Category Archives: Cruising Life

Describes an experience regarding the boating lifestyle of our travel.

Book Coming Soon!

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Volume 1, of the yet untitled book covering San Diego to Australia will hopefully be ready to purchase soon. Many people have asked us why they should buy our book if they can read our blog for free. Here are a few good reasons:

  • Prologue: How we formed the dream and the early planning stages.
  • The entire 21 day passage from San Diego to Nuka Hiva has been re-written. At that point, the blog was in real time and we didn’t want people to worry about us. But the truth was that it was tough!
  • Many new stories from the journey – And there are some really good ones!
  • In Retrospect sections with great insights — so you can see the situation through the eyes of a newbie as we learn, while simultaneously seeing the same situation through the eyes of experience.
  • Streamlined stories – some complained our posts were too long and detailed, and the book is a condensed version they will enjoy more.
  • Formatting is first person, through Christi’s eyes – Some complained they didn’t like the third person format, so they will enjoy the book more.
  • Actual dates on each post. On the blog, the dates are not real time, which is a significant piece of information for anyone hoping to follow in our footsteps.
  • All profits will go to our cruising fund. The more books we sell, the sooner you can start reading about our next journey! So, buy one and get all your friends to buy one, too!

Cruising Costs

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Since this Q& A is so long, it gets its own post!

Q: What is the exact cost of cruising, and why will no one will tell me?

A: We briefly addressed this in FAQ #26 and on this post, but since the question keeps coming up, we’ll try to be more explicit. When we were trying to budget, we were also frustrated at the lack of hard numbers for costs. But, now we understand why. There are many factors that can affect/change the costs.

First, nothing will dominate more than Continue reading →

Following the Red Line to San Diego

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May 31, 2009 We were up early and ready to pull out of port by 0645. Even though we were going through the usual motions, it felt different. For the first time in over two years, we were going back. We always moved forward. The fact that we were going back hit us hard. It’s over. It is really over.

We were joined by a journalist from Circumnavigator for the trip down. We pulled out as soon as she arrived. We actually had to fight the instinct to go north or west, and instead turned south. We used the never used in 2 years “reverse route” feature of the plotter to set a reciprocal course back to San Diego. Going back on our previous course seems wrong. Our plotter draws a red line where we have been. By definition of our circumnavigation the red line has always been behind us. Now we were following the red line.

Right away, we realized Continue reading →

Some Kosmos World Trip Statistics

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Here are some stats on our trip. If you are you interested in any other numbers, let us know and we’ll try to come up with them for you.

Trip Duration
Overall Time: 2 years, 2 days (733 days, 2008 was leap year).
Days at sea/days on land: 199/534 = 27% time at sea

Boat Numbers
Average speed entire trip: 6 knots
Engine Hours: 4,774
Generator hours: 1,902
Nautical Miles: 28,940 (33,821 statute miles, 53,539 kilometers)
Diesel consumed: ~11,800 US gallons, 44,600 liters
Main engine failures: None

Passages
Number of passages 7 days or longer: 8 (3 alone, 5 with crew)
Guests that did passages with us: 14 (counting the overnight guests on the Panama Canal transit)
Longest non-stop passage just the two of us: Continue reading →

The San Diego to San Diego World Circumnavigation is Completed!

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We got up at midnight after a two hour nap. Everything was pretty well ready to go before we took our nap, so all we needed to do was warm up the engine before we pulled out. We untied and took off at around 1230.

At first the seas were ugly. Eric was really sick and Christi was green. It is kind of surprising to us how fast we lose our tolerance to the ocean. The longer we sit in port, the more likely we are to be green when we do finally go out again.

The seas slowly but surely calmed down throughout the night, and by dawn it was pretty darn flat outside. It was foggy out. Not so foggy that there was no visibility, but foggy enough that we couldn’t see the mountainous Mexican coastline at all. And we were running pretty close to shore.

We got to the US border at around 0900. We were expecting Continue reading →