sv evi

The other night while lying in bed before we went to sleep, Riki and I were talking about some of the differences between life here and life back home in the States.

Some things are undeniably harder about living on a 35 foot boat than living in a 1350 square foot house. For example, when I was making butter chicken (my first foray into cooking Indian food!), I needed to blend something. This involves opening the battery bank, attaching the inverter (positive terminal first, then negative), then plugging in my little food chopper, and turning it on. Or washing clothes. Here it is a daily morning activity, during Wade’s nap. I have 2 buckets and my washboard, and I try to use as little water as possible. Then I wring them out and hang them on the lifeline. It takes me say 30-45 minutes depending on how much laundry we have. Sometimes I don’t want to do the washing, but I usually feel a small sense of accomplishment when it’s done. Another annoying thing is that whenever you want to find something, you have to move about 10 other things that are in the way to get to it. We do a lot of moving stuff around. Or we use headlamps at night to supplement the cabin lights if we have to look in the kitchen shelves.

We are limited in what we eat by what is available in the market. In the town of Savu Savu, you can get eggplant, carrots, bok choy, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, bananas, pineapple, green beans, apples and oranges (imported). We can get boxed UHT milk and powdered milk. We can get cheese, although it’s expensive and not that yummy. We can get butter and bread, beer and wine. We can get meat: chicken, pork, beef. Also pasta and rice. Vegetables are quite affordable, but imported goods are expensive. For example a big jar of Skippy peanut butter was 12 u.s. dollars, and a box of UHT milk is 2.50$ u.s.

Then we are limited by our cold storage–our fridge is a box about 2 x 2 feet. So we can’t buy too many vegetables because they go bad quickly if not kept cold. And then, once we leave port, cooking becomes a balance between which ingredients we have (what can we make with them?) and which ingredients we should use first before they go bad.

Showers here are usually a swim followed by a fresh water rinse on the back deck. We use a pesticide sprayer filled with water, and it uses very little water. If we are feeling like a real shower, we use soap & shampoo. Wade likes these showers just fine.

But life here is also pared down, it’s simpler, there are less distractions. And we have more time. So doing the washing by hand is not that big a deal, because we have more time…neither of us are working. I think that is the biggest gift of this year in Fiji: time. Time with Wade, to watch him learn and grow. Time to spend with each other. Time to be together, us three in our small boat. Time to try out EC, for example.

We usually wake at 5:30 am when Wade wakes up. Then Riki makes coffee while Wade and I play in the cockpit. We often work on a Sunday crossword puzzle in the mornings. Then breakfast of potatoes & onions & eggs, sometimes in a roti (tortilla), and breakfast for Wade. During Wade’s morning nap we wash laundry, sometimes snorkel (one of us), or work on boat projects, or write, or read, or play cards or cook. Then it’s lunch time and maybe a dinghy excursion or a swim off the back of the boat for all of us. Wade’s afternoon nap means more free time for Riki & I. Then it’s dinner time–we usually eat early, in the cockpit. It gets dark at 6 pm year-round here. Wade then goes to bed around 7 pm, and we follow by 8 pm.

Lo and behold, Wade is now sleeping through the night! For the past 4 nights, he has slept all through (7 pm to 5:30 or 6 am) with an occasional squawk, but he has settled himself each time. We did some sleep training back in the States in July (involving letting him cry for progressively longer stretches before a check-in), but with all the changes with moving to the boat we had gotten back into the easiest road: feeding him each time he awoke, which was 2 to 3 times a night. We finally got his sleeping quarters organized enough & were in a place where night crying wouldn’t awaken other boats, and so we did one night of letting him cry (he cried intermittently for an hour) and voila! Since then he’s been sleeping through. We also decided to stop the so-called dream feed, which I had been doing around 10 pm, since I no longer stay awake until 10 pm. 🙂

When there are other boats around, then we often engage with them: have potlucks, or drinks, or play games.

Riki told me, “I was trying to think of what you’d be missing about home, other than your friends and family obviously. Maybe you miss going to Bluebeard for a coffee.” But I haven’t missed that, or anything really concrete about home except people. I feel very present here, figuring out how to adapt to parenting on a boat–where we can play with Wade here; what he likes to do; how to make it safe for him. Also I’m learning some Fijian and re-learning the constellations of the Southern sky. And re-aquainting myself with how to cook with a pressure cooker, harking back to my Peace Corps days.

We’ve been in the Bay of Islands in Vanua Balavu in the northern Lau group for a week now. Our anchorage is stunning–clear blue water, surrounded by small steep green jungly islets. So steep you can’t go ashore. We have great snorkeling within swimming distance, and there are no other boats in sight. And only one around the corner. There is no internet access here. Later today we’ll go into the village and I’ll hopefully be able to post this with our internet access en route. We plan to hang out with the people in town, maybe drink some kava, go to church tomorrow, and then Monday take a truck ride over to Lomo Lomo to see what provisions we can find.