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Notes from a Challenging Passage (NZ to Fiji)

In my limited experience, open water passages can be categorized into three distinct time periods, getting your sea legs, a blur of timelessness that can include any number of days, and the last and absolutely longest day known in the universe. Getting our sea legs typically involves a day of feeling green and seasick followed by a night of sleeplessness, then a day of being overwhelmingly tired. After this, we usually get a solid night of rest while Brian and I complete shifts of 3 hours on-watch and 3 hours off-watch. By the third day we are typically in a rhythm with the boat, with the sea, and with our sleep schedule. Once we have sea legs, time seems to warp into a blend of days that are hard to keep track of. If there are no significant events this time can be 4 days or 10 days, or perhaps more (I have never been at sea that long). Then on the last day when we can wake up and actually see land, time stands still. I am certain that it is the anticipation of making lan

A Plastic Ocean - Fiji

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Fiji is absolute paradise! With its lush green mountains rising from a sapphire blue sea, Fiji seems to have it all; diving, surfing, hiking, waterfalls, and beautiful palm-lined white sand beaches. The people are the friendliest that I have encountered in all of my travels, and the culture is rich and beautiful. While Fiji is ripe with beauty and stunning landscapes, it is not immune from plastic pollution and beach trash. Unfortunately, Fiji's problem with plastic pollution not unique and are the same issues that face every beach-tourism based, oceanfront community around the globe. Back home we live in the tourist town of Santa Cruz, CA where flocks of visitors come to the beach every weekend. Sadly, we are used to seeing beaches littered with various packaging, plastics, and other discarded rubbish back home, but the issue is a bit more pervasive here in the islands. While Fiji is much better off than many other countries in this region, the beaches are littered with discarde

Boatschool Program

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In the spirit of back-to-school I thought I would add a blog post about our on board curriculum. Hands down the number one question that we get when people hear that we quit our jobs and are now sailing vagabonds is, "What about your kids education?". There are many many approaches to educating kids both on land and while sailing including un-schooling, packaged curriculum, and independent studies. Then there is the decision to have either online or hard copy/book study. We have chosen to put together an independent curriculum consisting of books and hard copies. Luckily for us we have lots of storage space available on the boat and the perfect set of drawers to house our school and art supplies. Since we travel to remote areas where internet is not available, online programs are not be a good choice for us. I also have a personal interest for the girls to have less screen time. Overall our boat school program resembles the CA state standards while using subjects that are rel

Highlight Video - Yasawa Fiji

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It took four whopping months for us to sit still long enough to put together a movie highlighting our time in the Mamanuca and Yasawa Islands of Fiji.  Click the link  https://youtu.be/faiY1GfBLro .

Coming in hot and having a plan

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Well we just had our first real near miss! We came within inches (well maybe feet) of going aground on a reef. How did this happen? What did we learn? Well here is the story from he day before Easter. We had just spent a couple of nights at our favorite anchorage free diving and spearfishing. The anchorage was rolly as a western swell had been building and winds, though light, were coming out of the north. This means that the winds aligned us broadside to the waves which results in the boat rocking. The wind prediction software that we use forecast that the wind was going to pick up to 25-30 knots and change direction which would not be favorable for this anchorage. So we decided to leave, right after one more dive! We like to get our ceviche in the fridge while on passage so we have it to eat when we arrive at our destination. We got our fish, cleaned up the boat, and got underway. We had almost no wind when we started our passage, so we motored. Without wind it was absolutely swe

Row, Row, Row your boat

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For a sailing family, we row...a lot! Most sailboats have a dingy that serves as their car to take them from their floating home to their destination on shore. We do not have a dingy, This is partly by circumstance and partly by choice. We knew when we bought Renegade, the dingy "was at the end of its useful life". We used it a couple of times when we first got here and then quickly decided that it was more trouble than it is worth. The inflatable dingy would not hold air and the engine was a total POS. (this could be a post on its own, so trust me when I say the dingy and outboard together were worthless). So we towed the dingy around for the first month or so, all the while talking about what to do with it. One day on our way back to the marina, we finally decided to dump it in the dumpster when we arrived. The day that we made that decision we were having a beautiful day of sailing, 15-20 knots on the beam and booking down the rhumb line back to port. Off in the distan

Saying Goodbye...Again and Again

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Something that I was not prepared for on this trip was how quickly we would meet and then have to say goodbye to new friends. Leaving our amazing tribe of friends behind in Santa Cruz, we are all longing for the connections that ground us and make us whole. This can be a hard thing to do while cruising. As our paths cross with other families and like minded sailors, we find that we are all on different time lines, heading to various destinations, with many goals in mind. What this means for us, is that as we meet amazing people and great families, we only get to brush the surface of getting to know them. We start with the basics of where are you from? and where are you going? Then as we delve deeper into the intricacies of lives well lived, raising kids, family connections, etc, we learn that we really, really like some of these families. They are the kind of people that we want to spend months and years getting to know, however with this lifestyle we have days and rarely weeks to spen