark blue water. There they were, Andrew and David, leaving the white breakers of the reef behind, crossing the deep waters. They had only just gone out to kitesurf the wave breaking on the reef some distance off Tenia island where we were anchored. “Already?”, I said “that’s a bit weird. Maybe it’s too windy”.

“I want boobie”, insisted Alec, pawing at Gabe’s wetsuit, his voice rising. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

We were sitting on the beach looking out over the anchorage. The big kids were making sand sculptures at the edge of the water, shrieking loudly whenever the gently lapping waves would overturn a newly created wall. There were only a few boats on the anchorage; it was too windy for most people to want to sail around, let alone anchor off a flat, windswept island offering little protection against the prevailing wind. The strong breeze lent a chilly note to the air, and we were fully rugged up, wearing rash vests and wetsuits.

The kites came rapidly closer; they were now across the reef and into the flat waters of the lagoon surrounding Tenia.

“Looks like they want to land”, I said. “I’ll go over and help”.

Bracing myself by folding my arms across my chest I made my way around the sandspit, abandoning the windless comfort of the leeward side for the chill embrace of 25 knots of wind just around the corner. By the time I came to the sandspit, the sound of Alec’s cries for boobie were long drowned out by the roar of the wind. Andrew was already standing there, waiting for me to land the kite.

Making sand sculptures

“What happened?”, I shouted as he lowered the kite towards me. “Was it too gnarly out there?”.
“Shark”, he shouted. “It was a big shark. David saw it on the surface, and we didn’t want to hang around”.

 

I shuddered. New Caledonia was teeming with sharks; the French Protectorate had recorded 19 shark attacks since the year 2000, many of them with a fatal outcome. Most attacks were on spearfishers hauling around their bloody catch, but in 2011 a 15 year old kitesurfer had been killed by a tiger shark after losing his board in a pass not dissimilar to the one off Tenia – experts reckoned that the shark confused the boardless kiter with a bird.

“So, if you guys want to go…”, said Andrew. “It’s nice and flat in the lagoon”.

Right.

I guess the big sharks don’t come into the shallows, they hang around waiting for large pelagic fish to come swarming through the pass. The bottom in the lagoon was mainly coral; the tide was on its way down, but there was still enough water cover to kitesurf, as long as you didn’t lose your board and got dragged over the sharp coral. In any case I was wearing a wetsuit. And we had come here to kite. The weather was perfect, a six metre kite plenty of power.

“OK”, I said. “I’ll go tell Gabe, she’s just feeding Alec”.

Our friends from Raglan, Andy and Gabe, and their two children Vida and Alec, had arrived in New Caledonia the day before. After provisioning, we’d left Noumea in the afternoon for Ilot Maitre, a nearby island where we anchored overnight. We’d gotten up early in the morning to watch the France – New Zealand rugby match at the local resort, with a group of increasingly despondent Frenchmen. When the score approached 40-13 New Zealand-France, the man seated next to me threw his hands in the air, grabbed his cigarette packet and got up.

“C’est terrible”, he said. “Quelle horreur. I am so depressed. I go now.”

I smiled in sympathy. Behind us the children were chanting “Go the All Blacks, the All Blacks are winning, go the All Blacks”, interspersed with the odd request for boobie. I didn’t blame him for leaving – who would want your nose rubbed in your humiliating defeat by a bunch of kids?

After the rugby we’d sailed to Tenia, anchored, and swiftly made our way ashore to go kiting, David excited to finally go wave sailing after a while of only flat water. Only to have his waves ruined by a shark.

When doing anything in the ocean here, as in a lot of places where we’ve been, we are always aware that there could be sharks around. As long as we don’t see them it is easy to pretend that they are not there and bask around in the water feeling safe and secure, even though we know that we would be unlikely to see a predatory shark before it bites us, the surprise being a key element of their attack strategy. The feeling of safety vanishes completely when you see them, when you can no longer pretend that they are not there and the cocoon of imagined safety bursts. It would be crazy to ignore a shark once you’ve seen it, to stay in the water with a large predatory beast, even if we know logically that most victims of shark attacks never see their attacker. We’d snorkelled with reef sharks on our travels, but had we seen a bull shark, or a tiger shark, we would have jumped out faster than quick.

 

As it turned out, Gabe and I had a good time on the flat waters of the shallow lagoon, whizzing around on our six metre kites watching fish scatter to all sides as the shadow of the kite fell upon them, Alec staring forlornly out from the beach, waiting patiently for his boobies to return. We didn’t see any big sharks, only the gray shadows of small reef sharks cruising the sandy channels of between the magnificently coloured coral, the blues and purples and yellows and greens turning the lagoon into a blur of colours.

