It looks like rain
Sometimes the life of a liveaboard sailor seems completely at odds with that of a landlubber: things that may seem simple in our boat lives may be infinitely more complex in a house. Likewise, there are subjects that appear trivial when you live on…
Cruising Outpost magazine
The nice folks at Cruising Outpost magazine in the USA gave us a 10 page spread for "The coconut milk run", a piece all about your [...]
Becalmed
Where has the wind gone? There’s an eerie feeling to losing even the merest scrap of breeze. We know the familiar adage “calm before a storm” so it’s wise to be on the alert when the air goes so quiet. Sometimes, a stillness in the immediate……
Fly by
Drones are a pretty amazing new piece of technology. Here's a very short glimpse of [...]
Thunderbolts, lightning, very very frightening…
I remember when we sailed across the Atlantic ocean and had to get comfortable with seeing lightning out at sea. It’s a rather spooky feeling, seeing those dramatic forks and flashes and remaining calm, knowing that when the sky is clear you can…
How do you know weather to go?
Our route this season takes us along some rather untouched and remote places, more so than in years before. This sometimes makes getting a good weather forecast a bit tricky. Previously we’d consult marina offices, go online where possible and…
The perfect wind
Sailors, true sailors, know how to grab their moments. A mere ten knots of wind guarantees them swiftly casting off the lines or, for the truly skilled, stylishly sailing off the anchor, to go out and play in the light breeze. Strengthening winds…
Smoothly does it
So, in typical sailor fashion, after meticulous planning of our Fiji to New Zealand passage, making sure we had extra crew on board and timing our departure just right in terms of weather, it ended up being really very straightforward and simply…
It still rains in paradise
It’s raining today in Fiji. Or perhaps I should say it’s raining again in Fiji. In the last few weeks we’ve been making passages through the reef systems of this beautiful island group but progress has been slow as we’ve been weather dodging, trying…
Look mum, no hands!
Change is in the air. We’re on the verge of beginning the next stage of our sailing journey: exploring the South Pacific. It’s also the start of us sailing as a family, which means we need to adapt the boat to make it a bit easier for either of us…
Role play
A few years ago James and I were walking along the cliffs of a Cornish seaside town and I glanced out to sea at a sailboat on the horizon. “We could just buy a boat and sail round the world”. That sentence changed everything. He quite rightly…