Occasionally we get a proper weekend, free from boat jobs. This last one was all about making.

Making food, making dens, making pictures.

Dinghy trips and paddleboard lessons are the order of the day.

So, you may be aware that the plan was to sail from New Zealand to Australia via Vanuatu and New Caledonia, getting to Australia for Christmas at the latest.

James left for Vanuatu with a couple of crew but got into an unexpected storm with 50 knot winds and big seas. They sustained some sail and running rigging damage, nothing awful but they were only 120miles out from NZ so James made the hard decision to return. At least everyone was safe and lots was learned.

This is the first time to date that we've ever been caught out by the weather which, on balance, makes us realise how lucky we've been in the past.

Now we're back on the dock in Opua, Bay of Islands, repairing the damage and trying to figure out our next move. We're longing to be back in the tropics but it's so late in the season that we'd have virtually no time in the islands before having to push through to Aus. If we stay in NZ then we can at least sail around all the islands here and get the kiddos up to speed with sailing.

But it all depends on whether our import permit can be extended so watch this space.

...Has finally had his first passage. We made the trip up from Whangarei to Opua over a few days via Urquharts Bay, Tutukaka Harbour and Urupukapuka Bay in the Bay of Islands.

The kiddos are adjusting to their harnesses and tethers for when they're in the cockpit and were great on passage which bodes well.

The very fact that our sailboat enables us to live on the water never ceases to amaze me.

This may sounds obvious but, like the landlubber homeowner who always wants to spend more time entertaining in their dining room, taking a luxurious soak in their bathtub or simply having a nice long phonecall while sitting halfway up the stairs, the ocean is our backyard and taking any opportunity to enjoy it makes me feel lucky.

Water surrounds us. Our everyday life at anchor is governed by the height of the tide, the strength of the current and the sudden ripples of wake from passing vessels. Down below, in the cabin, we hear the clicks and squeals when dolphins come near or the plops and slaps of a fish thrashing or a bird diving in. The tropical sun on our backs can only be endured so long before the delicious, soothing cool blanket of water beckons us in and we jump from the side or the boom, almost throwing ourselves back into it’s welcoming arms in a racket of laughter and splashing.

And, each time, even after all these years, I’m reminded of how different the view below the waterline is. The familiar salt sting to my eyes subsides and the anchorage opens up its secrets. We’ve dropped the hook in sand today but, swimming a few lazy strokes away from the boat, the underwater landscape shifts from fine sand and turquoise blue to the bright, bustling world of a small stretch of reef. I don my snorkel and mask and breathe deeply, noticing how the noises of the land life above become muffled and faded down here, and relaxing into that strange feeling of flying that snorkelling gives you.

My infant son’s chubby legs dangle enticingly from his inflatable seat as his pudgy hands pat the water’s surface while he giggles with delight. My husband and our little girl hang next to him, treading water, their legs cycling round. They are oblivious to the fact that a shoal of fish, in a sudden flash of silver, shifts direction to avoid their waving feet. Three black-tip reef sharks are stalking around down here, patrolling their coral territory and startling the fish. I remember how odd and unnatural it felt the first time we swam with sharks around but I’ve grown to learn that these small reef inhabitant ones pose no threat to me or to the tempting baby legs that are swaying at our stern.

I push on and try to make a mental note of all the creatures before me. Little light blue fish with bright yellow spots; black and white striped ones with yellow tails; snapper, clown fish, parrot fish, lion fish; oranges, greens and purples that dart by before I can decide if they’re Triggerfish, Wrasse or Tangs. The seabed is littered with clusters of long-spined sea urchins so I twist round in the water to change direction. Each visit reveals different residents and I swim a few circles, searching for the white spotted eagle rays, an elusive octopus or a green sea turtle. The shapes and patterns within the coral look so detailed and intricate, and every single one is a home to dozens of anemones, sea cucumbers, tiny crabs and sponges.