We stayed at Tenia for five days, the men managing to bravely / foolishly ignore the shark they had seen on the first day and return again and again to the break, having a ball on the wave. As the wind lessened over the course of the week, more kitesurfers and windsurfers appeared, but there was still plenty of space for us all in the vast lagoon.
The kids frolicked for days on end in the shallows, snorkelling the nearby reef, jumping off the kayak, making glue for sculptures out of liquified sand, Alec busily ferrying water from the sea to the sculpture factory for hours on end at the orders of the older children.

“We need more water, more water”, yelled Matias, who was busy mixing the sand.

“Water, more, water”, panted Alec, running as fast as he could on his little stumbly legs, tongue out, balancing his little water bottle in his hands, carefully emptying out water where instructed.
“We need more powder, get more powder”, shouted Vida from the nearby dune, her and Lukie busily grabbing tubberware full of soft, dry sand and running it down to the factory.

Thus occupied, the kids played for hours on end by the water’s edge, only interrupting their play to come eat – snacks of juicy pineapple, crackers and emmental, dried fruit, lunches of rice salads with parboiled haricots verts and crunchy cucumbers, or sandwiches, stuffed with french cheese and cerrano ham, fresh succulent tomatoes, crispy lettuce and French dijon mustard mayonnaise.

“I want boobie, I want boobie”, wailed Alec, not satisfied with the solid food, his voice rising with despair as he pushed away the proffered carrot sticks and orange wedges. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

The French know how to take care of and equip their deserted islands. Many of the little ilots dotting the lagoon are marine reserves, sporting pristine coral teeming with fish and turtles, dugongs hiding out in the deeper seagrass beds. Mooring buoys are provided in the ones closest to Noumea, making it easy for day boats and yachts to visit and reducing the damage done by anchoring. Compost toilets and fire pits with chained down picnic tables and fire grilles are scattered over the islands, and firewood is delivered daily or weekly depending on the number of visitors expected. It is free to camp here, and one could have an awesome, cheap camping holiday, kitesurfing and snorkelling, sleeping in zipped-up tents (to prevent warmth seeking seasnakes from entering) – all you would have to bring is food and water.

 

One evening on Tenia we had a bonfire in one of the firepits provided, feasting on French saucissons, crunchy salad and freshly roasted corn on the cobs, the kids piling into the dinghy in the dark to go back to the boat, full of sausages, sooty tribal patterns in their faces, sand in their hair.

 

Despite not seeing them for a year, it didn’t take Vida long to acclimatise to the boys.

“I LOVE Star Wars”, she said, after a briefing session watching excerpts from Movie III staged by the boys to familiarise her with their play. “The light sabres are SO cool”.

In the evening, before falling asleep, she would lie in her bed reading Matias’s Captain Underpants book, appearing freshly faced the next morning with quotes. “Pee on your socks for warmth, they changed the sign”, she chuckled, showing me a page in the book.

“Sorry, Gabe”, I said, “didn’t mean to introduce toilet humour to your family”.

“I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”, cried Alec somewhere in the background, distracting Gabe from a reply.

 

Once the wind died down a bit, we went back towards Noumea and stopped at Ilot Koue for a last day of kitesurfing. A tiny stretch of creamy sand scattered with white bleached corals and clinging succulent vegetation fighting to hold down the sand, Koue has only a few trees scattered on the raised platform of the centre of the island, and is surrounded by a turquoise lagoon fringed by a reef teeming with life, topped with a stretch of beautifully flat water to kite in a fresh seabreeze. The sun was fierce and the kids were splashing in the water as we took turns speeding across the shallows on our kite boards, just inches away from where the kids were peacefully playing in the shallows. At the end of a day there in the hot sun we were all red-faced and roasted, finally feeling warm after a week of chilly but enjoyable winds.

 

On our last day, a hot windless hazy morning, we went to Ilot Nge to show Vida the incredible sealife there. As we approached the mooring buoys through the glassy waters of the early morning we saw turtles and sharks, huge remora, giant trevally and large coral trouts gliding through the crystal clear waters. We soon went snorkelling, and Vida was ecstatic to see a turtle, snorkelling above it as it glid gracefully through the water just above the seabottom for hundreds of metres, weaving in and out of seagrass groves, stopping to visit small coral outcrops on its way away from the shadows following it around on the surface.

We celebrated our last night with a bonfire on the beach, roasting potatoes in the hot coals and chargrilling vegetables on a grille handily provided by the French authorities. The kids rummaged around the area and quickly turned into Indian savages, their faces covered in soot, feathers in their hair, bones and fish carcasses tied to their belts, fierce expressions on their faces, tent pegs in their hands as weapons, Alec’s facade the only one crumbling as the night wore on.

