Resort guests stroll up and down the dock, pointing to the boats that excite them the most. Penthouse-style motor yachts, carbon catamarans, classic monohulls. The motor yachts are usually a favourite. Exclamations of admiration and desire make their way out of mouths not privy to the fact that most of these boats are broken.
Immediate agendas are generally not discussed much amongst sailors. The bigger picture, sure, but the short term is better left to circumstance. It’s pretty much a guarantee that any attempt to stick to a schedule will leave you feeling like things didn’t go ‘according to plan’, so we tend to make a general outline and then take it day by day.
Northward, ho! We broke up the trip with a stop along the way, but tried to save some locations for the sail back down again. Octopus Resort on the island of Waya had a reportedly decent anchorage, so we popped in for a better night’s sleep and a quick poke about the area. Continue reading →
So we’ve been parked in Musket Cove for a silly amount of time now. The surf has been pumping ever since we showed up and we haven’t been able to create an excuse to sail away from it. Even on windier days it provides some ideal grounds for kiting, and after a brief encounter with a palm tree I’m finally starting to pick up the sport. So many activities! Continue reading →
There’s no passage like a speedy passage. We set off with a good deal of confidence in the forecasted winds, but were blown away (quite literally) by this run. It did take most of our first afternoon to get out of the wind shadow of New Zealand, but by nightfall we had 18 knots of southeast breeze that stayed with us nearly all the way to Fiji. Continue reading →
A week in Northland. That’s about the best you can hope for when trying to make tracks. With a chance to make the Fiji jump coming together almost perfectly, that’s exactly the timeframe we were looking at and hit the ground running. Continue reading →
It was 6 degrees the morning we left Nelson. We’d returned the heater a friend had loaned us two days prior, giving Cavalo more than enough time to meet the ambient temperature. The plan was relatively straightforward; we would chase a gale up and out of the bay into the Tasman, move up the west coast and round North Cape, finally heading southeast to the Bay of Islands where we could catch the next window to Fiji. A front slowly making its way down towards the North Island meant we would have only four days to do this or we’d get whacked, but we were confident in the miles we could make and growing increasingly impatient.