Sea gypsies

As I was driving home last night I looked out to sea and there, in the cove, it seemed as if someone had built, magically, a whole new town. Lights glowed soft yellow all across the bay - a village of boats.
The sky and sea were clear and bright blue this morning. There wasn't anyone much on the beach: three women walking their dogs and talking non-stop; a man swimming long breast-stroke laps; a roadwork crew in bright orange vests eating meat pies for breakfast; three cormorants, a few dozen gulls, millions of cockle shells, a dead fish, and me.
But the bay was filled with boats - not the normal pleasure cruisers or catamarans that often spend the weekend here (I live on an island). These were boats that people lived on, with bikes strapped on deck, and dogs, and washing hanging from the rigging: just the way people lived for centuries, and still do in some places in the world.
There was a solid blue ketch, possibly a converted fishing trawler, and many well-rigged ocean-going yachts - all small ships, really, able to weather storms and high seas, and big enough for a few people to live on.
It's not like the pirate days, of course. Now they have global positioning systems and solar panels and stainless steel barbeques and probably dishwashers for all I know. But still, it'd be a wonderful life.
I don't know why they all suddenly appeared. Perhaps they travel together. Or maybe it was a sea gypsy conference. Or just a wonderful coincidence.
All I can report is that it's very hard to concentrate on walking fast when there are too many boats to look at. By 8.30 when I'd finished my walk, there were lots more people on the beach: joggers with grim faces and sweat stains; yappy dogs with legs about an inch long; three back-packers screaming as they ran into the cold water; two German tourists wearing those complicated khaki trousers with a thousand pockets; and me.
A man came out onto the deck of the ketch, stretched and yawned, and sat down with a cup of tea. Nobody else seemed to be awake on the boats.
Imagine waking up and wondering, "Where shall we sail this morning? Or will we just stay here and laze about on the beach?"
It was such a bright day, you could see the outlines of all the other islands, and even the valleys on Great Barrier which are often hidden in seamist.
But I had to go. There was work to do.
When I drove back into town at lunchtime the local school was having a sports day on the beach and the tourist buses were unloading people for a picnic. A handful of gleaming white yachts lay at anchor. And yet somehow the bay seemed deserted.
The sea gypsies had gone.

Book booty

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main."
- Walt Disney

Visiting Malta

The Swashbuckler books are partly set in Malta (and in the sea around the islands). In May last year, after I'd finished writing all three books, I finally visited Malta to make sure everything was as I imagined, after years of research from the other side of the world.
Here are some of my notes about what happened while I was there:

Day one I know I'm supposed to be doing very serious research but it's gorgeous and you can't help falling in love - the cities glow yellow, and sea and sky are ridiculously blue. The limestone is crumbling now, but it's warm and honey coloured, and even the most impressive ramparts seem somehow welcoming (unless you're a Turkish corsair, of course).
Flew in a circle around the islands and it all seemed terribly familiar, except for the high rise apartments, which don't feature in my unique 1798 picture of the archipelago. Then the first things I saw when I arrived were a house called Lily [the name of the main character in Swashbuckler!] and a restaurant called Il Pirata.
Then I opened the curtains in my hotel room and a schooner sailed past.
Day three Am resting up after a day of scrambling around dusty old forts. Having invented a series of secret tunnels under Vittoriosa for Swashbuckler book 3, today I found some real life ones, and there was some very undignified squeezing through rusty iron gates and crawling along drainage ditches (which I'd also invented).
Day eight A potted history of Malta, so you know what I'm doing here:
Settled first by Sicilians, who built miraculous temples of huge monoliths a thousand years before Stonehenge. From then on, it's a Mediterranean hit parade of all the usual gang - Phoenicians, Ulysses (who spent seven years in a cave on Gozo, probably eating crunchy bread and honey), Romans, Arabs, Normans. Then the Knights of St John, who'd been thrown out of Rhodes by the Ottomans, were handed the islands. They built the great fortress cities and set themselves up as pirate crusaders, that is, they took Muslim slaves and gold as a way of getting back at the Barbary states. In 1798 Bonaparte arrived, then Nelson in his wake (and my imaginary pirates).
I spent all day yesterday back in Mdina, the Old City. Lots of pirate research there, as my books' narrator, Lily, and her crew have a few adventures there and I had to retrace all their steps I had made up. Luckily it all makes sense, and in fact it's a perfect pirate town. The laneways twist and turn, a bend every ninety paces, as that's the usual flight of an arrow, so you can fight a running battle in the streets.
This afternoon I've been out on the water, checking the fortifications from below.
Day ten In the second Swashbuckler book there is a long sequence where the crew goes into the Inland Sea - and today I did. It's a crack in the rock on the smaller island of Gozo, and you zoom through in a fishing boat (you don't row, lucky I checked) and the cliffs are sheer on either side and the water is... actually there's not a word for it... it's not electric blue, and azure doesn't even come close, it's just Impossibly Blue, that's all, and so clear you can see the coral forty feet down. I was in a little fishing boat with a grin from ear to ear (me, not the boat), although Max the fisherman told me I was crazy because you're supposed to do the research before you write the books.
Day thirteen Today was the final research day, the bit I've been looking forward to - the circumnavigation of the islands. I just booked one of those normal cruise boats, filled with sunburned English people, all unsuspecting that they are involved in a great pirate enterprise. They thought they were going snorkelling in the Blue Lagoon. Actually, it wasn't blue today, just a crazy kind of aqua. Because today was the first cold day.
After lunch came the coastline I really need to see, because I've decided on all these pirate landing places and my guide had showed me some cliffs that were about as death-defying as a council drain.
The cliffs! From the sea, they soar. For miles. And the pirate haven I had chosen on the basis of book-learning only looked absolutely perfect to me, and there are grottos deep into the limestone and on every headland a Knights of Malta watchtower still stands, beautiful squat stone things they are too. The wind rose, the sea was heaving and a wonderful dark blue.