“I want boobie, I WANT boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.

“Are you sure we should go today?” I asked.
David shrugged. “It won’t make a lot of difference if we delay it, this weather pattern will last to next week”.
I gulped. It had been a very rough passage from Fiji to Vanuatu, and I had been sicker than ever before, unable to do much but sit in the skipper’s seat and stare feebly at the horizon. It wasn’t that it was super windy, although we had been hit by a front or two; it was more the angle of the swell, the confused seastate tossing us around, jerking and slamming us one way and another until we were all covered in bruises.
“Well”, I said. “I guess we might as well go, then. I’ll take some seasickness pills, and give Matias some, too”.
And so we went, and in the end the seasickness wasn’t too bad, the pills keeping the nausea at bay for both Matias and myself. It was rough, though, waves crashing over us so frequently that it was impossible to sit in the cockpit without getting completely soaked. David kept maintaining that it really wasn’t that rough, that it was just the angle of the swell. But as far as I can remember, we’ve never before had so much water entering the cockpit.

On the second day Grande Terre of New Caledonia appared on the horizon, misty rocks rising steeply out of the dark grey water. Apparently Cook named it New Caledonia because it reminded him of the Scottish highlands, and on our approach we could see why – dark, rugged, green hills set against a background of the bleak grey sky. We were further south now than we had ever been and the weather was cold, a chill southerly breeze blowing. I went inside and got out the woollies – we hadn’t needed them until now, but there was a limit to what we could stoically endure – and we rugged up, in layers topped with our offshore jackets.

 

New Caledonia was first settled by the Lapita people (named for a site on Grande Terre where their pottery was found) who arrived from Vanuatu arund 1500 BC. Captain Cook spotted Grande Terre in 1774, and a few English and American whalers and sandalwood traders settled down in the area in the 1800s. Missionaries arrived soon after, both Tongan protestants and French Marists. The indigenous people, the Kanaks, were meanwhile stolen in large numbers and sent to work as slaves overseas as blackbirders.
In 1853 Napolen annexed the country, ostentiably to protect the Catholic missions there, but really to claim the land and establish a penal colony on Grande Terre to ease up space in France’s overfilled prisons.
As settlers began to spread skirmishes between Europeans and the Kanaks became more common until they culminated in the Revolt of 1878. Following the revolt the Kanaks were brutally suppressed by the French regime.

With World War II came the allies, with US forces setting up camp in Noumea from where they would lead attacks on the Japanese in the Philippines and Coral Sea.
After the war New Caledonia was changed from a colony to a French Overseas Territory, and Kanaks were finally recognised as citizens and the wealthier Kanaks given the vote. Great nickel reserves were found on Grande Terre, leading to an economic boom in the 1950s and 1960s; today New Caledonia remains one of the world’s largest nickel producers.

With the improving economy came decades of bitter strife and bloody fighting between the Kanak independence movement and the French. Finally in 1988, the French Prime Minister Michel Rocard brokered the Matignon Accords, under which it was agreed that the French would support education, construction and infrastructure to help the economy of the territory, and that a referendum on full independence would be held in the future. The referendum was held in May 2014; the outcome was that New Caledonia remains French Overseas Territory for the time being.

After spending a couple of days checking in and stocking up on parmesan, baguette and terrine du campagne, we left Noumea to spend some time on Ilot Nge, a wonderful little island about an hour’s sail from Noumea. The island has a great sandspit from which to launch a kite and wonderfully flat water behind the beautiful reef that surrounds it. The whole area is a marine reserve, and turtles and sharks came to greet us as we moored up on the buoys helpfully placed on the seagrass just off the beach.

A giant trevally and three remoras soon took up permanent residence under the boat; whenver we jumped in the water they would swim towards us in a hopeful manner, perhaps thinking that we were going to feed them.

Seasnakes were also showing some interest in us, swimming up to us in the shallows, snuggling up to the fire we lit on the beach, and one even climbed onto the boat one evening, making me nervous about what I could expect to find in my bed the next morning.

 

Seasnake venom is the most toxic venom known and one bite from a seasnake can easily kill a grown person. However, the snakes are quite small, and their mouth can’t gape over much, so in reality the risk of getting bitten by one is rather low, although we did have to issue stern warnings to the kids to leave them alone.

 

When kitesurfing over the seagrass beds, David saw a couple of dugongs, huge brown shapes sitting near the surface calmly chewing the seagrass cud. Large turtles were cruising the bay, coming up for air every 20 minutes or so. What a place – we’re looking forward to spending the next month or so here!