And all this life happens on top of each other, a school of stripy fish swimming past the small spiny lobsters clambering over a starfish, which, in turn, walks imperceptibly over a mound of brain coral. It’s the aquatic equivalent of Heathrow airport down here but I’m the only one to witness it; the only one to see all this life, in this place, at this moment. And yes, I never stop thinking just how lucky we are to have free access to all this whenever we want.

The rapid noise of an outboard propeller nearby interrupts my daydream and I glide slowly back to the friendly rounded shape of our hull in the water, and the shiny metal of the swimladder hanging down as the gateway into this other world. I clamber back up onto our sugar scoop and rinse myself off, shaking away the trancelike state that my underwater visits lull me into.

Up in the cockpit, James hands the sleeping baby into my arms and casually enquires how my swim was.

“Oh, you know,” I shrug, “The usual.”

And we smile at the triviality of that phrase.

Because no matter how many miles you log and how long you live on board, the pleasures that the water offers up to you never run dry.

Some days are all about staying in and playing Duplo...

We once left a taxi driver in St. Kitts dumbfounded when we explained that after getting out of his cab we’d be hopping into our dinghy to get to our yacht, lying at anchor.

“You got TWO boats?” was his astonished response, “You even got a boat to get to your boat?!?”

Far from the presumed luxury that he took a dinghy to be, all liveaboard cruisers rely heavily on their tenders. We prefer to anchor rather than sit in a marina so the dinghy is our lifeline to the shore. It’s essential for provisioning trips, it takes us out for snorkelling expeditions and we’ve even used it for collecting rainwater in tropical downpours. We often choose to row with the oars rather than use the outboard, as any quiet and less fuel hungry option is always our inclination.

Our current dinghy is the second one we’ve had. The first was once a noble inflatable chariot of a thing, bought second hand in the UK but, alas, is no more. It had survived countless inexperienced beach surf landings, meandering potters upriver, long adventures through mangrove jungle and a close shave with our enthusiastic, foolishly close experiments with paper fire lanterns at New Year’s Eve in Panama’s San Blas islands.

It even helped us perform a rescue mission one evening in the Caribbean when we were heading home to the boat and heard some yelps in the dark. We spotted two men in a tender, loaded down with luggage, no lights, calling us over to them. Their outboard had failed, the wind and waves had picked up and they were drifting out to sea in front of the high-speed ferry dock. We happily agreed to tow them but they were so laden down and our 3.3 horsepower outboard so pushed to the limit that it took us a good half hour to return them safely to their boat.

However, the breaking point for our beloved dinghy was the inescapable demise caused by years of tropical sun exposure. Upon leaving a marina in Mexico we observed that it had acquired more holes than a cheese grater – not a desirable feature in what should be an airtight vessel. To add to this the oars were a rather motley, mis-matched, half-broken set which left the whole thing looking rather sorry for itself.

Had it still been the two of us we probably would have just continued to patch, make do and mend it. But this turn of events had coincided with our first baby arriving, which left us toying with the advantages that an upgraded tender could bring. We were still pondering the decision when coming back to our freshly anchored boat and were confronted by the tail end of an offshore storm causing trouble in the bay. The system was directly to the West of us, meaning that there was nothing between the open sea kicked up by the storm and the shoreline except our anchorage.

Suffice to say that as we approached and saw our boat literally surfing breakers at anchor we decided that not only would these be the worst possible conditions for our first attempt at getting back on board with a new baby but that we should also plan to spend the night elsewhere. A rapidly deflating and sinking dinghy was definitely a contributing factor to that decision as we loitered hesitantly in front of our boat’s bouncing stern before resigning ourselves to the long limp back to the marina docks in our soggy rubber duck.

Dinghy number two was sold to us by another cruiser and seemed the height of luxury as it had a rigid bottom, something that gave us more confidence in it’s toughness given the crocodiles we’d seen in the waters of Central America and the sharp shell and stone beaches of the Pacific. In this second inflatable we visited the stingrays of Moorea, the pretty reefs of Fiji, and were circled by sharks in the Tuamotus. We even used it to slowly and gently follow behind a mother and calf humpback whale in the Vava’u group in Tonga.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, like any family with young children, our family ‘car’ has suddenly transformed from exotic adventurer to becoming overrun with more domestic items belonging to them. Pfd’s, flip-flops, a hodgepodge of snorkel gear and sunscreen now litter its floor and any outing off the boat seems to involve a whirlwind of tangled limbs and lots of wriggling akin to trying to control a bag full of squirrels. And it can only get worse so most likely we’ll shortly be investigating the aquatic equivalent of a people carrier.