In port this month

The Auckland Anniversary Regatta a few weeks ago brought a flock of tall ships into port. Good old Soren Larsen was around for a while, and I felt sure that the Spirit of Adventure visited us briefly. I recognise her profile. She's a tall ship especially designed to teach young people how to sail.
Now Windeward Bound, the brigantine that famously recreated Matthew Flinders' epic voyage, is tied up at Princess Wharf. She (like Endeavour) looks frighteningly small to venture out into the Tasman, let alone halfway around the world.
As if that weren't enough, one day I pounded around the corner to come face to bow with the QE2. She may no longer be the biggest cruise liner in the world, but she's still one of the most elegant, for my money, looking for all the world like one of those old Cunard Lines Art Deco posters. I shouted aloud in excitement. I'd only seen her once before, dwarfed by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but she towered over the Hilton Hotel on the wharf. Six men were abseiling down that famous funnel, painting, like tiny Action Man figures.
The next day I heard her horn, sounding the departure - it was deafening, even all the way down at my office in Westhaven (about a twenty minute walk).
The following morning, her berth was taken by Aurora, a megalithic white office block of a ship: she accommodates 1,950 passengers, has an atrium with a waterfall, and three swimming pools (including one with a sliding glass roof). The day after, the brand spanking new Diamond Princess arrived, all 116,000 tonnes of her. Both seemed even more monstrous than QE2, but less dignified.
The ferries turn and dock right next to the big ships so we get a tug's-eye view of the hull.
My personal favourite is the relatively miniscule Clipper Odyssey, which looks like an elegant version of those wonderful coastal tramps that ploughed their way from Hong Kong to Vladivostok via Shanghai in the '30s.

I grew up watching ships come and go - "under the hook," as they say in Port Melbourne. My grandfather was a warfie. So were all his mates.
We used to go down to Station Pier and watch the passenger ships leave. In those days, everyone on board, and everyone on the wharf, would throw streamers, and try to catch the streamers thrown by others. So as the ship pulled away from the dock it was still connected to the land by a bright web of thin paper strips. One by one, the streamers broke, until the last one fluttered into the water, and then the people on the wharf who were saying goodbye would shed a tear and stop waving.
Nobody throws streamers anymore, which I'm sure is much better for the environment, but not nearly as much fun.

Into the lion's den

At the weekend, I was at a rural show in Hamilton. In one of the huge halls at the Showgrounds, there was a vast series of wire cages. Inside, at one end, were three white lions. At the other end, separated by a wall of wire, were two young Bengal tigers. And in the middle, in a kind of big-cat playpen, were two Royal White tiger cubs, only a few months old.
The cats come from Zion Wildlife Gardens, run by "The Lion Man," Craig Busch, who breeds rare and endangered species. It was one of his lions, Zion, who was the real-life model for Aslan in the filming of the movie of The Narnia Chronicles.
The tiger cubs, Rongo and Kiwi, were born here, two of only about 100 Royal White tigers left in the world - all in captivity. One day soon they'll go to Africa, to a special World Heritage animal sanctuary.
They may have been young, but they were still fairly big, standing as high as my shoulders on their hind legs.
I can say this with some certainty, because I went right into the tiger enclosure - inside the cages with Craig - to take some photos!
Luckily, it was just after feeding time.