LESSONS LEARNED WHILE CRUISING Jamie & Behan Gifford


Becoming Comfortable and


Suwarrow Atoll, a Broken Dream Our early weeks of cruising in


Mexico felt awkward; like the first day in a new school with a huge zit on your forehead. Compassed by language and cultural differences, an unfamiliar coast featuring charts surveyed in the 1800’s and voices from the recent past saying don’t go, we had but one goal: don’t screw up. Then a booming voice broadcasting on channel 16 – “Easy Lady, Easy Lady, Easy Lady, this is Rock Hard”. A decidedly feminine voice replied, “Up to the channel of love, okay Rock?” Somehow, in that moment of laughter, we became perfectly comfortable. Since 2008, we’ve had the great


fortune of being anchored, moored, or docked in about 130 places across ten countries. Most visits are too brief. Weather and the desire to experience more keep us moving. Landscapes and lifestyles change with each place, but not really so much. From anchorage to anchorage we watch as people fish, play, learn, work, barter, slumber, and celebrate. As participants to life along the water’s edge, we’ve found that it’s the unexpected that personalizes the journey. Sometimes a surprise creates


a memory so superlative it seems unreal. In Anaho Bay, Nuka Hiva with several other boats, we happened upon a group of huge rays. Niall (our 12 year old son) instantly identified them as harmless giant mantas (with wingspans over 12-feet), grabbed his mask and jumped in after them. The other cruisers and I were stunned. What to do but go in after him. Within a few minutes most of the others were gliding with the mantas for the experience of a lifetime. Sometimes the surprise imprints a different feeling. Watching humpback whales in Tonga 48° NORTH, AUGUST 2011 PAGE 52


was exactly as stated in guidebooks— breathtaking. Seeing and hearing non- Tongan business owners constantly battle for control over tourist dollars was disgusting; we sailed on with a tainted image of Tonga not mentioned in the guidebooks. And sometimes the unexpected inspires as with Niall, when he wrote the following essay for a competition here in Sydney, Australia.


Broken Dream Suwarrow is a dream. Suwarrow is


a small atoll in the Cook Islands; and one of the least disturbed specks on our


planet. During my family’s sailing trip around the Pacific Ocean, we visited Suwarrow. But some things can turn Suwarrow from a dream to a dump. The atoll’s pristine waters have all


sizes, shapes and colors of beautiful coral. With 50 meters of water clarity, you can easily see countless species of tropical fish, including sharks. On shore, palm trees have lots of birds and below on the sand, crabs scurry. The only residents on Suwarrow are two park rangers six months of each year. James and Apii were the two rangers during our visit. When we went to shore, we were surprised to see piles of garbage on the beach. We heard that James and Apii frequently collect garbage. We even saw a pile of fishing buoys as high as two cars! So, my family and other sailors organized a walk to collect the trash. By the end we were hot, sweaty and dirty. I felt frustrated that people don’t care about the environment. After just a few hours we had bags full of debris: bottles, shoes, plastics chairs, hard hats, fishing buoys, dolls and even a GPS transponder. Not one piece of rubbish came from Suwarrow. There were some items that were so large that we couldn’t move them, like the rusty metal freezer. To be honest, the garbage was also interesting. A toy doll, were did it come


from? Perhaps a young girl was playing on the dock in Brisbane and dropped it in the water? Maybe the workman’s hard hat was accidentally bumped off of an oil rig near the American coast. Could the plastic chairs have come from a ferry boat in Indonesia,


Niall, Mairen and Siobhan do a quick cleanup around the dock.


swept off during a storm? Perhaps the fishing buoys were holding up a net off the coast of Mexico. It could be that


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