Arlene Galisky - Dreamers and Doers: Sailing the South Pacific

Dreamers and Doers

Sailing the South Pacific

Arlene Galisky

Dreamers and Doers
Sailing the South Pacific

Copyright 2018 Arlene Galisky.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5185-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5186-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907700

iUniverse rev. date: 07/09/2018

Contents

For David,

Together, we turned a dream into reality.

Maps

After the haulout in New Zealand

CHAPTER 1

The Dream

When darkness fell, we were still hours away from the Australian coast; the wind had died again and we were motoring. We spotted lights on shore about midnight, appearing and disappearing as Windy Lady rose and fell in three-foot seas. An hour later, we were anxiously searching for the red and green lights marking the entrance to the shipping channel into Moreton Bay. When the sun later brightened the sky over Moreton Island, we would see the Queensland coast for the first time.

Dave and I were within hours of achieving our dream of sailing from Victoria, Canada, to Brisbane, Australia. The dream was only three years old, but the time had been tumultuous. Wed bought a sailboat and learned to sail, then prepared the boat and ourselves for a voyage across the Pacific Ocean. Sailing out of Victoria harbor seventeen months earlier, wed spent 110 days at sea, and visited Hawaii, Palmyra, American Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. Now, before us, was Australia!

It was an unlikely accomplishment for two people whose only familiarity with the ocean came from a couple of winter holidays in Hawaii. Dave came up with the plan; he was the dreamer. Four years earlier, hed been a partner in a public accounting firm in Prince George, a small city in central BC. He had grown restless, however, and lost interest in the work. With their two children grown, he and his wife were also in the process of separating.

His retirement funds, which had limped along for decades, had started to grow a few years earlier. One day he realized that with some careful planning, he could retire at age fifty-five. While he welcomed the idea of retirement, he also worried. Hed had partners who retired and were dead within a year. After going into the office every day for years on end, what could he do differently?

Dave was a big man, standing over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds; he was still vital and healthy. He had grown up in southern Saskatchewan, and by the time he graduated from high school, had worked as a farm hand, a section hand on the railroad, and a roughneck on an oilrig. In the years that followed, he joined the air force, worked in an oil refinery, and immigrated to Australia, where he worked underground in a mine for six months. He then returned to Canada and articled with an accounting firm.

He just wasnt the type to sit back and take it easy, so now thought about buying a 4x4 pickup and driving from BC to the southern tip of South America. He lost interest, however, after reading about the Darien Gap and other difficulties faced by travelers in Central America. He didnt have to look far for another idea, as he was then receiving the occasional letter from a friend, who was sailing around the world. Although hed never been on a sailboat, it wasnt a difficult leap from a truck to a boat and from South America to the South Pacific.

He began studying cruising magazines and researching sailboats; soon he knew the Boat Trader inside out. His resolve was shaken by his fathers death in November 1993, but his mothers passing the following July spurred him into action. With only a month remaining until he retired, he made up his mind and came to see me. Lene, he declared, Im going to buy a sailboat and sail to Australia. Then he added quietly, Do you want to come?

Dave and I had been friends for years, often hiking or whitewater canoeing together, sharing an enthusiasm for outdoor adventure. At one time, admittedly, such an invitation would have been the answer to my prayers, but that time had long since passed. I was forty-eight years old with my own career, family obligations, and community involvements. As it happened, I was also at a turning point in my life.

Five years earlier, Id become active in a local campaign to save a river from a diversion project. I felt passionately about it and became so involved that it turned into a second full-time job. An environmental review panel had finished hearings just the previous week, and now that it was over, I was exhausted and despondent. I needed time off, probably had to make some changes, but wasnt up to thinking about it yet.

As I listened to Dave reveal his plans, I knew that he was not talking about a simple change. To do this would mean walking away from everything I had achieved, as well as any ambitions I had for the future. Still, I said, Let me think about it for a day or two.

I had just started to do so when a memory popped into my head of an event that occurred twenty years earlier. Id been living in the west coast city of Vancouver and was walking with a friend in Stanley Park. We had stopped to watch the sun setting over the Strait of Georgia, and immersed in the view, I was startled to hear my friend ask, What was that? Only then realizing that Id spoken my thoughts aloud, I nodded my head towards the sea and repeated firmly, One day, Im going out there!

Maybe those words simply reflected a hidden yearning for adventure or freedom; maybe they didnt mean anything at all, as I hadnt thought of them once in the years since. But I knew instantly that I could never pass up such an adventure. There was no decision required, and within days, Id given three months notice to my employer.

As neither Dave nor I had sailed before, we first signed up for a course offered by a sailing school in Vancouver. In early September, we joined an instructor and one other couple onboard a thirty-four-foot sailboat and spent five days cruising in the Strait of Georgia, a 240-km long arm of the ocean lying between Vancouver Island and the mainland of BC. As winds were light, we mostly just raised and lowered sails, but did motor through fog and ran aground on a sunny afternoon. As neither of us showed any signs of being seasick, our plans moved forward.