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April 12, 2005
Stevie’s blog: Dinah Beach Yacht Club, Darwin.
Organising an expedition is not dissimilar to running a small company. It requires a lot of office work – telephoning, ordering parts, meetings and administration. The putting together of the adventure and getting to the start line, as we’ve often said, is a bigger battle than the trip itself. The goods news is that we have office facilities – table, chair, phone, the Internet, tools, etc – but these are spread over an area of several square miles. Within Moksha’s boat yard space we have only a makeshift table made of abandoned wood pallets, two deck chairs and an electric cable powering a light bulb and a fan. All the surviving equipment is scattered around on the concrete floor, and we have erected a staggeringly haphazard arrangement of tarpaulins, supporting poles and cordage to offer a degree of shade and shelter from torrential downpours. Imagine if you will, trying to organise your own complex affairs from under a sheet of plastic in a parking lot.
Bouts of uncontrollable laughter seem to be our best (or perhaps our only) answer to the rain and the chaos at times, followed by a few bottles of Cooper’s Sparkling Ale.
I’ll try to keep my main item of news short and sweet: I won’t be accompanying Jason on the crossing to Timor. Our dear friend Lourdes, from California, will be taking my place. Since Jason decided not to renovate and repaint Moksha until she gets shipped on to Singapore, there’s not much work to be done on her, only cleaning, testing safety gear and electrics and loading supplies, I’ll be doing that for the next week and then taking off to visit friends on the NSW Coast and to fulfil a lifelong wish to see Tasmania.
Lourdes has been a keen supporter and friend of the expedition since we met her in Monterey, CA in 1997. She has long been promised a pedal voyage, and this next 2-week trip might conceivably be Moksha’s last outing. I hope it will be a fantastic experience for her. She is a lovely woman and I’m sure you’ll get to know her well over the coming months. As for me, well the truth is I acted rather selfishly in staking my claim on this (potentially) final Moksha trip – it was kind of my “last dance” with the old girl. I was looking forward to the simplicity and solitude of the Big Blue, having worked so hard for 5 years to write my book – Pedalling To Hawaii. So I’ve decided to give Lourdes her long-awaited taste of Moksha and to seek my own, much needed solitude in the company of my friend and teacher Zen Master Hogen in the delightful surroundings of the Funky Forest retreat community near Byron Bay.
Sorry for the confusion, but it seems the right thing to do for us all. The adventure continues...
Steve
Posted on April 12, 2005 2:04 AM