Pacific Voyages

We got around to watching "Moana" since returning from the east coast. It fit in nicely with a BBC production on Netflix we'd been watching earlier this summer, a Benedict Cumberbatch-narrated collection about the South Pacific.

We both really enjoyed Moana: it's beautiful and fun and paced well, it seems like the culmination of the Disney heroine archetype, and the songs are still stuck in my head, especially "Your Welcome" and "Shiny." (ESPECIALLY "Shiny".)

It helps that I'm a sucker for early human migration---reading about it, thinking about it, writing scenes of it into a novel I'm working on, and getting to watch it fictionalized in Disney animated feature.

[[Digression: between Zootopia and Moana (and maybe even Tangled and Frozen), doesn't it seem like Disney has taken over from Pixar on making the best animated features?]]

Here's a graphic from the migratory patters of those Austronesians over the years:

The South Pacific BBC series had some very cool from-space footage that really captured the true vastness and emptiness of the region, the part of the planet that holds one-quarter of all the water on earth.

A documentary that I put into our Netflix Instacue was called "Losing Sight of Shore", and once I read the description again the other day, I thought, well now, this is fitting.

It's shot in a reality-style (not generally a fan), but that's because it's shot by the four women of the Doris, the members of the Coxless Crew, as they rowed from San Francisco to Australia.

Let me put that in all caps, as it seems ludicrous on the face of it: THEY ROWED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO HAWAI'I TO SAMOA AND ONTO AUSTRALIA.

They were trying to raise money for breast cancer research and the like, and their documentary kept talking about they m being the first set of four ladies to make the trip, as in there were a few groups that have made the rowing trek before.

To get a sense of their voyage, here's how their trip started: after taking on water in their battery hold, by day 11 they had to turn back for California, but they'd only gone maybe 30 miles out to sea. It took six days to get to Santa Barbara, seal up their batteries, and then it was really on. 17 days at sea, and they'd really just begun.

Two ladies would row for two hours while the other two either napped or did chores that had to be done. Then they'd switch. Two hours on, two off, every day of every week while they slowly headed west and south. They'd planned for 155 days, and it took 257.

In other words, it took three months, and then some more, longer than they'd planned.

Row for two hours, off for two. On, off. For over 8 months.

I made a joke while watching these chicks, their hands blistered and skin chapped while I was comfortable on the couch, and Corrie said something like, "Like you could row from here to Hawai'i."

I snorted. "Honey, I'd be hardpressed to row from one side of Rainbow Lagoon to the other and back."

Rainbow Lagoon is a manmade pond at the Hyatt downtown, and starts behind the bridge I'm standing on to take this picture, but not far behind. It curves of somewhat:

The watery road to Hawai'i it certainly is not.

The documentary is crazy, and you feel for the girls on the days when their average milage dips into the -9.5 range. That's what makes the good 50 mile days all the sweeter.

The BBC documentaries that are not the David Attenborough versions are okay if not great, but listening to Cumberbatch butcher the word "penguin" ("peng-in" and my favorite, "peng-weng") is worth it.

Of the three, Moana is probably the best. They sail more than row.