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here was a pearl in Oriental’s harbor for an instant Sunday afternoon.

The MV, Pearl.

Pearl, a 32-foot steel Bruce Roberts-designed trawler came to town to refuel.

At the fuel dock on the harbor, a family of four from New Zealand emerged for a less-than-half-hour stop in Oriental. 16-year old Alice, her 14-year old brother Lloyd, their mother Phillippa waited while John Ashbey filled the diesel tank, two yellow fuel containers at a time.

Phillippa and John Ashbey of Christchurch, New Zealand, who are traveling the Great Loop with their two children.

The process allowed a short time to find out about their trip.

The family bought the boat in Florida this winter and set out from Fort Myers in mid-February, working their way up the ICW. They’re bound for the Hudson river, the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi on the Great Loop trail.

Ashbey family.

Pearl has been on some of that loop before. Phillippa says the man who built the boat earlier this decade — “a farmer in Ohio” — motored it to Florida via the Ten Tom River.

As John ferried more containers of fuel on to the boat, Phillippa laughed about some adaptations to boating in the US. The weather channel on the VHF wasn’t immediately evident and they’d been relying on the weather forecasts that came more intermittently from other sources. (Some other sailors assured them they hadn’t been missing much in the way of accurate predictions of the weather.)

The deck of “Pearl”

Phillippa also said that she was surprised not to see more families with children traveling on boats, an observation another sailing mother at the dock shared. Her son and daughter, she said, were passing a lot of the time reading.

This is not the first adventure on boats for the family. A few years ago they flew to Europe and took at boat along canals there. When the children were toddlers, the flew to England and sailed up its coast.

Compariing notes. Alice, Phillippa and Lloyd Ashbey and at right, Kaeo and Bird Clarke, who were just back from a winter in the Bahamas on their parents’ boat, “Osprey.” .

Back in Christchurch, NZ, they have a sailboat. But they haven’t made home a starting point for a sailing trip. Yet.

They hope to complete the Great Loop, and have about 8 months to do it. John Ashbey says they have return airplane tickets for mid-January and Alice and Lloyd’s school year starts about a week later.

John Ashbey, foreground and his daughter Alice who tends to the lines as Pearl prepared to leave Oriental.

Traveling at 6 mph, they have done a lot of 30 mile days on this trip, stopping in to see towns. They didn’t tarry long in Oriental. John wanted to take advantage of the flat conditions and get a few more miles under their belt.
Later this month, there’s a Sea Scouts gathering on the Potomac, so the family were anxious to keep moving north to be there in a week and a half.

The upper deck on “Pearl.”

The Ashbey family is writing of their adventures on a blog bowwaves.blogspot.com.

Posted Monday May 11, 2009 by Melinda Penkava

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