I’ll never forget stepping on board our boat for the first time. Sure, I’d seen countless photos. It was me who found it online, added it to our list and urged my husband to visit it even though, at the time, it was out of our budget. The images of the main saloon had sold it to me as the fit-out had created a deceptively large space for what was only a 42-foot boat. I ignored the price tag and persevered, as I felt, somehow, that this would be the boat for us.

However, standing in that great main space for the first time, I realised something quite comical that didn’t feel right.

“Is it just me or does our boat have a nautical theme?!?”

I looked around and began to mentally catalogue the culprits of this matter. There was the navy blue bench seating, the blue and white striped sofa backs and co-ordinating hatch curtains. Both settees were covered with so large an assortment of scatter cushions that you couldn’t actually sit down and all of these featured the same image of a yacht.

The port and starboard walls and the bulkhead of the saloon were hung with gilt framed prints showing a schooner, a cutter, a Bermudan sloop and several more, although none of them was a painting of our boat. Then there were brass fittings galore, hanging lamps, wall-mounted lamps, an hourglass and a big brass ship’s bell.

I loved the wood interior and the feeling that the room was both capacious and comforting but the style made it look more like a museum than a yacht that was about to sail anywhere.

Fast-forward by five years and that same space looks rather different. There is no sign of blue and white upholstery anywhere and the brass is all gone. The gas lamps added a certain romance to the atmosphere of our evenings at anchor but, since replacing all our lights with LEDs, there was no practical need for them. The ship’s bell was allowed to hang free and sound for our first few passages before we realised that every heel of the boat made it clang. At first we put a pad in to muffle it, making it utterly redundant, so it was soon sold at a swap meet, along with the hourglass.

Now the walls are filled with the story of our adventures so far. There are Indian animal god figures and a Nepalese timber ‘Om’ from our previous travels; there is a beaten up old Spanish guitar, which neither of us can yet play; there is a painting of a skeletal mermaid; a woollen chimpanzee; a brightly coloured tray; three little monkey masks and a carved decorated jaguar’s head from Mexico. The seating has been recovered in a plain grey to contrast with the vivid patterns of the large Guatemalan cushion and the bold banded Mexican throw that sit on them. Our portlights are fringed with a panoply of handmade courtesy flags, some hastily crafted only moments before making landfall. Even the striped teak bilge panels that make up the floor are now partly obscured by a rich woven rug from Oaxaca and a scattering of children’s books and toys as our little ones play.

The big hanging gas lamp that once swung above our table has been replaced with a wooden flapping dragon, a painted pink panther marionette and three antique ornate fish that spin in the breeze. Our fruit sits in a dark timber kava bowl, paired with a carved ceremonial axe that adorns one of our doors, found together in Fiji. There are other bizarre sundry items, both bought and found, that I’ve chosen to paint in a blinding rainbow of colours, and other images from my hands are pinned around the room.

And, I’ll grant you, each time we prep the boat for passage, this collection of curios that festoons the space does get at least partly streamlined and stowed away.

But this is the stuff of sailing life. In place of the aspirational sailing-themed and yacht-emblazoned trimmings that used to prettify the inside of our boat when it sat unused in a marina for years this colourful and jumbled multitude of objects has crossed oceans, traversed both the equator and the international date line and witnessed many personal milestones along our journey from green and clueless sailing couple to salty, skilful, parents of two boat babies. No more is it a yachting museum, she’s a bluewater home, with stories under her keel and a lot more miles to go.

We are gracing another magazine cover this month. The July issue of Australia's "Cruising Helmsman" magazine has a 6 page spread of my article on "The coconut milk run" about crossing the Pacific ocean and a photo of our boat taken from the top of the mast is on the cover page. Check it out below.