Passage from Luagnville, Vanuatu to Cairns, Australia

We left for a nine day passage to Cairns, Australia. Being that it is such a long passage, we had some serious getting ready to do. We spent all day Thursday and most of the day Friday doing chores.

Jaime volunteered to scrub the waterline, which delighted Christi. Christi thinks that the waterline is by far her hardest job duty. She was pretty happy about passing it off onto Adrienne, and even happier to have gotten out of it a second time in a row. He hopped in and hopped right back out, realizing that there was no way he could fight the aggressive two knot current. At slack tide he hopped in and got to work, but wasn’t able to finish the job before the tide picked back up. When the tide was slack again, he got in to finish the job. Jaime is planning on buying a Nordhavn and is trying to decide between a 43 and a 47. After finally completing the waterline, he came inside and announced that he had decided on the 43 he couldn’t possibly take doing the waterline of the 47, which is actually 50 and a half feet

Christi did the bottom when Jaime finished the water line. As she prepared to get in, she managed to break Continue reading

Tonga Chores, Visitors and Jinxes

Eric spent the entire day yesterday doing boat chores. He changed the pre-filter on the water maker and cleaned the sea strainer, and changed the generator impellor. He also did some good stuff like secure the toaster oven and dish drainer so they don’t go flying when we get hit by a side wave, re-running wires so we could move some of the computer gear to better locations, general reorganizing, and cleaning.

Yesterday was the last day of SCUBA class for Christi. She took her final exam and did three dives in other parts of the harbor. The other dive sites had more life than the site on Tuesday, but were still mostly dead. There were lots more of both starfish and a couple of sea anenomoies. Christi passed the class with flying colors. After three days of being in the sun with her mask on, she has stylish mask tan lines. Continue reading

Monkey Island, Suwarrow

First thing this morning, John, the caretaker, called and asked us if we would like some fresh fish they had just caught. We said “sure” and headed over to shore. They gave us a ziplock bag containing enough fish for two dinners for us. There was tuna, rainbow fish, and something else. Much to Christi’s delight, the fish was filleted. Continue reading

Passage from Bora Bora to Suwarrow

We had a decent passage from Bora Bora to Suwarrow with seas at a rocky 6 feet when we left, working and slowly mellowing out a little each day to nice 3 foot seas by the last day. Up until that last day we were running at 1600-1700 rpm and doing about 6.4 knots. The last day the wind and current both picked up in our favor and we had to slow down to 1400 rpm to keep our speed at 6.4 knots. Why slow down? So we could arrive at daylight in Suwarrow. Continue reading