Late out the Gate – Cairns to Lizard Island

Overlooking Lizard Island Anchorage

I know, I know… Sometimes I get so behind on this blog that it seems impossible to resume. It’s far too easy to slide from one experience to next and put writing them down on the back burner. You’d almost think that nothing was going on over here, though it’s honestly due to the exact opposite.

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Yamba… sort of

waves crashing

How do eight months go by so fast? I was late-night binge-scrolling through Instagram recently and found a drone shot someone got of us the morning we first arrived in Yamba. I’ll pause for a moment so you can let that sink in…Continue reading →

New Caledonia

kitesurfing new caledonia

Hello. In all the madness surrounding our current state of affairs, I realised that I’ve seriously neglected the blog. My bad. It’s a bit of a time warp to look at the last post. From Fiji to now, where we’re sorting out how to live in Australia for the next six months (btw we made it to Oz), a whole lot of stuff has gone down. Boat projects continue, seas have been crossed. I feel like I spent an entire month doing paperwork, and somewhere in between we went to New Caledonia.Continue reading →

Uluikaukau

sunrise on fiji mountains yasawa

We’ve had an unusually high number of visitors this season. While we’re secretly (maybe not so secretly) delighted to finally have the boat back to ourselves, having friends visit breaks us out of our normal routine of surfing and kiting. It also forces us to take a break from the never ending list of boat projects, and pushes us to find a more diverse array of locations and activities. Win! Matt and Ally came to stay with us in August and were keen to see the Yasawa, so we watched the weather and put together a south-north-south itinerary.

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Salt

sunset sailing

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.

– John F. Kennedy

Mango Fire

man spinning fire in fiji

The touristy-thing has worked its way onto our agenda; this happens every so often and honestly it can be a nice change of pace. We’ve got some things going on back in the States, so we detached ourselves from the Musket scene and moved Cavalo over to Denarau where we’d reserved a mooring for two weeks. People were shocked to hear we had a mooring. We reserved it over three months ago before we were even in the country or had plane tickets home. Highly advised. In transit to our parking space a refreshed surf report revealed better-than-normal conditions for the following day, so we made a last minute decision to pack overnight bags and head for the Coral Coast where we could spend our last full day in Fiji letting someone else take us to the waves. Did I mention that we’ve completely dismantled our windlass and can’t really anchor the boat? No? Can’t wait to get back to that project…

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These Wheels Keep on Turning

barient winches from the 1970's

People love to ask us if we ever get bored on the boat. At times yes, maybe? The thing is, if you’re not out surfing or kiting or diving or doing whatever it is that excites you, there’s bound to be a long list of boat projects that needs tending to. I can’t say rebuilding the head or trying time and again to find the problem with the SSB radio are tasks that get me out of bed in the morning ready to conquer the world, but do they make me bored? No. Once you get into it they’re just a more masochistic kind of fun.

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