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…

Sailing the Solomons

There is always a squeeze point in our sailing plans. Although we try to avoid sailing to deadlines there are larger forces such as cyclone season, monsoon season or the turn of the prevailing winds or currents that force our hand. That’s one of the…

Clandestine mangos in the mangroves

Now that it is April we can relish the fact that its mango season. However, we don’t get our mangos from the shop or the market… no, now we get them in darkness in the bushes. Welcome to Cuba, communist land where no man owns what he works for. Here…