Tag Archives: living the dream

Baguette search success

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Well there you have it. Goal achieved

Baguette has arrived

Arrived yesterday morning, as planned, through pass at sunrise, can’t see the reefs until you are right there and just a change in wave behavior above them

The light house is there to guide you in.

Lighthouse at daybreak

Welcomed into the lagoon with this sight.

A welcome squall

A crazy run around to get immigration process complete before they closed at noon? Best government job ever.

A couple of beers and pizza with friends who met us at the dock and grabbed our lines and secretly dropped off some French pastries for breakfast. There was a band at the marina bar, started at 6pm… don’t think I was awake for the end of the first song.

What started out as 880nm trip, turned into 1047nm. I took the scenic route. Don’t know if it was more comfortable or not, I do know it was full day longer than following the direct route. There was some nice sailing in the middle part, but the beginning and end were definitely not champagne sailing, you would have missed your mouth with the champagne flute on every sip. We averaged 7.5 knots for the trip which is pretty good for a long passage.

Anyway cheers signing off till our next passage.

NZ Bound #3: 9 till we see old friends and new

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Arriving the Heads at day break per plan.

It’s friggin cold and I forgot to take the heater exhaust plugs out when we left Fiji, so heaters will have to wait a bit longer .

Bream Head

NZ Bound #3: 418 till speeding tickets showing up in the mail

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Obviously I have a need for speed! Who knew NZ had so many speed cameras? I found out when tickets started to pile up in our mailbox that we never checked unless an essential boat part was being delivered, aka Temu. All I can say is it was good thing the car wasn’t registered in my name.

We are still speeding along on the ocean highway toward NZ, is it day 3 or twelve I can’t keep track. BUT we did keep track that we just covered 218 nm in just 24 hours toward our destination, and that’s “sweet as”.

To celebrate I grilled up some steaks at 10 knots, well we had to eat them before NZ confiscated them. If we had some champagne we could have enjoyed that too as most of the day has been fast and moderately comfortable considering it’s really an ocean out here.

Grilling at 10 knots

Weather news from the SSB and forecasts say we need to be arriving before the next weather system. Everything is looking good on our end to arrive the day before. As we continue to pass some of the boats that left the day before we did.

Left are boats from Fiji, right are boats coming from Tonga. The customs dock will be over crowded.

One bit of sad news today. I was re-enacting a recent episode where the wave splashed and completely soaked me. Arms flailing and knocked myself in my head. Don’t worry, my head is fine. The tragedy was very traumatic, the ball cap that kept my nose from the sun for the past 2 years and covered all my unkempt gray hair went to find Neptune. No one will recognize me without that well bleached piece of advertising on my head. So we dropped sails, put a full stop man overboard drill and …. Yeah Naw, not a chance and ruin our 24 hr average? Fresh one from the closet, back to black. Maybe the boat “#southernwinds” will find my hat as I rescued one of theirs floating by just before we left Fiji. 🇫🇯.

All well onboard,