Seven years ago today, this little fella, aka Barney the Yorkshire Terror, changed my life in ways and degrees that I am still unable to fully comprehend.
More accurately, it was seeing him for the first time in the short 25 second video below that captured my attention, so take a look and a listen and then come on on back for the rest of this wonderful story.
177º23’02”E so it well into the Cyclone Zone and yes, you can ask me how I know!
So this stop over adds a few days to the passage and has taken me 17-18 days in the past.
OK, Wayne but what the heck does this have to do with the Barney video that changed your life so incredibly?
Ahhh, right.
So back aboard the good ship Learnativity, that Friday morning 7 years ago, Ruby the Wonderdog (my little Black Spoodle who had been with me since I started my single handed sailing adventures in San Francisco in March 2007), and I were up just after sunrise as usual for most sailors, had fixed my breakfast and was sipping my morning Latte and enjoying yet another beautiful sunny morning up in the cockpit of LTY (Learnativity).
This was typically the only time each day when I could sit and relax a wee bit catch up with all the Emails and other online content that had come in the past 24 hours. As I was zipping through all those Emails I came across an auto-generated one informing me that there was a new post on the Write on the Water blog which was of the several hundred blogs that I subscribe to on a wild range of topics.
Little did I know that clicking on that link was going to be one of the most life changing events of my already VERY eventful life!
Seeing that “Write on the Water” name, I vaguely recalled that I had been subscribed to this blog several years ago because, Christine Kling, one of four writers/sailors who wrote one post a week on Write on the Water (get it?), and she was not only an author of some very good best seller mystery novels, she was also a fellow single handed and very experienced sailor, currently sailing around the Caribbean islands on her sailboat sv Tale Spinner from her home Port in Ft. Lauderdale Florida.
The link opened up the blog post fine, but there was no text, no story? Simply the Title “Barney the Yorkshire Terror” and that little face staring up at me with a “Click to Play” button on his nose. I hit Play and as I suspect he might have just done for you, Barney gave ma a good morning chuckle. It also piqued my curiosity as to how this cute little animated dog video had been made? So I quickly fired off a short comment to the author which just happen to have saved and it reads;
Wayne says: November 22, 2013 at 07:17 am (Fiji Time)
Very cute and fun Christine. I too am out single handed sailing with my 6 year old “Spoodle” Ruby the Wonderdog and we are currently in Vuda Pt. marina in Fiji finishing up the latest refit in preparation for the next few years sailing through the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and making my way through Indonesia. I’d be interested to know more about how you made this little video if you care to share?
Also enjoying your books and have several loaded on my Kindle for upcoming passages. Thanks for all.
Wayne
I finished up my coffee and Email updates and got back to work on Learnativity.
Next morning, same routine and as I was enjoying my first coffee and going through the latest Emails, one was a WordPress comment from the Write on the Water blog, which thanks to the wonders of cloud storage and my somewhat geeky nature, I also still have a copy of so you can read it for yourself.
Nice of her to respond I thought as so many such questions go unanswered, and so being Canadian and just doing what I think is important, I wrote back a short note to thank her for getting back to me and that I would try out this little “My Talking Pet” app and maybe use it to make one with Ruby the Wonderdog. And then it was back to work for me and I never gave it another thought.
Well, as I was to learn weeks later, Christine was quite taken aback that someone had actually said “Thank You” ? Apparently when she dutifully answers all the thousands of questions a famous author receives, she rarely receives anything but more questions and never a Thank You. Who knew???
And so she wrote me back, and the following Email was on my screen as I was sipping my first coffee the next day: (click to enlarge if you want to read it)
No need to read the whole Email, but if you do, you will see what a catastrophic error she makes in the very first sentence when she starts off with; “Hi Wayne, Thank you so much for the interesting note full of info about you and your boat. I love getting long emails, so don’t ever
worry about writing too much.”
Oh the poor innocent dear! She has NO idea that she is saying that to Mr. Neveraparagraphwhenasentencewilldo! Though she might have started to clue in when I wrote back:
I will spare my full response, lucky you!! and just share the first of my brief four page Email response.
Not to worry, I am NOT about to share ALL our Emails back and forth in the coming days and weeks, again Lucky, Lucky you!
Suffice it to say, that the Email exchanges got longer and longer and more and more often.
Then Emails led to voice calls which followed my same “brevity challenged” arc.
Voice calls quickly led to Skype calls and let’s just say neither one of us got too much sleep in those first two weeks or so as we were living literally on the opposite sides of the world and I was on the other side of the International Date Line so we were not only many hours apart in different Time Zones, we were also on different days! Hence we were both on Skype calls in either the wee hours of our respective mornings or on very late night hours. Our internet connection had quite literally become the “International Date Line”.
