Underway

It's been a wild and crazy last few days starting with the startled and blank looks we had when we got to SFO to get on our outbound flight and were asked for New Zealand visas - after a little back and forth, it worked and we landed in Auckland at 5Am on the 30th. Ryan from Shalimar had offered to pick us up and I of course took him up on it, but felt really bad when I realized that picking us up meant driving 2 hours out of his way (and then two hours back with us for a four hour round trip!).

Getting a ride meant that we didn't have to drag over 100lbs of crap through Auckland and that we got back to Opua in time to actually accomplish a few things that day rather than just stumble back on the boat. Most importantly though, we got to spend some time with people that now feel like old friends - Archetheuthis, Dilligaf, Piko and Shalimar are all boats that we spent last season with, and the reunions were pretty sweet.

That was Monday. By Wednesday morning, we'd managed to clean out the boat (no small task - Amanda has some great pictures of all the mold that greeted us, though the boat was in all other ways just as we'd left her), get the bottom cleaned, buy solar panels, buy additional provions, check out of New Zealand and talk with Fijian customs about our arrival. It was pretty hectic and as we sailed out of the Bay of Islands yesterday, I was struck by how different an experience this was from our departure from Mexico. Passage making is starting to feel a little routine, and we know what we need to do - massive thought and mental preparations don't really feel necessary.


One photo is enough to show the kind of mold-covering Britannia grew in our absence.

So we're underway to Savu Savu right now and have spectacular sailing conditions. The seas were big and beamy for the first 12 hours, but are now extremely slight with winds in the 15 to 20 knot range - we've been doing hull speed pretty much for 24 hours straight now.

We're both tired, though I'm finding that I'm sleeping better than I usually do on the first day of a passage - I think there's something to the idea of leaving exhausted. You're going to get exhausted anyhow before you manage to sleep, so you might as well get right to it. Five hours of jetlag doesn't hurt either.

Our time back in the US felt a little dream like, and it's been interesting to feel like I'm snapping out of it since being back. The routine we had at home was ingrained over 10 years, and I think that getting our old jobs back made kept that routine unchanged - it required no thought is I guess what I'm saying. Being on the boat requires lots of thought - dreaming is encouraged as well, but attentiveness is requisite in a way that it's not at home.

Anyhow, it's good to be back. We're missing friends and family back home, but are happy to be back to "real life".