Bareboat sailing
Sailors like to get naked. After all your boat is your home and who needs to be covered up in sweltering layers in the tropical heat? Why not just [...]
What’s in a name?
Once you’ve been cruising for a while you develop a shorthand, referring to every couple or family onboard by their boat name. We get cards or emails to “the Adamastors” and we never take offence at it, although it’s a far cry from our much cooler…
It all comes out in the wash
We’re back in the UK, enjoying the reunions with family and friends that our brief sojourns from our ‘proper’ life at sea allow us. And there is one acquaintance that I must admit I am incredibly glad to see again – a washing machine. Not a bucket,…
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……
The beach
Summer has begun. For us Brits the snatched breaks of bank holidays and family vacations send us flocking to the beach. Whether it’s the English seaside - complete with donkey rides, rockpools, and someone selling jellied eels - or jetting off to…
Worse things happen at sea
A boat is really a house combined with a car and put into an environment that constantly attacks it. Saltwater and sun destroy whatever they can without mercy. It’s a matter of constant maintenance as things will always break. Some items you can…
The trading post
When you come from a world of shops, fixed prices and hard currency it’s hard to imagine how you’d go about trading goods or swapping skills in exchange for your family’s food. Yet, in the last year, sailing in Vanuatu, the Solomon islands, Papua…
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…
Making friends
A smile can do a lot of things. In Nissan island, our first PNG stop, we have a canoe full of kids paddling up to the boat on our first morning there. They are grinning, gleaming white smiles from ear to ear but they have little to no words of…
S-l-o-w time
The nature of the experience of travel is hugely dependent on the speed at which you move. When we first told people that we had grand plans to sail around the world, those that didn’t simply blink back at us in disbelief would nod slowly, as if the…
The outer islands
The country of Papua New Guinea is a place that’s always conjured up images of the exotic for me. From the treehouse-building Korowai tribe, to the unusual Vogelkop bower bird and birds of paradise native to this land, PNG is a place that most of us…
Maiden voyage
One thing that I’ve learned is that sailors are suckers for ritual celebrations. Crossing the Equator, cutting over the International Date Line, transiting the Panama canal and “closing the circle” upon circumnavigation are all [...]
Like a fish to water
Living on a boat with kids means that you’re in and out of the water a lot. It’s a welcome way of cooling off from the heat of the day in the tropics or calming down if the children have got a bit wild. It’s our backyard, our swimming pool, our…