Think about it for a minute and I’ll wait till you get it ……………………………….
OK, OK, enough already Wayne!!
You know where this is going so let me just quickly summarize what happened from there.
Video calls are fascinating, especially when you start logging hundreds of hours of them with someone you have never met. They pretty much cancel out any chances that either of you can be “faking it”, so you do end up learning more and more about the very real person on that screen for hours and in your ears and in hour head. But it still isn’t the same as the “real thing” and so at some point we started to talk about how, when and where we could meet up in person and find out if all the sparks that were flying back and forth through the ether were really real or just our twitterpated imaginations?
It was now December and so my first suggestions had been that I would sail up to Majuro and get Learnativity safely moored there as I had done in the past few years and then get the short flight from Majuro to Honolulu which happens 3 days a week and we could meet there. A bit longer but easy to get flights for Christine to fly from Florida to Honolulu and so that was the tentative plan. Emphasis on “tentative” of course because WAYNE still needed to finish the work on LTY, get her all sea worthy and ship shape for a relatively long passage and only then be able to know what sort of dates we could fly and meet.
Of course things never go as planned, especially when it comes to big boat projects. I was working longer and longer days, as was Christine who was in the midst of finishing and publishing her latest book at the time “Dragon’s Triangle” and we were both getting more and more frustrated that our “Launch Date” for this distant blooming romance seemed to be getting more and more elusive and later.
Hmmm, why does that sound so familiar??
Several hours into one of our Skype calls at that time, partly out of pure frustration, partly for some levity, I said something like “You know what would be really crazy, would be if you just flew here to Fiji and we could have our first date be the sail up to Rotuma and Majuro”.
Keep in mind that it is now only about two weeks before Christmas and I was sure that she would not want to be away from her family in Florida over the holidays so maybe Honolulu in the New Year would be best after all. So we started to look a the calendar and figure out the likely length of my sail up to Majuro and what dates early in the New Year we might be able to fly there and meet. So I simply asked “What date do you think you could fly?” And surely she understood I was talking about her flying to Honolulu right?
I had already learned that Christine can have some VERY “pregnant pauses” with her responses so I just patiently waited after asking what date she thought she could fly as I watched her eyes look up as if she was searching some calendar on the ceiling and then watched her lips moving a bit as she seemed to be doing some calculations in her head. After several minutes of this, she looked back at me on the screen and said “Tuesday”.
Huh? “Tuesday” I said? What do you mean “Tuesday”?
Never missing a beat and with a very quizzical look on her most serious face, she said; “I can be in Fiji on Tuesday.”
This was all happening late on a Friday night on Christine’s side of the International Date Line and in a very rare for me “pregnant pause” with my mind reeling with what I thought I had just heard I think I simply said “Are you kidding me?!?!?!”
I had borrowed my dear friends Ian and Coleen’s car to drive the 25km or so to the Nadi airport from Vuda Pt. Marina as their beautiful big boat mv Summer Spirt and had been my dock neighbors as you can see here, for all the months I had been there in Fiji over the last few years.
This is our first photo together, thanks Coleen, on the aft deck of Summer Spirit.
Fast forwarding through the months and years that followed:
OK, OK OK!!! Seriously this time, ENOUGH WAYNE!!!!
More of those stories for another time.
Right now, I sit here in Antalya Turkey with my Beautiful Bride of six years making us another one of her delicious meals and we have a bottle of bubbly in the fridge that I’m about to go pop so we can celebrate the 7th anniversary of our First Contact.
Thanks Barney!
I am the luckiest and richest man in the world all thanks to YOU!
Happy Anniversary!
I LOVE You Christine Louise!!
What a great story ! Too bad we were out of sync with our Marshall Island trips as it would have been fun to meet you two. We did two Fiji to Majuro trips (and one return to the South Pacific and one from Majuro back to North America via the Aleutians) and also had the pleasure of spending time with the new crew of Learnativity in Majuro, NZ and Vanuatu.
Thanks for the kind comments Max and it is indeed too bad that our timing was out of synch to meet up in the Marshalls. RMI (Republic of the Marshall Islands for those new to them) is one of my and now Christine’s favorite spots. I’ve done four Fiji to Majuro runs over the years and I think must have spent well over 2 years there all together so clearly a favorite and we already look forward to having Möbius take us there for our next visit.
Great to hear that you had the chance to spend some time with our previous Learnativity and more so with Chuck and Laurie, we also look forward to meeting up with them in some anchorage somewhere. Would be quite the hoot to have Learnativity and Möbius sharing an anchorage!
Happy Anniversary. Another great Sunday story. Can’t wait what to see the next year brings to these pages. Cheers!!!
Thanks Donny and do stay tuned as there are LOTS more stories where that “first meeting thanks to Barney” came from!
Another great story Wayne, thank you. I thought I was just here for the boatbuilding bits but now I’ll be looking forward to the people stories even more.
Thanks for sharing and Happy Anniversary to you both!
Thanks Dan. It is a challenge that Christine and I discuss a bunch about how to best group and present all the very different kinds of content and followers we have. We try to tag every post as best we can and then Christine has the site divided up a bit between her posts and mine and what featured posts go up top.
We will soon, hopefully, face more of this kind of challenge once we make the transition from building to cruising. Especially with all the “infant mortality” of new equipment not working out just right as well as just the regular “feature” of any boat being plenty of maintenance, there will still be plenty of my more “technical” posts for a long time to come which will hopefully satisfy the desires of our more technically inclined followers. But we will need to also figure out how to serve up the increasing amount of content we will be generating from our travels, the running of the boat, new cultures and people, etc.
Always a work in progress and we hope that you and others reading this will be encouraged to send us any and all suggestions you have to help us improve this Mobius.World site. So please do tell us what is working best for you, what you want more of, what isn’t working and you want less of, etc. And we are very open to any other suggestions that would help you get more value and entertainment out of this site.
Thanks in advance,
Wayne
Lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you enjoyed it JZ. We always appreciate feedback to know how our content is being received, especially when it is a bit outside the “norm” of our other content.
Hope we can provide more enjoyable content for you from here.
-Wayne
As you both know I don’t usually comment here, but I just have to add a tiny piece of the story from the other side. As Chris and I sat in Starbucks that December day and she was telling me about her plans to fly to Fiji, I remember my (and other friends) first reactions – “Are you crazy! He could be an axe…) Of course, I have never known a brighter, more level headed person in my life and if Chris said it was going to be okay, then I had to take her word for it. Of course, it turned out to be just another adventure in Chris’ life with the best outcome ever and I’m pleased to say I got to attend your wedding and to celebrate the start of another adventure. Congrats to you both, Barb.
Hi there Barbara!! What a lovely treat to have you pop up here. I know you and Christine get to chat reasonably often so I do manage to keep up with you a bit that way.
So pleased to have you following along with us on this latest adventure as well as looking back at past ones. I’ve heard many of the stories from people like you and Christine’s many other dear friends of their concern and dread over her outlandish idea of flying off to meet this “Crazy Canuck”, and just in case you didn’t know this little factoid, I did indeed carry a large red axe onboard Learnativity! However, this is simply because believe it or not that is a requirement of all Canadian registered boats, not any personal desire! 🙂
And of course you and I are in heated agreement that our meeting up was indeed as you put it; “just another adventure in Chris’ life with the best outcome ever”. We were thrilled to have you and 60+ of our best friends and family from truly all over the world, decide to surprise us in the eXtreme by showing up for what we thought was going to be this tiniest of weddings in San Diego. Christine and I have both spent most of our lives traveling the world and so with our friends and families quite literally scattered around the globe, our initial thought was that a wedding wasn’t something that made any sense. However my “force of nature” daughter Lia, set us straight that we HAD to have one, which she then went on to help organize and run, and lo and behold SIXTY people decided it would be fun to fly into San Diego for a few days and join us for our celebration of Love. You flying in from Florida is a perfect example of that and we can never thank you and all our other friends and family for making our wedding into a truly awemazing experience that stretched out over four days!
Thanks again for your note Barbara and we both look forward to seeing you again soonest when we all get to travel again. AND we have a pretty nice Guest Cabin with your name on it anytime you can get to us!
-Wayne
Well, thanks for sharing this bloggers affair;;
Thanks Gerson. We think of our lives as a great big collection of stories and are happy to share them with anyone that is interested in them.
-Wayne
A very Happy Anniversary to you both….
Thanks for sharing your “Barney” story with us Wayne. I too have had long distance relationships over the internet and I agree with you 100% about really getting to know each other well. I met my second & now ex wife, from Brazil while I was living in California that way. When we finally met in person it was like we already knew each other. I am now talking with a lady from Romania that I hope to be meeting later this week, depending on what the latest spike in Covid-19 does to travel restrictions. Best to the both of you.
Capt OH
Hello!
Could you reveal me,
witch bilge water censor you used with your bilge- system?